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massive corruption, conflict, poor social
achievement, authoritarian politics and low
economic growth (see Karl, 1999: see also
rent). Oil states, transnational companies, na-
tional oil companies, international financial
institutions and various sorts of military and
security forces combine to produce an ‘oil
complex’ (Watts, 2005), which operates as a
powerful system for dispossession andprimi-
tive accumulation. Industrialized oil import-
ers have been only too happy to build warm
and friendly relations with corrupt petro-
states, turning a blind eye tohuman rights
violations and faileddevelopment, provided
that the oil continues to flow.
Petroleum is the quintessential modern nat-
ural resource. It is present in and produced by
nature, and a material source of wealth that
occurs in a natural state. But this is a contra-
dictory and non-sensible claim on its face. Oil
is natural insofar as it resides in its Jurassic
bedrock. But it is not immediately accessible
or useful: it presupposes human knowledge
and practice (drilling, exploring, refining).
Oil’s wealth is not conferred solely by natural
process, but rests upon an appraisal – a state of
knowledge and practice – that is social, tech-
nological and historical. Petroleum is pro-
foundlyofnature – it is typically subterranean
and has peculiar biophysical properties. And
yet its naturalism is expressed and understood
in quite determinate ways: how differently
would the first-centurybceChinese bureau-
crat and the twentieth-century hard-rock
geologist have described petroleum’s natural
properties! Petroleum’s ‘resourcefulness’ is
not natural at all. Its expressive form as wealth- the defining property of a resource – presup-
poses acts of transformation, distribution and
use which, incidentally, were very different for
sixteenth-century North American Indians
than for a twenty-first-century Louisiana
petrochemical industry. Petroleum as a nat-
ural resource rests, then, on particular mean-
ings of natural (e.g. theories of biophysics),
and particular renderings of resource (e.g. the-
ories of wealth predicated on scarcity and nat-
ural limits).
But there is another realm in which natural
resources must operate; namely, the social
imaginary – in other words, how oil is rooted
in the imagination of people living in the spe-
cific historical and social circumstances of
its use and deployment (seegeographical
imaginaries). Oil as a natural resource carries
it own mythos, also shaped byplaceand time.
From the vantage point of the oil-importing
North Atlantic economies, oil stands in a
specific relationship to the mosque and the
Arab world. For oil-producing states, petrol-
eum provides the idiom for nation-building
and the financial wherewithal for modern de-
velopment (think, for example, of the petrolic-
ambition of a great modernizer such as Shah
Palavi in Iran). Oil is inextricably bound up
with unimaginable personalpower(Rockefel-
ler, Nobel, Rothschild, the Sultan of Brunei),
untrammelled corporate hegemony (‘the Seven
Sisters’) and a history of spectacular imperial
violenceandwar. Did not the long and
dark tentacles of oil appear in the catastrophic
demise of the twin Trade Towers in New
York? Was not Osama bin Laden a product
of oil as much as of Wahabbi Islam? Was not
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979
fuelled by oil-inspired resentments and griev-
ances? Need one mention Enron? Oil and
Islam, war and violence, corruption and
power, wealth andspectacle,scarcityandcri-
sisare, in our times, seemingly all of a piece.
In contemporary America or Europe, oil is a
particular type of commodity used, exchanged
and fetishized in quite precise ways. It is a
bundle of natural (biophysical), productive,
cultural and economic relations. It is al-
together appropriate to recall that petroleum
is popularly referred to as ‘black gold’. But,
after all, gold isn’t black. And neither are many
forms of oil. They are colourless. mwSuggested reading
Clarke (2007); Juhasz (2008); Klare (2008).ontology The study and description of
‘being’, or that which can be said to exist in
the world (cf. epistemology). Although
ontology has many definitions and approaches
inphilosophyand ingeography, it tends to
be formulated by considering interactions bet-
ween the world as-it-is and ideas or concep-
tions about the world. Western thought has
been greatly influenced by the classical, formal
ontology of essences, exemplified by Plato’s
Ideals (where objects in the world are imper-
fect copies of ideal forms) and Aristotle’s
categories (where all such forms emerge
inductively out of the stuff of the world).
Concern with ontology in the natural sciences
and the human sciences typically focuses less
on thegeneralconditions of existence than on
the objects, relations and concepts serving as
the foci of theirspecificdisciplines. In this vein,
the main ontological hobbyhorses inhuman
geographyhave included the character of the
relations betweensociety andnature,and
concepts ofplaceandspace.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_O Final Proof page 511 30.3.2009 7:51pmONTOLOGY