An archaeology of Western energy culture that demystifies the role that fossil fuels play in the day-to-day rituals of modern life.

Spanning the past two hundred years, this book offers an alternative history of modernity that restores to fossil fuels their central role in the growth of capitalism and modernity itself, including the emotional attachments and real injuries that they generate and command. Everything about us-our bodies, minds, sense of self, nature, reason, and faith-has been conditioned by a global infrastructure of carbon flows that saturates our habits, thoughts, and practices. And it is that deep energy infrastructure that provides material for the imagination and senses and even shapes our expectations about what it means to be fully human in the twenty-first century.

In Mineral Rites, Bob Johnson illustrates that fossil fuels are embodied today not only in the morning commute and in home HVAC systems but in the everyday textures, rituals, architecture, and artifacts of modern life. In a series of illuminating essays touching on such disparate topics as hot yoga, electric robots, automobility, the RMS Titanic, reality TV, and the modern novel, Johnson takes the discussion of fossil fuels and their role in climate change far beyond the traditional domains of policy and economics into the deepest layers of the body, ideology, and psyche.

An audacious revision to the history of modernity, Mineral Rites shows how fossil fuels operate at the level of infrapolitics and how they permeate life as second nature.

An archaeology of Western energy culture that demystifies the role that fossil fuels play in the day-to-day rituals of modern life.

About the Author

Bob Johnson is the chair of the Department of Social Sciences and a professor of history at National University. He is the author of Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture.

Reviews
Literary and cultural critic Bob Johnson provides a language with which to make sense of these complex, embodied, everyday experiences of extracted energy.
-Public Books
The subtitle of Mineral Rites is particularly apt, for it truly is a work of rhetorical archaeology - Johnson peels back the layers of what we know (or think we know) about the fossil fuel industry to reveal the mind-bogglingly expansive scope of how the fossil economy reaches out and affects peoples' lived experiences in vastly different ways . . . As a cautionary tale, it is a veritable punch to the gut that leaves us gasping for air.
-Material Culture



Book Information
ISBN 9781421427560
Author Bob Johnson
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 22mm