"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.
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