Paper 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."