Jacinta, deaf from birth, chose to give birth to her own baby at home without her hearing aids. Fu-Yu assisted and took photos of the process. This is a Photo Essay about alternative possibilities to biomedical childbirth. We share our experience through this medium, as the ‘visual’ was our shared sensory perception at the time. Besides acknowledging the intersubjectivities that surfaced, we see the importance of recognising that ‘images are representations of the world filtered by the positionalities of the makers themselves, influenced by unique experiences that brought them to that point in time … Images become an extension of a way of thinking, visually connecting maker with participant along lines of thought’ (Cartwright and Crowder 2017, 515). Although Fu-Yu is the one operating the camera, Jacinta, her partner, her mother, her cat and her home ‘make the image’. Whilst Jacinta was in labour, Fu-Yu was assisting Carmen Susana (the midwife) and recording the event at the same time with a camera hanging around her neck. We want to offer the audience this shared ‘visual’ experience as an invitation to think and ‘visualise’ care and childbirth from a disability-studies perspective.
{"title":"Giving Birth in Silence","authors":"Fu-Yu Chang, Jacinta Aguirre","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.3.7943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.3.7943","url":null,"abstract":"Jacinta, deaf from birth, chose to give birth to her own baby at home without her hearing aids. Fu-Yu assisted and took photos of the process. This is a Photo Essay about alternative possibilities to biomedical childbirth. We share our experience through this medium, as the ‘visual’ was our shared sensory perception at the time. Besides acknowledging the intersubjectivities that surfaced, we see the importance of recognising that ‘images are representations of the world filtered by the positionalities of the makers themselves, influenced by unique experiences that brought them to that point in time … Images become an extension of a way of thinking, visually connecting maker with participant along lines of thought’ (Cartwright and Crowder 2017, 515). Although Fu-Yu is the one operating the camera, Jacinta, her partner, her mother, her cat and her home ‘make the image’. Whilst Jacinta was in labour, Fu-Yu was assisting Carmen Susana (the midwife) and recording the event at the same time with a camera hanging around her neck. We want to offer the audience this shared ‘visual’ experience as an invitation to think and ‘visualise’ care and childbirth from a disability-studies perspective.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135586441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Central American sugarcane plantations have become ‘hotspots’ of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although CKD is frequently caused by diabetes or hypertension, most sugarcane plantation workers who have it have no history of either condition. They are among a growing number of people worldwide afflicted by chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes (CKDnt). The ‘hotspot’ concept resonates with those who study CKDnt in part because work-related heat stress has been the factor most strongly associated with the disease. Drawn from ethnographic research on CKDnt in Nicaragua and a close reading of scientific and policy documents, this research article frames the plantation as a health hotspot in three ways. First, plantations are sites of intensive, environment-altering capital investment. Second, public health research on the connection between heat stress and CKDnt remakes plantations as sites of intensive experimental scrutiny. Third, plantations produce innovative genres of political action. Nicaragua’s epidemic has given rise to a form of health activism, or ‘hotspotting’, in which workers and their allies use digital media to circulate evidence of environmental harm. This tripartite view of plantations as hotspots highlights what I suggest are some of the ‘Earthly limits’ of global health.
