Energy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8200668 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel Havrelock (University of Illinois Chicago, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 87 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 607-617 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jaarel/lfz055 |
| OpenAlex | W4229587768 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
He realized what Dad meant when he compared the oil-game to heaven, where many are called and few are chosen. —Bunny in Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (2007, 73) A KEY PROPERTY of petroleum or, better said, what Andreas Malm (2016) calls fossil capital, rests in its ability to hide in plain sight. In truth, it is too much to see, too hard to fix our eyes on a single form and say, “This is oil.” These perplexing optics mean that the ways in which oil becomes visible on a large scale indicates quite a bit about its materiality and the social contexts that make it legible. Here we will attend to how fossil capital becomes visible in the form of religious extremism, which has come to serve as an index for copious amounts of oil—just think about what comes to mind with the image of a Saudi sheik, an Iranian mullah, or a Texas preacher. However, drawing the link between extremism and oil too directly or causally simply grants fossil capital another convenient hiding place because, at the same time that zealotry indexes oil, it places it at a remove as a difficult-to-grasp, even exotic, phenomenon. When oil becomes apparent as religious extremism, perennial operations of accumulation and exploitation remain largely invisible. Because—in contrast to religious commitments cast as excessive and irrational—the alienation of residents from the market-valued flows beneath their feet, the highly mechanized overturning of the earth, and the assault on natural and social systems alike appear reasonable. For example, when ISIS is banished and Russia, Genie Oil and Gas (board members include Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, and former CIA director James Woolsey), and Shell obtain contracts, normalcy seems to have been restored.
Aesthetics · Alienation · Archaeology · Heaven · Irrational number · Materiality (auditing) · Political science · Sight · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |