Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine—a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the ...industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of "modularity"—mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work in Equatorial Guinea to function "just like" offshore work elsewhere. Anthropologists often characterize as naive the simplifications of modular processes, the evacuation of specificity they entail. Yet for the industry in Equatorial Guinea, this evacuation of specificity was neither mistake nor flaw. Tracing the making of modularity shows how corporations can appear removed from local entanglements and also helps to clarify the "how" of capitalism—the work required to frame heterogeneity and contingency into the profit and power found in many global capitalist projects.
The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general ...forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism —practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible.
Starting from the juxtaposition of Equatorial Guinea's luxurious private oil compounds with the sporadic and uneven public infrastructure outside their walls, this article explores how infrastructure ...becomes a key site through which oil and gas companies and Equatoguinean actors negotiate entanglement and disentanglement, responsibility and its abdication. If basic forms of infrastructural violence include exclusion and disconnection, that violence is redoubled by the work of disentanglement-the work to abdicate responsibility for those forms of violence. Drawing on 14 months of fìeldwork in Equatorial Guinea, as well as on the work of Michel Callon and Koray Çaliskan, this article describes how the work-intensive disentanglement evidenced in the enclaves operates on behalf of the marketization of oil and gas. Marketization is made possible through work to deny the web of sociopolitical relations required for hydrocarbon extraction and production, thus allowing the commodity (and the companies producing it) to appear as if separate from the broader social context within which they operate. At the same time, however, this work to deny certain social relations inevitably requires the production and internalization of others, often materialized through the production and manipulation of infrastructure.
The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project-U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea-and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and ...processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism-practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible.
Endothelial function and the risk for endothelial dysfunction differ between males and females. Besides the action of estrogen, sex chromosome gene expression and programming effects also provoke ...this sexual dimorphism. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as regulators of endothelial cell function and dysfunction. We here hypothesized distinct miRNA expression patterns in male versus female human endothelial cells that contribute to the functional differences. We used our well-established model of fetal endothelial cells isolated from placenta (fpEC) and analyzed sexual dimorphic miRNA expression and potentially affected biological functions. Next-generation miRNA sequencing of fpEC isolated after pregnancies with male and female neonates identified sex-dependent miRNA expression patterns. Potential biological pathways regulated by the altered set of miRNAs were determined using mirPath and mirSystem softwares, and suggested differences in barrier function and actin organization. The identified pathways were further investigated by monolayer impedance measurements (ECIS) and analysis of F-actin organization (Phalloidin). Nine miRNAs were differentially expressed in fpEC of male versus female neonates. Functional pathways most significantly regulated by these miRNAs included 'Adherens junction', 'ECM receptor interaction' and 'Focal adhesion'. These pathways control monolayer barrier function and may be paralleled by altered cytoskeletal organization. In fact, monolayer impedance was higher in fpEC of male progeny, and F-actin staining revealed more pronounced peripheral stress fibers in male versus female fpEC. Our data highlight that endothelial cell function differs between males and females already in utero, and that altered miRNAs are associated with sex dependent differences in barrier function and actin organization.
Function and dysfunction of endothelial cells are regulated by a multitude of factors. Endothelial cell research often requires in vitro cell culture experiments. Hence, various culture media ...specifically designed to promote endothelial cell growth are available. These strikingly differ in their composition: complex media contain endothelial cell growth supplement (ECGS), an extract produced of bovine brain with undefined amounts of biologically active compounds, whilst defined media contain selected growth factors in defined concentrations. We here compared the effect of seven purchasable endothelial cell culture media on colony outgrowth, proliferation, viability, in vitro angiogenesis and phenotype of mature primary human endothelial cells using feto-placental endothelial cells isolated from chorionic arteries (fpEC). The effect of media on colony outgrowth was additionally tested on umbilical cord blood-derived endothelial progenitor cells (ECFCs). Outgrowth, purity, proliferation and viability differed between media. Outgrowth of fpEC and ECFCs was best in a defined medium containing EGF, FGF2 and VEGF. By contrast, established fpEC isolations proliferated best in complex media containing ECGS, heparin and ascorbic acid. Also viability of cells was higher in complex media. In vitro angiogenesis was most intense in a defined medium containing the highest number of individual growth factors. FACS analysis of surface markers for endothelial cell subtypes revealed that endothelial phenotype of fpEC was unaffected by media composition. Our data demonstrate the fundamental effect of endothelial cell culture media on primary cell isolation success and behaviour. Whether the composition of supplements is suitable also for individual experiments needs to be tested specifically.
