Subterranean Estates : Life Worlds of Oil and Gas

This innovative, interdisciplinary volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of the multidimensional world of the global oil and gas industry. -- Cornell University Press

"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.

"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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Oil Talk Part I. Oil as a Way of Life Chapter 1. Oil For Life Chapter 2. Velocity and Viscosity Chapter 3. Deep Oil and Deep Culture in the Russian Urals Chapter 4. Oil, Masculinity, and Violence Part II. The Oil Archive, Expertise, and Strategic Knowledges Chapter 5. The Oil Archives Chapter 6. Securing the Natural Gas Boom Chapter 7. Crude Contamination Chapter 8. The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil Photo Essay. Specters Of Oil. Part III. Oil Markets. Chapter 9. Near Futures and Perfect Hedges in the Gulf of Mexico Chapter 10. Securing Oil. Chapter 11. Oil Assemblages and the Production of Confusion. Part IV. Hard and Soft Infrastructures Chapter 12. Offshore Work. Chapter 13. Black Oil Business. Chapter 14. The Political Economy Of Oil Privatization In Post-Soviet Kazakhstan Part V. Oil Futures And Oil Transitions Chapter 15. Carbon, Convertibility, And The Technopolitics of Oil. Chapter 16. Events Collectives. The Social Life of a Promise-Disappointment Cycle Chapter 17. Reserves, Secrecy, and the Science of Oil Prognostication in Southern Arabia Chapter 18. Vicious Transparency. References Index