




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 4 (1): 139–143, January 2021 

 
BOOK REVIEW 
  

A Wealth of Information in a Novel Narrative 
 

Sarandha Jain  
 
Dolly Kikon. 2019. Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization 
in Northeast India (Culture, Place, and Nature). Seattle: University of 
Washington Press. ISBN: 978-02-9574-395-0, pp. 204, USD 30 (PB).  

Amplifying local voices in Assam 
and Nagaland, Dolly Kikon‘s 
ethnographic account along the 
border of these states shows us 
what marking a territory as ―fossil 
fuel rich‖ does to the daily lives of 
the people there. She uses emic 
metaphors to describe everyday 
entanglements with oil and coal in 
spaces of extraction, which are 
physically separated from local 
communities and heavily guarded 
by security forces but socially 
conjoined with people‘s lives. 
Kikon‘s narrative tells us how 
fossil fuels rise from the ground 
beneath and seep into the social 
relations and worldviews of the 
locals, configuring everything 
from political struggles and 

                                                        
 PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 452 Schermerhorn 
Extension, 1200 Amsterdam Avenue, New York 10027, USA; j.sarandha@columbia.edu. 

Copyright © Jain 2021. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 
International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.357   

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.357


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [140] 

administrative procedures to personal aspirations, future plans, and 
subjectivities.  

Just as the presence of rigs, wells, pipes, tankers, and gated oil sites alters 
the physical landscape, the presence of geologists, traders, bureaucrats, 
engineers, and armed forces alters the social landscape. The production of 
an extraction site is just as much the work of soft infrastructures and social 
networks as it is of material infrastructures. The effect this has on the micro 
and macro lives of the people living there, Kikon points out, is largely 
shaped by violence and surveillance.  

The growing literature on oil extraction suggests that living with oil implies 
living with violence, as it isn‘t just an effect of extraction but has been 
fundamental to fossil fuel production (Sawyer 2004; Vitalis 2007; Watts 
2008; Shever 2012). Given oil‘s centrality to economic growth and state 
power, its sites being armed and surveilled and the people living there being 
displaced and doubted have become regular features. However, Timothy 
Mitchell (2011) urges us to question the obviousness of this linkage 
between oil and violence: can a bureaucracy and management of oil look 
more egalitarian and transparent if its leadership and the goals and 
meanings attached to it are different? Or is there something inherent to the 
physicality of oil that leaves a trail of oppression? In most cases, certain 
characteristics of oil are emphasized by certain modes of its management, 
to coproduce the structures we have around it, which illuminates the ways 
in which material and human factors co-create particular regimes, which are 
historically contingent (Jain 2020). Hannah Appel (2012, 2019) has 
illustrated the role of capitalist economies in allowing oil sites to disengage 
with the local, while Kikon‘s research demonstrates their entanglements 
with the local. Similar to Kikon, Mandana Limbert (2010) studies how lives 
are affected by oil by exploring how locals understand the transformation 
of their worlds, institutions, practices, and infrastructures, and their 
expectations from the future. This book does not engage with these 
discussions. 

It focuses on how the Indian state views the North Eastern states, how that 
impacts the lives of the people there, and how they articulate their demands 
to the state in a vocabulary provided by resource richness. Rights over 
resources—the ability to extract and sell them—become the primary talking 
point in political struggles, and hailing from regions rich in minerals 
becomes embedded in people‘s cultural and personal identities. This implies 
that once a place gets marked as ―fossil fuel rich‖, it changes the terms of 
the debate irreversibly, even for the locals. That identity, once given to 
them, cannot be escaped. Kikon describes the ordinary ways in which place 
making, borders, resource richness, and the military get woven into local 



[141] Sarandha Jain 

stories, histories, and myths, which enable people to make meaning of their 
lives. 

Resistance against the state is then also expressed in the language of oil, 
either via resistance to it or a fight to control it. Control over oil becomes a 
metaphor for sovereignty. As Fernando Coronil (1997) elucidates, oil comes 
to be seen as a ―magical‖ substance, the owner of which can either be a 
―devil‖ or a ―magnanimous sorcerer‖, bringing riches to the people. But 
once local dreams of self-determination are sought to be realized through 
the ownership of oil, the model of governance and socio-economic life they 
aspire to are often aligned with capitalist development and are not radically 
different from their current state. The book does not provide us with a 
history of Assam‘s political struggle and how it is mired with oil. Instead, 
Kikon sets out to explore the ways in which a fossil fuel identity has 
unfolded in Assam and Nagaland. 

