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SEMINAREpisode 1: Plastic Matter: On Materiality, Plasticity and Toxicity - With Heather DavisSummary:Dialoguing with indigenous epistemologies, such as the Lenape of the United States, Davis begins by analysing the presence of plastic in the environment, its effect on bodies and how Western infrastructure makes this invasion invisible. Plastic and its toxicity, as well as its creativity, is a planetary event associated with the idea of an evolutionary techno-scientific notion, the industrial revolution, the expansion of capitalism as an ontology, the capitalocene, the anthropocene. These abilities of plastic as a non-human agent unfold in other different ways, of which the ones raised so far concern the development of diseases such as certain types of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or bacteria that feed on plastic. Plastic, Davis teaches us, is part of an infrastructure that is invisible to the eye until it begins to overflow everywhere.

ARTICLESustaining (Dis)Embodied Inequalities in the(ir) Eurocene: Ancient Microbes, Racial Anthropometry, and Life Choices - Coll de Lima Hutchison, Andrea Núñez CasalSummary:This paper brings together our two independent ethnographic research projects carried by out in Coll de Lima and Andrea the Amazon region. Juxtaposing their projects they aim to demonstrate how the reproduction and intensification of Indigenous embodied inequalities in the Americas are central to proposals for the various geological ‘-cenes’. These include the Anthropocene proposal, which they interpret as an Euro-American mythical order, as evidenced in its name (i.e., including ‘anthropos’ as geological actors) and the socio-geological narratives it draws upon (e.g., the atomic age, Europe’s industrial revolution) (Danowski and Castro 2017). Not by siding with ‘the Anthropocene’ the authors accept a multiplicity of overlapping ‘-cenes’ (Larsen and Harrington 2021), rather than backing one ‘-cene’ to rule them all.

SHORT MOVIESAgriculture in Villa Díaz Ordazby Dr Gabriela Martínez AguilarSummary:Agriculture as an essential activity in the countryside has become marginal for most of the benniza’a families in Villa Díaz Ordaz, Oaxaca. They no longer depend on it as their main source of food. The environmental conditions they face, due to the lack of water in the subsoil and the drought in their cornfields because of the absence of rain, increasingly scarify the harvests to provide them with the vital food: corn.

PODCASTEpisode 5: Medical anthropology and social medicine (ad)dressing the colonial wounds - with Cesar AbadiaSummary:How can we treat the wounds or effects of the Anthropocene on the health of social groups affected by the imposition of Western social dynamics and the capitalist way of life? Latin America has struggled for centuries with disease, genocide and, above all, epistemicide caused by the imposition of health practices that disregard culturally localised knowledge. In this podcast, Cesar Abadia-Barrero talks to us about going beyond the perpetuation of colonialist dynamics in health issues, reinforcing the importance of indigenising the West, bringing “epistemologies of care” into the academic debate and into public policies. This talks about culturally localised knowledge, built from the characteristic conditions of the global south, its nature, its people and animals, its culture and history.

SEMINAREpisode 8: Cosmocentrism, the ethics of indigenous civilizations, and the right to resist global extractivist-capitalism - with Prof Stefano Varese and Dr. Carolina ComandulliSummary:Non-anthropocentric conceptions and ways of life of the Ashaninka people from the Peruvian and the Brazilian Amazon, centre on the idea that soil, water, air, plants, animals, humans and the universe form a whole continuum where life, death and time flow; life is everything and everywhere; and life is deeply spiritual and sacred. The speakers propose the concept of "cosmocentrism" to explain it and venture the idea that it is the destruction of this principle in Capitalism and the Wstern world that has permitted the progressive destruction of our own planet. They also show how the Ashaninka have creatively adapted to the contemporary world making global connections and alliances to protect their ways of life, the Amazon forest and the planet itself.

