Plastic litter at the outskirts of a village. Plastics in the oceans. Beaches littered with plastics. Images of whales and cows with plastics in their bellies. Calls for citizens not to litter, to throw away trash responsibly, to join clean up drives, to recycle. In the public imagination, the problem of plastics has largely become one of litter.
Plastic litter …
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, air pollution and greenhouse emissions decrease, or so news reports say. The satellite images of China in lockdown provided a first striking example. In response to this, one Dutch newspaper even proclaimed ‘a winner’ in the coronavirus pandemic, namely ‘the environment’. But that is a bit too hasty. Not only are (as environmental experts warn) …
Introduction
Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnographic portrayal that is prismatic in its attention, the book combines numerous elements––place, civic performance, history, political economy––to bear on the lead poisoning epidemic in Montevideo, Uruguay at the turn of the 21st…
One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health
Stanford University Press, 2017, 262 pages.
Bringing children to the field can change an anthropologist’s relationship to fieldwork immensely. For University of Auckland anthropologist, Susanna Trnka, bringing her children to the Czech Republic quickly became a confronting medical experience when her nine-year-old daughter suffered her …
“What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received” (Acceptance 490).
“What if containment is a joke?” (Acceptance 576).
It all begins with a thorn: the delicate, glittering prickle of an unidentified plant …
The Chinese film, Under the Dome, tells the story of a former CCTV news anchor’s struggle to understand and deal with smog in the wake of her pregnancy and motherhood. The filmmaker and narrator, Chai Jing, makes a case for reducing pollution in China by highlighting the potential correlation between Beijing’s smog and the tumor found in her developing fetus, …