Map test 1

SEMINAR Episode 1: Plastic Matter: On Materiality, Plasticity and Toxicity - With Heather Davis Summary: 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.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE The Ethnobotanical Assembly Summary: The Ethnobotanical Assembly (TEA) is a quarterly online magazine for research, writing, and thinking about people-plant relationships. TEA aims to bring together the growing community of people thinking and working at the interface of people and plants.

ARTICLE Sustaining (Dis)Embodied Inequalities in the(ir) Eurocene: Ancient Microbes, Racial Anthropometry, and Life Choices - Coll de Lima Hutchison, Andrea Núñez Casal Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 8: Indigenous Women, Coloniality and Climate Changes - with Elizângela Baré Summary: In this podcast, we talk to Elizângela Baré about her journey as an indigenous leader in the Amazon region and how this intertwines with her academic career. She advocates that indigenous knowledge should not only be part of, but also recognized as important in the university education. We also talk about climate change and gender relations, with Eliz’s critical reflections serving as the guiding thread.

SHORT MOVIES Villa Díaz Ordaz, agriculture under climate vulnerability by Dr Gabriela Martínez Aguilar Summary: 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.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE The coloniality of gender and sexuality - Digital exhibition By Jennie Gamlin Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 5: Medical anthropology and social medicine (ad)dressing the colonial wounds - with Cesar Abadia Summary: 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.

SEMINAR Episode 8: Cosmocentrism, the ethics of indigenous civilizations, and the right to resist global extractivist-capitalism - with Prof Stefano Varese and Dr. Carolina Comandulli Summary: 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.

ARTICLE Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene - Introduction 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 RESOURCE Traditional Indigenous Midwifery By CIESAS Pacífico Sur Summary: 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.

ARTICLE Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene - Jennie Gamlin Summary: 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 MOVIES More sustainable ways of life: local knowledge and small-scale livestock farming by Dr Ivana Teixeira Summary: 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.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE UCL Anthropocene Summary: UCL Anthropocene works as a virtual school by assembling projects, people, courses, and events from across the social sciences, arts, humanities, life, environmental, and health sciences to articulate and address the problems that the Anthropocene poses for our collective future.

SEMINAR Episode 6: Feeding the end of the world: agribusiness, pandemics, and Anthropocene in Brazil - with Dr Jean Segata Summary: 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?

7. Temperature map

6. World rivers map

5 Ecoregions map

4. Terrestrial biomes map

3. Livestock map

1. Peters Projection map

2. Cattle map

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.

Map credits

ARTICLE Toxic Legacies and Health Inequalities of the Anthropocene: Perspectives from the Margins - Melania Calestani Summary: 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 RESOURCE The Huaves in the Technocene: Disputes over Nature, the Body, and Language in Contemporary Mexico Edited by Francesco Zanotelli and Laura Montesi Summary: After at least a thousand years of transformations in the Oaxacan isthmus, the Huave people are entering the 21st century facing deeper and more vertiginous changes than ever before. Their terrestrial and sea environment, their fishing, their food, their bodies, their festivals and their cosmovision, give a real-time account of a tidal wave driven by both internal and external factors. This tidal wave encompasses the most dissimilar elements, such as the new fishing gear that challenges the cayuco and the atarraya, the advance of the evangelical churches, the local economy around beer consumption, the struggle of midwives against medicalised childbirth, a language that renews itself to continue existing, and the promises of development and destruction of megaprojects such as wind farms or the Interoceanic Corridor. The epoch in which these changes are situated is the Technocene, a stage of life on Earth in which technologies reproduce unequal exchanges, and whose unjust social relations, established since the Conquest, are now hidden under techniques and instruments. What happens to ways of life, identities and subjectivities at a time when the relentless extractivist economy influences most of the Huave existential processes, from the moment of birth to the way they die, increasingly from complications of diabetes? These 13 essays, conscientiously written by researchers who have devoted a good part of their lives to understanding the ikoots/ikojts/konajts, wrapped and macerated in rigorous bibliographic research, offer us a glimpse into this new moment – a defining one – in the lives of these lagoon peoples. The questions they address, in the end, challenge all of us.

SHORT MOVIES Embodied inequalities in health: about rabies in the Gaucho Pampa by Dr Ivana Teixeira Summary: 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.

