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CUAN cuan_1153 Dispatch: June 13, 2012 CE: N/A
Journal MSP No. No. of pages: 16 PE: Sarah
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ETHNOGRAPHY IN LATE INDUSTRIALISM
KIM FORTUN
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Think about the timing. The 1984 Bhopal disaster—marking the risks of
industrial order, and the already degraded state of industrial infrastructure. The
“American” plant in central India was underdesigned for safety, and had not been
maintained. The 40-ton tank that released its contents into the air of a sleeping
city on December 3, 1984, is where the many failures of many involved systems
came together, at a boil (Fortun 2001).
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Thousands were killed; hundreds of
thousands of others were exposed, their bodies becoming even more laced with
toxics than mine, yours, and all others in our late industrial age. Understanding
of the chemicals released in Bhopal remains inconclusive; they are among the over
100,000 chemicals registered with governments around the world for routine use;
the data hasn’t been collected, the science hasn’t been done, to understand how
these chemicals affect human and ecosystem health. Thousands of new chemicals
continue to be introduced each year (see Figure 1).
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The Bhopal plant site today is decrepit and eerie. The old control room is
open air and crumbling. The old piping configuration still stands, rusted; former
Union Carbide worker T. R. Chouhan can still narrate its workings, pointing out
the pathways and junctures leading to the reaction in Tank 610.
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On the perimeter
of the site, an old waste disposal site still oozes chemicals (Centre for Science and
the Environment [CSE] 2009). The smell is truly worse than shit. It is the smell of
late industrialism. Children play and cows graze within it (see Figure 2).
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 3, pp. 446–464. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.
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2012 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01153.x
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ETHNOGRAPHY IN LATE INDUSTRIALISM
FIGURE 1. Tank 610 at the old Union Carbide plant in Bhopal India. Forty tons of toxic methyl
isocyanate were released from this tank in the early morning hours of December 3, 1984.
Zoom out to picture Delhi. New, gated communities house a multinational
corporate elite. The future they work for, that they have anteriorized, is that
promised and motored by neoliberalism, bolstered by digital infrastructure and
wealth but still energized by coal and oil. There are many more cars on the
road. And increasing rates of asthma. People can’t breath. Another sign of late
industrialism (CSE 2011).
And people can’t think. According to a survey of “American Environmen-
tal Values” sponsored by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations,
Americans are paralyzed by issue complexity. The survey also reports that “liber-
tarian values are ascendent over communal values” (SRI Consulting 2006). Com-
plexity, but little collectivity. Not a great combination.
This is a world in which Clarence Thomas, former attorney for Monsanto,
becomes a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. A world in which Iraqi farmers are told
that they are required to plant “protected,” crop varieties, defined as new, distinct,
uniform and stable—as Monsanto seeds. Seed saving was made illegal; contracts to
purchase herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers were also required (Sourcewatch
n.d.). The complexity of these conditions, the entanglements—of business and
government, of law and politics, of war and farming, of natural and technical
systems—is stunning, and sobering.
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:3
FIGURE 2. Degraded components of the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. The
site is now abandoned, but remains contaminated with pesticides, chlorinated benzenes, and
heavy metals. Groundwater serving local communities is also contaminated.
This is late industrialism, where we’ve come since 1984.
Again, think about the timing: 1986, Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture,a
call to rethink thought—about anthropology and ethnography, authority and the
purpose and responsibilities of scholarship. It was historically attuned, and a call
to remain historically attuned, a call to always ask about the conditions in which
ethnography is produced, and must work within, a call to recognize how discursive
forms, including those of ethnography, stage, direct and limit, what is said and
not said, who is heard and benefits, who and what remains subaltern, outside
articulation. It embodied and animated what has become known as the “language
turn” in the humanities and the human sciences.
The original critique was directed at the conceptual, discursive, and social
forms of what could be called high industrialism. The concern was with discursive
exclusion and the promise of polyvocalism, with ways around the disjuncture
between dominant ways of understanding the world, and what ethnographers
encountered on the ground.
How, today, do we both stay with and update the call? How, today, at a
time when social order and sensibility are worked out on talk shows, a time in
whichweareOutfoxed (2004) by the news, and even the best of coverage insists on
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ETHNOGRAPHY IN LATE INDUSTRIALISM
“balance,” granting equal time to those few who refuse to believe scientific evidence
of climate change, working with constructs of fairness and appropriateness that
embody simple to the point of simplistic notions of democracy and truth (Boykoff
and Boykoff 2004).
