Oil Culture: Producing the New Russia

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Douglas J. Rogers (Yale University) will investigate the changing nature and functions of "petro-states" in the modern world economy. His research will focus on oil companies in present-day Russian society, using the Perm Region of the Urals as a case study. Lukoil, the primary oil company operating in the Perm Region, has pumped enormous sums of money into social and cultural projects over the last decade, often partnering with state offices and other companies to fund everything from museums and youth festivals to the reconstruction of churches and scholarly research on ethnicity. Rogers will explore the effects of these highly visible sponsorship activities on configurations of state and market, concepts of citizen and citizenship, and, ultimately, the petrostate itself, which appears to becoming quite distinct from the postcolonial oil-exporting states most familiar to social scientists. Rogers will conduct research in four different districts of the Perm Region, in order to investigate the local significance of social and cultural projects funded by new oil wealth. He will collect primarily qualitative data through a variety of ethnographic research methods. Data will come from semi-structured and unstructured interviews, employment and training histories, cultural project narratives, histories of particular cultural objects, participant observation, and archival and newspaper research. This research is important because existing social science research focuses primarily on international pipeline politics or the manipulation of oil wealth to support and contest political power. Very little is known about how oil has affected local society, culture, and state in today's global political economy. This project will be among the first to approach recent developments ethnographically, exploring and then theorizing the effects of oil-driven social and cultural change at the ground level.