国際シンポジウム Decomposing Anthropocene （2024年2月4日）の開催について

2024年2月4日（日）に東京大学駒場キャンパスにて国際シンポジウムを開催します。ハイブリッド形式で事前の登録が必要です。

第2回東京大学文化人類学セミナー／「感染症の人間学」国際シンポジウム

Decomposing Anthropocene: Exploring a Chemical Ethics Beyond Laboratory

＜概要＞

化学倫理は、しばしば、化学者が化学研究をする際の倫理的指針を検討する萌芽的な領域だと考えられている。しかし、人新世と物質代謝に関する近年のディベートが明らかにしてきたように、化学物質を生産・消費・排出しているのは化学者だけではない。また、化学物質の民族誌が明らかにしてきたように、人間や人間以外のものの生について考える際には、環境中の化学物質の配置に対する目配りは必要不可欠なものになってきている。そこで、このシンポジウムでは東アフリカと日本の事例に基づいて、化学物質を媒介する者である人間としての日常倫理について検討し、人新世について、より身体に近い場所や、よりミクロなレベルから検討しなおすことを目的とする。

※各発表の要旨は文末に掲載しております。

日時：2024年2月4日（日）14 ～18時

開催場所：東京大学駒場キャンパス18号館４階　コラボレーションルーム１

14:00-14:15 イントロダクション : 浜田明範（東京大学）

14:15-15:00 発表 1：ウェンゼル・ガイスラー／ルース・プリンス（オスロ大学）

“Tracing the metabolites of history: studying the toxic aftermath of the1950s Pare-Taveta malaria eradication experiment”

15:00-15:45 発表 2：福永真弓（東京大学）

"Terra-reforming for socio-ecological salvation: Ways of governing aquatic nutrients for healing a stranger sea"

15:45-16:15 休憩

16:15-17:00 発表 3：ルース・プリンス（オスロ大学）

“Toxic exposures and urban living: notes from Kisumu, Kenya”

17:00-17:20 コメント：ゲルゲイ・モハーチ（大阪大学）

17:20-18:00 ディスカッション

18:00- 懇親会

司会：北川真紀

言語：英語

★申し込みフォーム（2月2日（金）深夜まで）

https://forms.gle/yeA4wyJfYxpfRi2u7

※現地参加、オンライン参加ともに上記のフォームから必要事項をご記入ください。シンポジウム前日までに現地参加の方には会場へのアクセス方法等を、オンライン参加の方にはZoom URL等をお送りいたします。

お問い合わせ先

北川真紀（東京大学）

kitagawa.maki(at)anthro.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

メールを送信される際には(at)を@に変えてください。

主催

・東京大学文化人類学研究室

（https://dept.anthro.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/）

・科研費(学術変革領域研究B)「パンデミックが照らし出す都市化と移動」（代表：浜田明範、課題番号：23H03793）

共催

・AnthEM

(https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/AnthEm/index.html)

・Global Trout

(https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/global-trout/index.html)

Presentation Abstract

Paper 1:

Wenzel Geissler & R. J. Prince (and the Pare-collective) (University of Oslo)

“Tracing the metabolites of history: studying the toxic aftermath of the1950s Pare-Taveta malaria eradication experiment”

Between the 1950s and 60s, the Kenyan-Tanganyikan ‘Pare-Taveta Scheme’ temporarily eradicated malaria in one valley by regularly spraying 10,000’s of houses with potent organochloride insecticides (DDT, dieldrin). Implemented by medical entomologists of the East African Malaria Research Institute and chemists of the Colonial Pesticide Research Unit, the experiment became a model for global malaria eradication. In February 2023, we worked in Pare, alongside toxicologists from the Tanzanian Tropical Pesticide Research Institute that had grown from the colonial unit that had conducted the original spraying campaign, to study its material traces and afterlives.

Systematically sampling housing-materials to detect residuals of toxic chemicals deposited 70 years ago, our joint fieldwork led us on to find various other material and narrative, social and political-economic, institutional and affective remains of the colonial and post-colonial scientific past in the landscape. Our movements opened often surprising insights into past medical research and its lasting imprint and legacies, and political-economic and scientific continuities and ruptures that had shaped the present – and our own place in it.

