The unevenly distributed environmental burdens of the Anthropocene become evident in conflicts surrounding the extractive industries. ThyssenKrupp’s steel mill (TKCSA) in Rio de Janeiro is an illustrative example. The factory transformed its surrounding landscape and emitted a fine metallic dust over its human and non-human neighbours. This article focuses on some of the less tangible elements of Anthropocene transformations around the mill. I examine ThyssenKrupp’s communication strategies to reveal the underlying meanings of corporate rhetorical devices, uncover the violence of public relations language and understand the intensity of feeling that surrounded it. I trace the affective registers that emerged around the steel mill as a result of its polluting activities, its approach to corporate communications, and its ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) activities. Everyday life involved minimal corporeal expressions of emotion that encapsulated feeling and allowed for perseverance in the face of toxic suffering. The ‘Stop TKCSA’ campaign involved affective labour; emotions were the agentic contribution campaigners were able to make in the context of unequal power structures. I centre these less visible dynamics of power to examine how emotions can shape experiences of environmental conflict, form coalitional politics, and contribute to the very landscapes of the Anthropocene.
Congenital heart defects (CHDs) are the most common type of major birth defects worldwide. Yet globally, access to high quality treatment is very limited and uneven with most patients living in places without adequate diagnostic or treatment. Based on ethnographic engagement with Beninese and Togolese children undergoing surgical treatment in Switzerland through a humanitarian medicine programme, this paper explores the multiple temporalities and experiences of chronicity at play in the lived experiences of families with children with CHDs in a context of profound health inequalities. These temporal experiences encompass the various promises of a cure made to them, ensuring continued investment in their child’s health, experiencing a sense of rebirth, and navigating the potential risks of future complications. The article highlights how families facing CHDs in underserved regions encounter distinct forms of chronicity compared to those in more privileged areas. It identifies four kinds of chronicity in the families’ lived experiences: symptom-related, procedural, follow-up, and emotions-related.
Illness is fluid. It can cross bodily boundaries, across space and time, and permeate entire families and communities. This is especially apparent in places where people have come to rely on one another in order to withstand austerity and state disregard. Here I share a creative revision of field notes from home visits with a family living with debilitating illness in rural Guatemala. Through their experience, I contemplate how vulnerability and illness are not merely hardships to be endured but can also be conditions productive of collective action, resistance, and new forms of belonging.
In this Field Note, I take the opportunity to reflect on some of the concrete dilemmas that I was faced with in trying to negotiate, secure and maintain access to my field-site. These reflections derive from my engagement with infectious diseases physicians, at a renowned corporate tertiary care hospital in Southern India, who are working towards mitigating antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance. By drawing on the difficulties of felicitously translating my concerns, as an ethnographer, to the epistemological universe that animated (but did not wholly determine) my site of investigation allows me to think through what might or might not emerge as strategically useful in the varied loci that anthropologists are increasingly engaged with.
Precision medicine is a field of future promise. Its imaginary is that ‘health data saves lives’. But which lives and at what costs? In this position piece, we direct attention to how non-imagination (Prainsack 2022) operates in the field of precision medicine. We argue that central actors in the field, along with social scientists researching it, non-imagine the relevance of environmental collapse to the pursuit of precision medicine, despite its huge energy consumption and focus on prolonging human lives in places that contribute the most to climate change. This non-imagination raises questions about how we as medical anthropologists approach and theorise the ‘life politics’ at the centre of anthropological studies of the life sciences. In light of the current ecological peril, we advocate for extending the discipline’s focus from the governance of life in politics, labs, and clinics to the governance of ‘earth-life’.
