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Pollution, Health, and Disaster
Summary
This review examined how pollution, health, and disaster research intersects across medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies, arguing for greater collaboration between these fields to better understand lived experiences in toxic environmental contexts.
The materiality of pollution is increasingly embodied in humans, animals, and the living environment. Ethnographic research, especially from within the fields broadly construed as medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, disaster anthropology, and science and technology studies are all positioned to make important contributions to understanding present lived experiences in disastrous environmental contexts. This article examines points of articulation within recent research in these areas, which have much in common but are not always in conversation with one another. Research and writing collaborations, as well as shared knowledge bases between ethnographic researchers who center different aspects of the spectrum of toxics- based environmental health, are needed to better account for and address the material and lived realities of increasing pollution levels in the time of a warming climate.
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