Petroleum is one of the most prominent driving substances for the modern era, the Anthropocene, and therefore an important subject for Geoanthropology. It connects the deep natural history of the planet with all layers of modern human life and affects all types of politicial, societal, and ecological futures. It is both a global and intensely local commodity that can tell stories of empowerment as well as of destruction. In the forty-four chapters of their Atlas of Petromodernity, Benjamin Steininger and Alexander Klose present insight into sciences, technologies, geographies, politics, cultures, and subjectivities connected by a substance that, in all its complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences still needs more understanding to be left behind.
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