Maike Melles, Daniel Sosna, and Petr Jehlička (2026) 'Resources.' The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Melles, Maike, Daniel Sosna, and Petr Jehlička (2026) Resources. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Riddhi Bhandari. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/26resources

Abstract
Using and valuing resources is a vital component of human life. Yet as much as resources such as water, land, or fuel contribute to the flourishing of communities, they also constitute objects of contestation and conflict. This entry highlights a range of conceptual and thematic ways in which anthropologists have studied resources. First, resources constitute a means of livelihood and sociality that shape human lives in significant ways. Second, resources emerge from material and conceptual relations between humans and environments, offering insight into what societies deem good and valuable. Third, resources are key to different modes of production in which their accumulation and the scale of their use create and perpetuate unequal distributions of goods, labour, and power. Finally, resources have increasingly been analysed as vehicles of resistance and of (re-)negotiating the ethical underpinnings of their extraction. Using examples of food provisioning, this entry will show that all four ways of thinking about resources—as means of livelihood, results of relations, determinants of modes of production, and vehicles of resistance—elucidate important debates. They teach us about value extraction and commodification, sustainable and excessive modes of consumption, and the exploitation of people and environments. The four conceptualisations of resources presented here share a range of premises, yet they also have points of friction that limit their seamless combination. Holding different ways of thinking about resources in tension is necessary to account for their use and for conflict in times of diminishing liveability for human and non-human beings on the planet.