Member Profile

Elana Shever

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Colgate University

Scholar-in-Residence, Institute for Advance Study, University of Minnesota

Research Interests

Contact

Email
Website

Publications

Books

Vital Relations : Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship

Susan McKinnon, Fenella Cannell | SAR Press, School for Advanced Research Press (2013) | ISBN: 9781938645013

For more than 150 years, theories of social evolution, development, and modernity have been unanimous in their assumption that kinship organizes simpler, traditional, pre-state societies but not complex, modern, state societies. And these theories have been unanimous in their presupposition that within modern state-based societies kinship has been relegated to the domestic domain, has lost its economic and political functions, has retained no organizing force in modern political and economic structures and processes, and has become secularized and rationalized. Vital Relations challenges these notions. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain a different perspective on the concept of modernity itself, and on the place of kinship and family in modern life.

Resources for Reform : Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina

Elana Shever | Stanford University Press (2012) | ISBN: 080477840X

While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.

Examining Argentina's conversion from a state-controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.

Resources for Reform : Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina

Elana Shever | Stanford University Press (2012) | ISBN: 9780804778404

While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.

Examining Argentina's conversion from a state-controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.

Articles

Engendering the Company:Corporate Personhood and the “Face” of an Oil Company in Metropolitan Buenos Aires

Elana Shever (2010) | PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33(1): 26-46 | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2010.01091.x

Neoliberal associations: Property, company, and family in the Argentine oil fields

ELANA SHEVER (2008) | American Ethnologist 35(4): 701-716 | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00106.x