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".