Toxicities that matter: Slow bureaucracy and polluting temporalities in a southern Italian city

Abstract

This paper deconstructs toxicity through a juxtaposition of a conventional epidemiological approach to pollutants and the lived experience of a highly polluted residential area next to the largest steel production plant in Europe. An ethnographic analysis of toxicity in Taranto illustrates the complexity of various temporal scales through which toxic chemicals contribute to new biological, political and moral balances. Attuning to the slow experiences of pollution is fundamental to shed light on the processes moulding aspirations to environmental justice within the community. In particular, law and bureaucracy imbue pollutants with experiential legitimacy, allowing them to be seen, contested and collectivized. I focus on the residents’ and workers’ dissonant experiences with the bureaucratic system to illustrate how their encounter with asbestos has profoundly shaped toxic exposure to less bureaucratically visible shapeshifting pollutants, thus contributing to a diffused sense of political resignation.

Global containments and local leakages: Structural violence and the toxic flows of shipbreaking

“…This reluctance to make claims about environmental damage and health highlights not only a political sensitivity surrounding the issue of toxic causality (see Lora-Wainwright 2017; Ippolito 2022, this issue), but also a sense of despair and powerlessness similar to the invocation of “rien à faire” (nothing to be done) in Martinique when faced with the widespread nature of the local environment’s contamination (Agard-Jones 2013). As Agard-Jones notes, Martinican residents’ bodies are produced through and via engagements with the local, regional, and global forms of power that have made the island’s chlordecone contamination possible.…”

Introduction to special issue: “Scaled ethnographies of toxic flows”

“…Raffaele Ippolito (2022) highlights environmental injustice within the EU, in the steel town of Taranto, Italy in "Toxicities that matter: Slow bureaucracy and polluting temporalities in a southern Italian City". In Taranto, chemicals such as dioxins act as 'shapeshifting pollutants' with political properties that reframe toxicity through their continuous changes in the legal system.…”

“…An attention to the scaled materiality of toxic substancesfrom how they are bodily experienced to local, national, and global regulatory efforts to contain toxic seepages (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023;Evans, 2022;Ippolito, 2022;Perczel, 2023) reveal the unequal distribution and failures to contain toxic flows where some groups are more exposed to harmful effects than others. In an industrial Italian town, experiences of asbestos regulations in the past shape engagements with dioxins in the present, highlighting the temporalities of toxic matter as health effects are delayed over time (Ippolito, 2022). Even after decades of hazardous spills, asbestos and PCBs continue to find their way into shipbreaking sites in Bangladesh where the poorest workers are the most affected (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023).…”

“…To conclude, ethnographic attention to the spatial politics of toxic flows constitutes a critical intervention in geography and anthropology by underlining the inherent inequality of poisonous exposure that reduces life expectancy and devalues human (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023;Garb and Leblond, 2023;Ippolito, 2022) and other-than-human (Evans, 2022) life. Scaled ethnographies tracing toxic flows help us visualize spatial geographies of structural inequality and the ways in which toxicity reshapes sociopolitical life (Fisher et al, 2021).…”

Breathing new futures in polluted environments (Taranto, Italy)

“…D'Ovidio (2021) argues that such practices lead to different trajectories for the neighbourhood and the city itself. Ippolito (forthcoming) problematises the lived experiences of different pollutants and the extent to which their dissonant temporalities produce narratives that are connected to the community's resignation to pollution, and Alliegro (2020) has analysed environmental monitoring by different institutional and community‐based groups in Taranto. Barca and Leonardi (2016) investigate Taranto's steel‐plant workers' mobilisation for environmental justice and health, and Greco and Di Fabbio (2014) discuss alternative economies to Taranto's path‐dependency on steel production.…”