Over the last three days I’ve laid out a typology of North Dakota Work Camps (and successfully killed my page view counts for the entire week). I have tried to be as formal as possible and keep my analysis somewhat separate from these description. In the spirit of this blog, however, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some preliminary interpretations of these camps. Much of my interpretations here owe something to Paul Shackel’s excellent little book, The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life (2009).
So, in my tradition of poorly composed lists, here are five things:
1. Docile Bodies. The most uniform, Type 1, style camps have much in common with company towns and the neatly arranged and carefully monitored mining camps of the late 19th and early 20th century. These camps and towns had both utopian aspirations in that they sought to produce a space that would enforce idealized social and economic relationships. The arrangement of the spaces and the utopian supporting them sought, in part, to create docile bodies among the men and women who labored in the name of capital. The well-ordered spaces camp or town reproduced the well-ordered spaces of the factory or the mine and ran explicitly counter to the stereotypical chaos of the working class.
2. Camper Culture. Type 2 and Type 3 work camps move away from the uniformity of Type 1 camps, but nevertheless echo another form of capitalist culture (albeit in a ironic way). The clusters of camper inhabited by oil patch workers have clear parallels with holiday campers clumped along the shores of various lakes across the northern plains (and the west more generally). The needs and opportunities of the oil patch transformed the campsite from a space of middle-class recreation to a place of working class residence.
3. Agency. On our drives around the Bakken range, Bret Weber and I spent considerable time talking about agency in the settlement patterns exhibited in the oil path. The extreme economy of Type 2 and Type 3 camps and the absence of what many regard as the most basic human comforts hint at the significant poverty and suffering. On the other hand, the temporary and ad hoc nature of the work camps may also reflect a series of economic strategies designed to limit risk and investment in the Bakken oil patch. The nature of booms brought on by natural resource exploitation and global markets makes modest, temporary housing a strategically sound decision for both individuals and communities. Moreover, many of the workers in the oil patch maintain primary residence elsewhere, so economizing at a remote work site is a strategy to maximize profits. Determining how much agency individual residents of the camps have and what strategies they use to optimize their time in the oil patch will be a key component of interviews as well as efforts to document the material culture.
4. Community. In many of the discussions of the oil patch, we hear how the arrival of significant numbers of workers, heavy equipment, wealth, and all of the attendant chaos has effected local communities. Rarely have we heard much on the nature of communities of workers in the region. While communities may emerge in any number of places, surely the work camps represent a place where some basic community practices come into play. The arrangement of units, dispute resolution practices, discard behavior, and other issues that impact even the most ad hoc communities, certainly manifest themselves on both the social and material levels. The construction of community in the work camps remains a key interest of our project moving forward.
5. Work and Home. One of the more remarkable things at many of the camps was the blurring of the lines between domestic space and space of work. In some cases, Type 1 camps were built on the actual work site. Type 2 and 3 camps were often surrounded with truck tires, industrial equipment, and other indications that the residents used the unit as both a place of work and a place of lodging. Unlike company towns where an effort was made to maintain clear delineations between domestic and industrial space, work camps show a far more fluid and ad hoc relationship between the two spheres. While this is unsurprising perhaps for temporary housing serving an area of rapid industrial expansion, it nevertheless represents another way that life in a North Dakota man camp challenges traditional views of settlement and habitation practice in the U.S.
The temporary nature of camps presents a challenge and opportunity to study settlement strategies in a remarkably dynamic corner of the world. None of the 10 camps that we visited this past weekend, for example, appear on satellite images taken in 2010. Documenting such ephemeral and sudden shifts in human settlement should provide insights into economic and social strategies, changing notions of domesticity, and the requirement of early 21st century industrial capital.