{"title":"The Plantation as Hotspot: Capital, Science, Labour, and the Earthly Limits of Global Health","authors":"Alex M Nading","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6928","url":null,"abstract":"Central American sugarcane plantations have become ‘hotspots’ of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although CKD is frequently caused by diabetes or hypertension, most sugarcane plantation workers who have it have no history of either condition. They are among a growing number of people worldwide afflicted by chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes (CKDnt). The ‘hotspot’ concept resonates with those who study CKDnt in part because work-related heat stress has been the factor most strongly associated with the disease. Drawn from ethnographic research on CKDnt in Nicaragua and a close reading of scientific and policy documents, this research article frames the plantation as a health hotspot in three ways. First, plantations are sites of intensive, environment-altering capital investment. Second, public health research on the connection between heat stress and CKDnt remakes plantations as sites of intensive experimental scrutiny. Third, plantations produce innovative genres of political action. Nicaragua’s epidemic has given rise to a form of health activism, or ‘hotspotting’, in which workers and their allies use digital media to circulate evidence of environmental harm. This tripartite view of plantations as hotspots highlights what I suggest are some of the ‘Earthly limits’ of global health.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44269295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By understanding a community’s medical system, we are able to see its body ontology and how the people within it live in relation to the world, a historically constructed ideological position. Modernisation and development have restructured Indigenous communities and devalued traditional ontologies, including medical systems. This is a global pattern, where historical power relationships defined the coloniality of being and from this, organised healthcare, governance, and education in relation to patriarchal and capitalist universals. These social structures underlie the Anthropocene geological epoch and planetary crisis. Wixárika Indigenous communities live a polytheistic sociality; their medical system treats the spiritual origins of illness, attending to social cohesion in a society of humans, the supernatural, flora and fauna. This system is subalternised by dominant universals of biomedicine, which treat the body as separate from the environment and society. I refer to this epistemological inequality as the ontological Anthropocene. Wixaritari use both allopathic and traditional medical systems, following a non-hierarchical syncretic understanding of wellbeing. Giving equal importance to both systems may be a framework with implications for wellbeing beyond human health. This Research Article proposes that by centring Indigenous sociality that is more-than-human we can reconceive our planetary relationships in the broadest sense.
{"title":"Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene","authors":"J. Gamlin","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6912","url":null,"abstract":"By understanding a community’s medical system, we are able to see its body ontology and how the people within it live in relation to the world, a historically constructed ideological position. Modernisation and development have restructured Indigenous communities and devalued traditional ontologies, including medical systems. This is a global pattern, where historical power relationships defined the coloniality of being and from this, organised healthcare, governance, and education in relation to patriarchal and capitalist universals. These social structures underlie the Anthropocene geological epoch and planetary crisis. Wixárika Indigenous communities live a polytheistic sociality; their medical system treats the spiritual origins of illness, attending to social cohesion in a society of humans, the supernatural, flora and fauna. This system is subalternised by dominant universals of biomedicine, which treat the body as separate from the environment and society. I refer to this epistemological inequality as the ontological Anthropocene. Wixaritari use both allopathic and traditional medical systems, following a non-hierarchical syncretic understanding of wellbeing. Giving equal importance to both systems may be a framework with implications for wellbeing beyond human health. This Research Article proposes that by centring Indigenous sociality that is more-than-human we can reconceive our planetary relationships in the broadest sense.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41416359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Racialisation and colonialism are central to sustaining (dis)embodied inequalities. We bring together our distinct ethnographic projects to explore this. The first project accompanied a microbiome expedition involving Amazonian Indigenous non/human communities, whereas the second project focussed on medical professional’ encounters with Mbya Guarani communities in the Atlantic Forest region. Both projects explore racialised assumptions of human difference and colonial extractive practices. In the case of medical intervention with the Mbya, and their forms of life, this is perpetuated through the imposition of anthropometric growth standards. With the human microbiome initiatives, identifying Indigenous Peoples as potential reservoirs for novel probiotics also ultimately amplifies racialised (dis)embodied inequalities. Rather than these interventions addressing such disembodied equalities, we draw parallels between the two, to show that they perpetuate them. Finally, we propose that part of ceasing to reproduce these (dis)embodied inequalities requires ‘us’ to challenge the racialised and colonial histories of the life and geological sciences, to recognise their embodied consequences in the present, as well as how they are implicated in emergent proposals for new geological ‘-cenes’.
