Short Abstract

Ethnographies of health-environment relations focusing on the movement of substances through bodies.

Long Abstract

What moves through us, and what moves with it? This workshop invites contributions by anthropologists working on health-environment relations in the “new abnormal.” Chemical and biological substances connect the health of people, plants, and animals with the vitality of water, soil, and air through material and semiotic processes. As substances such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and parasites move through homes, laboratories, bodies, clinics, markets, rivers, and regulatory jurisdictions, their meanings, values, and capacities to act also change. We interrogate how these trans-corporeal movements occur, attending to dynamics of contagion, absorption, digestion, decay, and filtration. We approach metabolic processes within and between bodies as troubling the premise of singular environments, bounded bodies, and fixed molecules. Following these processes brings into view the unequal conditions under which substances become part of everyday life and emerge as matters of health/environmental concern, highlighting the relations through which their effects are experienced, recognised, or contested. Drawing on anthropology, STS, and geography, this panel invites ethnographic accounts and theoretical reflections that follow substances within, through, and beyond bodies, institutions, and environments.