Readings
- BOND, D. (2021) Contamination in theory and protest. American Ethnologist 2021 Vol. 48 Issue 4 Pages 386-403, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13035 https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/amet.13035
Contamination offers a new observatory for anthropological theory. But does it bring us closer to the world at hand? I have spent the past five years working with residents in Bennington, Vermont, and Hoosick Falls, New York, in pursuit of justice after the toxin PFOA was discovered in their drinking water. Turning from advocacy to writing, I've been struck by how prominent toxicity is becoming in certain currents of anthropological theory and how little those theories illuminate about the protests against contamination I participated in. As the theoretical dazzle of contamination surges forward toward experimental futures, planetary futures, and queer futures, toxicity can become an oracle whose ethnographic significance lies more in its prophetic intimation than in its present inhabitation. Staying close to the experience of a New England community protesting industrial pollution, I show how the ethnographic realities of contamination can orient theory for a better world without first resigning us to the loss of the present. [toxics, materiality, futures, environmental justice, PFAS, plastic pollution, United States]
- NADING, A. (2020) Living in a Toxic World. Annual Review of Anthropology 2020 Vol. 49 Issue 1 Pages 209-224, DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-074557; https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-074557
While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continue to produce uncertainty. The project of living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter among beings, systems, and things, rather than as a fundamental characteristic of particular substances. Anthropologists do not just observe such encounters; they live and work within them. This review examines recent anthropological research on toxicity, proposing that responses to toxic disaster and occupational exposure, as well as acts of familial, state, or corporate care, are all modes of “toxic worlding.” The review concludes with a summary of recent research in collaborative and engaged anthropology, suggesting that such approaches are essential not so much for purifying or detoxifying the world as for making it otherwise.