Table of Contents for A Blessing and a Curse
1.Sowing the Oil
Chapter 1 sets out the book's distinctive theoretical contribution, which combines anthropological approaches to ethics/morality with those that theorize oil/natural resources. It outlines how A Blessing and a Curse builds on the work of Fernando Coronil, whose seminal text The Magical State (1997) examined the disjunctive relationship between Venezuela's oil economy and its modern democracy. This chapter updates Coronil's central thesis by proposing that the political economy of oil shapes not only the material contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution but also the everyday moral experiences of life within it. By extending Coronil's ideas into quotidian spheres that he left unexplored—kinship, grassroots politics, moral subjectivity, economic crisis—the book proposes a new way of thinking about the social and cultural dimensions of oil in postcolonial settings.
2.Portrait of a Political Family
Chapter 2 explores the relationship between kinship, morality, and political subjectivity. It introduces the large family network that sits at the heart of the book—a kinship group known in El Camoruco (the book's setting) as "Los Hernández"—and traces the early history of the Bolivarian Revolution through the family's recollections of Chávez's rise to power. The chapter sheds new light on contemporary debates about populism and subjectivity, showing how the chavista political identity emerged through the shared experience of national political events in intimate and everyday settings. In the process, kinship networks such as Los Hernández became central to the revolution's organizational and affective efficacy in working-class barrios like El Camoruco.
3.Aspirations and Disparities in the Bolivarian Barrio
Chapter 3 explores the new opportunities and the new tensions that emerged as the Chávez government rolled out its flagship social missions during the first decade of Bolivarian rule. The education missions in particular proved hugely popular with El Camoruco's residents, giving many adults the opportunity to complete high school and some the chance to study at university as well. But while these openings improved literacy and other core skills, they also produced an array of moral ambiguities, as social mobility tied to an expanding, oil-funded public sector produced new local inequalities. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai's theorization of the "capacity to aspire," the chapter shows how aspiration became a site of moral tension in the boom years of the revolution.
4.Insecurity and the Search for Moral Order
Chapter 4 examines one of the great puzzles of the boom period for chavismo: why, during a period of record high oil prices, economic growth, and public investment, did violent crime continue to rise in Venezuela? It explores this question by tracing the story of a young man named Guillermo, whose account shows how young barrio men often found themselves pulled into gang violence due to economic necessity, loyalty to friends, and a particular expression of masculinity that many felt compelled to perform. The chapter argues that as they struggled to create themselves as different kinds of moral actors amid a range of everyday dangers, young barrio men like Guillermo embodied an uneasy search for moral order that haunted Bolivarian Venezuela even in its most optimistic and prosperous period.
5.The Moral Life of Revolution
Chapter 5 switches the book's focus to grassroots politics during a period of radical reform and political possibility. The chapter explores the contrasting experiences of both recent "converts" to the revolution and more long-standing community leaders, showing how tensions between these different segments of the chavista base reflected deeper moral uncertainties about the revolution's progress. It examines how processes of revolutionary self-making were accompanied by an array of public ethical performances, as community leaders called into question the motivations of new activists, long-term comrades, and even themselves. Such dilemmas, it suggests, reflected underlying anxieties about the moral underpinnings of the revolution and its dependence on oil revenues.
6.Petro-democracy and Its Discontents
Chapter 6 analyzes the launch of the communal councils (CCs) in El Camoruco. Envisioned as the first step toward the establishment of a "communal state," the CCs enabled local people to directly manage oil revenues channeled from the central state. The chapter demonstrates how this proved to be a double-edged sword for the community's residents, who interpreted the CCs' mission in diverse and often conflictual ways. An irony of the drive to stimulate participatory democracy under Chávez was that the decentralization of resources inadvertently led to a decentralization of suspicion about the perceived contaminating influence of oil money on local political life.
7.The Weight of the Future
Chapter 7 examines the next level of the communal state project through a case study of commune construction that took place between El Camoruco and a number of nearby barrios between 2009 and 2012. Detailing the complex meanderings of what for a long time was a would-be commune, the chapter argues that the attempt to incorporate grassroots community organizations into a state-managed model of petro-democracy produced a series of "utopian disjunctures" for the actors involved. It shows how myriad everyday tensions within the project could be traced to the deeper political, moral, and temporal contradictions that underlay petro-socialism, and to the strange imaginative void between future visions and present realities that haunted the revolution.
8.The Unraveling
In chapter 8, the book returns to El Camoruco in 2017 to document how the community's residents were surviving amid a serious economic and humanitarian crisis compounded by a backdrop of political violence. The chapter opens by explaining how the monetary policy of overvaluing the Venezuelan currency—a means of maximizing state income from oil revenues—resulted in a crisis of hyperinflation when world oil prices dropped in 2014. It then turns to the everyday experience of hyperinflation in El Camoruco, showing how many of the asymmetries and inequalities that were present under Chávez had significantly worsened under Maduro, as old friendships and loyalties fractured amid the government's authoritarian turn at the national level.
9.Beyond the Magical State
The book's concluding chapter returns to its central argument by considering the relationship between the political economy of oil and deep-seated anxieties about the moral influence of petroleum on Venezuela's social and cultural life. Showing how such anxieties reflect an internalization of what Coronil termed "Occidentalism," the chapter argues that the vernacular understanding of oil wealth as a curse that Venezuelans culturally embody can be understood as an attempt to bring an alienating and multiscalar political economy within some kind of tangible moral order. The book concludes by considering how the global economy might be restructured to give resource-dependent states in the Global South a better chance of economically equitable, politically stable, and ecologically regenerative futures.