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- Convenors:
-
Mary Mostafanezhad
(University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Roger Norum (University of Oulu)
- Discussant:
-
Anna Lora-Wainwright
(University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) SR2
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel questions forms and systems of "pollutants" by exploring how narratives mediate social relations amidst socio-environmentally pollutive events, states and agents. Papers examine the narratives/imaginations that speak to sensory materialities of pollution in its multiple forms and spaces.
Long Abstract:
In the 1960s Mary Douglas demonstrated that environmental knowledge is culturally mediated by systems of classification that identify pollution as matter out of place, shaping behaviors and producing human beings. Social science scholarship over the past decade on the politics of pollution has examined how pollution is differently understood, experienced and governed across diverse socio-cultural contexts. Scholars have written about materialities of pollution that go far beyond mere environmentally destructive effluent, considering also rampant hyperproductions of auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile and even discursive, epistemological stimuli that register as "matter out of place". In such spaces, anthropologists have drawn attention to how corporeal practices of atmospheric consumption are affectively registered and re-imagined amidst spaces of abandonment. This raises new questions about how the materiality of pollution interacts with humans' embodied experience to co-constitute new environmental narratives that reshape social relations - particularly between so-called polluter and polluted. This panel aims to confront multiple forms of "pollutants" and their systems as a means of contesting binaries of auspicious and adverse by exploring how various forms of narrative mediate social relations in contexts of socio-environmentally pollutive events, processes, agents and states. We invite submissions that examine the narratives and imaginations that speak to the sensory materialities of pollution across a range of forms (e.g. noise, thermal, light, soil, etc.) and spaces.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Dust is a key "matter of concern" in Nicaragua, speaking volumes about issues of climate change, public health, the integrity of the household, and the politics of everyday social life. This paper explores the political ecology of dust as "pollution," broadly conceptualized, in urban Nicaragua.
Paper long abstract:
In urban Nicaragua, it is often said, there are two seasons, mud and dust, and the relationship between them is quickly changing. This paper explores the political ecology of dust as a conceptual vector for pollution (material-cum-symbolic) and as an index of socio-ecological and political concerns in the anthropocene. Dust, in Latour's words, is the quintessential "matter of concern." As dust is deterritorialized by the wind, it becomes difficult to quantify and yet speaks volumes about large issues of climate change, environmentalism, and public health. As it reterritorializes in homes and human lungs -- and people work to fight back against its persistent encroach -- it seeps further into local explanations for disease, into social and moral evaluations of the "dignified household" (la casa digna), and even, if only idiomatically, for gendered issues like the promiscuous sex of men. For anthropology, the analysis of dust may contribute not only to conversations about the conceptualization of social problems as in the long tradition of the literature on pollution, but also to what has been called the "volumetric turn" in political ecological analysis, a theoretical approach, it is argued, that is struggling to come to grips with the sometimes blurred boundary between materiality of physico-chemical, or ecological processes and immateriality social, symbolic, and political processes -- i.e. how millions of individual units of particulate matter might "swarm" and manifest as things, and then again as representations local or planetary socio-ecological and political "crisis."
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic and geospatial data from northern Thailand, this paper argues that the judgment of seasonal air pollution as a crisis is contingent on contestations over livelihoods and worldviews.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological engagements with environmental crises have taken a number of forms. Some scholars have argued that crises judgments are revelatory and expose the contradictions of modes of production through interruptions to socio-economic life that can no longer be ignored. Others contend that crises judgments conceal more than they reveal through the framing of crisis as "error" and the focus on technocratic solutions to political-economic problems. This paper argues that the judgment of seasonal air pollution as a crisis is contingent on contestations over livelihoods and worldviews. Based in northern Thailand, the paper focuses on what is described by many residents as the region's annually recurring "haze crisis". In recent decades, broad shifts from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture and increased volumes of agricultural biomass burning have reportedly exacerbated the production of air pollution in the form of haze—an airborne mixture of pollutants that includes gasses, fine soot particles, and carbon dioxide. Once a quotidian phenomenon of relatively little concern, today seasonal haze is a crisis. While causal uncertainty exists surrounding the precise combination of the socio-ecological drivers of haze production, multiple narratives of the causes and effects of the haze circulate throughout the region, in which blame is frequently placed on smallholder farmers who have recently entered into new market relations. Situated within broader regional agrarian transitions, this paper draws on mixed ethnographic, quantitative, and geospatial methods to examine the chronopolitics of seasonal air pollution and by what mechanisms such pollution comes to be constituted as a "crisis".
Paper short abstract:
This paper challenges the municipal-corporate narrative of waste-to-energy (WTE) as the epitome of sustainable waste management for Honolulu. This narrative undermines alternative management approaches and silences the contested nature of the impacts of WTE's greenhouse gas and pollution emissions.