SEMINAR Episode 2: Grappling with lead in Mexico City - with Elizabeth Roberts Summary: 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 MOVIES Is it possible to build an Opy (prayer house) in the Anthropocene epoch? by Maria Paula Prates Summary: This short movie captures some techniques for building a prayer house (opy) in Pará Roké, a Guarani-Mbyá village in southern Brazil. Due to environmental devastation, finding the good-beautiful (porã) material resources to construct this house has become increasingly difficult.

SHORT MOVIES Women and the countryside: the tejate in Villa Díaz Ordaz by Dr Gabriela Martínez Aguilar Summary: 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.

ARTICLE Just Graphite": Corporate Representations of Particular Matter in Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro - Delia Rizpah Hollowell Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 3: San Mateo del Mar: How to remain ikoots in the face of development megaprojects with Prof. Flavia Cuturi and Ikoots activist Betty Gutiérrez Summary: 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 RESOURCE Hunting tracks. Sustainability and Anthropocene By Laura Montesi & Iván González Summary: 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.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE Plants that produce people Cristiana Bastos, Mari Lo Bosco and Marta Macedo Summary: The domestication of plants and animals by the most varied human societies has been well explored by anthropology, but societies produced by plants or animals are invisibilised by humanist or anthropocenic logic. In this short film, Cristiana Bastos shows us how sugar cane turned humans into slaves, through a multi-species dynamic in colonisation processes after the abolition of slavery.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE Climaterra Anonymous collective Summary: The webpage in Spanish visibilises new ways of inhabiting ourselves and the Earth. We are in a moment of planetary transition: one world is ending and new possibilities are emerging. The website aims to disseminate new social, personal and ecological manifestations of planetary regeneration and to warn against the old forms that intend to continue with the control, domination, accumulation and destruction of the planet. It includes three major interrelated topics: a) keys to understanding the destruction of the planet: the climate and ecological crises; b) keys to understanding the concentration of wealth and power; and c) keys to understanding the human crisis in health and well-being: depression, loneliness, addictions.

SEMINAR Episode 9: A colonial metabolism: food, nutrition and extraction in Malawi - with Prof Megan Vaughan Summary: 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 Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies Edited by Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin Summary: Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies brings together artists, curators, philosophers, and critics to engage the provocative Anthropocene thesis. With contributions from artists, curators and theorists, we argue that the anthropocene is primarily an aesthetic event, and as such the arts are particularly well suited to making claims on our geologic and environmental present.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE ‘Ukari Wa’utsika’ (Women’s Stories) By Susie Vickery, Jennie Gamlin and the Indigenous community of Tuapurie, Mexico Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 6: Environmental Reproductive Justice - with Katie Dow and Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago Summary: Katie and Julieta discuss the emergence of Environmental Reproductive Justice (ERJ) along the intersect of discussions around climate crisis and reproductive justice, explaining why these two fields are inseparable and are an essential partnership in these anthropocenic times. After explaining how they came to ERJ from different positions, the speakers explore and explain why it is important that we challenge the individualistic approaches within climate science and how the notion of individual agency as a the focus of solutions is inadequate for addressing our current environmental problems.

SEMINAR Episode 3: Can the (Indigenous) subaltern speak (at the IPCC) - with Renzo Taddei Summary: 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.

SEMINAR Episode 10: Environmental entanglements and health: what era are we living in?Dr Andrea Mastrangelo Summary: 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.

ARTICLE Structural Vulnerability and Toxicity Experiences in the Uruguayan Soybeanisation Process - Victoria Evia Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 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 Contreras Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 7: Multi-species relations and racism, sugarcane plantations, social participation and health - with Cristiana Bastos Summary: In this episode, Cristiana Bastos talks about her research carried out in different countries such as Brazil, India, Angola and others. By unveiling processes of social inequality in these countries, she shows how the social thinking present in collective health in Brazil, for example, goes through a whole elaboration on the role of tropical medicine in the history of the constitution of the nation, in which the logic of tropical germ medicine was linked to colonial systems, such as the supremacy of one group of the population over the other, in the conquest of the interior, in the subjection of indigenous forces or in the expansion of a white urban logic. These links to the subjugation of certain otherness were investigated by Bastos in his project ‘Color of Labour’, highlighting how sugar cane plantations perpetuated slavery in the post-abolition period, through the migration of Madeiran workers to work in these places, carrying with them a servitude that differed from slavery, but also related to color, but which placed the immigrant under a signed work contract, perpetuating this imperialist logic.

