Writing Wednesday: Oil and Mobility

My effort to produce a complete manuscript of my short book project will go on pause for the next few weeks as I focus on a few projects with March deadlines. On Monday I flurried about a bit and produced some texts for the section on oil and mobility. Here’s where I am right now with it. It was fun to I’m hoping to add a final section on viscosity and oil and how the materiality of oil was central to its mobility. In the meantime, this is where I am: 

Among the most obvious features of the Bakken oil patch and petromodernity is the prevalence of mobility. From the endless rumble of trucks across the Bakken to the sleek and angular design of mobile homes and RVs, the landscape is pregnant with motion. We recognized the central role of mobility in the Bakken from our first visits to the region. As our project developed, we spent as many productive hours in the truck traveling between our study sites as we did on our sites. This time in motion not only gave us hours to discuss what we were seeing in the Bakken, but informed our decision to document the region through the use of a tourist guide. The guide as a genre not only reflected the hours spent driving through the oil patch, but also foregrounded the role that petromobility played in the production of the tourist and ultimately modernity. The parallel between our mobility as archaeologists, the mobility of oil workers, and the mobility of capital in the Bakken oil patch created a moving target for archaeological investigation.

The archaeology of the contemporary world has long understood that challenges of active site archaeology where the objects of study are in motion. One of the early classics in the sub-discipline was the ”excavation“ of a 1991 Ford Transit van used by an archaeological field projects. The very mobility of this vehicle shaped the kind of assemblages it produced. Automobiles are not only among the most valuable objects that many people own, but are also spatially and temporally diverse assemblages. The van itself, like most vehicles the late 20th and early 21st centuries, represented multiple places of manufacturing brought together only in final assembly. The objects deposited over the course of the van’s history likewise reflected its mobility by connecting the van to various sites of activity over its 15 year history.

The archaeological attention to abandoned cars at a Finish border crossing demonstrates how similar methods applied to different vehicles can contribute to our understanding of mobility on a transnational scale. The vehicles showed relatively few signs of their use by migrants who had crossed into Finland north of the Arctic circle: some cold weather clothing and blankets, notes with Russian and English phrases, addresses for relatives, cheap meals and drinks, and sometimes toys. The ephemerality of the migrant in the material record is characteristic of their mobility (Kourelis 2019). In the Bakken, mobility compensates for the precarity of employment and the volatility of the oil boom. Departed trailers, for example, can sometimes leave piles of trash, abandoned mudrooms, and outlines left by weather skirting around the base of the RV, but more often leave few traces as the operators of the RV parks typically clean up after the previous resident has departed in order to make the site usable again. Type 1 camps often sold communities on the ephemerality of their installations by juxtaposing them to more permanent housing solutions which require greater investments in infrastructure and risk glutting the housing market once the boom subsides. 

In many ways mobility is the dominant feature of the modern age. Fossil fuels made unprecedented mobility possible. By the 1920s, cars powered by oil were transforming personal mobility. The close connection between mobility and oil is nowhere more obvious than in the opening scenes of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927) where “Bunny” Ross and his Dad are barreling across the California landscape in a car on the way to negotiate an oil lease. By the mid-20th century, the “road novel” had become such an institution in American fiction that Amativ Ghosh could joke that it was only a matter of time before a graduate student would calculate the carbon emissions from a classic American road novel (Ghosh 1992). By the end of the 20th century, mobility in “petrofiction” as often referred to works like Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) which traced the displacement of a community from an Arabian oasis as a result of the discovery of oil. It offers a tragic counter point to Wallace Stegner’s description of Thomas Barger’s discovery of oil on the Arabia peninsula. In the 21st century, we see oil as both an agent of displacement and a fuel for the very displacements it affects. 

The viscosity of oil itself is crucial for our understanding of modern and contemporary mobility. Our ability to transport oil over long distances in pipeline relies on the viscosity of oil itself to facilitate its own mobility. The result of this viscosity is the gradual spread of both modernity as well as its consequences.