In human thermodynamics, ethnoenergetics, from the Greek prefix ethno-, a combining form meaning race, culture, or people, is the energetic study of races, cultures, and people. The term and subject was first introduced in the 1973 paper “Slavery, Surplus, and Stratification on the Northwest Coast: the Ethnoenergetics of an Incipient Stratification System” by American anthropologist Eugene Ruyle. [1] In ethnoenergetics, according to Ruyle, labor, value, money, and capital are all forms of “ethnoenergy”, defined as “somatic energy expended by the members of a population”, that property is an “ethnoenergetic field”, and that money is “a symbol for energy, a claim on the energy of other people.” [2]

See also
● Bioenergetics
● Human energetics
● Social energetics

References
1. (a) Ruyle, Eugene E. (1973). "Slavery, Surplus, and Stratification on the Northwest Coast: The Ethnoenergetics of an Incipient Stratification System." Current Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Dec.,), pp. 603-631.
(b) The paper itself was an outgrowth of term papers written in circa 1970 for Andrew P. Vayda and Morton H. Fried while Ruyle was a graduate student at Columbia University. Subsequent drafts were read and criticized by Theodore Caplow and Frank J.F. Wordick of the University of Virginia (note 1, ibid, 1973).
2. Hornborg, Alf. (2001). The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment (section: Energy, Value, and Society: Some Pervasive Problems in Earlier Theory, pgs. 95-101). Rowman Altamira.