Oil Culture: Producing the New Russia

耶鲁大学的道格拉斯·J·罗杰斯博士将研究“石油国家”在现代世界经济中不断变化的性质和功能。他的研究将聚焦于当今俄罗斯社会的石油公司，以乌拉尔的佩尔姆地区为案例研究。过去十年，在佩尔姆地区运营的主要石油公司卢克石油公司在社会和文化项目上投入了大量资金，经常与国家办公室和其他公司合作，资助从博物馆和青年节到教堂重建和种族学术研究的各种项目。罗杰斯将探索这些非常明显的赞助活动对国家和市场配置、公民和公民身份概念以及最终对石油国家本身的影响，石油国家似乎与社会科学家最熟悉的后殖民石油出口国家截然不同。罗杰斯将在佩尔姆地区的四个不同地区进行研究，以调查由新的石油财富资助的社会和文化项目在当地的意义。他将通过各种人种学研究方法收集主要的定性数据。数据将来自半结构化和非结构化访谈、就业和培训历史、文化项目叙述、特定文化对象的历史、参与者观察以及档案和报纸研究。这项研究之所以重要，是因为现有的社会科学研究主要集中在国际管道政治或操纵石油财富以支持和争夺政治权力。在当今的全球政治经济中，人们对石油对当地社会、文化和国家的影响知之甚少。该项目将是第一批从人种学角度探讨最新事态发展的项目之一，探索石油驱动的社会和文化变化在基层的影响，然后将其理论化。

Dr. Douglas J. Rogers (Yale University) will investigate the changing nature and functions of "petro-states" in the modern world economy. His research will focus on oil companies in present-day Russian society, using the Perm Region of the Urals as a case study. Lukoil, the primary oil company operating in the Perm Region, has pumped enormous sums of money into social and cultural projects over the last decade, often partnering with state offices and other companies to fund everything from museums and youth festivals to the reconstruction of churches and scholarly research on ethnicity. Rogers will explore the effects of these highly visible sponsorship activities on configurations of state and market, concepts of citizen and citizenship, and, ultimately, the petrostate itself, which appears to becoming quite distinct from the postcolonial oil-exporting states most familiar to social scientists.Rogers will conduct research in four different districts of the Perm Region, in order to investigate the local significance of social and cultural projects funded by new oil wealth. He will collect primarily qualitative data through a variety of ethnographic research methods. Data will come from semi-structured and unstructured interviews, employment and training histories, cultural project narratives, histories of particular cultural objects, participant observation, and archival and newspaper research. This research is important because existing social science research focuses primarily on international pipeline politics or the manipulation of oil wealth to support and contest political power. Very little is known about how oil has affected local society, culture, and state in today's global political economy. This project will be among the first to approach recent developments ethnographically, exploring and then theorizing the effects of oil-driven social and cultural change at the ground level.