{"title":"Sustaining (Dis)Embodied Inequalities in the(ir) Eurocene: Ancient Microbes, Racial Anthropometry, and Life Choices","authors":"Coll de Lima Hutchison, Andrea Núñez Casal","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.7105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.7105","url":null,"abstract":"Racialisation and colonialism are central to sustaining (dis)embodied inequalities. We bring together our distinct ethnographic projects to explore this. The first project accompanied a microbiome expedition involving Amazonian Indigenous non/human communities, whereas the second project focussed on medical professional’ encounters with Mbya Guarani communities in the Atlantic Forest region. Both projects explore racialised assumptions of human difference and colonial extractive practices. In the case of medical intervention with the Mbya, and their forms of life, this is perpetuated through the imposition of anthropometric growth standards. With the human microbiome initiatives, identifying Indigenous Peoples as potential reservoirs for novel probiotics also ultimately amplifies racialised (dis)embodied inequalities. Rather than these interventions addressing such disembodied equalities, we draw parallels between the two, to show that they perpetuate them. Finally, we propose that part of ceasing to reproduce these (dis)embodied inequalities requires ‘us’ to challenge the racialised and colonial histories of the life and geological sciences, to recognise their embodied consequences in the present, as well as how they are implicated in emergent proposals for new geological ‘-cenes’.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41865415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Based on research in Matamoros (Mexico) and Naples (Italy), this article critically deconstructs embodiments and social histories of toxicity, addressing uneven power relations and health inequalities generated through late capitalism of the Anthropocene. By focusing on food and water consumption in regions at the margins of borders and defined as toxic wastelands, it sheds light on the multidimensional power structures of the global economy. Whether through reference to the illegal dumping of toxic waste by mafia-structured organised crime groups, or the contamination caused by foreign-owned assembly plants, the article illustrates how mechanisms taking place in the individual realm are ‘subsumed’ (Breihl 2019, 33) within more complex historical, economic, and environmental processes. These two case studies are the point of departure to reflect upon the undisclosed but powerful impact that commercial determinants of health have on individuals’ wellbeing, feeding profound north–south inequalities.
{"title":"Toxic Legacies and Health Inequalities of the Anthropocene: Perspectives from the Margins","authors":"Melania Calestani","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6914","url":null,"abstract":"Based on research in Matamoros (Mexico) and Naples (Italy), this article critically deconstructs embodiments and social histories of toxicity, addressing uneven power relations and health inequalities generated through late capitalism of the Anthropocene. By focusing on food and water consumption in regions at the margins of borders and defined as toxic wastelands, it sheds light on the multidimensional power structures of the global economy. Whether through reference to the illegal dumping of toxic waste by mafia-structured organised crime groups, or the contamination caused by foreign-owned assembly plants, the article illustrates how mechanisms taking place in the individual realm are ‘subsumed’ (Breihl 2019, 33) within more complex historical, economic, and environmental processes. These two case studies are the point of departure to reflect upon the undisclosed but powerful impact that commercial determinants of health have on individuals’ wellbeing, feeding profound north–south inequalities.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43607858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jean Segata, C. Víctora, P. Sesia, Laura Montesi, J. Gamlin, S. Gibbon
Introduction to the special issue 'Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene', guest edited by Jennie Gamlin, Laura Montesi, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata, and Ceres Victora.
{"title":"Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene","authors":"Jean Segata, C. Víctora, P. Sesia, Laura Montesi, J. Gamlin, S. Gibbon","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.8887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.8887","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Introduction to the special issue 'Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene', guest edited by Jennie Gamlin, Laura Montesi, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata, and Ceres Victora. \u0000 \u0000","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46576480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Laura Montesi, Maria Paula Prates, S. Gibbon, Lina R. Berrio
Diverse histories and traditions of critical epidemiology in Latin America provide an important, although underutilised, alternative framework for engaging with the embodied health inequalities of the Anthropocene. Taking COVID-19 as ‘a paradigmatic example of an Anthropocene disease’ (O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó 2020) and drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil and Mexico on vaccination campaigns among Indigenous Peoples, we review and analyse the scope and limits of Latin American critical epidemiology in addressing Anthropocene health. While there are intersecting and parallel dynamics between diverse national and regional histories of epidemiology, we argue that the relatively differential focus on political economy, political ecology, and colonialism/coloniality in Latin American critical epidemiology, alongside the attention to non-western disease experiences and understandings, constitute a counterpoint to biomedical and specific ‘Euro-American’ epidemiological approaches. At the same time, Indigenous understandings of health/disease processes are intimately connected with territory protection, diplomacy with non-human entities, and embodied memories of violence. We examine how this presents new and challenging questions for critical epidemiology, particularly in how the ‘social’ is defined and how to address both social justice and social difference whilst also navigating the biopolitical challenges of state intervention in the era of Anthropocene health.