It also brought into view today’s acute health problems and scientific uncertainties, and the working conditions of toxicologists in a country that is flooded with agricultural biocides in amounts that dwarf colonial experimentation, and, unlike the latter are deregulated and undocumented. Searching for the echoes of molecules deployed long ago to solve Africa’s health and nutritional problems that since have become synonymous with colonial modernism’s ‘slow violence’, we found ourselves in raging epistemic and political-economic struggles about the unmeasured lethality of new pesticides and hopes for improved lives invested in them. We therefore expanded our charting of toxic particles to recent pesticides along with legacy ones, acknowledging the chemical synchronicity of asynchronous histories, and putting a century’s accrued toxicity into perspective, with the moment when insecticides were introduced three generations ago as vanishing point.

Paper 2 :

Mayumi Fukunaga (University of Tokyo)

“Terra-reforming for socio-ecological salvation: Ways of governing aquatic

nutrients for healing a stranger sea”

In the Seto Inland Sea, nitrogen and phosphorus have been recognized for more than 50 years as one of the main causes of water pollution that had led to the "dying sea" by the middle 1960s. As such there has been a persistent need to reduce their concentrations in the Sea, and we successfully restored water quality. However, fishermen's relationships with these chemical components have changed dramatically as they have encountered increasingly fragile and uncertain "strange seas" that have emerged as climate change exacerbates accumulated anthropogenic damages. They have come to see the sea as being too “clean” for the return of abundant and diverse life. Targeting historically familiar species to keep them from leaving the Sea, we began to more actively manage chemical components that we perceived indirectly through living organisms, using calculations and simulations to understand their life histories, the currents that carry them, the sediment they accumulate, and the disturbance forces such as typhoons that affect them. With such systematic, science-based management, an important social experiment began in 2015 by managing nutrients in water bodies by adjusting the wastewater treatment process to increase nitrogen and phosphorus in the effluent.

These changes in attitudes and ways of responding to these chemical components through management are transforming the human senses that perceive them; their aesthetic criteria; the social and personal resources and skills that aid them to better understand the interconnections between inorganic and organic materials; and their aspiration to respond to these environments in holistic ways by activating and using these resources. Needless to say, the chemical components nitrogen and phosphorus have profoundly transformed the modern terrestrial landscape, not only biochemically but also and especially epistemologically and ontologically. The fertilizers that run off from the land, together with human and animal excrement and domestic sewage, have brought eutrophication to the waters. In addition the pesticides that run off from agricultural lands and the pollution caused by the effluents of heavy chemical industries and the heavy oil that is dumped at the same time by industrial complexes: All of these have caused the disappearance of a broad range of organisms, the explosive growth of certain plankton, the flourishing of anaerobic microorganisms, and the persistence of anoxic conditions in these water bodies, especially in human-access littoral zones.

What have these chemical components brought to the coastal zone and how are they ontologically remaking these littoral waters and us? To explore these questions, let us note that despite these problems, the persistence of small-scale, artisanal fishing continues to allow us to weave together diverse sensation experiences of dirty vs. clarity, stench vs. healthy smell, clear blue vs. creamy green, sticky vs. thickened, all of which contribute to a new aesthetic and thereby an evolving set of ethical standards. It is the fishermen's effort to resist becoming inanimate, to perceive the phenomenological manifestation of these chemical components through their bodies, and to hybridize science and technology with conventional knowledge techniques to activate material biophysical – that is, ecological – metabolism towards life.

Paper 3 :

Ruth Prince (University of Oslo)

“Toxic exposures and urban living: notes from Kisumu, Kenya”

Starting from ethnographic fieldwork on what many Kenyans describe as an “cancer epidemic”, this paper addresses questions about cancer’s locations, its temporalities, its beginnings and endings, its boundaries and entanglements with toxicants. I describe the landscapes of exposure that people in the city of Kisumu associate with an increasingly visible cancer epidemic, including concerns based on partial and tentative knowledge about the toxicity of foods. Starting from conversations about cancer, food and toxicity, I follow interlocutors concerns about livelihoods, economies and ecologies, and the food and agricultural systems in which exposures and uncertainties are embedded.