Projects per year
Abstract
In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 24–43 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Critique of Anthropology |
Volume | 43 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 23 Feb 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2023 |
Keywords
- Affective labour
- Time
- Capitalism
- Extraction
- Kinship
- Offshore
- Oil
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- 1 Finished
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ENERGY ETHICS: Energy Ethics
High, M. M. (PI), Destree, P. (Researcher) & Field, S. (Researcher)
1/07/17 → 30/06/22
Project: Standard