ABSTRACT
What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably ...the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies become both intelligible, possessing representational unity or naturalized authority, and compelling—the stuff of fantasy and desire, power and subjugation. Taking a series of national economic conferences in Equatorial Guinea as a point of departure, the article argues for the centrality of the state and questions of geopolitical scale in any approach to the national economy form. Juxtaposing the literature on economic performativity with Equatoguinean political history and the power of U.S. oil companies in the global South highlights the open‐endedness of what Michel Callon has called economics “in the wild” and the as‐if qualities generated at the crossroads of economic theory and postcolonial inequality. This article thus aims to open up ethnographic possibilities in the face of national economies far beyond Equatorial Guinea's borders.
U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa's place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these ...institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we must not only analyze the geographic shift in where banks are headquartered and who owns them, but also generate empirical and theoretical shifts in what a bank is, what it does, and to what effect, especially in terms of the relationship between currencies, social violence, and imperial and racial power.
This article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate Occupy sites—the Alternative Banking working group of Occupy Wall Street, the daily life of lists in ...Liberty Square, née Zuccotti Park, and the work of Strike Debt. In particular, I focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. Where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism’s otherwises for inspiration and potential, the expansion of the economic imagination I trace here suggests that the centers constitute zones of possibility as well. I aim to show not only the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of imaginative work in the dense and seemingly definitive spaces of financial expertise but also a remarkable, and largely unrecognized, contemporary conversation around the future of banking, foreclosures, and democratized finance.
Conclusion: Energy ethics and ethical worlds Appel, Hannah
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
April 2019, 2019-04-00, 20190401, Letnik:
25, Številka:
S1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What happens when the effects of our ethical actions stretch beyond, often far beyond, first‐ and second‐person phenomena? What happens when one person's richly textured ethical world is another's ...profound violation? Energy offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through the questions posed by ethical worlds. Ethical worlds gesture both to the supra‐individual, supra‐present contexts in which we all craft quotidian ethics, and to the expansive geographies and timescapes in which the effects of our ethical practices ramify. Ethical worlds, fields, or landscapes are not bordered by first‐ or second‐person experiences, but rather they intersect and interfere with one another often at great distance, often over multiple generations, and certainly not equally. Ethical practices in more powerful fields spill out, invade, and give shape to ethical practices in other ethical fields. What does it mean to start to see and feel and analyse at these ethical crossroads? In particular, what might it mean to acknowledge that structure, power, and interest – which are too often arrayed against close ethnographic attention to individual and shared experience – are not ‘larger forces’ but other ethical worlds, equally amenable to ethnographic attention?
Abstrait
Conclusion : éthique de l’énergie et mondes éthiques
Résumé
Que se passe‐t‐il lorsque les effets de nos actions éthiques se répercutent au‐delà, souvent loin au‐delà, des phénomènes à la première ou deuxième personne ? Que se passe‐t‐il lorsque l'univers éthique si richement structuré d'une personne porte profondément atteinte à l’éthique d'une autre ? L’énergie constitue un terrain empirique particulièrement utile pour réfléchir aux questions posées par les mondes éthiques. Ceux‐ci relèvent des contextes supra‐individuels et au‐delà‐du‐présent dans lesquels nous créons notre éthique quotidienne, autant que des vastes géographies et chronologies dans lesquelles les effets de nos pratiques éthiques se ramifient. Les mondes, champs ou paysages éthiques ne se limitent pas à des expériences à la première ou à la deuxième personne. Ils se recoupent, interfèrent les uns avec les autres, souvent de très loin, sur plusieurs générations, et certainement pas de façon équilibrée. Les pratiques éthiques des domaines les plus puissants se répandent, envahissent et modèlent celles d'autres domaines éthiques. Qu'est‐ce que cela implique de commencer à voir, à ressentir, à analyser à ces croisées des chemins éthiques ? Et surtout, qu'implique la reconnaissance que la structure, le pouvoir et l'intérêt, trop souvent dressés contre l'examen ethnographique attentif des expériences individuelles et partagées, ne sont pas des « forces supérieures » mais d'autres mondes éthiques, que l'on pourrait tout aussi bien soumettre à l'attention ethnographique ?
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