Icelandic Resource Landscapes and the State

Abstract

This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between resource landscapes and the state in Iceland during a period of financial experimentation. In particular, it analyses a shift from the production of thermal water for local use to the production of electricity for the global aluminium market. This shift, the paper argues, is not merely a technocratic exercise in further resource extraction, it also indexes some of the tenuous connections between resource making and state making. The paper ends by offering a perspective on the recursive relationship between resource instabilities and instabilities within the state.