About

Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic specializing in the Caribbean and the Americas. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, race, and capital. His first book, The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, is a historical ethnography examining fossil fuel industries and postcolonial state building in Trinidad and Tobago. The book explores how the relationship between hydrocarbons and political power is maintained through a 'masquerade of permanence' supported by offshore and deepwater extraction, while working-class Trinbagonians stage protests and strikes as forms of direct democratic resistance. Jobson also contributed an introduction to a new edition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Peasants and Capital, situating the ethnography within recent historical contexts such as market changes, migration, and natural disasters. He is working on projects including a study of C.L.R. James’s political thought and a manuscript on anthropological theory in the context of climate extinction. At the University of Chicago, he holds faculty appointments across multiple departments and centers, including the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also co-editor in chief of Transforming Anthropology and serves on the editorial board of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• History
• Philosophy
• Environmental ethics
• Labour economics
• Economics
• Political economy
• Anthropology
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• To the Readers of <i>Transforming Anthropology</i>

  Transforming Anthropology · 2026-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Extractivism's limits: A conversation

  The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology · 2024-08-06 · 1 citations

  article1st author

  Abstract In this multiauthored conversation on the limits of extractivism, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Macarena Gómez Barris, Cymene Howe, and Mareike Winchell collectively reflect on the erasures and displacements of extractivism, and how it works to produce affective and material outcomes. They take time to imagine the possible, or the aspirational, futures in a postextractive world or worlds, while recognizing that “extractivism” itself has become a way of marking multiplied effects (and affects) that unfold differently in time and place, for humans and for nonhumans.

  PublisherDOI

• Facing the flames

  American Ethnologist · 2023-07-13 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In June 1939, Melville Herskovits arrived in Trinidad. Already committed to his eponymous thesis of African cultural survivals, he identified the rural municipality of Toco as a site to observe “African ways of life … in greatest purity.” The oil field strikes that gripped the island just two years earlier received only a passing mention in his monograph, Trinidad Village . This essay meditates on Herskovits's field notes to consider how a Boasian cultural paradigm compelled Herskovits to exclude the oil field labor from his study. Still, he is aggravated throughout by oil troubles of his own. Vexed by a faulty gasoline generator, Herskovits used his field diary to document his frustrated efforts to record audio of Shango songs in Toco. Engaging in a counterfactual thought experiment in which Herskovits pursued the aftermath of the oil field strikes as his object of study, this essay considers how Herskovits could have charted a distinct ontological ground for discipline of anthropology.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Keywords in Caribbean Studies

  Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism · 2022-07-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This essay introduces a new featured section, to be published in Small Axe annually, that explores the critical vocabulary of the field of Caribbean studies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 8. Dead Labor: On Racial Capital and Fossil Capital

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021 · 43 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Honoring Our Elders

  Transforming Anthropology · 2020-10-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

  American Anthropologist · 2020 · 408 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  ABSTRACT This essay principally meditates on the scholarship published by sociocultural anthropologists in 2019. In 2019, the field of anthropology confronted anthropogenic climate change and authoritarian governance both as objects of scholarly inquiry and as existential threats to the reproduction of the discipline. Taking the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose as a point of departure, this essay posits the California wildfires as an immanent challenge to anthropological practice. Pace Mike Davis, the case for letting anthropology burn entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions. As a discourse of moral perfectibility founded in histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, liberal humanism and its anthropological register of ethnographic sentimentalism proved insufficient to confront the existential threats of climate catastrophe and authoritarian retrenchment in 2019. The case for letting anthropology burn is fortified by efforts to unsettle the conceptual and methodological preoccupations of the discipline in service of political projects of repatriation, repair, and abolition. By abandoning the universal liberal subject as a stable foil for a renewed project of cultural critique, the field of anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject as its point of departure but must adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon. [ sociocultural anthropology, settler colonialism, afterlives of slavery, climate change, the human ]

  PublisherDOI

• States of Crisis, Flags of Convenience

  Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism · 2020 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political economy

  This essay serves as an introduction to the special section “States of Crisis.” Principally a meditation on political and ecological crisis in the Caribbean, this introduction revisits two concurrent events—the devastation of The Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian, and the arrival of the first oil production vessel in Guyanese territorial waters—and probes the contradictions between the extractive imperative of economic nationalism and the existential threat of Caribbean extinction. Engaging “flags of convenience” as a practice of merchant ship registration and a metaphor for the ideal of postcolonial sovereignty, this essay considers how climate crisis demands a refusal of the state form as the limit to a regional political horizon and a rejection of nationalist historiography as a basis for the project of Caribbean criticism.

  PublisherDOI

• Race

  2019-02-26

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The study of race has defined anthropology since its formalization as an academic discipline in the 19th century. The early history of academic anthropology and the wider human sciences is pervaded by efforts to draw a causal link between race and behavior, psychology, culture, or social organization. Enforcing a racial taxonomy in accordance with the system of classification developed by the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, anthropologists assigned scientific value to arbitrary racial types. Since the genesis of the discipline, however, the concept of race has been challenged by an expansive roster of scholars in anthropology and the social sciences. To this end, scholars have assembled a vast archive of empirical data in the four traditional subfields of anthropology—sociocultural, linguistic, biological, and archaeological—to disprove biologically deterministic theories of race. Nonetheless, an investment in racial essentialism endures among select professional and popular anthropologists who have revived race as an explanatory mechanism for intelligence, ability, or genetic and biomedical outcomes. In turn, debates continue over the salience of race as an object of anthropological inquiry and analysis. While some harken to earlier anthropological critiques in order to passively dismiss race as a social construction with limited analytical purchase, others have deployed anthropological methods to document and critique the consequences of race as a social construction forged through histories of colonization, racial slavery, and genocide. The anthropology of race, in this respect, remains inextricable from attendant anthropological approaches to racism and the history of racial capitalism.

  PublisherDOI

• Road Work: Highways and Hegemony in Trinidad and Tobago

  The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology · 2018-09-17 · 47 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Resumen En Trinidad y Tobago, los caminos funcionan como un medio estatal para traducir los beneficios de petróleo y gas a fuentes de apoyo popular y electoral. Como resultado, las carreteras funcionan como sitios de confrontación entre funcionarios parlamentarios y ciudadanos descontentos sobre cuestiones de contratación pública, desarrollo y gobernanza. Basado en trabajo de campo prolongado con el Movimiento de Re‐Ruta de la Autopista (HRM)—un grupo de residentes movilizados contra el proyecto de autopista más grande en la historia de Trinidad y Tobago—este artículo propone el trabajo vial como un enfoque metodológico y teórico en la antropología política del Caribe. A partir de la interpretación dual de “vial” en la jerga trinitaria como vía material de tránsito y espacio carnavalesco de potencialidad democrática, este artículo define el trabajo vial como una práctica insurgente que desafía las lógicas instrumentales del estado rentier a través de una atención crítica a las infraestructuras materiales y las redes burocráticas que avalan el orden político postcolonial. [antropología social, desarrollo, movimientos sociales, politica, Trinidad y Tobago]

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Macarena Gómez‐Barris

  Providence College

  2 shared

• Aisha M. Beliso‐De Jesús

  1 shared

• Mareike Winchell

  1 shared

• Cara McGuinness

  Boston University

  1 shared

• Leslie Arapi

  1 shared

• Madeleine Kronovet

  1 shared

• Cymene Howe

  Rice University

  1 shared

• Julia Margulis

  Gladstone Institutes

  1 shared