Naked in the Face of Contamination: Thinking Models and Metaphors of Toxicity Together


 

Fiske, Amelia. (2020). Naked in the face of contamination: Thinking models and metaphors of 
toxicity together. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(1), page 1-30. 

http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 

© Amelia Fiske, 2020 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution 
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Naked in the Face of Contamination: Thinking Models 

and Metaphors of Toxicity Together    
 

Amelia Fiske 

Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine, Technical University Munich 

a.fiske@tum.de 

 

 

Abstract 
While chemicals are often described and acted upon in technoscientific forums as 

isolated, discrete entities, vernacular experience points to possibilities of 

experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures that have 

otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. Drawing from ethnographic 

fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this article invokes accounts of daily life in 

order to argue that vernacular experience is necessary for understanding what it 

means to live in a place of environmental hazard, and for building a more inclusive 

politics of knowledge production in models and assessments of toxicity. 

Descriptions such as “naked in the face of contamination,” “swimming in oil,” 

“smoke thick like marmalade,” or exclamations of pain re-lived “tsaac!” refuse 

hegemonic assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. To take these 

descriptions of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations 

often far exceed the expected forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments 

of standard oil operations. The chemically saturated present demands a 

reconfiguration of toxicity – as a socio-material process, epistemic concept, and 

embodied experience – in order to work towards political and environmental, as 

well as epistemological, justice. 

 

Introduction 
In his Quito office, Camilo was showing me slides from a presentation he 

delivered at Brown University a few years before to explain how people in 



 

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Amazon come in contact with the toxic substances involved in oil production.1 A 

trained biologist, he lived in the Amazon in the 1990s and has since worked on 

environmental issues associated with oil production, including in relation to the 

Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit. As we spoke, he stopped, hovering over a slide in which 

he had juxtaposed two images. 

 

 
 
Figure 1. Camilo’s PowerPoint slide depicting the contrast between universal models of exposure 

and everyday exposures for individuals living in oil producing areas of the Amazon. 

 
The first image reads “EPA’s polluted guy.” It is a graphic intended to summarize 

for a lay audience the different means by which an average individual could be 

exposed to toxicants in a generically contaminated site, the kind you might find in 

a pamphlet about environmental contamination. The second, a photograph of a 

young child sitting on a dirt road with oil residue in an unidentified location in the 

Amazon, he has titled “Ecuador’s polluted kid.” These two images, he says, are 

essential for understanding the nature of toxic exposure in Ecuador, and 

underscore the relationship between ongoing problems with oil contamination in 

the Amazon and the history of US companies who have operated there: 

 
This for me is important. Because this is how the EPA sees people who 
are exposed to contamination. And this is how it is here. He has no 
shoes and no shirt…If you’re in the United States on a contaminated 



 

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site, normally you’re like this [pointing to “EPA’s polluted guy”], and 
not like this [pointing to “Ecuador’s polluted kid”]. Thus, the contact 
that our people have with contamination is much closer…Whatever 
scientific study you might do on contamination, or whatever you 
might know from the US, well it’s different here because we live 
differently. People here are much more naked in the face of 
contamination.2 
 

“Naked in the face of contamination” makes bare the vulnerability of residents of 

the Amazon who live alongside oil. Naked refers to the ways that unprotected 

human bodies—such as the extended crude-stained foot of the boy, or his hands 

and uncovered upper body—come in contact with chemicals. But naked also refers 

beyond the skin to the proximity of people’s homes to waste pits; to the unfiltered 

water in their wells that, for lack of better option, they drink despite the smell of 

oil; or to the limited resources to protect themselves from exposures within this 

industrial-natural landscape, all of which give shape to toxicity in the Amazon. To 

be “naked” is not necessarily contingent on a lack of knowledge about toxicity, 

but rather has to do first and foremost with the social, material, historical 

conditions that make some more vulnerable than others in the extractive present. 

 

This article explores connections between toxicants and their corporeal 

presences, using the language invoked by interlocutors to query models of 

toxicity as consequential interventions into the visibility and invisibility of 

pollutants. As Camilo illustrated through his contrast between the “EPA’s polluted 

guy” and “Ecuador’s polluted kid,” the nature of exposure in the Ecuadorian 

Amazon is different from generic models of exposure—such as those I once 

learned about in a graduate environmental health course, or those you might find 

in public education materials produced by environmental regulatory agencies. 

The juxtaposition of the two images articulates a direct relationship between the 

Amazon and the United States, histories of extraction under Texaco, and the 

profoundly unequal burdens of exposure and toxic presences that continue to 

characterize life today. Drawing from ethnographic research and the accounts of 

one woman in particular, whom I will call Lidia, I aim to illustrate that vernacular 

experience—such as the knowledge that in the past children and adults were 

routinely barefoot on crude-slicked roads—is necessary not only for 

understanding what it means to live in a place of environmental hazard, but also 

for building a more inclusive politics of knowledge production in models and 

assessments of toxicity.  

