Subterranean estates
Subtitle: life worlds of oil and gas
By: edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts
Contributors: Huber, Matthew T.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Ithaca; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 418
ISBN-13: 9780801453441; 9780801479861
Subjects: Social aspects; Gas industry; Political aspects; Petroleum industry and trade
Description: The scale and reach of the global oil and gas industry, valued at several trillions of dollars, is almost impossible to grasp. Despite its vast technical expertise and scientific sophistication, the industry betrays a startling degree of inexactitude and empirical disagreement about foundational questions of quantity, output, and price. As an industry typified by concentrated economic and political power, its operations are obscured by secrecy and security. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the social sciences typically approach oil as a metonym--of modernity, money, geopolitics, violence, corruption, curse, ur-commodity--rather than considering the daily life of the industry itself and of the hydrocarbons around which it is built.^ Instead, Subterranean Estates gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to provide a critical topography of the hydrocarbon industry, understood not solely as an assemblage of corporate forms but rather as an expansive and porous network of laborers and technologies, representation and expertise, and the ways of life oil and gas produce at points of extraction, production, marketing, consumption, and combustion. By accounting for oil as empirical and experiential, the contributors begin to demystify a commodity too often given almost demiurgic power. Subterranean Estates shifts critical attention away from an exclusive focus on global oil firms toward often overlooked aspects of the industry, including insurance, finance, law, and the role of consultants and community organizations.^ Based on ethnographic research from around the world (Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Oman, the United States, Ecuador, Chad, the United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iran, and Russia), and featuring a photoessay on the lived experiences of those who inhabit a universe populated by oil rigs, pipelines, and gas flares, this innovative volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of this multidimensional world.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 371-408) and index.
Table of contents: title: Oil for life : the Bureau of Mines and the biopolitics of the petroleum market / Matt Huber; title: Velocity and viscosity / Peter Hitchcock; title: Deep oil and deep culture in the Russian Urals / Doug Rogers; title: Oil, masculinity and violence : Egbesu worship and lived experience on the Niger Delta oilfields / Rebecca Golden; title: The oil archives / Andrew Barry; title: Securing the natural gas boom : oil field service companies and hydraulic fracturing's regulatory exemptions / Sarah Wylie; title: Crude contamination : law, science, and indeterminacy in Ecuador and beyond / Suzana Sawyer; title: The image world of Middle Eastern oil / Mona Damluji; title: Near futures and perfect hedges in the Gulf of Mexico / Leigh Johnson; title: Securing oil : frontiers, risk and accumulated insecurity / Michael J. Watts; title: Oil assemblages and the production of confusion : price fluctuations in two West African oil producing economies / Jane I. Guyer; title: Offshore work : infrastructure and hydrocarbon capitalism in Equatorial Guinea / Hannah Appel; title: Black oil business : rogue pipelines, hydrocarbon dealers, and the economics of oil theft / Elizabeth Gelber; title: The political economy of oil privatization in post-Soviet Kazakhstan / Saulesh Yessenova; title: Carbon, convertibility, and the technopolitics of oil / Hannah Knox; title: Events collectives : the social life of a promise-disappointment cycle / Arthur Mason; title: Depletion and the science of oil prognostications in southern Arabia / Mandana E. Limbert; title: Continental energy, contested futures : Canada in late-neoliberal North America / Anna Zalik.