It is also a world noisy with new media, streaming through products with
planned obsolescence (Slade 2006). Cell phones and iPods last a year or two. In
2009, when broadcasters switched to digital TV signal, millions of analog TVs
became garbage. Electronic waste piles up and circulates globally, leaching toxins
into humans and animals, soil, air and water.
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The pipes that carry water to and waste away from households, hospitals,
schools and businesses are now aging, even in metropoles like Washington, D.C.
The D.C. sewer was built in 1889. The average D.C. water pipe is 77 years
old (Halsey 2012). Across the United States, water and sewage systems haven’t
been updated; they leak and overflow.
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And they have no way to deal with what
now passes through them: water laced with runoff from roads and effluents from
manufacturing plants, but also with pharmaceutical residues, including synthetic
hormones (Zota 2010). Amphibians are the new canaries in the coal shaft, exhibiting
skewed sexual development, and extra limbs (Lanoo 2008; Slater 2012). Queer,
in a way that cannot be applauded.
And it is a world of even more experts. A world in which cadres of well
trained men and women carry out highly specific functions that maintain the
technical and economic conditions of our times. People specialize in very particular
domains of production, spending their days immersed in the information flows and
practices of biomedical care for asthma, of transportation engineering, of the
design of convenience stores or shopping malls. There is incredible particularity,
and incredible complexity. Incredible skill and pervasive deskilling.
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Much of the infrastructure, many of the paradigms that have held it up, are
exhausted. Things are falling apart, again.
What is the task of ethnography at such a moment?
QUESTIONS CONCERNING ETHNOGRAPHY
The word technology comes from Greek τεχνoλoγ
´
ια (technolog
´
ıa); from
τ
´
eχνη (t
´
echn
¯
e), meaning “art, skill, craft,” and -λoγ
´
ια (-log
´
ıa), meaning
“study of-.”
—Kim Fortun, 2012
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:3
How can we leverage the affordances of ethnography to understand and engage
a late industrial world? How, particularly, can we leverage understanding of how
ethnography works as articulated in Writing Culture, in synch with a 1980s flurry of
feminist and postcolonial criticism? What would make ethnography “appropriate”
to the historical conditions in which we find ourselves today? What designs on/of
ethnography should we cultivate?
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I write here—of leveraging, affordances, how things work, appropriateness
and design—from within Science and Technology Studies, where many of us love,
and love to study technology, understood expansively. Technology, from this
vantage point, is something crafted to enable and direct, routing desire, making
new things possible and possible to imagine. And it should, etymologically speaking,
have an in-built reflexivity, a study of that which is crafted, and of how craft happens
and should happen, that occurs alongside the making and use of the technology.
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Ethnography can be thought of as a technology in these terms, as a means
through which things are enabled. And ethnography, like other technologies can be
designed in different ways—to draw out what is, the state of things, or to show what
is at odds with extent theory, ethnography as cultural critique (Marcus and Fischer
1986). Ethnography, like other technologies can also be designed to challenge
Q1
and change existing order, provoking new orderings of subjectivity, society and
culture, having what Steve Tyler, in Writing Culture, called a “therapeutic effect”
(1986).
Thus far, it seems to me, we have made good use of ethnography for the first of
these, for understanding, and critique. And critique, to be sure, is transformative. I
don’t at all mean to suggest that ethnography has “just” been critique. I do, however
think there are new possibilities to pursue, directed at transformation, but without
the teleological overtones of activism as usual.
Ethnography, I want to suggest, can be designed to bring forth a future anterior
that is not calculable from what we now know, a future that surprises. Ethnography
thus becomes creative, producing something that didn’t exist before. Something
beyond codified expert formulas.
The future is anteriorized when the past is folded into the way reality presents
itself, setting up both the structures and the obligations of the future. The future
inhabits the present, yet it also has not yet come—rather like the way toxics inhabit
the bodies of those exposed, setting up the future but not yet manifest as disease,
nor even as an origin from which a specific and known disease will come. Toxics,
like the future anterior, call on us to think about determinism, but without the
straightforward directives of teleology.
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