The extensive narrative presents a series of observations about living with 
oil and coal, but the text remains largely descriptive, making no solid 
argument and offering little theoretical insight. Even the observations are 
often inconclusive. The one observation that is strongly emphasized is the 
mundane ways in which oil infrastructures interfere with quotidian lives, the 
militarized encounters that upend their lives, and the relationship of force 
and threat between the state and local citizens. While the ethnographic 
vignettes are appreciated, if the author is not using them to make a larger 
argument, they remain mere stories. One cannot help but wonder who her 
intended audience is. What body of literature is she speaking to? How does 
she position herself in the existing work on resource extraction? What 
conceptual framework is the book deploying and what are her theoretical 
assertions? What conversation does she want to open with this? If the book 
is meant to be read by the people she writes about, and not by academics, 
then too wouldn‘t a central argument that strings together their stories into 
a body of analyses be appreciated by them? What are the people—with the 
lived experiences narrated in the book—meant to derive from it? 

Her use of emic categories is admirable, but she leaves the work incomplete 
by not conceptualizing them enough to draw connections between local 
ideas and the observations she makes about them. For instance, her use of 
love as an analytic tool to understand social relationships amidst oil is 
fascinating, but it remains confusing because the reader is left wondering 
what she is attempting to highlight with it. What analytical work does this 
tool do here? Evidently, she is making connections between love, 
belonging, bodies, gender, ethnicity, geography, and mining. But these 
knots are not explained adequately. How are the different types of love tied 
to oil and coal? As independent stories, they are interesting empirical pieces, 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [142] 

but what do they tell us about living with oil? Is love a response to state 
violence and a form of resistance or a coping mechanism? It remains for 
the reader to guess. The only place where there is clarity regarding this is 
where she describes the relationship between state-sponsored development 
and citizens, which the latter define as love when the former is effective. 

Kikon uses the framework of citizenship to analyse her field. The idea of a 
―good person‖ being defined by their position vis-à-vis oil sites is insightful 
(142). This can be elaborated upon and analysed further by using the many 
frameworks of citizenship Niraja Jayal (2013) lays out in her capacious and 
authoritative theoretical work on the subject. However, Kikon does not 
conceptualize this any further. Instead, she discusses two ways of producing 
what she calls ―carbon citizenship‖ (143). The first is that citizens in these 
regions have to constantly produce documents and undergo profiling at 
security checkpoints. The second entails the violent interrogation of people 
by state authorities and oil companies in order to ensure that they are 
citizens. However, neither of these forms produce a ―carbon‖ citizenship. 
Their documents are not carbonized, the way an LPG account‘s document 
to prove one‘s citizenship is or the documents required to procure an LPG 
account are. An affiliation with oil is not required to prove one‘s 
citizenship, or vice-versa, according to the two methods she describes. 
Going by her descriptions, those methods are the results of the presence of 
carbon and end up assessing people‘s citizenship. They are not tying 
people—through specific carbonized documents or interrogations—to the 
state and producing an alternate type of citizenship emanating from fossil 
fuels. While they do speak of citizenship, should they be termed ―carbon 
citizenship‖? 

In sum, the book is narrative rich, but it does not deliver on the promises it 
sets up in the introduction. It flags some concepts but does not flesh them 
out or follow through. That said, because of its empirical wealth, it is 
informative, providing fodder for analyses of sites of extraction. It is useful 
for scholars of resource politics as well as scholars of North East India for 
whom it will act as a rich repository of knowledge for future research 
projects. 

 

REFERENCES 

Appel, H. 2012. ―Offshore Work: Oil, Modularity, and the How of Capitalism in 
Equatorial Guinea‖. American Ethnologist 39: 692–709. 
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01389.x 

_____ Appel, H. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. 
Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478090243 

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01389.x
https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478090243


[143] Sarandha Jain 

Coronil, F. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Jain, S. 2020. ―Building ‗Oil‘ in British India: A Category, an Infrastructure‖, Journal 
of Energy History/Revue d'Histoire de l'Énergie 3.  

Jayal, N. 2013. Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History. Ranikhet: Permanent 
Black. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067585 

Limbert, M. 2010. In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory and Social Life in an Omani Town. 
Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804774604 

Mitchell, T. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York: Verso. 

Sawyer, S. 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism 
in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385752 

Shever, E. 2012. Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina. Stanford: 
Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804783200 

Vitalis, R. 2007. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford: 
Stanford University Press. 

Watts, M. 2008. ―Economies of Violence‖. In Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, 
Culture and Power, edited by Amita Baviskar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 
106–36. 

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067585
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804774604
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385752
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804783200

