Abstract:

The privatization of the Argentine oil industry has been described as an unprecedented transfer of property, capital and control from the state to the corporate sphere, but this study demonstrates that the privatization process is better understood as a transformation of the historical configurations of oil-fueled development, political communities and human subjectivities. This dissertation probes the development of the state-led oil industry, and the shift to a corporate-led one, through an ethnography of Argentines differently positioned in relation to the global oil industry. The ethnography explores the lives of middle class oil workers and their families in Northwest Patagonia, impoverished residents of the shanty neighborhoods near the refineries in metropolitan Buenos Aires, and affluent employees of the translocal corporations operating in the Argentine oil fields.

After the Introduction delineates this study's four principal interventions into anthropological scholarship, each subsequent chapter engages a particular problem that cuts across the Argentine oil fields and the anthropological theoretical fields. Chapter Two scrutinizes the historical construction of the Argentine subterritory as a "natural" space of value. Chapters Three and Four investigate the articulation of capitalist production and filial reproduction. These chapters argue that sentiment is a crucial generative force that has shaped the oil industry, company towns and worker families from the founding of the state-owned oil company in beginning of the twentieth century to its conversion into a corporate-owned one at the century's close. Chapters Five and Six examine the emergence of consumer citizenship and corporate citizenship out of Argentine neoliberalismo and its transformation of the oil industry. They argue that consumer and corporate citizenship are both reformulations of the older traditions of liberalism and Peronism. All the chapters of this dissertation illustrate that the neoliberal transformation of the Argentine oil industry mutually reconfigured the statal, corporate and domestic domains, and through this process, remade personhood and relationality. They particularly scrutinize the complex web of power relationships that comprise the corporate domain, and argue that the seemingly invincible corporations that inhabit the contemporary world are the effects of a contingent historical process of redomaining people, materials and activities.