Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2694589

1527-1900

Stephen Cote,

Mining and Resource Management

Oil oozes through the pores of modern society, and neoliberalism has restructured Latin American community and kinship relationships so deeply, that it is no surprise that a cultural anthropologist would address these topics. Elana Shever's Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina does so with careful attention to detail and with compelling ethnography. Oil and neoliberalism, as Shever states, are “inseparably semiotic and material forces” that affect individuals and communities on an everyday basis, whether close to the centers of production or far from them, through consumption (p. 6). The study complements the many studies of neoliberalism in Latin America and recent anthropologies of petrostates such as Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Günther Schlee's edited collection Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil (2011).Shever chose Argentina because of the country's unique history of state involvement in the petroleum sector, which made wholesale privatization as part of recent neoliberal reforms particularly jarring. She focuses on two geographical areas for her ethnography: the northern oil camps of Patagonia and a shantytown in Buenos Aires located just outside the Shell refinery at Dock Sud. She explains the ways in which neoliberal privatization reshaped oil production, the oil company towns, and the families of oil workers in Patagonia, as well as the ways in which neoliberalism shaped the meanings of oil consumption in Buenos Aires. The simple act of women at a community kitchen debating whether to purchase a tank of propane instead of using wood fires demonstrated how oil consumption was gendered and class-based. The forms of protest against the neoliberal reforms, especially the boycott against Shell and Exxon in 2005, showed the ways in which the state attempted to control the debate while the overall structure of exploitative production remained intact.The Argentine state was directly involved in the earliest oil exploration and production in Patagonia, and the state oil company was the first in the world. While this book is not a history of Argentina's oil sector, Shever recognizes historical aspects of the industry that serve to contextualize the culture and politics of recent events, especially the role played by Peronism. Juan Perón helped to organize the oil workers into a state union during his first administration (1946–1952). Sindicato Unidos Petroleros del Estado (Union of State Petroleum Workers) became an important segment of his base of support. In return for loyalty to the state, the workers received paternalistic cradle-to-grave care that was also inheritable from generation to generation. The workers became part of a closely knit kinship group.Neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, as Shever explains, broke the kinship bonds within the state oil company. Not only did tens of thousands of oil workers lose their jobs, but also their many children, who had expected and felt entitled to both employment and the many benefits that came with it, were left with nothing. Shever complicates the intersection of neoliberal economics and oil by demonstrating that new paternalistic and kinship organizations formed among the former oil workers in Patagonia as they struggled to compete as contractors for the large transnationals. Most failed for lack of management skills and capital or were bought out, exposing the flaws in the basic philosophical grounds of neoliberal entrepreneurship espoused by the government. Production continued to be controlled by an increasingly small number of large foreign companies, while the former state oil workers became wage laborers with less security and less control over their lives. The book's cover photo, of a coil of rusting barbed wire, aptly portrays the sharp and painful effects of neoliberal privatizations and the decline of local industry and community that followed throughout the region.While the book is strong in many areas, its history of Argentina's oil sector relied too heavily on a single secondary source, Carl Solberg's Oil and Nationalism in Argentina: A History (1979). Nicolás Gadano's Historia del petróleo en la Argentina, 1907–1955: Desde los inicios hasta la caída de Perón (2006) and other sources would have strengthened the historical context, especially the emphasis on oil and labor during the Perón years. Furthermore, the insistence that the protests of 1996 known as La Pueblada were not directed against neoliberalism is less than convincing (pp. 90–95). The anger of the piqueteros would clearly seem to be a backlash against the devastating ripple effects of the new economy. Despite these two minor points, the book is an important addition to the study of the intersection of oil and neoliberalism, two major forces shaping Latin America in recent times. I would strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in either of these topics.