ARTICLEIntroduction to MAT series Summary:This is the introductory article to the special issue ‘Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene’, published by Medicine Anthropology Theory in 2021. The authors question the very concept of Anthropocene as it has initially been conceived in the scientific milieu, and argue that more than a geological-biological event, the Anthropocene is a social and political experience. Therefore, its analysis demands a conjoint critical study of ecological catastrophes, extreme events, citizenship, health, socio-environmental risks, and economic ‘development’. They also argue that the environmental destruction impacts both human and non-human health, and produces embodied inequalities. Showing evidence that vulnerable groups and populations tend to be more exposed to health and environmental risks and harms than others, the authors suggest that the environmental destruction is inextricable from structural violence, social inequality and colonialism. In its last section, the paper presents the other articles that were put together in the special issue to foster dialogue on critical areas, such as: coloniality, gender and reproduction, environmental justice, human-animal relations, the COVID pandemic, and public understanding of the Anthropocene.

EXTERNAL RESOURCETraditional Indigenous MidwiferyBy CIESAS Pacífico SurSummary:We highlight two videos from the ‘Parir Con Dignidad’ project on traditional Indigenous midwifery. The first video is called ‘The wise women who heal’ (6:47 mins): Being a midwife is a gift, a gift from our ancestors. The Indigenous Women’s House in the Ikoots community of San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico, has 11 very active midwives. They are Ikoods Mondüy Moniün Andeow, “the wise women who heal”. The members of this collective share with us their commitment to attend and care for pregnant women and help them to deliver their babies, even though medical personnel who work in clinics and hospitals do not believe they have the capacity to attend births. During the pandemic they attended many more women, since the institutional healthcare system collapsed, and women were afraid to go to hospitals.

ARTICLEWixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene - Jennie GamlinSummary:This paper proposes that by understanding a community’s medical system we are able to see their body ontology and how they live in relation to the world. It argues that colonisation and globalisation have restructured Indigenous communities and devalued traditional ontologies including medical systems in relation to the European notion of being human, creating the social structures that underlie the Anthropocene geological epoch and planetary crisis.Drawing on ethnographic work with Indigenous Wixárika communities Gamlin describes the polytheistic sociality as a basis for their medical system and argues that by treating the the spiritual origins of illness, Wixárika shamans are attending to social cohesion in a society of humans, the supernatural, flora and fauna. This system is subalternised by dominant universals of biomedicine which treat the body in binary opposition to the mind, environment and society through what the author refers to as the ontological Anthropocene. Wixaritari use both allopathic and traditional medical systems and the paper concludes that giving equal importance to both systems may be a framework with implications for wellbeing beyond human health.

SHORT MOVIESMore sustainable ways of life: local knowledge and small-scale livestock farmingby Dr Ivana TeixeiraSummary:You can see the environment of the pampa gaucho and the beings that relate to it in the context of a small farmer’s rural property. The type of dwelling, some characteristics of the animals and the way of life of the small gaucho farmer. These are examples of a sustainable way of life, with docile animals raised on a small scale and on the kitchen doorstep. Healthy ecologies are human-animal relationships with less asymmetrical contours than those developed in the industrial farming of large herds.

SEMINAREpisode 6: Feeding the end of the world: agribusiness, pandemics, and Anthropocene in Brazil - with Dr Jean SegataSummary:In the context of the Brazilian meat industry, a violent grammar, catalyzing asymmetrical relationships in highly unhealthy environments, operates behind an ideal of economic growth. The meatpacking plants that have invaded Brazil are based on often hidden ways of operating structures of inequality, such as poverty, racism and discrimination, which negatively impact the lives and well-being of human and non-human populations. Based on multispecies ethnography, the analysis proposed by Segata allows us to expand the idea of the affected population beyond human beings. Segata asks about our choices (or what we have available as a choice) or How is the way we eat fuelling the end of the world?

Map credits

Credits: Wikimedia Commons – patterned artwork added by EIA. Territory size is proportionate to the number of cattle in 2016.Global Livestock Distribution and Density. Credit: Adam Symington.The main biomes in the world, drawn by hand using maps. Credit: Ville Koistinen CC BY-SA 3.0.Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World. Credit: Olson et al. 2001, BioScience.World map of all navigable rivers.Average June/July/August temperatures historical 1986-2005. Credit: Climate impact lap CC BY 4.0.

