Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil: Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold

by Nelida Fuccaro (Editor), Mandana Limbert (Editor)

Overview

This volume explores the ways petroleum as an industry and substance has moulded the social, cultural and artistic life of the Middle East. Rather than tackle the powers of this crucial resource from the perspective of macro-economics, impersonal rentier states and large corporations, this book ‘brings oil back’ into the ebbs and flows of Middle Eastern life. It focuses on the ways petroleum mediates and is mediated by national formations and imaginaries, visual practices, as well as scientific, business and artistic production. In focusing on the largest oil producing and exporting region in the world, this volume sheds light on the effects and affects of petroleum’s presence within and beyond the oil-industry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399506151
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/13/2024
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Nelida Fuccaro is Professor of Middle Eastern History at New York UniversityAbu Dhabi. She has written on cities, public violence, frontier societies and on the urban, social, material and visual cultures of oil in the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Arabian Peninsula. Among her publications, she is the editor of Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (Stanford UniversityPress, 2016) and of the special issue ‘Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East’ in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East(2013). She is the author of Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2009).

Mandana Limbert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2002 and joined CUNY the same year. Her publications include her monograph In the Time of Oil (Stanford UniversityPress, 2010), a co-edited volume Timely Assets (School of American Research, 2008), as well as articles and chapters on oil development, temporality, and religiosity in Oman. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Social Text, Ethnos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

PART I EXPOSING OIL1 Scouting for Oil in the Middle East Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana E. Limbert2 ‘No Words Around to Describe’: Between Seeing and Comprehending Kuwait’s Oil Fires Farah Al-NakibPART II IMAGE WORLDSVISUALISING PETROLEUM PASTS3 Photographing Crude in the Desert: Sight and Sense among Oil Men Laura Hindelang4 The Oil Company’s Fields of Vision: Public Relations and Labour Images in the Arab World Nelida Fuccaro5 Al-Bahithun: Sounds that Call to the (Oil) FieldsAla YounisPROJECTING FUTURES6 Empathy for the Graph Arthur Mason7 After Oil Rania GhosnPART III OIL SUBJECTSECOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES OF PETROLEUM KNOWLEDGE8 Speculative Matters: The Pasts and Presents of Oil in TurkeyZeynep Oguz9 Petroprotein Dreams: Hydrocarbon Biotechnology and Microbial Life Worlds in the Middle EastDouglas Rogers10 Making Oil Men: Expertise, Discipline and Subjectivity in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Training Schemes Mattin BiglariNEW SPACES AND MOBILITIES11 Shifting Solidarities: Strikes, Indian Labour and the Arabian Sea Oil Industry, 1946–1953Andrea Wright12 Gender, Domesticity and Speed: American Petro-modernity Nathan J. Citino 13 Oil, Mobility and Territoriality in the Trucial States/United Arab Emirates, Muscat and Oman Matthew MacLean14 Contestation and Co-optation in the Desert Landscapes of Oman Dawn Chatty

Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Starting from oil's strange ability to be at once everywhere and nowhere, this groundbreaking collection reveals the profound ways that oil has shaped the practices and representations of everyday life in the Middle East. Encompassing themes of art and culture, labour, migration, politics, economics and the making of collective and individual subjectivities - this is a brilliant and expansive text that constantly surprises through its insights.

Adam Hanieh

This groundbreaking collection of interdisciplinary essays is a major contribution to understanding the social life of oil in the Middle East. Rather than the usual and reductive focus on the geopolitics of oil or the impact of its financial revenues in enabling states and ruling elites, the contributors shed light on the many ways in which oil has shaped everyday social experience, covering topics from the ecology and the built environment of cities and nation states to the public imaginaries and the cultural and material lives of ordinary peoples.

Kaveh Ehsani