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The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea
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.
344 pages, Hardcover
Published December 27, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 20, 2023
Assigned and read in my International Studies senior seminar.
The ethnographic writing in the text is great, and incredibly revealing of a variety of ways that US oil firms, and development capital more generally, seek to shape and pretend not to shape postcolonial governance and economics. The chapters on enclave Houston suburbs situated in Malabo, on boilerplate production sharing contracts, subcontracted labor "body shops," and on failed liberal transparency initiatives will be incredibly helpful for me. the overall argument that these are 'licit' rather than 'scandalous' features of capitalism is, i think, quite an elegant one.
I found myself at odds with the book's top-line argument, though, in two somewhat related regards. first, its injunction towards ethnography seems to follow the trend of anti-critique / anti-theory work that also (implicitly or explicitly) is a rebuke to marxism and critical postcolonialism. near as i can tell, it is a combination of timothy mitchell, bruno latour, and michel callon -- filtered and reshaped by anna tsing and karen ho. the theoretical argument i found to be incongruous and at times almost upsetting in my disagreement with its application. part of the problem with this sort of market ethnography is that its central argument seems to be that capitalism is nothing other than its effects. capitalism is fully immanent to itself. but this seems to mean that they cannot admit that capitalism exhibits an internal logic or force. whatever the aversion to marx, it's also a version of deleuze and guattari being used against itself. the completely flat version of immanence, to me, would seem to belie the staging of the virtual/actual (/intensive) distinctions; the plan(e)s, or the "abstract machine." for whatever reason, this observation/critique on my part seemed to have touched a nerve https://x.com/kaibosworth/status/1701...
the anti-critical tendency of the theoretical framework also felt somewhat ill fitting to its subject - immensely racially and colonially stratified labor and social structures. I felt like the scant references to "racial capitalism" and the one Fred Moten quote were sort of haphazardly tacked on to the project after the fact, not least because--though now quite varied in their uptake--these are anything but anti-critical, and surely a rejection of the model of flatness or temporal continuity(?) otherwise staged here.
all that said, I don't want to make it seem like i'm too hard on the book because a) writing a book is so fucking hard as shit that 'coherence' is completely elusive, and b) i learned so much from the research and writing, and really enjoyed teaching with it as well
The ethnographic writing in the text is great, and incredibly revealing of a variety of ways that US oil firms, and development capital more generally, seek to shape and pretend not to shape postcolonial governance and economics. The chapters on enclave Houston suburbs situated in Malabo, on boilerplate production sharing contracts, subcontracted labor "body shops," and on failed liberal transparency initiatives will be incredibly helpful for me. the overall argument that these are 'licit' rather than 'scandalous' features of capitalism is, i think, quite an elegant one.
I found myself at odds with the book's top-line argument, though, in two somewhat related regards. first, its injunction towards ethnography seems to follow the trend of anti-critique / anti-theory work that also (implicitly or explicitly) is a rebuke to marxism and critical postcolonialism. near as i can tell, it is a combination of timothy mitchell, bruno latour, and michel callon -- filtered and reshaped by anna tsing and karen ho. the theoretical argument i found to be incongruous and at times almost upsetting in my disagreement with its application. part of the problem with this sort of market ethnography is that its central argument seems to be that capitalism is nothing other than its effects. capitalism is fully immanent to itself. but this seems to mean that they cannot admit that capitalism exhibits an internal logic or force. whatever the aversion to marx, it's also a version of deleuze and guattari being used against itself. the completely flat version of immanence, to me, would seem to belie the staging of the virtual/actual (/intensive) distinctions; the plan(e)s, or the "abstract machine." for whatever reason, this observation/critique on my part seemed to have touched a nerve https://x.com/kaibosworth/status/1701...
the anti-critical tendency of the theoretical framework also felt somewhat ill fitting to its subject - immensely racially and colonially stratified labor and social structures. I felt like the scant references to "racial capitalism" and the one Fred Moten quote were sort of haphazardly tacked on to the project after the fact, not least because--though now quite varied in their uptake--these are anything but anti-critical, and surely a rejection of the model of flatness or temporal continuity(?) otherwise staged here.
all that said, I don't want to make it seem like i'm too hard on the book because a) writing a book is so fucking hard as shit that 'coherence' is completely elusive, and b) i learned so much from the research and writing, and really enjoyed teaching with it as well
July 26, 2021
This was an excellent read, though it suffered from a common syndrome where academic books are a little caught up on their own jargon and run on a bit too long. I think some of the language was needlessly inaccessible, but that’s par for the course for books like this tbh.
The content of the book was very good- I think it did a lot of interesting ethnography and tackled a conceptually interesting space. If you like capitalist critiques or legal anthropology this is a cool read. Some sections dragged a bit too long, but chapters like those looking at the contract were really interesting.