2. Cattle map

1. Peters Projection map

3. Livestock map

4. Terrestrial biomes map

5 Ecoregions map

6. World rivers map

7. Temperature map

ARTICLEToxic Legacies and Health Inequalities of the Anthropocene: Perspectives from the Margins - Melania CalestaniSummary:This article focused on waste disposal in two contrasting frontier zones in Mexico and Italy, linked to assembly plants in Matamoros in Mexico and the illegal dumping of toxic waste in Naples in Italy. It focuses on how consumption practices relating to food and water in both contexts need to be viewed in relation to the commercial determinants of health

EXTERNAL RESOURCEThe coloniality of gender and sexuality - Digital exhibitionBy Jennie GamlinSummary:Written and designed by EIA team member Jennie Gamlin, this bilingual exhibition is a collaboration with the British Museum’s San Diego Centre for Excellence in Research on Latin America. Beginning with an exploration of what gender looked like in precolonial times the exhibition critically traces the historicity of gender in Indigenous Wixárika communities through three ‘contact zones’ “spaces of imperial encounter where people who have historically been separated, come into contact with one another and establish ongoing relation, usually in conditions of racial inequality, violence or coercion” (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992). Colonialism, independence and modern Mexico each brough new structures and constraints to women’s and men’s identities reshaping Indigenous gender relations into a hybrid form of European patriarchy. The exhibition showcases ethnographic and historical data. Click on the picture below to start exploring the exhibition.

SEMINAREpisode 2: Grappling with lead in Mexico City - with Elizabeth RobertsSummary:How is lead related to social, economic, biological and technical processes in certain communities? Elizabeth Roberts shows us that lead influences culture and daily life in working-class neighbourhoods in Mexico City. However, the health problems are attributed by the interlocutors not to lead toxicity, as public health advocates, but to pesticides. Through “bioethnography”, a method that combines approaches from the social sciences such as ethnography and the life sciences such as long-term biomedical studies, this seminar draws our attention to the inequalities embodied by disadvantaged groups in Mexico City, such as the toxicity ingrained in food due to the abusive use of agrotoxics.

SHORT MOVIESFood scarcityby Dr Gabriela Martínez AguilarSummary:Faced with the scarcity of land suitable for agriculture and conditioned to a subsistence food system, which is combined with an environment of low socio-economic income, the inhabitants of Villa Díaz Ordaz, Oaxaca, have devised a series of strategies in accordance with the ecological conditions and their geographical location, with women in particular trying to compensate for their increasingly precarious food diets through their domestic spheres, prioritising the collective well-being of the family over that of the individual.

ARTICLEJust Graphite": Corporate Representations of Particular Matter in Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro - Delia Rizpah HollowellSummary:This article examines the less obvious immaterial aspects of toxic suffering focusing on the lives of residents in Santa Cruz in Brazil who live alongside a steel production plant. It explores the multiple forms of violence at stake not just from industrial extraction and its by products but the from ‘corporate responsibility’ and the role of affect and emotional labour as dust, protest activism and health are navigated.

PODCASTEpisode 3: San Mateo del Mar: How to remain ikoots in the face of development megaprojects with Prof. Flavia Cuturi and Ikoots activist Betty GutiérrezSummary:Nestled between the Pacific Ocean, the lagoons of the Mexican isthmus and the oil refinery in the city of Salina Cruz, the Ikoots people of San Mateo del Mar face existential challenges in the Anthropocene. In this episode, we engage in a dialogue with Beatriz Gutiérrez, an Ikoots educator and activist, and Flavia Cuturi, an anthropologist who has been involved in the social and cultural life of San Mateo for decades. Beatriz and Flavia reflect on the socio-environmental impacts of development projects on these lands, the physical and spiritual contamination, and the challenges for survival in this global crisis. They also point to the need to establish intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogues to imagine and build “alter-native” routes for “living well”, or monapaküy in the language of the Ikoots.

