The topic for this week is toxicity and exposure, and I think this is an especially interesting
aspect of the world today the anthropocene and it's something that a lot of anthropologists have
taken an interest in, in recent years. It's a phenomenon which can let us highlight something very
interesting namely how experiences with certain things in the world can make us think differently
about ourselves.
and I'd like to point out one thing briefly at the beginning That place the readings that you have in
some context.
So simply put there are two common approaches to toxicity and exposure and both of them are are
present in the reading that you have this week but I'm choosing to highlight one more than the
other.
So you can say that there's a political economy approach which is very prevalent in studies of toxicity
And exposure which says that toxicity and exposure is an effect produced by the global
economic system it is one more thing that shows interconnections long distances and other structures
of the world system and harms some people more than others. On the other hand you have what you might
call an experiential approach where
the focus is more on toxicity and exposure and experiences of having been exposed to or being exposed
to toxicity and how this may be is something that changes what it feels like to be you in the world
and to have a body and it changes what it feels like to relate to your own body and the world.
So you readings have elements of both these, but I'm going to emphasise the second one more than
the first one. So I've called this video anthropocene bodies and and to have a body in the
anthropocene and to have a body in the anthropocene is to have a body that is exposed to chemicals
and toxicity of various kinds but more generally it is a body that is unfixed
sort of distributed and also porous and our experiences with our own bodies in the anthropocene can
challenge how we conventionally think of bodies and persons in modern Western societies.
So one of your readings this week by a Vanessa Jones shows us one example of anthropocene
bodies she emphasises how bodies are in systems anthropocene bodies are bodies that are in systems,
and she draws on an anthropologists called Michel Truillot and one of his most significant
interventions was to focus on world systems not from the center but rather from the point of view of
their supposed
margins and fringes.
So we get a really a different view of the world systems like global capitalism if we start out from
a little village located on the margins somewhere, rather than focusing on say Wall Street or the UN
headquarters we're going to look at world systems from the point of view of a small village in
Martinique and Jones takes this a step further in a sense or maybe perhaps a
Step closer is a better word and asks what if we instead start with bodies. So bodies are
Signs of encounter and they can be signs of encounters that have happened in the past or
encounters that occur over very great distances.
Exposure and and bodies that have signs of exposure then reveal the system we might think of a body
as the sort of a sensor that picks up and records other strains of history then what gets written
down which is an idea we'll get back to in relation to Kate Brown's article about the
Chernobyl.
The global ask viewed and not just from villages but from particular bodies gives other stories
of the world so your body my body each of our bodies tells a story about the world Jones'
informant Mark is one such body from which to see the global, she writes and I quote as we scale inward
to his body most mundane functions we are also
scaling outward to talk about farming in Martinique about policy parody in France and about the
circulation of agricultural products in the global economy, all of these larger things affect
Mark's body and the way it functions and his body then is a place from which to get a different
kind of view of these large systems.
I'll get back to Mark in a little bit but first I wanted to show you the Vaval.
Jones is writing about and so the Vaval is this carnival figure that they have in parades in
Martinique and is this large Effigy made from papier-mâché and what you see here is actually a
photo of that actual Vaval that Jones describes in the article from the carnival on Martinique in
2013 and here it moves on the float
through the streets of Martinique. You can see the cars and people in the background there. So the
Vaval this carnival figure represents the spirit of colony while on the island but it also acts
as a kind of representation or a commentary on some current issue. It is decorated doing things that
that refer to current issues in Martinique and we can say that there are at least two comments that
this Vaval expresses, that
we can relate to the notion of bodies in systems and they both revolve around the
pesticide klordecone which you see written on the champagne glass there and
these comments are about the pesticide the chemical pesticide klordecone as tied to the world
system on one hand and about klordecone as tied to the functioning of local people's bodies on
the other hand.
In other words there are two ideas about anthropocene bodies that this carnival figure expresses
first the fact the fact of exposure to a chemical because of the relation between France and
Martinique and second the concern that this has an effect on who you are and what your body is to
you as a local Martinique person. So first Martinique is is part of the overseas territorial collectivity
of France
so it's a colony basically and the klordecone is there in the soil and in the food and in
bodies in part because the French government neglected to impose the same regulations on food
and agriculture to protect people in Martinique as they have in France so the presence and the
large concentrations of this chemical in the environment in Martinique is a sign of martinique's
position in the world
system and to the second point the Vaval expresses a concern with how klordécone effects
Martinique's people's bodies
so klordècone is a pesticide and what is used as a pesticide it seeps into the soil the water and
eventually ends with food that's grown and from there it gets into people's bodies, it is also
carcinogen it can cause cancer and its so-called environmental estrogen it's a
hormone altering chemical and it has been linked to male infertility so because
it generates estrogen it can change the way their body functions and it is felt especially acutely
by men.
