[12.06.2023] Grappling with Exposure in Mexico City 6pm!

A presentation by Elizabeth Roberts (University of Michigan):

In Mexico City, residents of colonias populares are devoted to lead’s powers for engendering pleasurable congregation through meals eaten off of lead-glazed ceramic dishes.  Their devotion comes from a careful grappling with the relationship of this complicated chemical to their relations and surroundings.  Grappling, often carried out in defiance of experts and authorities whose sole focus is the damage lead does to individual bodies, lays bare the reductionism of contemporary scientific exposure models which has contributed to making a “permanently polluted world” (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018).  Additionally, the grappling of the residents in these working class neighborhoods assumes permeation, which demonstrates some of the limits of “entanglement” in recent anthropological theory where vulnerability tends to be overlooked.  Grappling, which prioritizes pleasurable connective dependencies, can lead to greater devotion to complicated chemicals, or their replacement with equally complicated chemicals, and has much to teach the rest of us about how we might live in a world so saturated with toxicants and so unequally shared.