In 2014, the Government of India quintupled the scope of its National Solar Mission. With its revised target of 100 MW of solar capacity by 2022, this ambitious program did much more than catapult solar energy to the forefront of India’s development priorities. My dissertation, Shadows of Sunlight: Epistemic Experiments with Solar Energy in India, shows how the large scale rollout of solar transforms categories of knowledge formatted by fossil fuels, including “energy”, “rationality”, “the future”, and “the environment.” Chronicling the work of politicians, policymakers and activists, and drawing extensively from gray literature, the project engages debates in anthropology, science and technology studies, the sociology of knowledge, and political theory to chart the “worlding” of solar into a modern energy form.

Chapter one shows how solar is often unthinkable without coal and oil—policymakers work with a fossil fuel-conception of energy to anchor their ideas about what energy is. In exploring how “thinking solar” is a fundamentally relational project, this chapter also works to demonstrate the stakes of the dissertation: the question of how to think about solar is not just a methodological one, but also, an epistemological one. Chapter two draws links between solar philanthrocapitalism and the Enlightenment politics of light itself, the chapter cautions against the regressive epistemics we might unintentionally reinforce by mobilizing light as a measure of rationality. It suggests, in its place, a politics that de-links the expectation of development from the commitment to improve energy access—“endarkenment”— as an alternative register for theorizing solar as an energy form. Chapter three illustrates how solar defies the easy assumption that it serves techno-deterministically environmental ends, juxtaposing the practice of Solar Thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery against India’s leveraging of solar in its diplomatic bid to claim greater “carbon space.” Chapter four traces how solar is imagined, in a modular fashion that is inspired by the technical specificities of the technology, to “plug in” to the abstractions that are the environment and the economy as a solution writ large. In doing so, the chapter investigates how solutions interpellate the epistemic contours of the abstractions into which they are imagined to intervene.

This dissertation tracks the transformation of value as quartz crystals pass through a New Age commodity network spanning from rural Brazilian mines to crystal markets in the U.S. Southwest. The multi-sited research for this dissertation was guided by three primary goals: (1) to map the different ways that informal Brazilian miners, international wholesalers, and New Age crystal healers imagine “crystal energy;” (2) to trace how quartz crystals become spiritually, economically, and socially valuable; (3) to understand what people’s encounters with crystals might tell us about the world’s multibillion-dollar quartz crystal market and about New Age spirituality in the twenty-first century.

Drawing from classic follow-the-commodity studies, I conducted over 18 months of ethnographic research in Brazilian quartz mines, in wholesale warehouses, at the world’s largest gem and mineral shows, in U.S. retail spaces, and with crystal healers throughout California and Arizona. While value has long been theorized in terms of labor, exchange, and fetishization, this dissertation interrogates the phenomenal, performative, and semiotic processes that impact value transformation as crystals pass through each node of this commodity network.

Hedging against Marxian notions of use-value, this dissertation encourages scholars to think through how value and markets are distinctly shaped by performative, semiotic, and phenomenological processes. In doing so, it offers a way to understand other value circuits which don’t seems to fit within standard accounts, such as art markets and designer goods.

In this ethnography, based upon multi-sited fieldwork using participant observation, I tracked the movement and transformation of waste from discarded objects in Chicago’s alleyways to fully-fledged, shiny, new commodities rolling off the lines of Jindal Steel Work’s integrated steel facility in South India. I examine scrap metal recycling as a set or relations within relations that enables this commodity circuit to stretch from Chicago through the Port of Los Angeles to mini and integrated steel plants in the South Indian countryside.

This ethnography is organized around the elements that the global scrap metal economy must wrestle with, manipulate, use, and save: earth, air, water and fire. In the alleyways and scrap yards of Chicago, I examine the above ground mining of scrappers and their earth saving labor. At the Port of Los Angeles, I examine the making of the Port into a green, environmental subject through law and environmental monitoring. In multiple locations in India, I attend to the domestication of fire and its application in metal production. In the final chapter, I examine the shipbreaking industry in India and bring into question the environmental and labor repercussions of large-scale, for-profit scrap recycling.

I envision the empirical data generated from this research project fitting into conversations—in academia as well as in more public conversations—about the pressing global concern of how we produce commodities, expend their use values and ultimately strive, or fail, to efficaciously mediate post-consumptive waste. There is a certain timeliness to this work as sustainability, environmental consciousness, questions of waste disposal, and public health are more and more pressing issues in policy design and practical municipal matters of waste collection and disposal.