Subterranean Estates
Life Worlds of Oil and Gas
Michael Watts editor Hannah Appel editor Arthur Mason editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cornell University Press
Published:24th Jun '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£29.99(9780801479861)
"Oil is a fairy tale, and, like every fairy tale, is a bit of a lie."—Ryzard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs
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.
Subterranean Estates gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to instead 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.
Juxtaposed between the 'intellectual vertigo' induced by this massive industry and 'oil's cynosural politics,' the authors seek to clear away some of the 'epistemic murk' that pervades the worlds of oil and gas (p. 9).... Readers will note a meticulous focus on revealing, demystifying or engaging anew those features of the substance and the industry that have remained mostly out of the purview of examination.... The renewed engagement with oil materialities reveals important aspects of the everyday life of a resource and an industry that is as convoluted as it is complicated, powerful, destructive, ubiquitous, and ambiguous.
-- Amber Murrey * AntipoISBN: 9780801453441
Dimensions: 235mm x 155mm x 30mm
Weight: 907g
432 pages