Living in a Toxic World

Abstract

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. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 49 is October 21, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Social Life of the “Forever Chemical”

“…In some ways, the PFAS crisis compares to other toxic legacies of the modern industrial age that have altered the very biology of humanity and that will haunt us for generations, such as PCBs and nuclear radiation (Altman 2019). But the PFAS crisis, we contend, also requires new frameworks for understanding life in a toxic and permanently polluted world (Liboiron et al 2018;Nading 2020).…”

Toxic Research

“…Recall what Tuck (2009) said about "damage-centered research" acting as a form of poison in marginalized communities. Th is insight has helped many researchers avoid approaching toxicity simply as a capacity of certain substances or a condition of certain communities, thus reducing them, respectively, to the sources and repositories of harm (Nading 2020). Instead, toxicity is increasingly deployed as a method-or, per Liboiron and colleagues, "a way to focus on how forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to cultures, are enabled, constrained, and extinguished within broader power systems" (2018: 336).…”

“…Although not always collaborative in nature, these studies reveal how the fetishization of purity obscures complex forms of toxic entanglement, stigmatizes "polluted" bodies, and can thereby do as much harm as the substances that render us "impure" to begin with. Finally, we examine how political ecologists have increasingly taken up collaborative, decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist methodologies, which decenter the authority of academic researchers and position research as a form of community-led collective action (see Nading 2020).…”

Pollution, Health, and Disaster

“…Although not all the research reviewed is conducted by anthropologists, I am emphasizing work with an experience-near or ethnographic approach in order to draw attention to the contributions that researchers with deep knowledge of particular locations and collaborative histories working with communities have to off er to the larger understanding of the materiality of toxic experience. Inasmuch as recent writing has pointed to the enduring presence of materials that contribute to the formation of "toxic worlds" (Nading 2020; see also Liboiron et al 2018), we can also recognize that many of our current circumstances, especially the accelerating impact of global climate change, create increasing imperatives for such research. I attempt to map here an emergent and needed fi eld of collaboration that draws on Anna Tsing's notion that "transformation through collaboration, ugly and otherwise, is the human condition" (2015: 31).…”

“…Rather, the strongest anthropological research with communities of struggle and praxis is rooted in allyship, where the job of the anthropologist is to do what is needed for the community or organization, which in turn also directs the inquiries of the researcher. Anthropologists recognize that "the community" or any organization is not singular, so this work is not always straightforward, but a commitment to relationship-building is what can set anthropological work apart when researching the social, cultural, and material impact of contaminated worlds (Nading 2020).…”