Work

Between Fire and Electricity: A Cultural-Historical Analysis of Activity, Sense Formation, and Energy Transition among Wayuu Indigenous Women

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Energy transitions are typically framed as technical processes of infrastructure replacement. This study challenges that framing by examining how Wayuu Indigenous women from the Uriana clan in La Paz–Manaure (La Guajira, Colombia) form personal sense within culturally mediated activity systems as electricity gradually enters their territory. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, we analyse the hearth as a central mediating artefact that integrates embodied knowledge, intergenerational transmission, matrilineal authority, and the reproduction of collective life within the desert ecosystem. Through repeated ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), guided by Zemelman’s methodological orientation toward totality, displacement, and epistemic reorientation, we reconstruct two partially overlapping activity systems, fire-based and electricity-based, and examine the contradictions that arise at their intersection. The analysis shows that the introduction of the electric stove simplifies operations at the surface while reconfiguring motive–object relations, altering temporal and sensory structures of activity, and transforming the conditions under which personal sense is formed. These findings contribute to cultural-historical psychology by showing how technological change in marginalised Indigenous territories works as a dialectical transformation of activity, a process that exceeds the neutral substitution of tools, through which consciousness, identity, and intergenerational continuity are reorganised. The study calls for culturally situated approaches to energy transition that engage with the historically constituted forms of activity through which collective life and human subjectivity are reproduced.

Source: Human Arenas

DOI: 10.1007/s42087-026-00696-x

Authors: Juliana María Benavides-Castillo, Ramón Fernando Colmenares-Quintero, Jaime Alberto Carmona Parra, Alberto Coz Fernández

Institutions: Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, Universidad de Manizales, Universidad de Cantabria

Language: English

Topic: Innovative Education and Learning Practices

Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Affordable and clean energy

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,390