PODCAST Episode 9: Squid Lives: (Un)Making Ocean Ecologies in Peru - with Maximilian Viatori Summary: How are human and non-human lives brought together, made possible, and simultaneously imperilled in the blue Anthropocene? Peru’s jumbo squid fishery provides key insights into this question. Industrial reorganisations of Pacific Ocean ecologies have entwined the lives of often impoverished and radicalised| artisanal fishers with jumbo squid populations in ways that currently enable their (re)production while simultaneously devaluing them for the creation of cheap seafood. However, the tenuous conditions that have made the fishery possible are threatened by pressure from industrial producers to remove legal protections on the fishery, multinational fleets targeting squid outside Peru’s jurisdiction, and the squids’ rapid adaptations to shifting ocean conditions that can cause dramatic fluctuations in their populations. The story of jumbo squid fishing reveals the importance of studying multispecies displacements for understanding how the extraction of certain species for the purpose of capital accumulation re-orders entire ecological assemblages. Such reconfigurations imperil the precarious multispecies networks that make more-than-human life possible in the Anthropocene.

ARTICLE Situating 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. Berrio Summary: 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.

SEMINAR Episode 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.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE Animal Scales Seminar Series Hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Critical Global Change, Goldsmiths Summary: From Aristotle’s scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves ‘scale-makers’ and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.

ARTICLE Toward 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 Langdon Summary: 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.

ARTICLE The Plantation as Hotspot: Capital, Science, Labour, and the Earthly Limits of Global Health - Alex Nading Summary: 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 RESOURCE COVID-19 Humanities Network Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Summary: The Covid-19 Humanities MCTI Network produces qualitative research that analyses the impacts of Covid-19. Its aim is to subsidise actions that consider the scientific, technological, social, political, historical and cultural implications of the pandemic in a multiple and situated way. It has been carried out in the south, southeast and north of Brazil and has been divided into two phases: the first dealing with the pandemic and its impact on people getting sick; and the second dealing with the impacts of control actions such as immunisation, isolation, treatments and the environment.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE The Work of Art in the Age of Planetary Destruction Edited by Aarathi Prasad & David Osrin Summary: 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.

SEMINAR Episode 4: The illegal mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (TI), in Brazil - with Dário Votório Kopenawa Yanomami Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 4: Factory farming and human-hog entanglements - with Dr Alex Blanchette Summary: 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.

PODCAST Episode 1: Civilisational Crisis in the Anthropocene - with Dr Iván González Márquez Summary: 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 MOVIES New and ancentral habit-abilities: The Guarani-Mbyá village of Pará Roké (Brazil) by Maria Paula Prates Summary: This short film addresses the experiences of the coloniality of the Anthropocene. Pará Roké is a dreamed teko’a (Mbyá existencial spaces). Yva literally dreamed it. She was told through a dream that her family’s new teko’a would be near the sea, in far south Brazil. Pará Roké was for years a place for agribusiness research and currently the ruins of FEPAGRO’s buildings share the space with traditional Mbyá houses and swiddens.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability Hosted by UCL Anthropology Summary: The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) is a research centre that draws together the wide range of work of international excellence on questions related to the notion of social, cultural and environmental sustainability. Anthropology at UCL, with its four-field approach (social, biological, medical, material), has a unique contribution to make towards research in sustainability, and towards integrating multidisciplinary studies on ways of living that do not damage the ecological systems of which we are part, and on which we depend for survival. Our research focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability: on local and global understandings of the concept and on lived practices around the world.

ARTICLE Unruly Waters, Unsanitary Bodies Abject Terrains, Rehabilitation, and Infrastructures of Dispossession on the U.S.–Mexico Border - Carlos Martinez Summary: 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.

SEMINAR Episode 5: The ‘conquest of Mexico’ and the ‘patchy Anthropocene - with Dr. Francisco Vergara-Silva Summary: 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 MOVIES Motorcyclist's Happiness Won't Fit Into His Suit by Gabriel Herrera Summary: 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.

EXTERNAL RESOURCE Human Health & Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet Network The network Human Health & Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet, aims to think critically, broadly and inclusively about cities in order to address health problems. Considering the complex relationship between human health, biodiversity and urban pollution, the group has produced in-depth case studies of seven cities – Berlin, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Nakuru, Perth, São Paulo, and Visakhapatnam – to explain the potentials and pitfalls of new biodiversity strategies for human health. The studies are concentrated in four thematic fields in the sphere of multispecies urbanism, considering the environment as an active social agent in human co-production: (1) Global/Planetary Urban Health, (2) The Effects of Biophilic Cities on Health, (3) Cities and Infectious Diseases and (4) Urban Pollution and Multispecies Health.