Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia by Michael Cepek (review)

Michael Cepek’s Life in Oil is a profoundly nuanced and empathetic ethnography of Cofán people in the Ecuadorian Amazon living for decades in the shadow of oil extraction. Across eight highly readable and well-paced chapters that are interspersed with photographs, Cepek tackles an issue just as likely to be addressed outside as inside the academy. Far from an unknown people or region or hidden issue, the impact of oil on the lives of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been extensively covered by both journalists and scholars. The typical portrait painted in the popular media is one of an economically and culturally impoverished, devastated, and seemingly irredeemable people. Cepek uses a scholarly-yet-accessible approach to mediate the popular imaginary of the Cofán to build a more complex (and by far, more troubling) portrayal of the relationship between indigenous people and oil. Cepek gets behind this narrative to craft a much more nuanced and empathetic account of the effects of oil––in multiple senses––on Cofán lives and livelihoods. Cepek uses the classic tools and techniques of ethnography to break through these stereotypes. By residing in situ, speaking the indigenous language (A’ingae), and trying to understand oil, its impact, and implications of its extraction from the Cofán point of view, Cepek produces one of the more realistic accounts of the effects of oil on everyday life in a community on the frontlines of oil extraction.

By the second chapter, Cepek introduces us to Dureno, the main setting of the ethnography. Dureno is the most populous of the 13 Cofán communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Cepek has spent much time there since 2002, and during the most intensive period of his fieldwork, he lived with a host family and deeply immersed himself in the activities of the community––though some of these, including bathing in an oil-contaminated river, are perhaps more troubling to Cepek in retrospect than at the time. The ethnographic account re-animates Dureno, which is otherwise quite negatively depicted in multiple Western accounts as a depressing, alcoholic place destroyed by Texaco, who began pumping oil there with abandon some three decades ago. Cepek describes how Dureno residents have undergone the transition to a market economy and how this transition has occurred alongside transformations in the local ecology brought about by the discovery (by Shell in the 1940s) and initiation of commercial exploitation of crude (by Texaco).

The discovery of oil affects more than the natural environment or the economy. Cepek seems to understand very well that in order to understand the impact of oil better, we need to understand the subtleties of how oil effects particular communities in their cultural specificity, such the effects produced by what Cepek calls the “oil-Cofán encounter” (Chapter 6). To detail this, he looks at specific issues which build into themes that carry across the next chapters of the book. He looks at how Cofán residents face contamination and how this transforms their relationships with both the natural and supernatural world, as well as their bodies, as they confront or fail to confront new kinds of illness (Chapter 3); encounters and relationships with new social actors (outsiders, known as cocama) in their midst, especially oil workers, and the consequences of the power relations that ensue, including gendered violence (Chapter 4); contamination and environmental damage (Chapter 5); resistance and protest (Chapter 6); and coexistence (Chapter 7). Only towards the conclusion does Cepek talk a bit about the more well-known issue involving the Cofán: their contentious legal battle with Chevron. This is certainly not a focus of his ethnography and I think it is alright to have only addressed it tangentially.

A focus and, indeed, strength of the book is his nuanced treatment of the issue of contamination. Oil contaminates and harms lives and livelihoods in place- and culture-specific ways and it is...