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Accepted Paper:
On living and becoming in toxic environments
Imola Püsök
(University of Göttingen)
How deep can anthropological immersion go? To what extent can ethnographers go native? Can we think of anthropological fieldwork as being correspondence (in an Ingoldian sense) even on a cellular level?
Paper Abstract:
Geamăna was a village in the Western Carpathian mountains of Romania, which has been continuously flooded since the 1980s. The sterile waste and acid waters that are continuously being released from the nearby copper mine, are in the process of engulfing the last few remaining houses as I write this. Today only a handful of households still exist on the shores of the growing sterile lake, and the families still living there continue their traditional lifestyle: they have cattle, pigs and poultry, and they collect hay and produce vegetables in their shrinking gardens and lands. During the few days of fieldwork this January I ate meat and dairy from animals that have breathed the air (mixed with the gases evaporating from the lake), drink the water (laden with heavy metals that seep through the layers of earth into the wells), and eat the grass (that grows on toxic soil) of the frail environment. I drank coffee and tea made with water from the wells. As a result, at least some of my cells incorporated molecules laden with the history of human and non-human correspondence of that landscape. Focusing here on ideas and narratives of toxicity, I propose to follow anthropological immersion. I propose to disentangle some ways in which anthropologists become in their respective fields, and anthropological knowledge is produced through more-than-human assemblages.