Paper long abstract:
The City and County of Honolulu (the City) claims adherence to the waste management hierarchy, which positions waste reduction as the least pollutive and most effective strategy for managing waste and minimizing pollution. Source reduction is an upstream management strategy that precludes the generation of trash. In contradiction to this claim, the City invested in a technocratic management regime called waste-to-energy (WTE), a reactive strategy which incinerates waste to generate electricity in a facility called H-POWER. This paper explores the material and discursive tensions of the City's claim to value source reduction while prioritizing management through H-POWER, an approach which encourages waste production by contractually requiring the City to produce 800,000 tons of trash annually or pay a fine. This put-or-pay contract is held between the City and Covanta—the corporation that operates H-POWER.
Situated in a critical discard studies and STS approach, this work attempts a multi-sited ethnography of infrastructure to unpack the narrative used by the City and Covanta to create WTE-as-sustainable through claims to meet the island's "clean" energy needs and landfill diversion goals. This paper employs critical discourse analysis to highlight where ideological work is at play and simultaneously uncovers ways in which this discourse suppresses source reduction as a viable alternative. I argue that neoliberal ideology underlies Honolulu's waste-as-commodity approach. The Zero Waste movement contests WTE-as-sustainability based on the emissions implications of encouraging upstream production of goods for trash-fuel and based on the material consequences to human and environmental health from incinerating waste.
Paper short abstract:
Canada's Chemical Valley surrounds the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. This paper examines the community's participation in a community health study and the representation of their health concerns. Informed by corporeal citizenship, the paper elaborates a sensing policy approach to environmental justice.
Paper long abstract:
When citizens enter deliberative spaces of engagement, they encounter discursive fields of knowledge. This paper examines the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's participation in a community health study and the representation of their environmental and reproductive health concerns. By participating in this study, Indigenous citizens of Aamjiwnaang encountered a paradox of engagement: while included in the health study deliberations, their small-scale, situated concerns became marginalized. Informed by corporeal citizenship, this paper elaborates a sensing policy orientation to public engagement for environmental justice. As an interpretive and intersectional lens, sensing policy focuses on practices of meaning-making and enhances scientific communication through the meaningful inclusion of citizen stories and lived-experiences. This multilayered lens aims to improve public engagement processes on matters of environmental and reproductive health by providing some insight into how public officials can interpret and incorporate lived-experience, situated bodies of knowledge and geopolitical context into decision-making. In response to the central question: "how can public deliberation processes create spaces that are conducive to meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities experiencing environmental injustice in their everyday lives", this paper draws upon findings from document analysis and media coverage as well as extensive field-work in Lambton County, including participant observation at townhall meetings, and participatory action research within Aamjiwnaang. Contributing to the distributive, procedural and discursive dimensions of environmental justice scholarship, this paper argues that a critical examination of Aamjiwnaang's inclusion in the health study reveals the need for creative and interpretive approaches to public engagement with affected communities while making space for citizen stories.
Paper short abstract:
This talk reflects upon the normative understandings of sound as pollution and silence as purity in the context of wilderness spaces - in particular in the European High North. It analyses the shifting relationships between nature, culture and sound in the context of planetary environmental change.
Paper long abstract:
Noise pollution, or environmental noise, is often framed as an over-abundance of outdoor acoustic overexposure caused primarily by machines, transport and transportation systems, and is commonly thought to have a harmful impact on human or animal life. For example, noise pollution has been shown to have a detrimental effect on wild animals, by e.g. changing the balance in predator or prey detection/avoidance, or interfering in communication, reproduction or navigation. The binary relationship between sound/industry and silence/nature is reproduced extensively in common understandings of wilderness. In this talk, I analyse the experience of running a collaborative research project in Abisko, Sweden that blends bio-acoustic tools with participatory mapping in order to comprehensively capture stakeholders' perceptions of, knowledge about and attitudes towards dynamic Arctic environments. I demonstrate the ways in which sonic pollution is understood and narrativised so as to both contest and reproduce dominant normative understandings of human relationships to the wild and the roles that wild spaces play in contemporary human social and cultural experience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the local surfers in post-disaster Fukushima continue to live with a "polluted" sea through leisure. To give texture to the multi-sensory materialities of "polluted leisure" the paper is accompanied by a collection of sounds, objects and images of the Fukushima coastline.