 

While chemicals are often described and acted upon as isolated, discrete entities 



 

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in technoscientific forums (such as the “EPA’s polluted guy” who summarizes 

possible of routes of exposure through his universality in a summary model of 

environmental exposure; see Murphy, 2017), vernacular experience points to 

possibilities of experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures 

that have otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. More than allegory, 

statements such as “naked in the face of contamination,” or as interlocutors 

describe later in this article, life as “swimming in oil,” seeing “smoke thick like 

marmalade,” or exclamations of pain relived “tsaac!” refuse hegemonic 

assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. To take these descriptions 

of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations often 

exceed the expected forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments of oil 

operations, pointing to the failure of normative models of toxicity to capture 

experiences of exposure that inundate daily life. The chemically saturated present 

demands a reconfiguration of toxicity—as a sociomaterial process, epistemic 

concept, and embodied experience—one that, I will argue, requires attending to 

quotidian experience with toxicants in order to work towards not only political and 

environmental, but also epistemological justice. 

 

Oil Production in the Age of Toxicity 
The evidence for the infiltration of human-made, toxic chemicals into the fabric of 

biological and social life is extensive. From the proliferation of toxic compounds in 

our soil (Lyons, 2016), water (Davis, 2003), air (Harrison, 2011), bodies (Lundqvist 

et al., 2006; Wahlberg, 2018), and future generations (Keller 2014), to the flame 

retardants sprayed on baby mattresses and couches (Liboiron, 2016; Miller, 2017), 

the formaldehyde-derived adhesives in the flooring, walls, and carpentry of the 

average American home (Shapiro, 2015), the plastic particles found in most tap 

water worldwide (Carrington, 2017), or the routine, authorized use of chemical 

agents and violence against protesters at Standing Rock (Estes, 2019), the 

chemical constitution of post-industrial life has become at once extraordinary 

and, at the same time, utterly commonplace. We are living in the “age of toxicity” 

(Walker, 2011, p. ix). 

 

Petrochemical production in particular is rife with potential danger posed by 

toxicants, those found in hydrocarbons as well as chemicals used during the 

extraction, transport, and refinement (Appel, Mason, & Watts, 2015). By 

toxicants, I am referring to human-made, toxic chemicals that are defined by their 

central role in economic production and increasing ubiquity in bodies, homes, and 

environments (Liboiron, 2017). Following Liboiron, use of the term toxicant traces 

the global shift in public concern at the end of the twentieth century away from 



 

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naturally occurring toxic substances, such as arsenic, and towards the 

proliferation of manufactured chemicals. As a natural resource, some might argue 

that crude oil is a “toxin.” Yet quotidian encounters with crude in the Amazon also 

illustrate the ways that oil is also a “toxicant”—a substance that is encountered 

through human and industrial production that is harmful, even poisonous, to life. 

Importantly, as Liboiron (2017) notes, toxicants differ from toxins not only 

because of their synthetic rather than “natural” genesis, but also because of their 

“mass tonnage, wide economic production and distribution processes.” By 

extension, I argue that the produced forms through which oil is encountered—as 

sludge in waste pits or as separated gas that is combusted in direct proximity to 

homes—give rise to its near ubiquitous presence in everyday life in this region. To 

live in the Amazon is to live alongside, underneath, and submerged within oil 

production as well as its infrastructure, marking widespread transformations of 

space, practice, and exchange in everyday life in the past half century. Here, to be 

in relation to oil is unavoidable; this is “anthropocentric exposure,” where 

preventing permeation by the continual, residual, overwhelming onslaught of 

industrial toxicants is neither possible nor expected (Roberts, 2017a). 

 

The toxic substances that interlocutors encounter in their everyday life in the 

Amazon are rarely “pure” crude—such as the bitumen recalled in accounts by 

Indigenous residents that would seep through the soil in the Amazon or on the 

coast of Santa Elena (Cepek 2018; Sovacool & Scarpaci, 2016). Instead, what most 

residents encounter in the everyday are toxic composites or chemical mixtures 

composed of “natural” substances entangled with synthetic and industrially 

produced additives-- admixtures of potentially poisonous components and the 

life-sustaining fuel of the contemporary moment. Let me provide one example: 

When oil is extracted from the ground, it is part of a hybrid mixture of crude oil, 

gas, and water that exists as slurry in underground pockets. The water that is part 

of this underground solution is referred to as “production” or “formation waters”; 

it varies in composition by location, and is characterized by high salinity, the 

presence of hydrocarbons, and naturally occurring radioactive material. It also 

contains high levels of benzene, chromium-6, and mercury. Importantly, to coax 

this slurry out of the underground depths and separate out the crude that can 

then be sent to refineries, various chemical compounds are added in the drilling 

process. These can include radioactive materials and other chemical cocktails that 

are added to the muds to make them more viscous and more stable, and to 

reduce fluid loss, among other effects (Borchardt, 1989). During my research, 

residents recounted that routine practices under Texaco and state companies 

included dumping the production waters, drilling muds, crude oil, added 



 

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chemicals, and other forms of industrial trash into nearby waste pits created 

alongside the oil wells. Over the years, the chemicals from this mélange flooded 

their banks, were intentionally lit on fire, or slowly seeped through the unlined 

walls of the waste pits. Thus, when residents encounter contamination from oil in 

their streams, farms, homes, and places they traverse throughout the day, this 

contamination far exceeds its “natural” origins: it is most often in the form of 

toxicant mixtures that are only made possible through the political-economic and 

ideological structures that have enabled and encouraged oil extraction in the 

Amazon since the early 1960s.  

