Department seminar: Marianna Betti
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with PhD candidate Marianna Betti (UiB). The title of the lecture is: The “Syncretic Oil Complex” and the Destructive and Generative Powers of Oil: cases from Turkana, Northern Kenya
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Seminar paper
What are the syncretic effects that oil has on social relations and traditional practices? What are the unconventional domains which are touched by oil operations and surface in everyday practices? Can we talk about generative, rather than destructive powers of oil?
In Turkana, since the discovery of the oil, there has been apparently a rise in conflict among different groups, which has exacerbated an already existing situation of vulnerability and structural inequality. Whilst all this could be seen as a classic case of the “oil curse”, however, with this talk I aim at expanding on the universalized tendency on relying on theories and perspectives of political economy in reflecting on the effects of oil in society. Therefore, I argue, in the case of Turkana, the discovery of oil has inspired several epistemological domains and brought up ontological musings in the ways not only the locals, but also the oil company Tullow, understand power, cosmology, origins, belonging and identity and make a metaphysical reflection on the very nature of life and a re-evaluation of the means to sustain and protect life.
Thus, in this talk, taken from my dissertation, I will discuss cases like funeral practices, survey operations conducted by oil experts, cleansing ceremonies and ancestor worshipping that support the argument of “the syncretic oil complex”. Inspired by Michael Watt’s “oil complex” and informed by my own ethnographic data, I expand on this analytical tool by adding a syncretic aspect to it. By stressing the intense generative power of oil in slippery, greasy and unusual realms of inquiry like cosmology, ontology and genealogy, my research shows that seemingly opposite believes and encounters which are power imbalanced can merge in new exciting socio-political morphologies.
About the lecturer
Marianna Betti is a senior PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen to which she has been affiliated since 2008. Her research interests lay in the fields of political ecology and extractive industries, the anthropology of oil, the anthropology of development, religious studies and material culture. She holds a MA in Archaeology from UCLA and an MPhil in Anthropology of Development from UiB and she has been conducting archaeological, ethnoarcheological and ethnographic fieldwork in the US, Iceland, Egypt, Poland and Turkana.