Paper long abstract:
On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the north-east coast of Japan, triggering a 38-meter high tsunami and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The offshore winds that day meant 80% of the nuclear fallout went into the sea. Following the disaster, land-based decontamination efforts have focused on collecting and removing 5cm of top soils around residential areas. To protect these coastal communities from potential future tsunami 440 discrete concrete seawalls spanning 405 km are currently being constructed. However, considerations of how Fukushima coastal communities continue to live with "polluted" seas—spiritually, aesthetically, and creatively—are limited. Many questions remain: How do people forge new modes of dwelling within, amongst and against post-disaster coastlines? What kinds of embodied, sensory and technological assemblages comprise new practices of living with polluted seas? To address these questions ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in 2017 to document the sounds, stories, images and sensory materialities to express what life is like for those who chose to stay and continue to live with a "polluted" seascape. Specifically, we take a closer look at how Fukushima's surf communities deliberate, experience and (re)engage with a polluted coastline through what we refer to as their "polluted leisure". To give texture to the multi-sensory materialities of polluted leisure the presentation is accompanied by a collection of sounds, objects and images collected and/or inspired by Fukushima's surfscape. The study strives to broaden understandings of doing and feeling leisure in increasingly polluted times and dying seas.
Paper short abstract:
When and how does an environmental issue come to matter in people's everyday life? This article depicts the entanglement of local politics and environmental issues in post-handover Hong Kong and argues for a more holistic approach to research about the environments.
Paper long abstract:
When and how does an environmental issue come to matter in people's everyday life? Why is fireworks display a necessity for new year celebration but a source of air pollution on the National Day of China? In this article, I explain this conundrum by showing that the kind of 'pollution' that is most visceral to the people of Hong Kong is not environmental pollution in its most conventional sense, but the fear of being 'polluted by red China' (cek faa), also known to some as 'mainlandisation' (daai luk faa). Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article depicts the entanglement of local politics and environmental issues, especially the ways certain political issues are being reframed with certain environmental analogies. In particular, I discuss how 'pollution' and the 'soil' are being deployed as both an analytic and an analogy to address the fear of being polluted by communist China and the hope of revitalising Hong Kong's local values through the Agricultural Revitalisation Movement. In contrasting these two very different uses of environmental analogies—one imbued with fear (locust infestation) while another filled with hope (e.g., revitalise the local soil)—this article wishes to shed light on a variety of localism and environmentalism that are built on the politics of hope rather than xenophobia and fear in post-handover Hong Kong.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses in on middle class 'pollution talk' and the marketing of domestic air purifiers in India's capital. By exploring the conceptualisation of environmental goods in the city we can understand better if smog is indeed 'democratic'(Beck 1991)in contemporary Delhi.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years 'pollution talk' has become a key theme of middle class conversation in Delhi, from concerns about the risks of air pollution voiced at social gatherings to heated discussions on social media about the government's attempts to address the issue. Discussions revolve around interpretations of live data such as the National Air Quality Index (NAQI), apportioning blame to middle class cars, construction work, or the burning of biomass by the urban poor. The city's 'airpocalypse' has presented an entrepreneurial opportunity for some as a market for domestic air purifiers, masks and particulate pollution detectors has emerged, including lower cost machines aimed at Delhi's lower middle classes.
Personal and commercial narratives about the need to produce clean air within private spaces, such as homes and cars, build upon well-established fears about pollution affecting other environmental goods such as water, and help us to better understand the conceptualisation of environmental goods in contemporary urban settings.
By focusing in on the intersections between 'scientific' air quality data, situated knowledge about ways to mitigate exposure, and the marketing of technological innovations in air purification, the paper will locate the concept of a Right to Clean Air within the spatial and class politics of the city and explore if indeed 'smog is democratic'(Beck 1991) in Delhi.
Paper short abstract:
By exploring Akwamu narratives about blood in Ghana, this paper will revisit the politics of purity and pollution. It will unpack how contained/uncontrolled flows of certain types of blood are imagined to uphold and/or collapse socio-environmental relationality, and ask who gains from this.
Paper long abstract:
The bounding of blood - within the body and within certain spaces in the natural and domestic environment - is key to notions of physical and social life and death. For the Akwamu people of southern Ghana, blood seems indeed to be a key concept in the story of traditional Akwamu statehood. But such bounding of blood through narrative is only as robust as those that weave and maintain the stories and rules around it.
By exploring Akwamu narratives about blood in natural and domestic environs in Ghana, this paper will revisit the politics of purity and pollution. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic field research, I will unpack how contained/uncontrolled flows of certain types of blood are imagined to uphold and/or collapse relationality between people and between people and their broader (physical and spiritual) environment. In this vein, I will consider what flows of blood are said to shift Akwamu authorities from the danger of social death back into social life - or to purify - and which bloody flows threaten to pollute and endanger Akwamu socio-environmental relationality. By considering shifts in narratives about blood, I will question just how bounded and/or collapsible traditional categories of purity and pollution, or of good and bad, really are and ask who gains from this.
Paper short abstract:
This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies pollutes them and reveals their socio-political identity.
Paper long abstract:
In North Bihar, India, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies pollutes them and reveals their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this paper suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness and pollution. This opens the possibility of redefining dirt from the classic "matter out of place" to a semiotic interpretation of its political entanglements. Historical circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt loose their meaning.