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Elana Shever
Associate Professor of Anthropology; Chair, Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Department/Office Information
Sociology and AnthropologyElana Shever is a cultural anthropologist with interests in natural resources and materiality; science, technology and corporations in society; neoliberalism; globalization; and capitalism. She has conducted research in Argentina, Colombia, and the United States.
Dr. Shever's first book,(Stanford University Press, 2012)exploreshow people’s lives intersectwith the increasingly globalizedand concentrated oil industrythrough a close look at Argentina’sexperiment with privatizingits national oil company in thename of neoliberal reform.Examining Argentina’s conversionof its state-controlledoil market to a private market,the book reveals interconnectionsbetween large-scaletransformations in society andsmall-scale shifts in everydaypractice, intimate relationships,and identity. Itoffers a windowinto the experiences ofmiddle-class oil workers andtheir families, impoverishedresidents of shanty settlementsbordering refineries, and affluentemployees of transnationalcorporations as they strugglewith rapid changes in theglobal economy, their country,and their lives.Resources for Reformreverberatesfar beyond the Argentine oilfields and offers a fresh approachto the critical study ofneoliberalism, kinship, citizenship,and corporations.
This study has led to Dr. Shever's continued involvement in developing the critical anthropology of corporations. She wrote a review of the scholarship on transnational and multinational corporations for the . She also the author of the chapter "Corporations" for The Anthropology of Resource Extraction, which is being edited by Lorenzo D’Angelo and Robert Pijpers for Routledge.
Dr. Shever is currently working on a project called Making Our Beasts: Dinosaurs, Fossils and Science in the United States. This ethnography of science-in-action uses a familiar topic—dinosaur paleontology—to examine science and its objects in new ways. Shever’s research reveals what the common notion of scientific discovery hides, that is, that fossils are not discovered. They are made. Shever shows how fossils are created through a more-than-human process in which multiple forces—both human and nonhuman—determine which pieces of rock become valuable and meaningful objects, and which disintegrate into dust.
The first publication from this project is “” (Anthropology Quarterly 93(3):461-496). This article is a down-to-earth examination of a few crucial moments in the formation of Triceratops skull fossils that draws from Shever’s anthropological/paleontological fieldwork at a quarry in the Dakota Badlands and at a laboratory in Denver, Colorado. It exposes how fossils come into being through the mixing of biological and geological forces, tools and glues, and people’s somatic and intellectual labors. This article fuses insights from the anthropology of resource extraction and a post-humanist analytic of material vibrancy in order to rethink making in more-than-human terms. Yet it also draws attention to the neglected political economy of more-than-human making by demonstrating both the asymmetric collaborations among the human and nonhuman forces, and the importance of upper-class philanthropists’ capital and middle-class volunteers’ labor, in the coming-into-being of fossils.