Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health

ABSTRACT

This article examines how two chemical substances are woven into the infrastructure of global health as well as into the social lives of health workers in urban Nicaragua. One chemical is temephos, an organophosphate used to control mosquitoes. The other is chlorine-based products, which are used to disinfect surfaces and water. While global health projects tend to treat these substances as stable objects, there are three ways in which they might be understood as leaky things, implicated in fluid social interactions. First, global health chemicals are tracked through rigid accounting, but because of numerical leakages, they become vehicles for fashioning new forms of concern. Second, chemicals leak structurally: They can be dissolved and reproduced at a molecular level, although that dissolution is never absolute, and that reproduction is not everywhere the same. Third, chemicals leak in a sensory fashion. Sensory interactions with chemicals produce an entanglement of knowledge about bodies and environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• community health workers
• dengue
• environmental health
• mosquitoes

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the editor of Medical Anthropology, and three anonymous reviewers, for their supportive feedback on this manuscript. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the workshop “Embodied Being, Environing World,” held at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris in 2014. I thank the participants in that workshop, particularly Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Kim Fortun, and Frédéric Keck, for their helpful comments. Finally, thanks to Ann Kelly, Jamie Lorimer, and the participants in the Life after the Anthropocene Forum at Oxford University, as well as to Sarah Besky. The research received IRB approval from the University of Wisconsin and Franklin and Marshall College. Any errors are my own.

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays, and Franklin and Marshall College. Support for writing and further research was provided by the European Commission via a Fernand Braudel Fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Chair in Global Health at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Notes

1. World Wide Web searches are, of course, also locally contingent: results vary depending on one’s IP address location. This particular search was conducted from a computer terminal in France in 2014. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays, and Franklin and Marshall College. Support for writing and further research was provided by the European Commission via a Fernand Braudel Fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Chair in Global Health at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Notes on contributors

Alex M. Nading

Alex Nading is lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include the book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (2014). His current research is on the shifting role of microbes in health and nutrition practices in Nicaragua and the United States, and the role of chemicals in the management of life.