In a sense to put it bluntly we can say that the Vavals social commentary is that Klordècone is a
French neglect which leads to sterilization among Martinique in men. The Vaval expresses in a
symbolic form the fact that there are connections through Klordècone between the geopolitical
positioning of Martinique and the functioning of bodies like Mark's Body
Mark's Body then because of Klordècone becomes Troublesome for him his body acts in
unpredictable ways and his troublesome and unpredictable body is a sign of encounters encounters
between the French state and its colonies between Martinique and global commodity chains
political decisions and economic structures leave traces in the soil and in the drinking water and
ultimately in the bodies of people like Mark he is in a position where he doesn't
have a choice but to ingest klordècone it's in the water and in the soil and these traces manifest
in experiences of the body as something that has become unruly how to lose control he is sort of
experiences a lack of control over his own body, and this lack of control in turn is a reminder or
a sign Mark is reminded of something about a fact about his own body he is reminded that his
body is
porous that it has openings he knows that he is ingesting klordècone without being able to notice
it as it's happening he doesn't notice or feel it when it happens but he knows that is almost
certainly present in the food that he eats so when his body acts strangely when it causes him
trouble it is a reminder that he is being exposed to this chemical.
So I take this as a story about having an anthropocene exposed body
and to be clear this is the kind of body we all have to an extent but for most of us it isn't as
clear and as acutely felt that is as it is for someone like Mark and it shows just a few things
in such an anthropocene body it shows that exposure and toxicity makes us notice the various ways in which
the body is unfixed and open to the world, the body is porous sort of like a sponge.
There are ways into the body that we cannot control things from the environment around us
effect our bodies without our awareness. Another aspect that this shows is that your body
isn't just you, its workings are affected by the soil where you food grows and water that comes out
of your taps and your body is you along with various quasi human agents as Jones calls it
as well as chemicals and pesticides.
The body is a sign of past and distant encounters you can also see the body as a kind of site
where widely distributed things gather and accrete and it is sort of common to say that the
world is characterised by flows that are present world is one that characterized by global flows of
materials and such but bodies may be one of the kinds of sites were things
rather than flow through one of those places where flows cause sort of buildup
and finally anthropocene bodies are often unpredictable and unruly your body's workings if you have
an anthropocene body may be partly out of your control and so exposure challenges what many of us
take for granted about bodies. It introduces gray zones it can complicate things it disturbs
conventional boundaries and by conventional boundaries I mean the way that us here sort of in the
west tend
to think about the body and if we take exposure seriously it can challenge these
boundaries here between me and not me there are all sorts of gray zones now that is sort of part of
me but also not me and then inside and outside here and elsewhere like in the sense that larger
flows that come from many other places and from across time gather and build up in me right and
between human and non-human and alive
and dead anthropocene body's sort of obliterate the myth of the discrete and bounded individual.
When I did this lecture last year I talked about COVID and how our experiences would cope with
may have destabilized our conventional way of thinking about our bodies in sort of similar way to
exposure to have a body in like the COVID era is in many ways similar to have anybody in the
anthropocene just like the anthropocene and our
experiences with COVID having us nudged towards thinking about ourselves and our bodies as sort of
extended distributed and porous, so we've all had numerous experiences that have reminded us for
instance that we extend past the skin that our body doesn't end where we thought it did. Hand-washing
and distance and all that are also like little reminders in the everyday life that remnants
of other people linger all around
the world we pass through and that we can pick up remnants of other people as we go
through the world and
and if we do all these things the thinking was that if we do all these things over an extended
period of time that something that might change the way we think about ourselves and this year I
think we can think about these questions in different way we can
we can think about what lingers when we no longer do all of these things that tell ourselves
that we are porous and that we extend past the skin when we have stopped doing that is there
anything that lingers in our sense of our sense of ourselves and in our way of thinking about our
own bodies maybe our experiences with COVID maybe that's made it just a tiny bit more
Easy for us to think about ourselves as anthropocene bodies.