EXTERNAL RESOURCEHunting tracks. Sustainability and AnthropoceneBy Laura Montesi & Iván GonzálezSummary:These seven audio capsules, designed for children and young people, seek to explain in a simple and concrete way what the term Anthropocene stands for and how diverse but interrelated phenomena such as heat waves, droughts, the decrease of pollinating insects or plastic pollution, impact our everyday lives. The series reflects on how contemporary socio-environmental crises affect emotional health and proposes small individual and collective strategies to live (well) in these complex times. The series, written by EIA team member Laura Montesi with the collaboration of Iván González (CIESAS South Pacific), was produced and broadcast in Oaxaca in 2024 by CORTV, Corporación Oaxaqueña de Radio y Televisión, a non-profit public media that promotes the socio-cultural richness of the state of Oaxaca. Click on the picture below to start listening to the audio capsules in Spanish.

SEMINAREpisode 9: A colonial metabolism: food, nutrition and extraction in Malawi - with Prof Megan VaughanSummary:This seminar proposes the idea of colonial metabolism to understand how rural Malawian communities adapted their food systems the mid 20th century and what the consequences of this might be in the contemporary context of food insecurity, and agro-industry practices. It draws attention to how practices of colonial extraction must be situated in wider socio-ecological dynamics that include slow violence and adaptation.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE‘Ukari Wa’utsika’ (Women’s Stories)By Susie Vickery, Jennie Gamlin and the Indigenous community of Tuapurie, MexicoSummary:The short animated film ‘Ukari Wa’utsika’ is a collaboration between textile artist Susie Vickery, EIA team member Jennie Gamlin and the Indigenous community of Tuapurie, Mexico. It tells the story of how Wixárika women’s lives changed forever as they came into contact with Spanish missionaries, travellers, anthropologists and the Mexican state and is illustrated with yarn paintings, animated embroidery figures, historical documents and photographs. The film is narrated in Wixárika language with soundtracks by Wixárika musicians.

SEMINAREpisode 3: Can the (Indigenous) subaltern speak (at the IPCC) - with Renzo TaddeiSummary:Traditional peoples and indigenous populations have been systematically portrayed as defenceless victims of climate change in debates about sustainability. In the United Nations’ 2030 agenda, with its 17 sustainable development goals, for example, they figure as populations whose cultural heritage and physical survival need to be protected by governments and multilateral agencies. Against this trend, it is noteworthy that one of the 2022 reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognises the value of indigenous knowledge and recommends that it be integrated into the co-production processes of environmental governance, including participatory modelling and climate services. But how is indigenous knowledge integrated into these policies created by Western scientists? Renzo Tadei shows us, through an analysis of the IPCC and the knowledge generated on climate change, that indigenous knowledge has been acclaimed in conservation discourses, but has not been used correctly.

SEMINAREpisode 10: Environmental entanglements and health: what era are we living in?Dr Andrea MastrangeloSummary:What does industrial agroforestry in the Santo Tomé region, in Brazil’s bond with Argentina, have to do with the spread of Covid-19, fires and social inequalities in the region? Combining a feminist anthropological perspective and concerned with showing how the emerging agribusiness-driven technique creates environments and offers other forms of social exclusion, Andrea Mastrangelo analyses the environmental catastrophes, such as the fires, that have ravaged this region of Argentina, showing how the modification of the local biome and the introduction of biotechnologies in favour of agribusiness has resulted in fires, but also in syndemics, droughts, river floods and a decline in the supply of food and water. The era of the Anthropocene reveals how industry based on exploitation appropriates biological processes in favour of capital accumulation, as if nature were doing unpaid work, just like women.

ARTICLEStructural Vulnerability and Toxicity Experiences in the Uruguayan Soybeanisation Process - Victoria EviaSummary:The expansion of transgenic soybean crops in Uruguay goes hand-in-hand with the experience of toxicity among agricultural workers and rural inhabitants, due to an increased use of pesticides. Noxious pesticide effects go beyond chemical and biological embodied intoxication: they also involve daily lives, social suffering, sentiments and affects, intersectional conflicts, lay illness concepts, informal self-care networks, and unequal access to health services. The experience of toxic suffering embodies inequalities in environmental health and is shaped by structural vulnerabilities and differential politics of exposure.

