Awards

• Winner of Winner, Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology.

Overview

Omolade Adunbi investigates the myths behind competing claims to oil wealth in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Looking at ownership of natural resources, oil extraction practices, government control over oil resources, and discourse about oil, Adunbi shows how symbolic claims have created an ""oil citizenship."" He explores the ways NGOs, militant groups, and community organizers invoke an ancestral promise to defend land disputes, justify disruptive actions, or organize against oil corporations. Policies to control the abundant resources have increased contestations over wealth, transformed the relationship of people to their environment, and produced unique forms of power, governance, and belonging.

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9780253015730

Table of Contents

Reviews

Provides a much needed ethnographic perspective on the complex dimensions of the long-running social and political conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta. -Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria Reveals the complex interrelationships and ambiguous borders between key groups of actors: NGOs, militants, youth groups, elders, the army, corporations, and the state, and looks specifically and uniquely at the centrality of oil in the production of social identity. -Kristin D. Phillips, Emory University Recommended. - Choice

Provides a much needed ethnographic perspective on the complex dimensions of the long-running social and political conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta. -Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria Reveals the complex interrelationships and ambiguous borders between key groups of actors: NGOs, militants, youth groups, elders, the army, corporations, and the state, and looks specifically and uniquely at the centrality of oil in the production of social identity. -Kristin D. Phillips, Emory University Recommended. - Choice This book is well written and delivers what it promises to do at the outset. It details appreciably the different claims to Nigerian oil wealth and the consequences that follow when birthright claims go unmet. The growth in oil revenue, and the perception or reality that it has not been shared fairly, have no doubt been the major reasons for power contestation in Nigeria. -Africa Today

Provides a much needed ethnographic perspective on the complex dimensions of the long-running social and political conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta. -Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria Reveals the complex interrelationships and ambiguous borders between key groups of actors: NGOs, militants, youth groups, elders, the army, corporations, and the state, and looks specifically and uniquely at the centrality of oil in the production of social identity. -Kristin D. Phillips, Emory University

Provides a much needed ethnographic perspective on the complex dimensions of the long-running social and political conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria

Author Information

Omolade Adunbi is Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Faculty Associate for Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan.

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