Anthropological attention to sensory engagements with chemicals promise to expand and enrich medical anthropology\u2019s notion of place. At a time when global health and the Anthropocene are (for lots of good reasons) in vogue, the essays in this collection ask us to dwell in specificity. Toxicity resists standardization and toxic politics resist co-opting by universalizing technocratic solutions. For better or for worse, in late industrialism, it is chemicals that shape \u201csenses of place\u201d (Feld and Basso 1996). In places, chemicals are triggers, potentials, and even queer kinds of companions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maxime Polleri\u2019s story of a new prosthesis<\/a>\u00a0(the Geiger counters worn by people near Fukushima, Japan) gives us a beautiful reminder of the double-binds that shape our engagements with toxics, as well as how persons and selves are made through those engagements. As I see it, the argument here is that notions of citizenship and science must pass through processes of sensory knowledge-making. Polleri shows what it means to\u00a0feel\u00a0<\/em>connected to a place, and, through devices like Geiger counters, to infuse a feeling of belonging to place with a kind of expertise. In Japan, feeling like a citizen also means orienting oneself to toxins or poisons. Like the abstract counts given by the ubiquitous Geiger apparatus, the \u201cempowerment\u201d in citizen science is deceptive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One would not normally think about Geiger counters as akin to inhalers, but that\u2019s just what these essays ask us to do.\u00a0Ali Kenner\u2019s contribution pushes us<\/a>\u00a0to move discourse on respiratory distress away from talk of triggers\u2014of causes and effects or numerical levels of exposure\u2014and towards ordinary encounters with anti-asthmatic tools and the chemicals they contain. Indeed, for asthmatics, the feeling of being medically protected is impossible to completely disentangle from the feeling of being compromised by smoke or smog. As Polleri and Kenner show in different ways, the term \u201cexposure\u201d seems less and less helpful for comprehending the chemosphere (Shapiro 2015) either as a political entity or as an affective space. Both acts of taking on relationships and acts of taking breath open up persons and make them vulnerable. We are dealing here not with isolated instances of harm or help, but with unfolding, meaning-laden relationships. There is no air without such relationships, only chemicals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Kenner reminds us, air sits in places. The nebulizer, the bedroom, the schoolhouse are imbued with meaning and feeling. Even the inhaler has its own comforting tactility. I can\u2019t help but make the link here to the sense of comfort and ease that cigarette smokers get \u2013 not from inhaling tobacco fumes, but by turning a fresh pack over in their pockets or rolling out a fresh fag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By pulling us into places, these papers also pull us into times. The asthmatic\u2019s attunements to caring chemicals, developed over the life course, are temporally akin to the Curtis Bay residents\u2019 senses of the toxic potential of the incinerator.\u00a0As Chloe Ahmann notes,\u00a0<\/strong>Curtis Bay residents imagine a future<\/a>\u00a0that looks dangerously like the toxic past. I was reminded here of Michelle Murphy\u2019s (2013) observation that chemical infrastructures are often felt, rather than seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Curtis Bay is a place, as Ahmann tells us, it\u2019s seen, smelt, and breathed as much as it is measured and documented. The story of this once and future \u201ctoxic neighborhood\u201d shows how a kind of synaesthesia distinguishes places of attunement from mere sites of exposure. Can toxic potentials\u2014at once smelled, seen, breathed, and heard\u2014ever be adequately represented? I see the story of Curtis Bay as one about the poesis of risk. Here\u2019s where the papers really start to be in conversation with one another: if breathing is a sense-making act, it\u2019s of a different order than enumeration by Geiger counter, or of rendering risk in a \u201cpollution picture.\u201d Breathing should not ideally be sensed at all. If one is conscious of the breath, that\u2019s a problem, right? But then one realizes how important conscious breath is, in playing music or doing yoga or smoking or taking a welcome hit of Albuterol. A heightened consciousness can be either problematic or empowering, disquieting or pleasurable. One wonders whether, for the Curtis Bay activists, rendering toxic concerns into visual art isn\u2019t all these at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n