Abstract
Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas is an expansive collection of essays that provides a theoretically creative and empirically rich exploration of the role of oil in modernity and the dynamic ways in which oil is entangled in politics, culture, and economics. Editors Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts compile 18 methodologically and empirically diverse essays from a variety of disciplines that examine the tensions between oil’s central position to modern life and the level of risk and difficultly inherent in measuring and extracting it. The book explores how the oil assemblage—the complex networks of actors, institutions, infrastructures, processes, and imaginaries of the oil industry—is constituted through discursive and material practices including financial algorithms, global commodity markets, advertising films, pipelines, and geological technologies. The volume traces the global networks of extracting, transporting, selling, and consuming oil to show the inner workings and logics of the industry and how the processes of accumulation play out within particular sites and histories.
The editors and authors trace themes and issues across studies of seemingly disparate sites such as oil fields in Nigeria, fracking in North Dakota, and pipelines in the Middle East, which gives coherence to the eclectic mix of research sites, methods, and theories. In the introduction, the editors raise fundamental questions and issues around the spectacle of oil and set out to expose what is left invisible in dominant “oil talk.” The book is then divided into five thematic sections that explore oil cultures, production of expert knowledge, development of state policy, formation of commodity markets, creation of oil infrastructure, and conceptions around the future and risk. The essays include research on contemporary events such as the BP Horizon oil spill, rapid fluctuations in oil prices, and pipeline construction, as well as new analysis of post-Soviet oil privatization, British colonial development, and conflict in Nigerian oil fields.
The collection is useful for scholars from a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines who are focused on energy, resource extraction, and infrastructure, but the book also has much broader insights and implications for those interested in the environment, financialization, governance, science and technology studies, and global political economy.