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Russian Oil From Below

November 14, 2014 @ 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

The Jordan Center’s Colloquium Series serves to introduce the most recent work of scholars within the Slavic field. Participants come from universities across the country and abroad and work in disciplines ranging from history, political science and anthropology to literature and film. In the third session of the Fall 2014 Colloquium Series, Douglas Rogers will join us from Yale University.

Oil is most commonly studied at the uppermost reaches of Russian politics and economics: in the grand privatization deals and steals of the 1990s, in high-stakes conflicts between oligarchs and the Kremlin in the Putin era, or in struggles over federal budgets and stabilization funds. All of this neglects the important ways in which the residents of oil regions—from oil-sector workers to regional state and corporate elites—have powerfully shaped Russia’s emergence as a “petrostate.” Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this paper retells the story of post-Soviet oil from the perspective of the Perm Region of the Russian Urals, now an important base of operations for Lukoil. Crucial chapters in this story include bartered oil and oil-backed surrogate currencies; region-specific tax deals and bargains; corporate social responsibility projects aimed at reviving folk culture in oil production districts; and disputes about Perm’s 2009-2012 campaign to be designated a European Cultural Capital (a campaign that began with the opening of a new contemporary art museum in Perm). In all of these cases, oil’s materiality—its spatiality, its subsoil depth, its flows through specifically regional networks and landscapes—has been every bit as consequential as its abstraction into national fortunes and national politics. Indeed, these region-level transformations of oil have shaped post-Soviet Russia as “petrostate” far more often and to a far greater extent than has been appreciated.

Douglas Rogers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Cornell University Press will publish his new book, tentatively entitled The Depths of Russia: Oil, Culture, and Power After Socialism, in 2015. Rogers received his B.A. from Middlebury College, an M.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty at Yale, Rogers taught at Miami University of Ohio and was a Kennan Institute fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. His recent research has been funded by grants from the National Council on East European and Eurasian Research and the National Science Foundation and in 2012-3 he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Rogers is the author of The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Cornell, 2009), which received honorable mentions for the 2010 Davis Center Prize and the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize, as well as articles in leading journals including The American Ethnologist, Slavic Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Current Anthropology.

 

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Details

Date:
November 14, 2014
Time:
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Event Categories:
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Venue

NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia
19 University Place, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003 United States
Phone
212.992.6575