 

Oil extraction, as one of the principal drivers of anthropogenic change, chemical 

onslaught, and natural cultural transformation in this place, thus exists as a hybrid 

form of toxin and toxicant: it is a natural resource, but only attains its toxic 

potency through the systems of production, consumption, and fabricated 

chemicals of the twentieth century that bring it to the surface of the Amazon 

forest in historically unprecedented scales and intensities. I intentionally engage 

with the term toxicant and situate my ethnographic work in relation to scholarship 

on toxicants and chemo-ethnography in order to draw attention to these forms of 

labor, production, and consumption that have brought the people living in the 

Amazon into daily, unavoidable relation with oil. The very compounds used in the 

extraction and production of petrochemical products that produce harm are also 

what sustain our lives today. Importantly, scholars have argued that toxicants 

have fueled colonialist histories and enabled the extractive present, and, as such, 

demand rethinking of the rhetorical and political tools used to combat 

contamination (Widger, 2017). This includes, I argue, attending to quotidian 

experiences of toxicity in order to draw attention to the forms of harm that oil 

extraction —and the limits of our regulatory models for capturing its effects—

have entailed.  

 

Dominant modes of addressing pollution’s effects—regulatory science and law—

have proven unsatisfactory for stemming the wake of twentieth-century industrial 

toxicants in our lives (Boudia & Jas, 2014). Such officially sanctioned modes of 

response are also increasingly less equipped to respond to questions of 

responsibility and remediation as toxic problems grow in scope and frequency. 

The examples of this abound: Union Carbide in Bhopal, 1984; Chernobyl, 1986; 

Exxon Valdez, 1989; BP Deepwater Horizon explosion, 2010; Fukushima Daiichi 

nuclear disaster, 2011; Soma mine disaster in Turkey, 2014; Dakota Access 

Pipeline Protests at Standing Rock, 2016, among the many other ongoing, deadly 

problems of exposures to pesticides, formaldehyde, dioxins, radiation, and more.  



 

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This failure to capture and address the myriad effects of toxic substances in our 

lives reflects, in part, a fundamental shift in toxicity. As scholarship across 

anthropology, feminist science studies, and epigenomics has shown, the problem 

of toxicity is no longer a question of individuals being affected by rogue chemical 

particles, but rather entails a radical change in what it means to be human: we are 

now co-constituted by the toxicants of the twentieth century. Yet, as 

environmental justice scholars have repeatedly shown, while toxicants might be a 

universal problem, their distribution and burden is never borne equally (Bohme, 

2014; Brulle & Pellow, 2006; Bullard, 2001; Checker, 2005; Harrison, 2011). While 

Indigenous communities have long been living alongside sites of contamination 

and extraction (Hoover, 2017; Hoover et al., 2012; Estes, 2017, 2019), and poor 

communities of color have historically and repeatedly borne undue burdens of 

toxic waste and environmental racism (Checker, 2005; Pulido, 2000; Commission 

for Racial Justice, 1987), there is also an increasing awareness that the problem of 

toxicity, although profoundly distorted in its burdens, is not limited to “other” 

places and peoples. The distribution of poor health and industrial waste traverse 

pre-existing contours of position and power, including race, class, gender, and 

political-economic position.  

 

Increasingly, scholarship that explores human and nonhuman entanglements has 

turned to chemicals and their lifeworlds (Shapiro & Kirksey, 2017). From accounts 

of industrial disasters (Fortun, 2001; Petryna, 2002) to pharmaceutical markets 

(Dumit, 2012; Hayden, 2003) and experiences of medical conditions (Chen, 2012; 

Jain, 2013), chemicals have proven particularly productive figures for tracing the 

contours and threads of complex phenomena, such as the oil and gas industries. 

Referred to by some as “chemo-ethnography,” such work investigates the 

political-economic and personal relationships that have emerged through modern 

chemistry, following a “suite of chemicals that create possibilities for life while 

simultaneously enfeebling bodies or multispecies worlds” (Shapiro & Kirksey, 

2017, p. 482). The focus of this work is attuned to the micro-level, low-dose, 

chronic, multiple, and cumulative effects of toxic chemical compounds, 

interrogating the boundaries of bodies, environments, and the materials and 

violence of everyday life (Murphy, 2016; Povinelli, 2017; Roberts, 2017b; Shapiro & 

Kirksey, 2017; Simmons, 2017). Shapiro (2015), for instance, describes tracking 

indistinct and distributed changes to bodies and environments as the “chemical 

sublime” (p. 369), in which even minor encounters demand ethical consideration 

and practical intervention. Other work has shown how the concerns of toxicity 

extend beyond the material into the contamination of the social fabric (Ofrias, 



 

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2018), and the violence of chemical exposures as part of the settler project of the 

Dakota Access Pipeline (Simmons, 2017). A critical advancement of this work has 

been the move to consider chemical effects and relations with more-than-human 

spheres, and to point to the ways that focusing only on the molecular can have 

the effect of displacing other forms of harm, disavowing the violence of colonial 

projects, strangling relational politics, or obfuscating the concerns of those most 

effected. 