{"title":"Situating Latin American Critical Epidemiology in the Anthropocene: The Case of COVID-19 Vaccines and Indigenous Collectives in Brazil and Mexico","authors":"Laura Montesi, Maria Paula Prates, S. Gibbon, Lina R. Berrio","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6910","url":null,"abstract":"Diverse histories and traditions of critical epidemiology in Latin America provide an important, although underutilised, alternative framework for engaging with the embodied health inequalities of the Anthropocene. Taking COVID-19 as ‘a paradigmatic example of an Anthropocene disease’ (O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó 2020) and drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil and Mexico on vaccination campaigns among Indigenous Peoples, we review and analyse the scope and limits of Latin American critical epidemiology in addressing Anthropocene health. While there are intersecting and parallel dynamics between diverse national and regional histories of epidemiology, we argue that the relatively differential focus on political economy, political ecology, and colonialism/coloniality in Latin American critical epidemiology, alongside the attention to non-western disease experiences and understandings, constitute a counterpoint to biomedical and specific ‘Euro-American’ epidemiological approaches. At the same time, Indigenous understandings of health/disease processes are intimately connected with territory protection, diplomacy with non-human entities, and embodied memories of violence. We examine how this presents new and challenging questions for critical epidemiology, particularly in how the ‘social’ is defined and how to address both social justice and social difference whilst also navigating the biopolitical challenges of state intervention in the era of Anthropocene health.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44756287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The continual expansion of developmental frontiers has impacted dramatically upon Indigenous health in Brazil. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in Mato Grosso do Sul, its Indigenous populations were already living in circumstances of environmental degradation, food insecurity, racism, and structural violence. The synergistic interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 virus, other pathogens, and biosocial factors resulted in what Singer (2010) terms as ‘syndemics’. In the case of Mato Grosso do Sul, it brought about a substantial increase in the disease burden of Indigenous Peoples, where child malnutrition, obesity, hypertension, respiratory and parasitic diseases, and maternal mortality appear at higher rates than in the non-Indigenous population. This Research Article discusses the coping and participatory strategies that were employed by Indigenous Peoples early in the pandemic. Efforts by Indigenous Peoples to address the pandemic reveal ‘a clash’ between Indigenous and Colonial cosmographies with regard to notions of the body and health. Considering the Indigenous perspective on the relation between territoriality and health, the analysis highlights asymmetries of power and embodied vulnerabilities and the limits of the Anthropocene as a global perspective.
{"title":"Toward a Broader View of Health in the Anthropocene: The COVID-19 Syndemic and the Clash of Cosmographies in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil","authors":"R. Dias-Scopel, D. Scopel, E. J. Langdon","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6909","url":null,"abstract":"The continual expansion of developmental frontiers has impacted dramatically upon Indigenous health in Brazil. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in Mato Grosso do Sul, its Indigenous populations were already living in circumstances of environmental degradation, food insecurity, racism, and structural violence. The synergistic interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 virus, other pathogens, and biosocial factors resulted in what Singer (2010) terms as ‘syndemics’. In the case of Mato Grosso do Sul, it brought about a substantial increase in the disease burden of Indigenous Peoples, where child malnutrition, obesity, hypertension, respiratory and parasitic diseases, and maternal mortality appear at higher rates than in the non-Indigenous population. This Research Article discusses the coping and participatory strategies that were employed by Indigenous Peoples early in the pandemic. Efforts by Indigenous Peoples to address the pandemic reveal ‘a clash’ between Indigenous and Colonial cosmographies with regard to notions of the body and health. Considering the Indigenous perspective on the relation between territoriality and health, the analysis highlights asymmetries of power and embodied vulnerabilities and the limits of the Anthropocene as a global perspective.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47919554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among homeless deportees living in the Tijuana River canal, I examine how the ‘rehabilitation’ of toxic terrains can have corporeal and social consequences for those inhabiting such spaces. For decades, the Tijuana River basin traversing the U.S.–Mexico border has been perceived by officials from both countries as an unruly body of water. Prone to persistent flooding, the canal also experiences flows of toxic sewage from Tijuana’s maquiladora industry. In recent years, the riverbed in Tijuana has been inhabited by homeless and drug using communities, many of whom have been deported from the U.S. In response, rehabilitation of the canal and forced drug rehabilitation have been conjoined and promoted by the state as solutions for managing this unruly terrain and its residents. I take the deployment of the term ‘rehabilitation’ targeting both homeless deportees and the canal as an opportunity to consider how the concurrent disciplining of landscapes and human populations has been a central and evolving feature of the Anthropocene. I examine how my homeless interlocutors have experienced ‘rehabilitation’ as a violent process of abjection, dispossession, and captivity, which has converted this transborder landscape structure into a carceral zone under the guise of urban sanitation and health promotion.
