


































From Lead through activism to activism through lead 

Reviewer: Dr. Juan M del Nido

Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis and Hope in Uruguay, by Daniel Renfrew, 
Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2018, 296 pp., $85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-
0520295469, $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0520295476

Keywords: 
lead, Uruguay, environmental anthropology, activism, Latin America



Life Without Lead examines how lead poisoning became the first environmental problem to 
reach mass awareness in Uruguay, a self-styled continental haven of stable, middle class, “it 
can’t happen here” industriousness. Factories in Montevideo began smelting lead during 
Uruguay’s 1950s import substitution industrialisation efforts. Emboldened by tacit or explicit 
support from democratic and dictatorial governments alike, lack of protocols and/or controls 
concerning refuse disposal, and little public awareness, these factories, smaller businesses 
and microentrepreneurs smelting in backyards discarded lead and lead-laced contaminants in 
rivers and unclaimed land in La Teja, the historical and cultural heart of Montevideo’s 
working class. Residents used these waters and newcomers settled precariously on this land; 
by the turn of the millennium the first clinically-confirmed cases of long-suspected lead 
poisoning began making headlines. 

Neighbourhood activists, sympathetic politicians and militant paediatricians fought to 
visibilize lead contamination as a pervasive, silent threat to all Uruguayan people, and to 
relocate families living, literally, on lead-laced dirt floors. Much of this work, Daniel 
Renfrew shows, involved challenging the terms of contention of Uruguayan medico-
bureaucratic discourse. When health protocols were finally set up, contamination tolerance 
thresholds were exceptionally lenient in international terms, downplaying the seriousness of 
lead poisoning as an epidemic and reducing the number of cases in need of an assistance 
already insufficient. These activists secured relocation for many families, the redefinition of 
medical intervention protocols and the phasing out of tetraethyl leaded gasoline, but they 
never managed to frame lead contamination as a Uruguayan epidemic. Medical discourse, 
national statistics and popular common sense still account for lead poisoning through a 
culturalist take of the uneducated poor.

The author positions this work as a study of the various dimensions of a lead-poisoning 
epidemic through an ethnography of grassroots social movements (9) and at the theoretical 
intersection between environmental justice, knowledge and power, and government and 
resistance (11-15). Lead poisoning and activists do indeed come into being jointly, for 
example in Renfrew’s excellent analysis of the medical, legal and economic arguments 
involving activists, business representatives and government officials concerning who is to 
blame for what kind of contamination, why, and how that blame and that contamination are to 
be historicised and circumscribed (127-143). Particularly original is the author’s attention to 
the knowledge battles his informants had to wage to unsettle settled science in Chapter six, 
We Are All Contaminated. State doctors wrote off exceptionally high concentrations of lead as 
circumstantial outliers; aggregated and disaggregated soil samples such that averages were 
constantly “normalized”; and explained the case for this selective pragmatism through the 
logics of a realpolitik clinical approach to the Uruguayan biopolitical, since otherwise the 
entire country would be off the charts (189-198). Renfrew makes a very nuanced case against 
explaining these encounters through corruption, ignorance or indolence, focusing instead on 
how the contaminated bodies of the poor became the site of environmental and clinical 
knowledges in dispute. 

Aside from that chapter, Life Without Lead seems to work the other way around: it reads more 
as an in-depth study of a grassroot social movement through an ethnography of various 
dimensions of a lead-poisoning epidemic. At times this difference is irrelevant: Renfrew’s 
very point is that were it not for these activists’ efforts, lead poisoning would have never been 
problematized in the first place. Yet in several instances lead is a wholly adverbial presence, a 
means towards a main narrative spearheaded throughout the book by the grassroots 
movement. For instance, the third chapter, La Teja Shall Sing, minutely details the experience 