 

The toxicants used and produced in oil production cross boundaries, from the 

plastic industrial membranes installed to retain the contents of waste pits, to the 

fleshy ones covering human bodies. The movement of toxic substances 

throughout environments—in soil, water, and air—and in bodies of organisms—

across skin, or the blood-brain barrier—is one of their distinguishing features. 

Toxicants effect changes that are unanticipated and forceful. However, 

identifying, measuring, and demonstrating exposures to toxic substances outside 

of the laboratory is a problem: combinations of chemicals, changes in industry 

practices, the dispersion of chemicals throughout air or water over time, the 

movements of people between jobs and daily activities, all make tracking 

exposure exceedingly difficult. Given that it is enormously difficult to determine 

the effects of a toxic substance within a landscape of potential, repeated 

exposures, or the relationship between multiple toxicants and adverse health 

effects, it is often necessary to reduce the variables of study at the expense of 

attending to differential particularity. For instance, the question of why, and 

through what processes, some bodies become subject to industrial waste while 

others do not (Auyero & Swistun, 2009), or the ways in which pollution is becomes 

an externality, even a profitable one (Ofrias, 2017), has been divorced from the 

question of how exposure occurs. 

 

In her call for anti-colonial feminist tactics to take on toxicity, Murphy (2017) 

describes how technoscientific approaches to portraying chemicals as “discrete 

entities, as isolated molecules, often represented through abstract structural 

diagrams” (p. 495) has supplanted approaches that foreground complexity and 

entanglements between the living and nonliving. Such technoscientific 

explanations of how toxicity is manifest are largely incompatible with accounts 

that track the ways that sexuality, race, and gender shape the effects of chemicals 

on our bodies, and the irrevocable ways that toxicity is unequally embodied 

(Agard-Jones, 2014; Murphy, 2008). The failure of discrete mechanisms of 

chemical pathways to capture the effects of everyday life alongside oil production 

is seen in Camilo’s contrast between “EPA’s polluted guy” and “Ecuador’s polluted 



 

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kid,” and as I will focus on in what follows, is also seen in Lidia’s retelling of how oil 

production has given shape to everyday life. 

 

There are many examples of disjunctures between scientific models and the 

entanglements of toxicants and injustice. In places of environmental hazard, 

scientific and legal endeavors are generally called upon to parse precise 

distinctions between chemicals and their effects, between one oil company and 

another, between bodies and environments, between the synthetic and the 

organic. Contemporary methods in toxicology are rarely able to demonstrate 

causality between individual toxicants and human harm, and even less so for 

“cocktails” of toxicants (Boudia & Jas, 2014; Goldstein & Hall, 2015; Langston, 

2010; Van der Schalie et al., 1999). Further, while scientists acknowledge that 

toxins and toxicants play an important role in acute and chronic diseases, many of 

the relations between exposure and disease are poorly understood due to 

individual variation, the cumulative effects of multiple toxic substances, and 

complex interplay between genetics and environment (Miller, 2013; Nash, 2007; 

Wild, 2005). Due to the political-economic weight given to the methods of 

regulatory science, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about toxicants in any 

other way. Toxicity—like oil—is at once all around us, and at the same time, 

increasingly difficult to pin down (Cepek 2018).  

 

The conjoined development of industry and chemistry (Bensaude-Vincent & 

Stengers, 1996) and the resulting restrictive techno-scientific rationalities for 

understanding the chemical effects of environmental hazards (Murphy, 2017) has 

had serious consequences for everyday life from the twentieth into the twenty-

first century. The assumption of a “fixed” natural substrata against which 

subjective interpretations of toxicity are compared, or the generalizability of the 

“average” body, or the overreliance on models of toxicity (rather than the explicit 

recognition of the limits of modeling, see Tsing, 2004), have coalesced into taken-

for-granted ways of imagining, speaking, and acting on toxicants. While 

recognizing the many difficulties of accounting for toxicity in a given place, and 

acknowledging the necessity of privileging stable boundaries over entanglements 

in particular instances (Roberts, 2017b), this article is borne out of the concern 

raised by interlocutors like Camilo that the assumptions built into scientific 

models have been used to marginalize voices who have insisted on the more-

than-causal, not-yet-verified effects of toxicants, and to obscure the political-

economic structures that allow some to produce and profit from pollution. 

 

In my fieldwork in the Amazon, I found that assumptions built into studies of 



 

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toxicity about the “average” body, and “residential” versus “industrial” divisions of 

space in Environmental Impact Studies, as well as a limited notion of quantifiable 

“impact” in regulatory measures (Fiske, 2017) can minimize the dangers of oil 

operations in official assessments. In an effort to counter this tendency, here I turn 

to the ordinary, quotidian experiences of Lidia and her accounts of life in a 

landscape of contamination. After decades in the Amazon, such stories and 

experiences accrete, and it is impossible to distinguish singular moments of 

hazard. I aim to show through what might otherwise be dismissed as individual 

instances or anecdotes that vernacular experiences can offer critical insight into 

the particularities of exposures, and raise questions about what standard means 

of assessing toxic exposures may exclude, overlook, or obscure. Following 

Murphy’s (2017) call for approaches to toxicity that “refuse the hegemonic sense 

of what chemicals and life are” while “honor[ing] the inseparability of bodies and 

land” (p. 497), in what follows I explore how attention to the vernacular 

experiences of life alongside toxicants may point to ways that the corporeal 

presences of toxicants seep well beyond their given modes of action in exposure 

“pathways.” 

