Paper short abstract:

This paper employs my ethnography of Irish Travellers living in an extra-legal camp in South East London, to examine pollution from the perspective of its ritual efficacy and its intrinsic materiality. The paper also considers Moran-Thomas' notion of 'para-communicable' conditions.

Paper long abstract:

The emergent qualities of toxic human-environmental relations frame much contemporary anthropological and geographical thought. From the molecular ecologies of Indian megacities to enactments of infrastructural violence in central London, toxic attachments constitute human and nonhuman relations across multiple scales. Pollution, bodies and boundaries are already commonly used framing devices in both classic and contemporary scholarship on Travellers and Gypsies. The aim of this paper is to employ my ethnography of Irish Travellers living in an extra-legal camp in South East London, to examine each of these framings.

It will demonstrate that dirt and pollution represent far more than the symbolic sentinels of order which patrol the borders of Travellers' moral cosmology, as previous scholarship influenced by Mary Douglas contended. Instead, I argue that Travellers have developed what Kath Weston terms 'toxicity infused attachments' to the environments in which they live (2017). From this perspective, the pollution that flows from truck exhausts and the chimneys of cement manufacturing plants, into Traveller bodies, not only causes illness, but creates a paradoxical situation where caregiving, as well as the intimate family bonds this produces, are intensified.

The paper concludes by considering Amy Moran-Thomas' notion of 'para-communicable' conditions (2019); a category that unsettles the boundaries between infectious and non-transmittable disease, to enquire whether the co-constitutional involvement of industrial toxins and Travellers' bodies cross the threshold of what are conventionally classified as non-transmittable conditions.