Paper short abstract:

Chemicals have become ethnographic objects. Anthropologists are tracing the material, toxicological, and neurological valences of molecular dreamworlds, growing pharmaceutical markets, and landscapes haunted by industrial capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Chemical ethnography, or chemo-ethnography, owes intellectual debts to Lochlann Jain who has ushered "cancer and its identities out of the closet and into a space not of comfort, or righteous anger, but of mourning, a space where the material humanity of suffering and death informs communicative and collective action" (Jain 2013). As ethnographers start to "follow the chemical species" (cf. Marcus 1995), venturing into the realm of non-life where the pharmakon breaks down, new insights are emerging about multispecies worlds. Encounters between organic and inorganic matter—between rock and water, among biological organisms, metabolites, and toxins—produce distinct entities and agents that do not precede, but rather emerge through, molecular intra-actions (cf. Povinelli 2016; Barad 2014). Sensing technologies, and collaborations with allies in other disciplines, are allowing ethnographers to study chemical species in water, soil, air, human bodies, and emergent ecological assemblages. Theoretical and empirical research is engaging with questions related to processes of corrosion and combustion, the cultivation of non-innocent optimism, state abdication, and capital despoilment.