Toxic worlds and the power of denial

0556775 - SOÚ 2023 RIV eng U - Conference, Workshop Arrangement
Gibas, Petr
Toxic worlds and the power of denial.
[Praha (online), 19.04.2022-19.04.2022, (W-EUR 30/20)]
Grant - others:AV ČR(CZ) CEFRES 2022-2024
Program: CEFRES - TANDEM
Institutional support: RVO:68378025
Keywords : toxic waste * pollution * home * more-than-human dwelling
OECD category: Sociology

Bureaucrats and politicians have long turned a blind eye to the accumulation of small toxic doses in soils, groundwater, oceans and in bodies. Toxic waste from industrial processes have been tolerated as a price to pay for living 'progress' and 'growth'. Anthropologists are interested in the capacity of humans to render invisible and deny the toxic evidence, and in the stubborn refusal to observe and understand the real materiál consequences of our economic and technical system. Denial makes the invisible traces and effects of the catastrophe disappear. A powerful weapon, it allows to normalize a situation in a way that reproduces rational logic while producing a deep abandonment to the evil of non-reflection. To speak of pollution is to recognize its immense power to render a hitherto familiar space uninhabitable. Ethnographic fieldwork shows that chemical relations do not begin and end where the chemical industry and the state think they do. Instead of following bureaucratic reasoning and official science, it seeks to understand the intimate experiences that men and women have with toxic products and pollution. Nuclear power, pesticides, mining projects, everyday chemicals, industrial waste, plastics, the Seveso disaster are taken by their effects on bodies, and by the way they reflect and accentuate social, gender, class and racial inequalities. The reasoning of the bodies calls for a universal right to breath.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0330971