Petrobarter

Oil, Inequality, and the Political Imagination in and after the Cold War

Bibliographic Data

ID2223786
AuthorsDouglas Rogers (corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume55
Issue2
Pages131-153
Publication date2014-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/675498
PMID24991673
OpenAlexW2030362008
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited60

Petrobarter--the exchange of oil for goods and services without reference to monetary currency--has been a widespread and underappreciated practice among corporations, states, and state agencies over the past half century. Analyzing this practice with reference to anthropological theories of barter adds to our understandings of two significant and intertwined concerns in contemporary social science: (1) the production and reproduction of inequality at various scales, from subnational regions to the international system as a whole, and (2) the generation and fate of mobilizing political imaginaries that challenge the abstracted, universalizing imaginaries so often associated with monetized exchange, especially in capitalist contexts. Barter exchanges featuring oil are, therefore, as analytically significant as the much more commonly studied transactions of oil and money. Ethnographic and historical case studies of petrobarter are drawn from the Perm region of the Russian Urals in the post-Soviet period and the global oil trade in the early Cold War. This view from the perspective of the socialist and postsocialist world, it is argued, provides an instructive counterpoint to the many existing studies of oil and money, both in and beyond anthropology, that are situated in the European-American colonial and postcolonial periphery

Barter · Currency · Economics · Economy · Ethnography · Market economy · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Situated · Sociology · State (computer science · American Environmental and Regional History · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Mining and Resource Management

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