of a murga, a musical festivity-cum-parade proper to the River Plate basin, and the history of 
an activist publication, as sites of ritualized, idealized resistance and authenticity (83-114). 
Lead is there, but by the time it enters the narrative as a concern of the publication, in murga 
lyrics and in schoolchildren’s homework (104-108), it can only do so as the (fascinating!) 
modifier of a subplot that has already become about the semiotics of a somewhat heroic 
associative life. Often, the interesting technical, STS-y arguments the book makes are 
crowded out by the very richly detailed context, history, affects, semiotics, performativity and 
poetics of activism. Contributions like “counterexpertise,” defined as alternative scientific 
discourses within western medical epistemology deployed for strategic reasons (33-34), and 
spectral science, “science that has become unmoored (...) and translated selectively to fit 
locally disputed contexts” (189), crucial to problematising lead by the author’s own account, 
go unmentioned for the 150 pages separating these quotations. When they reappear to explain 
the grassroots fight to redefine both lead poisoning and its appropriate care, their exact 
meanings are hard to tell apart, and both fuse with what the author calls “graphic evidence” 
(202): the deployment of grotesque, dramatic imagery, clinical and cultural, to visibilize lead 
as a medical problem.  

As an ethnography of activism, Life Without Lead joins the work of ethnographers, also often 
activists themselves, studying economic-environmental grassroots movements and political 
ecology of Latin America through the continent’s alleged, or attempted, turn away from 
neoliberalism. To an anthropology increasingly seeing its duty in ethico-narrative terms, and 
finding those terms in a certain kind and intensity of portraiture, these works add the task of 
examining “popular” struggles. In this convergence romanticization is near inescapable. 
Renfrew knows this; his excellent analysis of Uruguay’s recent political and economic history 
(57-71) and a nuanced take on simplistic discourses blaming “neoliberalism” for lead 
poisoning (25-34) convincingly embed this activism in industrial and employment conditions, 
Montevideo’s geography and complex political networks – activism as a social condition. 
Still, a general conflation between “being from La Teja” and “resistance,” an insistence on 
“traditions of solidarity and collectivity” (68, also 70, 72, 74) and passages as “La Teja (…) 
would prove through its collective response (…) that there was still fight resonating deep 
from within the spirit of its proud residents” (74) confirm a tone of working class culture 
panegyric that a passing declaration of fissures within this collective (71) does not dispel. 
Part of the difficulty of shedding this romanticization is of course that through it this ethico-
narrative duty produces the conditions where it itself finds, produces and signals its 
legitimacy. Following several pages of quite impressionistic accounts of the destitution and 
contamination of the poor where he “looked into the eyes of a baby girl (…) and (he) felt 
complicit with her poisoning” (147-166, quote in 166), Renfrew asks “how do we render the 
look and feel of ‘shattered people’ living in polluted and ‘ruptured places’?”, and “how do we 
avoid the voyeuristic ‘dismay of images’ in a media-saturated world that often (…) 
aestheticize(s) or pathologize(s) suffering?” (ibid, my emphasis). Readers unconcerned with 
this particular ethico-narrative duty might find the book flirts with a somewhat baroque, and 
ultimately barren, solipsism. Certainly, the latter neither defines nor challenges its 
contributions in terms of rigour, nuance and originality, but does confirm in tone and 
positionality Life Without Lead’s concern with activism and its struggles rather than with 
lead.

Although some sections are heavy on theoretical reviews and references, this book remains 
an engaging, accessible and interesting read and one of the very few book-length studies of 
Uruguay. Beyond anthropology it will be well suited for regional studies, environmental, 



human, cultural and economic geography, and of course, popular politics and activism 
reading lists.  

Juan M. del Nido is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for 
Ethics, Economy and Social Change, University of Cambridge, UK. His research 
focuses on political and economic reasoning; the logics, rhetoric, and affect of 
materialities and infrastructure; and new technologies. His manuscript examining the 
conflict around Uber’s arrival in Buenos Aires is forthcoming with Stanford University 
Press. 

© 2021 Juan M. Del Nido


