The materiality of the corporation: Oil, gas, and corporate social technologies in the remaking of a Russian region

In the Perm Region of Russia, recent social and cultural projects sponsored by energy companies prominently reference certain material qualities of oil and gas. The depth associated with the region’s oil deposits is evoked in cultural heritage celebrations funded by Lukoil-Perm, and the connectivity associated with natural gas pipelines figures in PermRegionGaz’s efforts to foster new patterns of sociability. Attending to the larger material and semiotic shifts in which these projects are embedded points to a significant dimension of contemporary hydrocarbon politics and to specific ways in which corporations attempt to transform critiques of their operations. [oil, natural gas, corporations, materiality, infrastructure, corporate social responsibility, postsocialisms] The last millennium in the history of the [Perm Region] has been a period of expansion and continuous territorial development—by the Novgorod Ushkuiniks and the missionary bishop Stephen of Perm; by the Stroganov and Demidov dynasties; by Timofei Ermak and Vasilii Tatishchev; by the colleagues of the OGPU and the victims of the GULAG; by Communist Partymembers and nonmembers; by Lukoil and Gazprom. —“The New Perm Period,” New Companion, December 26, 1999 C asting an eye back at the turn of the millennium, one of the leading newspapers of the Perm Region, in the Russian Urals, characterized the region’s present age as defined by two massive corporations, both of them in the energy sector. Indeed, for all that observers have trained their gaze on a resurgent Russian state in recent years, corporations have also been central to the development and implementation of a powerful set of new technologies aimed at shaping human lives. In the PermRegion of the early 2000s, Lukoil and Gazprom, in the shape of regional subsidiaries, were often understood to be out in front of both state agencies and NGOs in their efforts to respond to critiques of the status quo and mold new kinds of citizens and communities after a decade of “transition.” They had become as central to life in the Perm Region as the Communist Party and the Stroganovs were in earlier eras. The dynamics by which oil and gas invite—and constrain—certain politics are most heavily theorized at the level of the nation-state, where political factions struggle to capture resource rents and those rents, in turn, fund projects of national development or integration (e.g., Apter 2005; Coronil 1997). An increasingly evident dimension of hydrocarbon politics in recent years, however, is the participation of oil and gas companies in smalland medium-scale development projects in their areas of operation. Attending to these projects in a single region permits an examination of some of the more direct—and less state-mediated—mechanisms by which oil and gas participate in the reshaping of political, social, and cultural orders. At this level of analysis, the kinds ofmaterial and semiotic processes that help constitute hydrocarbon politics come into particularly sharp focus. Consider two opening snapshots from the Perm Region. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 284–296, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01364.x The materiality of the corporation American Ethnologist Snapshot 1 is of the town of Il’inskii, which has been quite successful in grant competitions in recent years. Lukoil-Perm, a subsidiary of Russia’s largest private oil company that operates a number of wells in the surrounding district, has provided funds to remodel the library, start a folk-crafts center, and support annual festivals celebrating local culture. Perhaps themost significant grant-funded addition to Il’inskii has been a newly renovated and expanded 1,600-square-meter regional studies museum dedicated to the famous Stroganovs, whose large family estates in tsarist-era Perm Province were administered from offices in Il’inskii. Il’inskii’s projects are most notable for their frequent emphasis on celebrating cultural identity and local history. Taking part in the town’s many cultural festivals or visiting the professionally designed exhibits about the Stroganovs in Il’inskii’s new museum, one can hardly bemoan the Soviet-era destruction of local cultural heritage, as onemight have in the 1990s. So, at least, say those doling out Lukoil-Perm’s grants. Snapshot 2 is of the town of Babka, some one hundred sixty kilometers to the southwest of Il’inskii, which has also distinguished itself in grant competitions. Reconstruction of the central square, for instance, began in 2004 with financing from PermRegionGaz, a subsidiary of Gazprom responsible for pipelines in the district. The new square features a garden, a fountain, new benches for sitting and talking, paved paths designed with stroller-pushing mothers in mind, and even a small monument to the town’s namesake—a grandma (babka). “We call it ‘Babka Arbat,’” one of the out-of-town specialists who helped secure grant funding for the square toldmewith a smile and some pride, referring to the old Moscow district known for its strolling pedestrians, resident intellectuals, and air of sociability. Projects like those in Babka, it was thought by their gascompany funders, might provide people with new ways to make connections, to get to know their fellow townspeople. Indeed, with its benches and paths, Babka’s new square was explicitly designed and promoted to provide a new place for the sociability that many Russians longed for after the tumultuous and alienating 1990s. In this article, I focus on a curious and, I argue, very significant element shared by these two examples. In both cases, aspects of crude oil and natural gas as material substances, along with the infrastructures built to extract and transport these substances, feature prominently in their reincarnations as sponsored social and cultural projects intended, in part, to tamp down anticorporate critique. In the first case, Lukoil-Perm’s grants for cultural heritage projects often liken the geological depth of oil deposits to the historical depth attributed to local culture—even as they seek to reassure local communities that “their” oil has not been stolen by faraway oligarchs. In the second case, PermRegionGaz’s grants for projects fostering social connectivity often evoke the material connectivity and networks of pipeline natural gas—even as they seek to counter widespread opinion that the gas industry makes its money by speculating on a transient product. Depth and connectivity, then, as material qualities associated respectively with oil and gas, play an important role in corporate social and cultural projects in the region. Indeed, I show in the following discussion that links between oil and culture, on the one hand, and pipeline gas and sociability, on the other hand, have become central to the political landscape of the Perm Region. These links are contingent but not arbitrary. In fact, one can trace their origins fairly precisely within Lukoil-Perm and PermRegionGaz as emergent corporations of regional scope. My exploration of this dimension of hydrocarbon politics thus proceedswithin a broader argument about how capitalist corporations engage with the material world. The corporation: Materiality beyond production, exchange, and consumption By materiality, I mean the sensuous and phenomenal qualities of things and their implication in human social and cultural life. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the material qualities of objects—such as depth or connectivity—enter into and shift within broader regimes of signification at particular times and places.1 Materiality in this and other senses has long been at the center of anthropological studies of production, exchange, and consumption, but it appears only in limited ways in anthropologists’ more recent turn to the study of aspects of the corporation. The literature on corporate social technologies2—the strand of the anthropology of the corporation with which I engage here—is illustrative in this regard. Ethnographybased accounts of corporate social technologies (hereafter, CSTs) have contributed enormously to understandings of the ways in which corporate participation in development, environmental, and other projects is reshaping communities and persons around the world (e.g., Kirsch 2007; Rajak 2011; Welker 2009; Welker and Wood 2011; see also Barry 2004).3 Synthesizing much of this literature and their own pathbreaking ethnographies of corporations, Peter Benson and Stuart Kirsch (2010) have set out an instructive model of the stages—denial, acknowledgment, and engagement— through which corporations often move in their efforts to respond to criticism. In this model, the material qualities of objects appear chiefly in the role of causing deleterious human health consequences and environmental destruction in the first place. Specific material qualities of tobacco smoke or mine tailings, for instance, are revealed to be harmful; this revelation prompts the stages of corporate response culminating in what, in recent times, has come to be termed “corporate social responsibility.”4