PODCASTEpisode 2: 'We are Fishermen, not Predators: the Fight for Social Justice and Environmental Justice Against Large Fishing Companies in Peru' with María Elena Foronda Farro and Lorenzo Macedonio Vázquez ContrerasSummary:How do the overexploitation of marine resources and the destruction of bio-eco-socio environments relate to today’s predatory capitalism and the coloniality of “development”? María Elena Farro and Macedonio Vásquez share their deep knowledge on these issues acquired through their lifelong experience of struggle against those forces in the so called “fetid paradise” of Chimbote, Peru, where ecocide has impacted human and non-human life alike.

ARTICLESituating Latin American Critical Epidemiology in the Anthropocene: The Case of COVID-19 Vaccines and Indigenous Collectives in Brazil and Mexico - Laura Montesi, Maria Paula Prates, Sahra Gibbon, Lina R. BerrioSummary:Indigenous people in Brazil and Mexico have suffered the lethal effects of COVID-19 in great numbers. Some Indigenous communities have been hesitant towards the vaccination campaigns as they perceived a contradiction between the State’s protection of lives through vaccines and its otherwise, ordinary violent practices such as land dispossession. In what ways can Latin American critical epidemiology help us to understand Indigenous people’s COVID-19 experiences, including vaccination hesitancy, and their views regarding wellbeing and socioenvironmental justice? This article invites the readership to draw from Latin American critical epidemiology to rethink the COVID-19 pandemic as “a paradigmatic disease of the Anthropocene”. This includes considering the colonial histories that make up Indigenous health and learning from Indigenous cosmologies to reframe concepts around health, disease, and human and more than human biosocialities.

SEMINAREpisode 7: MAT series launch seminar Summary:This seminar session covers the content of the Medicine Anthropology Theory special issue edited by the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene collective and with the participation of contributors.

ARTICLEToward a Broader View of Health in the Anthropocene: The COVID-19 Syndemic and the Clash of Cosmographies in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil - Raquel Dias-Scopel, Daniel Scopel, Esther Jean LangdonSummary:The chronicle of the COVID-19 pandemic, state (in)action, and Indigenous Peoples’ care strategies in Mato Grosso do Sul serves as a point of departure for criticizing the concept of the Anthropocene (seen as a universalizing narrative obfuscating alternative logics of existence) and invites a ‘more inclusive and decolonized notion of health’, in their own words. In a context marked by the syndemic interaction between violence, poor health conditions, discrimination, and now also COVID-19, Indigenous leaders showed political consciousness and leadership, mobilizing a variety of collective care strategies where human health and land protection went hand in hand. In the face of rampant environmental degradation and land usurpation due to an ever -expanding agricultural and industrial frontier, Indigenous Peoples show the perdurance of a different cosmography, which can also serve as a futuristic counternarrative to the Anthropocene.

ARTICLEThe Plantation as Hotspot: Capital, Science, Labour, and the Earthly Limits of Global Health - Alex NadingSummary:This article draws on ethnographic work with health activists on the sugarcane plantations of Nicaragua’s Pacific coast chronic kidney disease (CKD). Nadding argues that sugarcane monoculture in Nicaragua is a 'hotspot', a term that marks spaces in which the economic and social differences arising from settler colonialism are embodied as disease, as the high rates of CKD in these places. The plantations are “health hotspots” because the disease emerges as an embodied effect of the plantation and the toxicity it produces. At the same time, this article conjugs discussions around labor conditions, and the potentiality of the plantation in originating innovative genres of political action.

EXTERNAL RESOURCEThe Work of Art in the Age of Planetary DestructionEdited by Aarathi Prasad & David OsrinSummary:This book is a collection of ideas from creators across the world about their role in imagining the global future. What do they do that politicians and climate scientists can’t or won’t do? There is only one true version of the book. All other versions — printed or online — are mechanical reproductions of it. The printed copies have been perforated so that their pages can be pulled apart, to remind us that the things we take can’t always be put back and the things we lose can’t always be recovered. To start exploring the book, click on the image below.

