Surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in Argentina, a highly polluted river, a hazardous waste incinerator, and an unmonitored landfill, the shantytown Flammable suffers from rampant contamination of its soil, air, and water. In this book, Javier Auyero and Flammable resident Débora Alejandra Swistun draw upon archival research and two and a half years of fieldwork to explore the lived experiences of environmental suffering. Perhaps most interesting, the authors show that residents doubt or even deny the harmful impact of pollution on their lives. This denial of the obvious occurs through a "labor of confusion" generated by state officials who frequently raise the issue of relocation and just as frequently suspend it; by doctors who say the illnesses are no different from those elsewhere, but tell patients they must leave the neighborhood; and by lawyers who encourage residents to hold out for a settlement. Auyero and Swistun vividly depict this slow-motion disaster, dissecting the manifold ways in which it is experienced by Flammable residents.
Javier Auyero is Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas, and is the author of, among other books, Routine Politics and Collective Violence in Argentina. Débora Alejandra Swistun received her BA in Anthropology from the University of La Plata, Argentina.
Introduction ; 1. Villas del Riachuelo. Life amidst Hazards, Garbage, and Poison ; 2. The Compound and the Neighborhood ; 3. Toxic Wor(l)ds ; 4. The (Confused and Mistaken) Categories of the Dominated ; 5. Exposed Waiting ; 6. Collective Disbelief in Joint Action ; 7. The Social Production of Toxic Uncertainty ; 8. Ethnography and Environmental Suffering ; Acknowledgments ; Notes
The authors have accomplished an astounding analysis of the destruction-physical and psychological-of a people living in poverty, their world dominated by a multinational corporate giant whose toxic waste pollutes their everyday lives. This superb and moving political ethnography captures the meanings of contamination to the residents, who live in disaster-immobilized by the toxic uncertainty, powerless confusion, and mistake that ultimately normalize risk and danger.