Department seminar: María A. Guzmán-Gallegos

My presentation draws on recent fieldwork in Amazonian Kichwa communities living in sites of oil extraction in Northern Peru. It engages in a conversation with recent literature, which addresses the imperceptibility and fluidity of chemical relations and infrastructures, and proposes a shared condition of chemically altered human bodies.

While I acknowledge the validity of these propositions, I nevertheless ask what ‘toxic’ is in contexts where 1) bodies are perceived and experienced as inherently entangled with and transformable by the acts of others, and, 2) where bio-medical diseases are chronically unstable and seldom crystallize as diseases. Common explanations and experiences of sickness substantiate these points. To be sick entails being harmed by the ill-will of humans and non-humans, and to be affected by an indeterminate disease. A person´s condition can be explained as the result of the harming acts of a neighbor, a relative or an acquaintance who in collaboration with particular plants or animals destroy the affected person. It may also be the result of for example hepatitis, cirrhosis or liver cancer at once. The indeterminacy of diseases is constituted by current bio-medical practices that do not allow to define a stable diagnosis nor to delineate therapeutic treatment.

Exploring the conceptual openings these explanations and experiences may afford, I propose to examine the particular enactments of extractive capitalism, and suggest that it generates not just toxic fluidities but also toxic closures. Fluidities and closures create new ways of disentangling humans from non-humans that I argue generate new forms of slow violence. I illustrate this point by showing how affected bodies are constituted not as sick but rather as mere environmental indicators of degraded landscapes.

BIO:
María A. Guzmán-Gallegos is associate professor at VID - Specialized University, Oslo.  She has carried out extensive research on Kichwa communities in Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia, and has over the last three years also worked with Shuar communities. Guzmán-Gallegos’ work builds on a long-standing engagement with Amazonian indigenous communities as a researcher, and as a practitioner collaborating with local indigenous organizations through work for a transnational non-governmental organization. In her research, she combines these experiences with her theoretical interest in knowledge production, personhood, ontological politics, decolonial thinking, the study of socio-environmental issues and non-renewable resource extraction.

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the talk. All interested are welcome!