Appel H., Mason A., Watts M. (Eds.) Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas

Cornell University Press, 2015. — 412 p. — ISBN 978-0-8014-7986-1.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, urcommodity – 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.
This book will be a long-lasting contribution to the study of oil and gas, of interest to senior scholars in this field and graduate students just beginning to engage with it. Although it was not framed in this way, this book could possibly be of interest outside of the academy, to the people who experience “intellectual vertigo” in their struggles against the oil and gas industry and are interested in a further understanding of its obscure operations.Introduction: Oil Talk
Oil as a Way of Life
Velocity and Viscosity
Deep Oil and Deep Culture in the Russian Urals
Oil, Masculinity, and Violence: Egbesu Worship in the Niger Delta of Nigeria
The Oil Archive, Expertise, and Strategic Knowledges
The Oil Archives
Securing the Natural Gas Boom: Oil Field Service Companies and Hydraulic Fracturing’s Regulatory Exemptions
Crude Contamination: Law, Science, and Indeterminacy in Ecuador and Beyond
The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil
Photo Essay. Specters of Oil: An Introduction to the Photographs of Ed Kashi
Oil Markets: Turbulence, Risk, and Security
Near Futures and Perfect Hedges in the Gulf of Mexico
Securing Oil: Frontiers, Risk, and Spaces of Accumulated Insecurity
Oil Assemblages and the Production of Confusion: Price Fluctuations in Two West African Oil-Producing Economies
Hard and Soft Infrastructures
Offshore Work: Infrastructure and Hydrocarbon Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea
Black Oil Business: Rogue Pipelines, Hydrocarbon Dealers, and the “Economics” of Oil Theft
The Political Economy of Oil Privatization in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan
Oil Futures and Oil Transitions
Carbon, Convertibility, and the Technopolitics of Oil
Events Collectives: The Social Life of a Promise-Disappointment Cycle
Reserves, Secrecy, and the Science of Oil Prognostication in Southern Arabia
Vicious Transparency: Contesting Canada’s Hydrocarbon Future.