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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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American ethnologist Vol. 39; no. 4; pp. 692 - 709
Main Author: APPEL, HANNAH
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Malden, USA Wiley Subscription Services 01.11.2012
Blackwell Publishing Inc
Wiley
American Ethnological Society
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Subjects:
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 Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary: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.
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ISSN:0094-0496
1548-1425
DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01389.x