Paparazzi Ethnography

Clusters
Coming immediately to our minds with the data we collected summer 2010 is how information tends to cluster around themes. In Lysaker, we met with energy consultant Ivar Tangen, childhood friend of Bengt Hansen, president of Statoil in Moscow. Statoil is a Norwegian oil company and one of three companies that formed Shtokman AG, the partnership group with plans to develop the Barents Sea off-shore natural gas field called Shtokman. The other two companies are Russia’s Gazprom, owning majority stake (just over 50%), and France’s Total S.A. The connection of Ivar Tangen to Bengt Hansen was close so that we established with Statoil Moscow on one phone call, our meeting, upon arriving to Russia. It is a question: what type of connection creates the meeting with one phone call?

Statoil conference room

When I worked for Alaska Governor Tony Knowles, in his D.C. Office– Knowles was regal indeed, enjoying all forms of formality paid to him in his person –we thought about the access issue–who had it and who didn’t. In D.C., we always took note upon seeing a memo addressed to the power-holder (governor) that was written, “Dear Tony,…” — who could write that instead of “Dear Governor”? These guys are typically so formal– it is rare to see them addressed at the office in any other manner than their sociological title. Moving on. We arrived to the Statoil office in Moscow, and had our meeting with Hansen (Norwegian) + two deputies (Russian), in the conference room.

This photo above on the left, is the conference room a few minutes before the meeting. Here, the angle of view is one corner of the office, but revealing indeed. This is the entrance side, and directly you confront two images: first, the wall map of oil and gas production in Russia (on the left), and second, a high-rise window perspective of the Moscow landscape. You should be able to increase the size of all the images by clicking on them. Both perspectives, the map and the city landscape, represent their own particular form of cadastral map– a miniature resource map– of Russia’s hydrocarbons, and of the city scape.

Kremlin from Statoil watchtower

In fact, looking out this window, as seen in this image on the left, (walking closely as if to the map to see where resources are), you see the Kremlin in center. Admittedly, not much to see. We’re not Muscovites, and not even looking for it, but it was easy to spot gazing out. You get a sense, pretty quickly, when looking out the window, that you’re gazing out of a particular kind of watch tower — a tower of power-holding, and gazing off, on to another tower of power-holding. When we finally arrived at the Kremlin, we looked for the Statoil office building and found it easily. It’s there in the below photo to the left, the watchtower building standing in the middle…

Returning to the image above, the conference room, what you see then, upon entering, are two framed windows looking out upon the Russian landscape: the first, a cartographic landscape of resources presented in miniature or model scale and brought into the interior of  decision-making (e.g., Scott’s Seeing Like a State) and the other is the miniature image of the city-scape, where the power of the state is brought into the conference room, again, at the level of decision-making. Many times, we were reminded of the power of the Russian state, especially at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, by way of metaphor, in which attendees refer to “kissing the ring” as a form of deference among western businesses paying tribute to Putin and friends.

Statoil Moscow reception

There’s other things we will refer to, for example, the first image of Hansen above, where it was taken, at the Petroleum Oil and Gas Congress in Moscow on the eve of his retirement, and how everyone in the room gave him a standing ovation, and really, you could see that he was an endearing figure to many in the Russian oil and gas industry, and this would be in contrast to descriptions of other western operators, which we won’t get to at the moment. But finally, this image here on the left, taken of the reception table of Statoil Moscow, which has the Herald Tribune newspaper, and a few glossy Statoil brochures in English. All materials here are in English, and we know for certain that the Statoil brochures are also printed in Russian (a Russian copy sits below in the photo on the left, which we obtained at the Oil and Gas Congress).

Statoil’s Russian Brochure

So for us, it is indication, that whoever comes through the door and sits down (that is, whoever is made to wait and not immediately brought through to Hansen), the person(s) are likely to be English speakers. You could read it in different ways. Maybe non-English speakers are not made to wait, which could be another reason the oil/gas community respected Hansen– Or again, maybe all business was at that level, instructed by the very beginning, to be in English, after all, Statoil is a Norwegian company.

To wrap up, in these photos, we see examples of what we call clusters. A set of information particles, that are now and have since become arranged in a certain form, as an image. What you see is a discursive effect on the landscape of meanings regarding the encounter (that is, when one is lucky enough to pass through a set of images regarding the power-holder of a major oil company). And here, again, we’re referring to an aesthetics and factory of the sensible (J. Rancier), the surfacial features which provide the sense making that work to position the common sense of decision making on Shtokman natural gas development.