If you are reading the book halfway through and aren’t yet satisfied with it making the connections/fully realizing the capitalist critiques that naturally arise from the subject matter, I suggest sticking through until the end. The conclusion really brought it all together and bumped this up from just being a ‘book that went on too long without ever making the exact point you’re expecting/wanting’- it paid off.
The content of the book was very good- I think it did a lot of interesting ethnography and tackled a conceptually interesting space. If you like capitalist critiques or legal anthropology this is a cool read. Some sections dragged a bit too long, but chapters like those looking at the contract were really interesting.
If you are reading the book halfway through and aren’t yet satisfied with it making the connections/fully realizing the capitalist critiques that naturally arise from the subject matter, I suggest sticking through until the end. The conclusion really brought it all together and bumped this up from just being a ‘book that went on too long without ever making the exact point you’re expecting/wanting’- it paid off.
October 24, 2021
A remarkable ethnographic deep dive into the offshore oil industry of the worlds most corrupt dictatorship, Equatorial Guinea. Appel’s main thesis is that creating a tidy, clean “licit” look to western operations at the global mineral frontier requires a constant and expensive effort to wall off (literally) the lives of those involved in managing the extraction from the messy political, social, and economic realities on the ground in those locales, messes often intimately bound up with the extractive processes themselves. This walling off process allows those participating in the process to dismiss the pathologies caused by the industry as being a result of the natural indigenous conditions, a product not of the imbricated relations, but of a “resource curse.”
Appel’s central argument is that the “licit” face of capitalism, especially in the global south as in EG, is “performative” — that is, by making the world of the expats seem like a little mini-Houston it performs licitness, modernity, legitimacy etc — while holding at bay (and allowing western participants to disavow any responsibility for) the “messy entanglements” of the realities on the ground in the places they are working, messy conditions that the oil companies help to produce and enforce (not least by buttressing Africa’s longest serving and most corrupt dictator). This is clearly true on some level, but it also seems to beg a question of how and when a “performance” is sustained long enough it actually becomes (in some ontological sense) the thing that at first and for a long time it was just mimicking? Singapore in 1965 could surely have been characterized as “performative” of modernity, its corrupt and seedy near past still clearly visible; and yet, as Lee Kwan Yoo sustained the charade for decade after decade after decade, eventually it became the thing it was at first only pretending to be, eg it eventually fully inhabited the performed role, like the ultimate method actor.
I suppose part of Appel’s answer to this, though she doesn’t spell it out, is that whereas Singapore was a locally directed performance with permanent actors, these offshore performances are played by a rotating cast whose very racial and national outsiderness makes them ineligible to become “native” (in both sense of the word). And yet even here, I wonder: are there not legion examples of settler colonialists who have in fact created new hybrid indigineities? Is this not the history of modern Latin America?
Appel’s central argument is that the “licit” face of capitalism, especially in the global south as in EG, is “performative” — that is, by making the world of the expats seem like a little mini-Houston it performs licitness, modernity, legitimacy etc — while holding at bay (and allowing western participants to disavow any responsibility for) the “messy entanglements” of the realities on the ground in the places they are working, messy conditions that the oil companies help to produce and enforce (not least by buttressing Africa’s longest serving and most corrupt dictator). This is clearly true on some level, but it also seems to beg a question of how and when a “performance” is sustained long enough it actually becomes (in some ontological sense) the thing that at first and for a long time it was just mimicking? Singapore in 1965 could surely have been characterized as “performative” of modernity, its corrupt and seedy near past still clearly visible; and yet, as Lee Kwan Yoo sustained the charade for decade after decade after decade, eventually it became the thing it was at first only pretending to be, eg it eventually fully inhabited the performed role, like the ultimate method actor.
I suppose part of Appel’s answer to this, though she doesn’t spell it out, is that whereas Singapore was a locally directed performance with permanent actors, these offshore performances are played by a rotating cast whose very racial and national outsiderness makes them ineligible to become “native” (in both sense of the word). And yet even here, I wonder: are there not legion examples of settler colonialists who have in fact created new hybrid indigineities? Is this not the history of modern Latin America?
March 21, 2024
Great analysis and review about Capitalism, its right hand man- liberalism, and the licitness of inequality within society. Lots of memorable quotes in the first chapter of this book, including “If people want cheap gas, there cannot be democracy” 😟! The parts where Appel talks about contract law and sub contracts is where i get lost.. very dense for me, but this book is a mandatory read for every anthro student!
October 11, 2022
One of the best ethnographies of capitalism I’ve ever read, trying to invert the classic anthropology move (life is more complicated than capitalists/planners think, the economic social) to instead interrogate how capitalism comes to seem frictionless and smooth through a lot of work. The chapter on expats particularly strong connection between race/class/gender/domesticity and capitalism.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews