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Paper short abstract

Through what I call the ‘Oily Lifeworlds’ this paper demonstrates how beyond being a source of toxic pollution, people in the extractive landscape of the Niger Delta perceive, live with and reimagine oil as a material, socio-cultural and spiritual resource for both human and more than human entities

Paper long abstract

As extractivism continues to produce environmental toxicity in the Global South, indigenous populations disproportionately impacted by pollution have responded in different ways, particularly in several resource endowed localities that play host to extractive activities in Africa. The Niger Delta, where decades of crude oil extraction have led to persistent hydrocarbon pollution affecting millions of inhabitants, provides a lens through which the diverse and unique ways indigenous people respond to pollution can be observed and understood. This paper deviates from widely recognized approaches of environmental protests and resistance which objectifies crude oil as a toxic pollutant responsible for the region’s environmental crisis. Instead, it focuses on the rather uncommon and subtle entanglements with oil, which has enabled the people to live with oil pollution. Drawing from ethnographic analysis of the ‘Oily Lifeworlds’ in the Niger Delta, I argue that oil is embedded in everyday life and reanimated as a symbol of geo-cultural identity, as well as reimagined as a resource for economic, medicinal and spiritual utility for communities. Through accumulated experiential knowledge systems associated with decades of oil entanglements, residents of host communities have learned to co-exist with oil and the associated extractive activities as part of their everyday life. This approach of reimagining pollution as a source of utility foregrounds one of the unique and numerous ways in which indigenous people respond to pollution. Beyond this, it offers new insights into the intersection between extractivism and geo-cultural knowledge production in localities of resource extraction.