Elana Shever

Elana 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, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2012) explores how people’s lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina’s experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform. Examining Argentina’s conversion of its state-controlled oil market to a private market, the book reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. It offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. Resources for Reform reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, 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 International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. She also the author of the chapter "Corporations" in The Anthropology of Resource Extraction.

Dr. Shever latest book is Making Our Beasts: Paleontology in the United States (University of California Press, forthcoming). This ethnography of science-in-action uses a familiar topic—dinosaur paleontology—to examine science and its objects in new ways. The book shows how paleontology extends frontier myths about the American West, while obscuring colonialism, violence and dispossession beneath the thrills of scientific “discovery.” Shever’s research reveals how fossils are not simply “discovered” but rather “made” through more-than-human labor and knowledge production. While telling engaging stories about the people and things encountered in excavation sites, laboratories, museum exhibits, amusement parks, and the media, the book offers fresh analysis of the relationship among science, settler colonialism, masculinity and whiteness. It also tackles scholarly debates about agency, nature and culture, materialism and posthumanism.

Dr. Shever's scholarship has been published in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, among other venues.