Description
Book SynopsisHow do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from th
Trade Review"An exceptional comparative ethnography! Enclaves of Exception is a fresh and fascinating analytic trajectory; a robust and valuable, if also troubling, insight into contemporary extractive economies struggling with the contradictions of special economic zones. This book is an inspiring contribution to economic anthropology."—Wale Adebanwi, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
"Enclaves of Exception is a triumph of scholarship that seamlessly fuses an unparalleled ethnography of the Niger Delta with an analytical vision that encompasses African, European, and East Asian energy regimes—and even the moonshining of the prohibition-era United States. Adunbi demonstrates the enormous potential of attending insistently and expansively to the proliferating enclaves of today's global energy complex."—Douglas Rogers, Yale University
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Extraction
1. Contested Enclaves of Profit
2. Infrastructures of Convenience
3. "This Place Is Not Nigeria"
4. From Moonshine to Ogogoro
5. Flames of Wealth
6. The Social Death of the Environment
Conclusion: Revisiting the Ancestors
Bibliography
Index
