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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Toxic Tropics: Purity And Danger In Everywhere In Everyday Life, Liza Grandia
Toxic Tropics: Purity And Danger In Everywhere In Everyday Life, Liza Grandia
Journal of Ecological Anthropology
In contrast to popular images of the tropics as verdant Edens, forest dwellers face various pollutants with little-understood environmental health impacts. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research in northern Guatemala through the lens of Mary Douglas' work on purity, danger, and culture, this paper describes how the inventive re-use of modern waste exposes rural people to new and unknown toxic substances from “matter out of place.” While environmental justice literature has emphasized industrial, extractive, and military disasters, this note draws attention to the less dramatic yet lethal pollutants encountered in the everyday lives of the rural poor through “chemical trespass.”
Going To School In The Forest: Changing Evaluations Of Animal-Plant Interactions In The Kichwa Amazon, Jeffrey T. Shenton
Going To School In The Forest: Changing Evaluations Of Animal-Plant Interactions In The Kichwa Amazon, Jeffrey T. Shenton
Journal of Ecological Anthropology
For rural, indigenous communities the ways structural modernization, exposure to Western-scientific epistemologies, and formal schooling affect environmental reasoning remain unclear. For one Kichwa community in the Napo region of Ecuador, daily routines have re-oriented toward formal schooling but environmental learning opportunities remain intact. Here, while a Species Interaction Task elicited consensus across ages on inferred ecological interactions, younger people reasoned differently than older people: for them, animal interactions with flora were considered damaging, not neutral. Aspirational practices like schooling can thus reorient environmental reasoning, even in contexts in which young people share cultural understandings of local ecological relationships with adults.