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About
While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform. Examining Argentina's conversion from a state-controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.
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Reviews
"Elana Shever's Resources for Reform breaks the mold for anthropological studies of oil. Shever designed her well-balanced project to examine the production, distribution, and consumption of oil in both rural Patagonia and urban Buenos Aires, Argentina . . . By incorporating observations among both 'upstream' and 'downstream' sectors of the oil industry in Argentina, Resources for Reform sets a ne
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
"Shever's is one of just a handful of monographs that looks closely at the lived and embodies experience of transformations in resource sovereignty . . . [Shever] uses the transformation in resource sovereignty to build an instructive and nuanced lesson for understanding the multidimensionality of neoliberalism in practice . . . [I]n chapters describing and detailing its precise operations, Shever
American Anthropologist
"Resources for Reform is an exemplary, well written and very accessible account of a highly complex story encompassing poor and rich Argentines, hard-working industry labourers and people struggling to get by, as well as politicians, lawyers, international consultants, and corporate representatives who have all contributed, in one way or another, to tying Argentina's oil industry more tightly into
Anthropology of this Century