Tasting toxicity: bodies, perplexity, and the fraught witnessing of environmental risk in Sri Lanka’s dry zone

Abstract

In Sri Lanka’s dry zone, a mysterious form of chronic kidney disease has inspired myriad interventions to improve rural health. Chief among these are strategies to promote more ‘healthy’ consumption practices among residents by reconfiguring the dry zone’s water supply and agricultural systems. This article examines how these ongoing schemes to improve kidney health reorder the visual, haptic, and olfactory cues that residents use to measure environmental toxicity. While my analysis finds that these attempts to retune embodied knowledge are transformative, I demonstrate how they also inadvertently re-inscribe pre-existing social differences, generate new uncertainties about environmental risk and inspire situated critiques of state interventions. I argue that residents’ encounters with improvement schemes are thus increasingly characterised by ‘sensuous perplexity,’ an optic that encapsulates how practices of embodied witnessing (re)produce ambivalence and uncertainty about what harms and what heals. By shedding light on residents’ complex patterns of resource use, while also revealing the limits of schemes which seek to enact health through governing consumption practices, the article posits that the concept of sensuous perplexity can extend current theorizing on the experience of living within toxic spaces.

Keywords:

• Dry zone Sri Lanka
• embodied knowledge
• environmental risk
• health geography
• mystery kidney disease
• perplexity

Acknowledgements

The thoughtful and incisive comments of three anonymous reviewers greatly improved the focus and clarity of the manuscript. Earlier versions of this manuscript were also greatly strengthened by careful and generous reads by Ingrid Behrsin, Brian King, Karen Paiva- Henrique, A. Marie Ranjbar and Jen Sedell. I also wish to thank Katherine Brickell for her guidance during the revision of the paper.

The empirical material on Sri Lanka was informed by numerous conversations with local government officials, and the people of Padaviya and Sri Pura who were all incredibly gracious with their time, insights, and stories. Thanks, as well to Brittany Waltemate for her help designing the maps in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork in Sri Lanka was funded by the Social Science Research Council, American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies, National Science Foundation (Award no. 1633991), and the Society of Woman Geographers.

Notes on contributors

Nari Senanayake

Nari Senanayake is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research bridges geographic work on health/disease, agrarian environments, and scholarship on the politics of knowledge, science and expertise. In particular, her current research project focuses on everyday encounters with a severe and mysterious form of chronic kidney disease (CKDu) in Sri Lanka’s dry zone.