Matt Wilde's "A Blessing and a Curse"

Matt Wilde is an anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela, and reported the following:

A Blessing and a Curse is a book about how petro-states shape the everyday lives of their citizens in complex and contradictory ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in urban Venezuela over the course of a decade, it explores how the residents of a low-income periphery known as El Camoruco experienced conflictual social change under the governments of first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro. One of the book’s central arguments is that the drive to undertake radical social and political reforms using oil revenues produced an array of moral doubts for the residents of El Camruco, as the circulation of petro-dollars in local and everyday settings led to new dilemmas for the pro-government grassroots activists (chavistas) who play a central role in the book’s analysis.

Situated in a chapter titled “The Moral Life of Revolution,” page 99 encapsulates these doubts perfectly. It describes how one of the book’s main protagonists, a local chavista leader known as Rafael, wrestles with the offer of a free Blackberry smartphone from a representative of the local mayor. In 2009, the year in which the encounter took place, Blackberry smartphones had a particular cultural cache in Venezuela. As expensive and highly valued imported commodities, they were associated with the kind of North American-flavoured conspicuous consumption that might be found in the salubrious shopping malls located in the wealthiest zones of cities like Caracas and Valencia. But as a socialist community leader who hailed from the poor barrios of Valencia’s south – communities that are both geographically and symbolically far from such malls – the offer of the Blackberry constituted a moral hazard for Rafael. As he explains on Page 99:

I’d be really embarrassed to walk around with a phone like that, really embarrassed. To walk around with a tremendous telephone like that with the people who are with me – with where I’m from – I couldn’t do it.

Although tempted by the smartphone, Rafael eventually decides not to accept the offer, concluding that he’s better off with the simple cell phone he already used. In doing so, he’s able to “walk the walk” of socialist asceticism without feeling morally compromised. The scene captures precisely the kind of lived uncertainties that shaped the Bolivarian Revolution even in its most optimistic period. It also shows how the Venezuelan people experienced undercurrents of the political and economic tensions that would later spill over into a profound crisis under President Maduro.

Learn more about A Blessing and a Curse at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue