Oily Lifeworlds’: On Oil and Everyday Spirituality in Nigeria’s Niger Delta

On Wednesday 22 October, we are excited to host another EHN lecture and discussion with Jackson Tamunosaki Jack at House of Connections!

Jackson Tamunosaki Jack is a postdoctoral fellow in the AFREXTRACT project. His research explores extractive lifeworlds and the political ecology of crude oil extraction in Africa. You can find the promising abstract of his talk below:

Abstract

As natural resource extraction continues to produce adverse environmental transformations in Africa, communities in mining localities have responded to extractivism in diverse ways. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta where seven decades of crude oil extraction produces environmental toxicity, residents continue to alter their realities through meaning-making processes that have culminated in diverse entangled relationships with oil. Tracing these forms of entangled relationships to the integration of crude oil into indigenous environmental worldviews, this paper foregrounds the centrality of crude oil in everyday spirituality in the Niger Delta. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of what I call the ‘Oily Lifeworlds’, the paper argues that beyond being a capitalist commodity, crude oil features prominently in everyday spirituality, shaping extractive and healing ritual practices. This approach of reimagining crude oil as a spiritual force demonstrates the agency of spirits in extractive spaces, as well as the agency of communities in negotiating and re-purposing toxic capitalist commodities into resource for local spiritual healing, protection and symbolic identities. This spiritual entanglements reveals the complex ways people live with crude oil, both as a toxic contaminant and a source of spiritual empowerment.