Paper short abstract:

I deconstruct toxicity through a comparison between an epidemiological approach to pollutants and their lived experience. An ethnographic analysis of toxicity in Taranto illustrates the complexity of temporal scales through which chemicals contribute to new biological, political and moral orders.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the lived experience of toxicity and its relationship to the environmentalist resignation of a community living in one of the most polluted Italian cities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the focus of this paper are the conflicting moral nuances that emerge at the intersection between epidemiology and the lived experience of toxicity in Taranto. Embedded within public discourse in the city, pollutants flow beyond the epidemiological scale of the environmental disaster and are re-evaluated according to the lived experience of the community. I will first focus on the dissonance between asbestos (banned in 1992) and dioxin to explain how the experience of the former in the earlier phase of the industry deeply shaped the community's understanding of the latter in the present. Over three decades, long-term exposure to asbestos produced a politics of indifference toward all toxic substances on behalf of the earlier generations of workers. This contributes to a low participation in the environmental movement on behalf of the wider community.

The second part of the paper will describe the implications of Taranto's experience of asbestos in the moral life of the community. The context-specific experience of asbestos-related disease, in combination to a well-established compensation system and an ongoing trial for environmental disaster, leads to an experience of death as the systematic monetization of human life. Understanding how different toxicities are co-produced within these narratives is of primary relevance in dissecting the forms of political resignation that the workers and their social circles engage with.