A Blessing and a Curse : Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela / Matt Wilde.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilde, Matt (College teacher), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Working class--Venezuela--Valencia (Carabobo).

Working class.

Petroleum industry and trade--Government policy--Venezuela.

Petroleum industry and trade.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (238 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023]

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

"A Blessing and a Curse examines the lived experience of political change, moral uncertainty, and economic crisis amid Venezuela's controversial Bolivarian Revolution. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an urban barrio over the course of a decade, Matt Wilde argues that everyday life in this period was intimately shaped by a critical contradiction: that in their efforts to capture a larger portion of oil money and distribute it more widely among the population, the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro pursued policies that ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency they sought to overcome. Offering a new synthesis between anthropological work on energy, politics, and morality, the book explores how the use of oil money to fund the revolution's social programs and political reforms produced profound cultural anxieties about the contaminating effects of petroleum revenues in everyday settings. Tracing how these anxieties rippled out into community life, family networks, and local politics, Wilde shows how questions about how to live a good life came to be intimately shaped by Venezuela's contradictory relationship with oil. In doing so, he proposes a new way of thinking about the political and moral economies of natural resources in postcolonial settings"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. Sowing the Oil

2. Portrait of a Political Family

3. Aspirations and Disparities in the Bolivarian Barrio

4. Insecurity and the Search for Moral Order

5. The Moral Life of Revolution

6. Petro-democracy and its Ambiguities

7. The Weight of the Future

8. The Unraveling

9. Beyond the Magical State

Notes

References

Index

Back Cover.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Wilde, Matt A Blessing and a Curse

ISBN:

9781503637085

1503637085

OCLC:

1390917978