 

Fieldwork 
The field research for this project took place over twenty-seven months between 

2011 and 2013. Throughout this time, I lived in Lago Agrio—located around fifteen 

miles south of the Colombian border in the northeastern corner of the Amazon. 

The city marks the site of the first exploratory wells drilled by the Texaco 

Company, from which they struck the so-called black gold in 1964.  

 

Oil and settlement occurred in tandem, and today daily life is thoroughly 

entangled with the industry. As a result of a drought in the southern highlands 

and increasing land crowding throughout the Sierra in the 1960s, government 

officials hoped that the Amazon could become the next breadbasket of the nation 

(Wasserstrom & Southgate, 2013). At the same time, the government was 

pursuing oil extraction as the next step for national development. Politicians 

hoped that oil—through the infrastructure and revenue it would bring—would 

help to facilitate colonization of unconquered border territory in the Amazon. All 

told, the processes of oil development and state-sponsored colonization resulted 

in the arrival of more than 300,000 colonists to the Amazon (Watts, 2005), who 

claimed more than 4.5 million hectares of land (Lucero, 2008; Sawyer, 2004) that 

was the ancestral territory of Indigenous nationalities living in the region, such as 

the Cofán, Waorani, Siona, and Sekoya. The history of oil development in the 

region falls within the continuation of extractive logics that accompanied, for 



 

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example, prior waves of rubber extraction in the nineteenth and twentieth 

centuries (Fontaine, 2007; Wasserstrom, 2014). This period was marked by a 

significant territorial expansion of industry, which has resulted in an immensely 

unequal distribution of both the harmful effects of toxicants and the national 

benefits of revenues resulting from oil production. Additionally, oil extraction was 

facilitated by governmental policies that profoundly transformed Indigenous 

relationships to nature, created dependencies on institutionalized energy 

production, and reshaped the roles of women in social reproduction and 

production (Cielo, Coba, & Vallejo, 2016; Vallejo, 2014).   

 

In the 1960s, Ecuador entered in a joint venture with the Texaco Company of the 

US to begin oil operations. Initially a consortium formed between Texaco, Gulf, 

and the nascent Corporación Estatal de Petroleos de Ecuador (Ecuadorian State 

Petroleum Company), later Texaco and Gulf delegated their work to the 

subsidiary company Texpet (a move that was subsequently used to argue that the 

parent company does not bear responsibility for wrongdoing (see also Sawyer, 

2002). Over the course of twenty years of operations, Texaco drilled 339 wells and 

built eighteen production stations, to extract an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of 

crude (Kimerling, 2006). Rampant dumping of crude oil and production waters 

into waste pits and local streams, and the routine burning of oil byproducts in pits 

and gas flares resulted not only in massive environmental contamination but also 

health problems for Indigenous and settler farmer communities (Beristain, Páez 

Rovira, & Fernández, 2009; Fiske, 2018;  Kimerling, 1991, 2006; San Sebastián & 

Córdoba, 2000; San Sebastián, Armstrong, Córdoba, & Stephens, 2001; San 

Sebastián & Hurtig, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). It is important to note that because 

tracking the effects of toxicants in soil, water, air, and bodies over the course of 

decades is exceptionally difficult, there has been significant controversy 

surrounding claims of harm to human health under Texaco’s operations, including 

industry-sponsored scientific studies and rebuttals to public health studies (Kelsh, 

McHugh, & Tomasi, 2008; Kelsh, Morimoto, & Lau, 2009; Sever, 2005). These 

controversies underscore the limitations of conventional exposure and risk 

assessment in decades-long environmental disaster. 

 

Thus, the arrival of oil in the Amazon carried with it many familiar colonial tropes. 

State-sponsored displacement of Indigenous nationalities, the precarious 

settlement of colonist communities alongside oil operations, and utter lack of 

industry regulation and adequate health services in the first two decades of 

operations compounded emerging inequalities in health, wealth, and education in 

the region. Lago Agrio, the city founded alongside the first well drilled in the 



 

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Amazon (reportedly named by Texaco workers after the company’s city of origin, 

Sour Lake, Texas), was located in Cofán territory at the time, an area that was 

colonized by settler communities who arrived with the oil boom (Cepek, 2012; 

Cepek, 2018). Following Texaco’s exit from Ecuador in 1993, national and foreign 

oil companies expanded operations, and extraction has become an object of 

growing political and social controversy. Ecuador introduced its first 

comprehensive environmental regulations in the 1990s, resulting in new audit 

practices and increased state involvement in industry operations (Fiske, 2017). In 

the decades since, Cofán, Sekyoa, Siona, Waorani, and Kichwa nationalities have 

continued to struggle with entrenched disparities in relation to extractivism (Cielo 

& Coba, 2018), for territorial rights to land and survival (Riederer, 2019), as well as 

the right to free, prior, and informed consent to oil operations (Brown, 2019). 

