Paper short abstract:

This paper theorises the moment when hopes of gaining anthropological knowledge of toxicity through the bodies of interlocutor and observer are disappointed and confused by claims that toxicity remains elsewhere.

Paper long abstract:

In the heat of 2019's scorching Delhi summer, sitting on a bag of dismantled CD-ROM parts (40 rupees a kilo with copper prices in a slump), I observe Shaheed dip PCBs into molten solder to remove a small motor. My face twitches with the fumes, hoping to finally receive an answer, I ask Shaheed whether he is affected by it. "No, I am not."

The proposed paper is based on twelve months of fieldwork, on the peripheries of Delhi, observing relations between informal and formal e-waste dismantling operations. The concern with growing piles of e-waste is fuelled by concerns for toxic flows documented to be traversing the world through nodes of toxic urban wastelands such as Delhi. Yet, the anthropological method poses a challenge to study toxicity, with moments such as the above that promise but disappoint. In this paper I explore the methodological difficulty of following toxicity, while it is always indicated by informants to remain located elsewhere. The above moment highlights how toxicity may be known through the body, but interlocutors' answers are not decodable without already possessed knowledge of standards and research and the observer's own bodily reactions; knowledge that is always about elsewhere. Expectations of gaining access to interlocutor's lived experiences disappoint as workers of urban wastelands consider their own bodies more habituated to toxicity than they expect the observers'. While differential bodily reactions are ascribed to gender, class and ethnic differences. This paper attempts to invert the glances of interlocutors on the anthropologist's body as indicators of lived experience.