Social Science Research Council

“Crude Fictions: Oil and the Making of Modularity in Equatorial Guinea”

In the first seven years of the new millennium, the central African micro-state of Equatorial Guinea has seen over 10 billion dollars in capital investment from the United States alone. The most important new oil producer in Africa, Equatorial Guinea is at the center of the petroleum industry’s ‘new Persian Gulf,’ from which 25% of U.S. oil imports are expected to come by 2010. Social science scholarship presents at least two ways of approaching these astounding developments: First, a political science narrative of the typical oil state and its pathologies suggests that Equatorial Guinea will now become a member of a class of states that includes Nigeria, Venezuela, Kuwait, etc. Second, there is a more anthropological approach which finds this narrative of ‘typicality’ reductionist, and points instead to contingent realities unique to particular sites like Equatorial Guinea. Preliminary fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea reveals that neither of these approaches adequately grasps the ongoing processes through which the country is becoming an oil-exporter. In Equatorial Guinea today, the duplication of standard oil state characteristics coexists with complex and unpredictable rearrangements of social, political, and economic practices. Within this coexistence, local and international actors do a tremendous amount of work to standardize Equatorial Guinea, to make it into an efficient replica of an oil-exporting state. In this project I use the term modularity to refer to this replication: the social, political, and economic effort to create forms of equivalence and commensurability specific to an oil-exporting state. Modularity refers to (1) the IKEA-like way in which identical technologies, models of capitalist development, and critiques of the petroleum industry are employed in Equatorial Guinea; and (2) the human work required to produce, apply, and maintain these identical modules or components.