 

In 1993 a group of lawyers launched a lawsuit on behalf of thirty thousand 

Amazonians against Texaco (Aguinda v. Texaco), demanding reparations for 

environmental, health, and cultural damages. The suit brought unprecedented 

international attention to the region. In 2011 the court found Chevron (which 

purchased Texaco in 2001 in a $45 billion merger) guilty of “gross negligence” and 

extensive contamination throughout the region, and fined the company $9.5 

billion (Zambrano Lozada, 2011). However, despite the landmark ruling, the case 

has not yet been brought to a close, in part because Chevron no longer has any 

holdings in Ecuador. As a result, the Aguinda sentence could not be executed in 

the country. In the years since, the plaintiffs have taken the case to countries such 

as Argentina and Canada where Chevron has operations, seeking a ruling by a 

third-party court to claim the financial settlement. Since the 2011 ruling, there has 

been a lengthy appeals process, including several additional lawsuits (one in which 

Chevron successfully sued the Ecuadorian state for interference in the Aguinda 

legal process, and brought successful a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt 

Organizations Act lawsuit against plaintiff attorney Steven Donziger for fraud in 

2014; see also Barrett, 2014). During this period, former President Rafael Correa 

and the Alianza País party pushed for a post-neoliberal economy that, through the 

redistribution and continued generation of oil rents, sought to bring the Amazon 

out of poverty and expand infrastructure and public services. Despite such efforts, 

the effects of territorial dispossession, continued problems of contamination 

resulting from ongoing and prior oil production, and socio-economic inequalities 

have arguably become more acute (Vallejo, Cielo, & García, 2019). In the case of 

the plaintiffs living in the former Texaco Concession area, the effects of 

contamination have generated significant public and scientific controversy 

(Acosta, 2011; Alexander, 2014; Barrett, 2014; Dematteis, 2012); whether or not 



 

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the plaintiffs will ultimately be able to collect the settlement for damages 

occurred remained uncertain at the time of writing this text. 

 

When oil extraction commenced, thousands of colonists headed to Lago Agrio 

and the surrounding area from Ecuador’s southern and highland regions. Settlers 

followed the newly laid oil access roads in search of land to claim, staking out 

plots along the road and turning forest into farms. This history has given a 

particular shape to life in the area. The towns and small cities that have grown up 

follow the contours of the roads intended to connect oil wells. The logic of oil 

permeates every aspect of life here. As settlers expanded, they built houses next 

to wells, platforms, and stations—occupying ancestral territory that was rapidly 

being exploited by the oil industry. Today, this means that many people have to 

cross pipelines just to reach their front doors. Others dry their laundry on 

pipelines, or tie animals to them to graze. In some cases, arriving after waste pits 

had been covered over with dirt, settlers built houses directly on top of the pits 

next to wells. Some did not know there was a waste pit below and simply thought 

they had found a nice, flat space ready for construction; others told me that they 

did not realize that waste pits were hazardous to their health.  

 

In spite of the ubiquity of fences, security guards, and physical as well as 

bureaucratic boundaries that demarcate space in the Amazon, it is due to this 

knotted history of settlement and industrial development that distinctions 

between industrial and residential spaces are particularly porous here. The 

proximity of settler and Indigenous communities to unregulated operations 

during the first decades of oil development exacerbated health and social 

problems and has had important repercussions for disputes over harm. In legal 

and scientific forums, boundaries must be drawn to demarcate where industry 

ends and life begins. Such an exercise has proven difficult in a place where life and 

oil, like dense jungle vines, have grown together.  

 

In what follows, I draw principally from the accounts of Lidia, one of the first 

settlers to the region. Her story, on the one hand, represents a singular experience 

of life in this place. However, while honoring the specifics of her narrative, I also 

want to point out that her account has much in common with the life histories told 

to me by her neighbors and even those living further away in region. In her case, 

the labor to carve a life out of contaminated land has propelled her into broader 

struggles for justice in the Aguinda lawsuit, through which she traveled to the US 

to share her story with other environmental justice activists and Chevron 

shareholders. She illustrates the importance of attending to vernacular, intimate, 



 

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sensory experiences when tracing the material presences of toxicants. Yet, her 

story also points us to ways that the colonialist project of state-sponsored 

settlement displaced Indigenous communities that hunted, fished, and called this 

territory home, and at the same time, created new forms of as trees were felled, 

wells were drilled, and settler communities grew. I turn to her story now with the 

hope of demonstrating the importance of finding ways to accommodate these 

unrecorded seepages of industrial toxicants and unofficial erasures of lives and 

land in models of toxicity. Yet, in working with stories of embodied experience of 

exposures, I do not aim to privilege a more authentic “local” body over numbers, 

samples, or other forms of evidence of harm. Bodies are also suggestible, and 

even misleading; most relevant to the discussion here, they are situated. This 

article seeks to contribute to scholarship that insists on the situatedness of all 

accounts: from the technical to the experiential, from relative positions of power 

and proximity to pollution, and from critical histories of colonization, settlement, 

and extraction. The point of positionality in relation to toxicity is not to insist that 

boundaries and contours of difference do not exist, but rather to be accountable 

for the ways in which we draw them in our work, and the consequences they have 

for peoples’ everyday lives. 

