The ethnographical study of the social effects of toxic-associated diseases from industrial activity can illuminate the ways in which environmental inequalities are intimately embodied, giving an idea of the social implications of those (in) visible markers of disadvantage. What are the social effec...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Universidad de Chile, Departamento de Geografía
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Investigaciones Geográficas |
| Online Access: | https://investigacionesgeograficas.uchile.cl/index.php/IG/article/view/51995 |
| Summary: | The ethnographical study of the social effects of toxic-associated diseases from industrial activity can illuminate the ways in which environmental inequalities are intimately embodied, giving an idea of the social implications of those (in) visible markers of disadvantage. What are the social effects of carrying a pollution landscape in the body? I will return to Lock’s concept of local biology, which synthesizes the way biology differs by culture, diet, and the environment, and the stigmatized biology concept of Horton and Baker that incorporates a subject’s position in the social structure. When we look at a body we can discover marks and intuit what caused them, what landscape that body inhabits and what is its place (social belonging) in the city. In this respect, Meneses’ definition of the dimension of the visible in a visual regime also matters: the visible is the dimension that surrounds the domain of power and control, seeing or being seen, showing oneself or not, the visibility or invisibility. The particular combination of the concepts of landscape, embodiment and stigmatized biology mediated by the concept of visual regime, proposed here, could help to understand some of the symbolic ways of reproducing social exclusion in the city and facilitate the analysis of the bodily dimension in the studies of pollution flows in the urban political ecology field. |
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| ISSN: | 0718-9575 0719-5370 |