{"title":"Unruly Waters, Unsanitary Bodies Abject Terrains, Rehabilitation, and Infrastructures of Dispossession on the U.S.–Mexico Border","authors":"C. Martínez","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6907","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among homeless deportees living in the Tijuana River canal, I examine how the ‘rehabilitation’ of toxic terrains can have corporeal and social consequences for those inhabiting such spaces. For decades, the Tijuana River basin traversing the U.S.–Mexico border has been perceived by officials from both countries as an unruly body of water. Prone to persistent flooding, the canal also experiences flows of toxic sewage from Tijuana’s maquiladora industry. In recent years, the riverbed in Tijuana has been inhabited by homeless and drug using communities, many of whom have been deported from the U.S. In response, rehabilitation of the canal and forced drug rehabilitation have been conjoined and promoted by the state as solutions for managing this unruly terrain and its residents. I take the deployment of the term ‘rehabilitation’ targeting both homeless deportees and the canal as an opportunity to consider how the concurrent disciplining of landscapes and human populations has been a central and evolving feature of the Anthropocene. I examine how my homeless interlocutors have experienced ‘rehabilitation’ as a violent process of abjection, dispossession, and captivity, which has converted this transborder landscape structure into a carceral zone under the guise of urban sanitation and health promotion.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46522864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The unevenly distributed environmental burdens of the Anthropocene become evident in conflicts surrounding the extractive industries. ThyssenKrupp’s steel mill (TKCSA) in Rio de Janeiro is an illustrative example. The factory transformed its surrounding landscape and emitted a fine metallic dust over its human and non-human neighbours. This article focuses on some of the less tangible elements of Anthropocene transformations around the mill. I examine ThyssenKrupp’s communication strategies to reveal the underlying meanings of corporate rhetorical devices, uncover the violence of public relations language and understand the intensity of feeling that surrounded it. I trace the affective registers that emerged around the steel mill as a result of its polluting activities, its approach to corporate communications, and its ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) activities. Everyday life involved minimal corporeal expressions of emotion that encapsulated feeling and allowed for perseverance in the face of toxic suffering. The ‘Stop TKCSA’ campaign involved affective labour; emotions were the agentic contribution campaigners were able to make in the context of unequal power structures. I centre these less visible dynamics of power to examine how emotions can shape experiences of environmental conflict, form coalitional politics, and contribute to the very landscapes of the Anthropocene.
{"title":"\"Just Graphite\": Corporate Representations of Particular Matter in Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro","authors":"D. R. Hollowell","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.2.6900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.2.6900","url":null,"abstract":"The unevenly distributed environmental burdens of the Anthropocene become evident in conflicts surrounding the extractive industries. ThyssenKrupp’s steel mill (TKCSA) in Rio de Janeiro is an illustrative example. The factory transformed its surrounding landscape and emitted a fine metallic dust over its human and non-human neighbours. This article focuses on some of the less tangible elements of Anthropocene transformations around the mill. I examine ThyssenKrupp’s communication strategies to reveal the underlying meanings of corporate rhetorical devices, uncover the violence of public relations language and understand the intensity of feeling that surrounded it. I trace the affective registers that emerged around the steel mill as a result of its polluting activities, its approach to corporate communications, and its ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) activities. Everyday life involved minimal corporeal expressions of emotion that encapsulated feeling and allowed for perseverance in the face of toxic suffering. The ‘Stop TKCSA’ campaign involved affective labour; emotions were the agentic contribution campaigners were able to make in the context of unequal power structures. I centre these less visible dynamics of power to examine how emotions can shape experiences of environmental conflict, form coalitional politics, and contribute to the very landscapes of the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42646222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：