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Projects of devotion: energy exploration and moral ambition in the cosmoeconomy of oil and gas in the Western United States
Author(s) -
High Mette M.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.13013
Subject(s) - vision , compassion , outreach , environmental ethics , energy (signal processing) , relation (database) , valuation (finance) , petroleum industry , political science , business , sociology , law , engineering , finance , philosophy , anthropology , statistics , mathematics , database , environmental engineering , computer science
This essay considers how people working in the oil and gas industry in Colorado perceive their involvement in energy exploration in relation to broader practices of devotion, compassion, and outreach. I argue that although their energy projects may appear to merely echo companies’ formal promotional pitches, the oilfield and corporate actors’ own moral ambitions reveal more‐than‐human cosmoeconomic visions of oil's potentiality. This essay thus demonstrates how multiple and diverging ethical registers intersect and inform the valuation of oil.