Introduction
Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnographic portrayal that is prismatic in its attention, the book combines numerous elements––place, civic performance, history, political economy––to bear on the lead poisoning epidemic in Montevideo, Uruguay at the turn of the 21st…
It is both a vexing challenge and a special privilege to write and publish a book. To have first-rate scholars and scholar-activists carefully read, digest, and reflect upon it makes me humbled and deeply grateful. So my first comment is one of gratitude to my four colleagues who took the time and effort to engage so thoughtfully and generously with …
In Daniel Renfrew’s new book Life Without Lead, the statement “we all have a little lead” was deployed in millennial Uruguay to radically different effect. It was used by public health officials to quell parents’ anger and simmering political volatility in the face of widespread childhood lead contamination in many of Montevideo’s poorest neighborhoods. These officials diminished the children’s …
Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead is an exhaustively researched, imaginatively conceived, and empathetically written ethnographic study of lead poisoning and environmental justice activism in Montevideo, Uruguay. Renfrew argues that “lead poisoning took on the status of a publicly conscious, media-propelled event by linking up with larger stories affecting Uruguay and in this sense acted as a ‘prism’ and ‘social surrogate’ …
Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal
Duke University Press, 2018. 224 pages.
In Edges of Exposure, Noémi Tousignant provides a comprehensive and provocative history of the “slow starts” in the attempts to build a robust, public infrastructure for monitoring toxins and their very real human impact in postcolonial Senegal. She …
[This article originally appeared in Limn, Issue No. 7, “Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics”.]
For the past several decades, Flint, Michigan, has staggered under waves of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and abandonment that have left the city depopulated, its built environment in shambles, and its remaining residents reeling from high unemployment and crime rates, a decimated tax base, and dwindling municipal …