Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea

Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine—a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Start...

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Veröffentlicht in:	American ethnologist Jg. 39; H. 4; S. 692 - 709
1. Verfasser:	APPEL, HANNAH
Format:	Journal Article
Sprache:	Englisch
Veröffentlicht:	Malden, USA Wiley Subscription Services 01.11.2012 Blackwell Publishing Inc Wiley American Ethnological Society Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Schlagworte:	Africa Anthropologists Anthropology Business entities Capitalism Economic changes and development Economic infrastructure Economics Equatorial Guinea Ethnographic research Ethnography Ethnology Evacuation Fossil fuels Globalization Investment risk Labour supply Mobile phones Modularity Money Morphological source materials Offshore drilling Offshore work oil Oil and corporate illusions Oil companies Oil industry Operating companies Petroleum Petroleum industry Political economy Rituals Work Central Africa Equatorial Guinea Fieldwork modularity oil work Labour Equatorial Guinea Petroleum Capitalism
ISSN:	0094-0496, 1548-1425
Online-Zugang:	Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:	Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine—a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of "modularity"—mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work in Equatorial Guinea to function "just like" offshore work elsewhere. Anthropologists often characterize as naive the simplifications of modular processes, the evacuation of specificity they entail. Yet for the industry in Equatorial Guinea, this evacuation of specificity was neither mistake nor flaw. Tracing the making of modularity shows how corporations can appear removed from local entanglements and also helps to clarify the "how" of capitalism—the work required to frame heterogeneity and contingency into the profit and power found in many global capitalist projects.
Bibliographie:	SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Commentary-1 content type line 14 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23
ISSN:	0094-0496 1548-1425
DOI:	10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01389.x