 

Swimming in Oil 
“Well, I’m from Loja. And I tell you, I didn’t know anything, didn’t know what 

petroleum was.” For those settlers who came to Lago Agrio from the southern 

highlands after ongoing struggles with drought, land crowding, and poverty in the 

1970s, the Amazon was a source of wonder. Lidia describes her initial delight at 

the natural abundance, coupled with a fear of the unknown: “I tell you we came 

here to see something new, to feel what it was like to live in another world here in 

our own country…the fauna, the flora, the jungle. There were some huge trees, 

tremendous trees. And different flowers too.” She goes on to list the size of the 

fish they could catch even in small streams, and the abundant game of paujiles, 

turkeys, or even a fat guatusa.3 This was the divine providence that many, like 

Lidia, felt was a gift from god, made possible by the invitation of the government 

and longstanding declaration of these lands as “vacant” and ready to be worked 

(Wasserstrom & Southgate, 2013). As Jorge Añazco Castillo (2008), a trader who 

spent years traveling throughout the region and led one of the first groups of 

settlers to claim land, wrote in his autobiographical account of life in the 

“Oriente,” “Thus, between drinks, the project of colonization of the NorOriente 

was born, the place where oil had burst forth and there were millions of hectares 

of vacant lands that would accommodate thousands of campesinos who had no 

land to farm” (p. 131).  



 

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Yet they were not alone in this wild. Settling on the ancestral lands of the Cofán 

nationality north of what is today the bustling city of Lago Agrio, Lidia’s family 

took up land that would soon become the home of a Texaco oil station and 

multiple wells. And that, she says, is when it all began to change: “After this, the 

oil started to spill. A substance, black, started spreading. First, the machine would 

come by, removing the rocks from the roads…and then they’d put down the oil. 

And everything would be coated.” Lidia was describing a common practice of the 

time called “road oiling.” For the first two decades of Texaco operations, crude oil 

was distributed over dirt roads to keep the dust down. The abundant Amazonian 

rains made this a sinisterly efficient way for the crude oil to permeate water 

sources and farmlands. The feet of families like Lidia’s were coated in crude as 

they walked to town, to school, or to their farmland. As Camilo emphasized in the 

opening of this article, paying attention to the particulars of how crude oil 

production unfolded in this region, among a population that often went barefoot, 

begins to illustrate how toxicity is not a scientific “given” as mobilized in the 

generic models of exposure in Camilo’s example. Rather, toxicity is a 

sociomaterial process that emerges in distinct formations entangled with the 

particulars of history, place, settler colonialism, scientific knowledges, and 

political economy. 

 

Early tales of rivers that ran black with crude, waste pits that overflowed and filled 

streams and swamps downstream, or the many documented and undocumented 

spills in rivers—often from pipelines—are indicative of the widespread 

contamination of land, waterways, and air as a result of oil operations in this 

region. Exposure to chemicals in the water was amplified by the absence of piped 

water in residents’ homes; people relied on rivers for all their basic needs, and 

ingested toxicants directly through drinking, cooking, and bathing.  

 

For Lidia, these early years of life in the Amazon are riddled with memories of the 

materiality of oil—how its viscosity changed under the hot sun, how it stuck to 

skin, impervious to any amount of soap, scrubbing, or swearing. She describes 

how these corporeal presences and permutations are connected to experiences of 

illness: 

 
Oil is sticky and, when it was hot out, because the sun is strong here, 
there was no way to walk because the oil [on the roads] burned your 
feet. It would cause blisters, all of that. So, that’s how things started, 
first our legs started to hurt, we started to get cramps. And we said to 
the engineers from Texaco, “Why do you spill oil?” And they said, “No, 



 

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no, oil is not harmful. Petroleum is a form of medicine. Petroleum can 
be used for pain, for pain in your bones, for whatever.” So we were 
unconcerned, out there swimming in oil. 
 

In the process of conducting fieldwork, I found that Lidia’s account was 

remarkably similar to other residents in the region who emphasized the settlers’ 

initial ignorance of the health problems that can result from oil operations. This 

anecdote of the exchange with Texaco workers was repeated to me frequently 

throughout research. Lidia and others recounted that Texaco workers told 

residents at the time that petroleum was good for curing the aches and pains of 

arthritis, instructing them to place it directly on their joints. Stories like this 

encapsulate a common view of those in charge of oil operations: at best, they left 

an ignorant population in the dark, and at worst, they intentionally exposed 

residents to harmful contamination. 

 

As Lidia tells it, the settlers’ collective ignorance of petroleum’s harmful effects 

was so great—and their resources to seek out alternatives once they began to 

experience damages so poor—that when the oil from spills and overflowing waste 

pits became so thick that it formed a skim floating on the rivers or in the rain 

buckets, she and others would simply scrape it off and proceed: 

 
No, we weren’t worried because they told us that petroleum wasn’t 
harmful…We used the water in these streams to wash…for cooking, 
for drinking, for everything…There was a skim, a thick covering, 
sometimes two or three centimeters thick, sometimes up to five 
centimeters thick—a layer that was made out of crude. So that’s why I 
tell you, it was hard. It was hard, really hard, for us.4  
 

Lidia’s words echo in my head after our meetings. Swimming in oil. An apt 

summary of the lengthy accounts she would tell of her experience in this place. 