SEMINAREpisode 4: The illegal mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (TI), in Brazil - with Dário Votório Kopenawa YanomamiSummary:In the Yanimami Indigenous lands, humans, animals, and the environment have suffered from the territorial devastation caused by mineral exploration since colonial times. In this Seminar Series, Dario Kopenawa, a Yanomami indigenous leader, denounces the vicious effects of illegal mining in indigenous territory that has caused illnesses as well the death of animals, plants, rivers, people and their cultures. Kopenawa highlights the effects of mercury contamination on the environment and criticizes former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s government for this sanitary and humanitarian crisis and its devastating consequences.

PODCASTEpisode 4: Factory farming and human-hog entanglements - with Dr Alex BlanchetteSummary:Alex Blanchette, author of “Porkopolis” speaks to us about how he began researching human-hog relationships from an interest in understanding class, race and labour relations in industrial scale pig farms. In the process he realised how conjoined the lives of pigs and human workers had become. As a site for labour the industrial pig generates 1,100 products from meat to printer paper and road surfaces made possible through the hyper industrialisation of life and death and constant quest for more uniform growth. These radical interventions into animals lives continually cause problems for pig lives and the humans they are entangled with. Blanchette’s Marxist lens discusses how pigs and people serve capital through 200 different job and asks whether a work-centred life is compatible with planetary health, where the energy needs of consumerism are transforming the planet and driving people to work. Yet to do this, capitalism also requires an ethic of care for the product itself, the pig.

PODCASTEpisode 1: Civilisational Crisis in the Anthropocene - with Dr Iván González MárquezSummary:What links sexual violence by soldiers against rural indigenous women and the war over natural resources? From this triggering and disquieting question, Iván González reflects on the links between violence, health and ecocide, and invites us to think about the ways in which human civilisations based on the centralisation of power have driven ecosystems and humanity itself to the limits of survival.

SHORT MOVIESEmbodied inequalities in health: about rabies in the Gaucho Pampaby Dr Ivana TeixeiraSummary:With a trend towards intensification among farmed cattle, rabies is the only zoonosis in Brazil’s pampa gaucho that really threatens small farmers, who are often unaware of the disease due to various factors. The scenes associated in this way are intended to show the environment in which bovine rabies develops in the pampas of Rio Grande do Sul and the type of social group affected. In the region where the ethnographic work was carried out, cases of rabies were particularly prevalent among small farmers, causing economic and emotional damage. It has been argued that the increase in rabies cases in Brazil and especially in the Pampa region is due to the deforestation of the humid regions of northern South America, caused to create pasture for the large herds of cattle that feed the global meat industry.

ARTICLEUnruly Waters, Unsanitary Bodies Abject Terrains, Rehabilitation, and Infrastructures of Dispossession on the U.S.–Mexico Border - Carlos MartinezSummary:This article examines how toxic industrial waste in the Tijuana River canal region in Mexico/US border interacts with practices of drug and canal rehabilitation. It shows how these social and ecological practices are entangled and perpetuate cycles of violence and domination for the displaced and marginal communities who live there.

SEMINAREpisode 5: The ‘conquest of Mexico’ and the ‘patchy Anthropocene - with Dr. Francisco Vergara-SilvaSummary:This episode explores the Conquest of Mexico from a multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on Multispecies Anthropology and Eco-evolution to understand the historical events of 500 years ago in today's American Continent, highlighting the introduction of non-native species by Europeans and their impact on indigenous ecosystems and societies. Based on work presented by Anna Tsing and colleagues, through the "Atlas Feral", it reflects on how interactions between humans and other species have shaped history and ecology. The concept of the "patchy anthropocene" is introduced to suggest that human impact is patchy and localised, with specific significant ecological consequences. Finally, the idea of "niche construction" is proposed to analyse the co-evolution and adaptation of species through time, providing a broader perspective on human influence on the environment, before and after the Conquest.

SHORT MOVIESMotorcyclist's Happiness Won't Fit Into His Suitby Gabriel HerreraSummary:A motorcyclist is extremely happy with his motorcycle. He will not lend it to anyone. Instead, he will “embellish” it every time more. On board of his motorcycle and with a haughty demeanor he rides noisily into the jungle.