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- Convenors:
-
Sahra Gibbon
(University College London (UCL))
Maria Paula Prates (University of Oxford)
Jennie Gamlin (University College London)
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Short Abstract:
This panel invites academic scholars interested in sharing multidisciplinary insights, theoretical or methodological approaches and challenges in thinking through how the so called Anthropocene epoch impacts on human health and produces embodied inequalities.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites academic scholars interested in sharing multidisciplinary insights, theoretical or methodological approaches and challenges in thinking through how the so called Anthropocene epoch impacts on human health and produces embodied inequalities. As Medical Anthropologists we are concerned with how human bodies are unevenly affected by and responding to diverse Anthropocene contexts. At the same time our problematisation of this phenomena is unsettled and restricted by Western categorisations of planetary life, human experiences and the methods of achieving sustainable social and environmental futures. The very definition of this epoch as the 'Anthropocene', suggests a global human responsibility for what is effectively the fallout of Western industrial social orders. Drawing from insights and experiences of engaged anthropological research, political and ecology, public health and activism around the world we seek to address discussion and dialogue in key areas of engagement concerning i)indigenous experience and coloniality of the Anthropocene, ii) gender, reproduction and environmental justice, iii) multispecies ethnography and human-animal health, iv) COVID-19 and co-related diseases, v) chemical exposures and living with toxicity and also more wider public understanding of the Anthropocene
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 11 April, 2023, -Jennie Gamlin (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present historical and ethnographic data on Indigenous Wixárika communities to engage with theoretical debates about the gender of the Anthropocene, or “Earth Stalked by Man”.
Paper long abstract:
The gender of the Anthropocene is barely theorised or made visible when we consider how it has produced human health impacts and their differential embodiment. Tsing writes of “Earth Stalked by Man” (2016), to speak of our current predicament and its enlightenment origins. Anthropology became the discipline from which to generalise about Mankind, a category claimed by white Christian men, ensuring that the modern, capitalist era was defined, policed and stalked by this specific Man.
Although concepts such as decolonisation are now mainstreamed into anthropological theory and practice, the details of how Man became universalised in specific locations and the gendering of structures and processes within what Brand and Wissen refer to as the ‘Imperial mode of living’ require empirical as well as theoretical disentangling.
In this paper the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene will serve as a location from which to unpack and decolonise universalised gendering, revealing invisibility, violence and categorical orderings of people and place that have not served the wellbeing of specific groups. Drawing on ongoing historical and ethnographic research I will present an overview of how “Man” stalked Indigenous Wixárika people, gendering their mode of incorporation into the Capitalist world economy and in his wake, creating uneven and messy patterns of human experience and existence. These preliminary findings suggest a hypothesis for why violence against women has been extreme in this context that can be traced back to Man’s mission to dominate, extract and rule.
Zofia Boni (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan)
Paper short abstract:
How do age, class and gender inequalities shape people’s experiences of urban heat and its impact on their health and wellbeing? Based on the case of older adults, this paper analyses experiencing urban heat and embodying climate change as a biosocial process.
Paper long abstract:
With the warming climate, excessive summer heat is becoming a daily reality for many people in the Anthropocene. Heat-related morbidity and mortality increases globally. But people’s lives are not affected equally, not only because of their geographical locations. Due to the combination of biosocial factors, adults above the age of 65 are considered one of the most vulnerable to heat stress groups. How do they cope and adapt? How are age, gender and class inequalities embedded in urban heat adaptation and people’s experiences?
This paper stems from an interdisciplinary project ‘Embodying Climate Change: Transdisciplinary Research on Urban Overheating’ (EmCliC) that brings together social anthropology, sociology, physics, environmental engineering, climate science and epidemiology to better understand older adults’ experiences of urban heat in two European locations: Warsaw and Madrid. This paper focuses on the notion of embodying heat and climate change. First, based on ethnographic research, I will discuss the age, class and gender inequalities related to heat stress and consider the impact of summer heat on older adults’ lives, health and wellbeing. Second, I will critically reflect on studying and operationalizing the notion of embodiment as a biosocial process in an interdisciplinary research. Is embodiment always connected to health? Can people embody positive aspects of climate change? Can we quantify embodiment? Based on the case of older adults and urban heat, the paper aims to theoretically and methodologically explore how people embody climate change.
Thandeka Cochrane (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
As Africa increasingly faces the ‘fallout of Western industrial orders’, cancer is becoming an oft ignored yet burgeoning health problem. This paper examines this problem through the lens of data paucity on the continent and the agential actions of care through data collection of registrars.
Paper long abstract:
The WHO has warned that Africa is facing a ‘cancer epidemic’. Many people on the ground believe that there is an increase in cancer incidence due to life-style changes and increased environmental and industrial pollutants, essentially in the effects of ‘Western industrial fallout’.
Much of the continent, however, has suffered under a decade’s long paucity of cancer data – therefore knowing, or saying, much about cancer on the continent is fraught with challenges, resulting in statistical inequality and an exclusion of Africa's cancer burdens in global discourses, as well as inadequate responses from local governments. As a result, African bodies that find themselves afflicted by cancer are subjected to very late diagnosis, long distances to access treatment or an inability to afford it, lack of treatment options, and a lack of research on them as cancer bearing bodies.
Focusing on the work being done by cancer registries in east and southern Africa, the first part of the paper argues that the paucity of cancer data has negatively affected health possibilities around cancer. The second part of the paper examines how cancer registrars dedicate themselves to collecting data precisely as an act of both agency and care. Through this, the paper shows the work actors on the ground are doing to change the narratives around African cancer incidences, mobilising data not only to create structures of care, but also to actively face the growing challenge this disease poses for the continent.