Abstract: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 con… Show more
“…Labelled ‘forever chemicals’ for their highly stable chemical structure and resistance to be broken down, PFAS are a group of over 9000 chemical compounds of escalating concern. Increasingly, research points to their toxicity, ubiquity and potential harms to human and environmental health (Bond, 2021; Fenton et al, 2021; Lenka et al, 2022; Renfrew & Pearson, 2021; Richter et al, 2021). Prior to any known consumer use, PFAS were first synthesised in the 1930s and used in the thermonuclear activity of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s (Gaines, 2023).…”
Section: Global Context and Theoretical Starting Pointsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…There is compounding evidence of PFAS' toxicity and research has been significantly focused on human health effects, recognising that ‘they [PFAS] have an affinity for living creatures’ (Bond, 2021, p. 388). For instance, an Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) hazard assessment concluded that PFOS (the most common of the PFAS family of compounds) was ‘persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic to mammalian species’ (OECD, 2002).…”
Section: Global Context and Theoretical Starting Pointsmentioning
We provide a perspective on the ubiquity of PFAS (a suite of unique per‐ and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or ‘forever chemicals’) as toxic, pervasive and environmentally persistent more‐than‐human agents. We situate our discussion of these more‐than‐human contaminants in our location of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), a post‐production, post‐consumption contaminated site. We therefore make an Antipodean contribution to PFAS research—a predominantly North American/European body of work—providing an account of the specific landmasses, cultural contexts and regulation here, while also noting simultaneous entanglements with the global environment. In dealing with this group of contaminants, we identify opportunities for Aotearoa NZ's regulatory and management processes to consider the more‐than‐human theorising of aspects of ‘the natural world’, not for their utility but for the intrinsic value of more‐than‐human lives, and in order to do regulation, policy and practice differently.
“…Labelled ‘forever chemicals’ for their highly stable chemical structure and resistance to be broken down, PFAS are a group of over 9000 chemical compounds of escalating concern. Increasingly, research points to their toxicity, ubiquity and potential harms to human and environmental health (Bond, 2021; Fenton et al, 2021; Lenka et al, 2022; Renfrew & Pearson, 2021; Richter et al, 2021). Prior to any known consumer use, PFAS were first synthesised in the 1930s and used in the thermonuclear activity of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s (Gaines, 2023).…”
Section: Global Context and Theoretical Starting Pointsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…There is compounding evidence of PFAS' toxicity and research has been significantly focused on human health effects, recognising that ‘they [PFAS] have an affinity for living creatures’ (Bond, 2021, p. 388). For instance, an Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) hazard assessment concluded that PFOS (the most common of the PFAS family of compounds) was ‘persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic to mammalian species’ (OECD, 2002).…”
Section: Global Context and Theoretical Starting Pointsmentioning
We provide a perspective on the ubiquity of PFAS (a suite of unique per‐ and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or ‘forever chemicals’) as toxic, pervasive and environmentally persistent more‐than‐human agents. We situate our discussion of these more‐than‐human contaminants in our location of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), a post‐production, post‐consumption contaminated site. We therefore make an Antipodean contribution to PFAS research—a predominantly North American/European body of work—providing an account of the specific landmasses, cultural contexts and regulation here, while also noting simultaneous entanglements with the global environment. In dealing with this group of contaminants, we identify opportunities for Aotearoa NZ's regulatory and management processes to consider the more‐than‐human theorising of aspects of ‘the natural world’, not for their utility but for the intrinsic value of more‐than‐human lives, and in order to do regulation, policy and practice differently.
“…It pinpoints the racialization of death and its nonrecognition in the “slow death” and dying that ecological devastation and contamination engender (Rodríguez Aguilera 2021). While the discipline of anthropology has taken a turn toward the Anthropocene, particularly in its theoretical conceptualizing of contamination and toxicity, this shift poses significant questions for retaining a grounding in the present material and embodied stakes of toxic geographies rather than a fixed orientation toward the theory's prospects for future possibilities (Bond 2021). As Bond cautions in the impetus toward positive articulations of the disruption and unsettling force of contamination, How might ethnography hold together the shortcomings of the present and the alternatives that these wanting worlds gesture toward?…”
In this experimental year‐in‐review article, we center the everyday, ongoing, and emergent rebellions of livingness against imbricated structures of antiblackness and Indigenous erasure that shape carceral global landscapes to think with the premise that “liberation is an already existing and unfinished and unmet possibility” (McKittrick 2021, 13). We do so through engaging what Orisanmi Burton (2021, 2) theorizes as the “ethnographic and political modality” of letter writing as an intimate practice of radical kinship and rebellious method. Our focus is on rebellious methods of living and loving that call on anthropologists to think with the fugitive acts of everyday people struggling to survive the shifting terrains of white supremacy, settler‐colonial and capitalist power, and ecological devastation while also tending to the forms of expansion, imagination, and rearticulation that always already exist in and beyond this frame. Sharing practices of rebellion and rebellious method across geographies allows us to hone anthropological insights from terrains of struggle through which alternative futures can be imagined, including constellations of a new humanism and anticipatory vocabularies of otherwise worlds.
“…Some scholars do. David Bond (2021, 393), for example, critiques the ceding of the political to the philosophical, asking how our research and writing might be generative for the people with whom we work, rather than only for social theory.…”
To theorize is to make an argument, to make sense of the world, to name and create. It is to stake a claim in and about the world. This can be an ethical act. But it has not always been one. Thinking of theory as ethics, rather than solely as intellectual practice, requires a rethinking of the purpose and not just the content of theory. This is not a prescription for theory but an acknowledgment of a shift underway across the disciplines. In anthropology, one key move is our recognition of ethnography as theory as well as method. As we reassess theory as a form of ethnographic knowledge, how and when do ethics enter the conversation? What are our responsibilities to speak not only truth to power, but also ethics to theory? [ethnography, theory, ethics, anthropology, fieldwork, refusal, relations, storytelling]
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