Abstract
How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a “story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught” (p.4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as “cognitive liberation.” But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the “silent habituation to contamination” that is often associated with slum communities? Why the “perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion” (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores “the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault” (p. 8). “Uncertainty and ignorance,” they claim “have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers” (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail.
The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays.
This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as “symbolic violence,” “schemata of perception,” “how domination works,” and the curious “site effects” (where “what is lived and seen on the ground” is really “elsewhere”) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them.
In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had.
The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the swamplands as migrant workers arrived seeking jobs. This created a new underclass in the shantytown area, alongside the older, working-class part of town. Though class is not used as an explanatory variable, class conflict would seem to illuminate one of the striking findings of the book: the residents in the older area deny their own contamination, and blame the contamination of those in the shantytown upon their own behavior, rather than Shell and the other industrial plants.
Shell has a paternal relationship with the settlement, admitting a minor obligation to it by funding a health clinic, a nutritional program, T-shirts for athletes and toys for schoolchildren on Children’s Day. But the company denies any role in the contamination, saying that media reports of it are “all lies” (p. 66). It acknowledges that the area is unsuitable for human habitation because of the high lead levels; people should not be living there, an official says. But Shell says it has nothing to do with the pollution problems, especially the all-pervasive lead contamination of the residents. We expect this denial of responsibility from corporations. We even are not even surprised when a Shell official blames the health practices and parenting practices of the shantytown inhabitants for their contamination, playing the class card.
What is surprising is that many of the residents agree. In 2001 government studies were commissioned of the air quality in the area and a Japanese NGO did an epidemiological study that disclosed that half of the children had excessive levels of lead. The multiple sources of contamination—air, land and water—were present in both the older and the newer parts of town. Yet Auyero and Swistun, in their interviews of 40 families four years after that study, found that many denied that their health problems were related to contamination. Old town residents praised Shell for all it had done in the community. Many of those from the old town attributed the health problems of shanty dwellers as due to poor parenting and poor health practices, just as Shell claimed. Permissive mothers, they said, allow their children to swim in dirty waters and to play barefoot, and they do not wash their hands. They discounted evidence of illness in their own children. The denial of health problems, even visible symptoms, and the reluctance to implicate Shell, are striking. Shell no longer even employed many of the residents because of automation. The authors suggest habituation (Shell had been their neighbor for 70 years), misinformation from doctors paid by Shell, and the incremental nature of the poisoning. True, but the denial is still hard to comprehend. It is depressing to find that the shantytown residents are complicit in the poisoning. They pay the dump trucks hauling toxic trash to the dump to divert it to their swampy plots as fill.
The only sustained collective protest, lasting seven months, was against a utility company tearing up neighborhoods by putting in concrete columns for high voltage wires. This was visible violence to their lives, unlike the silent contamination. Little was won by the community in that protest, despite the videos of gruesome conditions shown on local TV. Later the authors’ research became public news in Argentina. Swistun, having just received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from an Argentinean university, accepted a position in the federal agency in charge of environmental policy. At the time the book was written, she was working on a project to improve living conditions in the neighborhood and to eventually relocate the residents. We can only wish her well, and hope for an ethnography of that experience.