While doubling as a semantic description, there is also a literal truth embedded 

here, I argue, that is instructive in understanding the material manifestations of 

toxicity: she and her family have indeed swum, bathed, walked upon, breathed, 

and ingested the toxic components of oil production over the course of decades. 

Lidia’s reality—one of memories of pain and struggle, joys and new delights in this 

place—exceeds any model of “normal” exposure from oil operations. Rather than 

pathways of exposure, what might we learn from thinking with the explanatory 

metaphors used by those living alongside extraction? How could an 

understanding of toxicity based on the premise of bodies submerged, swimming 

in the toxic substances of their lifeworlds, differently inform political, regulatory, 

or scientific action? Following Camilo and Lidia, we could begin by questioning 



 

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the assumption that everyone wears shoes when walking in “industrial sites,” or 

that all homes have treated water running through their taps, or that clothes are 

washed in machines and not by women who are submerged in polluted rivers, in 

order to better capture the cumulative, layered, kaleidoscopic effects of 

exposures over decades of life in this place.   

 

Smoke Thick Like Marmalade 
Today, close to where she first settled, Lidia lives at the end of a dirt path on the 

rise of a hill overlooking her grown children’s homes. The road and pipeline form a 

parallel horizon as she gazes out her front door. Her immediate neighbors are the 

now state-run oil station on one side and a sherbet-colored hourly motel to the 

other. She has lived here for over four decades. Over time, the boundaries of her 

property, the places where she keeps her pigs and grows her cacao, have shifted 

as various industrial incidents have rendered land unsuitable for planting or raising 

animals. The soundscape of Lidia’s home is filled with the insistent squawk of 

chickens and the grunts of her favorite fat sow tethered close to the door. In the 

background is the constant drone of motors and gas flares from the station. By 6 

p.m., the flares flash through the treetops against the lavender light of 

Amazonian dusk. The noise, in the relative quiet of the evening hours, is 

amplified. The flares are always lit. Depending on the direction of the wind, the 

smell of gas is unmistakable.  

 

When I asked Lidia about life next to the gas flares, her story was one of 

unrelenting adversity. In years prior, a black film coated everything: rooftops, rain 

barrels, the leaves of planted crops, clothing hung on the line. Sometimes, she 

notes, this still happens, though not as often. Today, the flare leaves ashy traces 

that Lidia and her family touch and inadvertently ingest by drinking from water 

tanks or harvesting crops. The flares emits gasses: sulfur dioxide, hydrogen 

sulfide, nitrogen dioxide. Present too are other substances: carbon dioxide, 

methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, heptane, carbon monoxide. 

Although she can never be sure on a given day what combination of chemicals 

they happen to be surrounded by, Lidia is certain that these gasses sometimes 

cause headaches that render her and her family unable to work; for others they 

make eyes red and itchy, throats scratchy, or chests too tight to breathe. Each 

person’s response is a bit different. The proximity of Lidia’s home to these flares—

while exceptional in its assiduous onslaught against their health—is common 

here.  

 

As we spoke, occasionally Lidia’s adult children would come by to collect their 



 

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children, whom she had been watching while they were at work. They would stop 

to listen, leaning on the doorframe to add any additional details she had 

neglected. During one visit, one of her sons sat down to describe the debris that 

would catch fire in the gas flares and fall down on them, like flaming bits of 

smoldering rain. There were other times too, her son noted, when the oil workers 

would light the waste pits on fire, and the smoke descended upon them like a 

thick blanket. He recalled,  

 
They would light the waste pits on fire where they would store the oil.5 
And the fire would make these terrible columns of smoke. Black, but 
thick, like when you’re making marmalade. And in each part of these 
columns, you could see this big thick cloud. That’s how it was. It would 
start like that and then within an hour and a half or so, then it would 
rain. And with the rain, all of this smoke fell over the plants. Stained all 
the plants, the clothes too if they were outside. Sometimes we 
weren’t at home, and when we got back all of the clothes would be 
stained black. The plants were bathed in this, it would damage the 
roofs of the houses and we wouldn’t have any water. And in the water 
tanks that we had started to build would be covered too. 

 

Lidia’s son went on to describe how their animals began to lose their fur. For Lidia 

and her children, the health problems of their numerous dogs were clear signs of 

what the toxicants were doing their bodies as well. Her son stuck his chin in the 

direction of one dog who was sleeping in the sun of the courtyard, pointing my 

attention the mangy patches where much of the fur on the haunches had fallen 

out: “he went over to the river and was crossing near the station when he went in 

river…The water was hot, and doubtless had a lot of chemicals in it.” The loss of 

fur, moments of seizure-like shaking, the effects of toxicity on animal 

counterparts are registered in family histories among overlapping memories of 

clouds thick with black smoke. 

 

Stories of animals lost to contamination here abound: from cows who gave birth 

to malformed calves, to chickens who ran around just before dying in a frenetic, 

fanatical dance after drinking contaminated water. Animals died after drinking 

water in the rivers and streams; on occasion, they would fall into open waste pits 

and drown, stuck in the oily slop. Tales of animals lost or injured by oil operations, 

or those deformed or de-furred after crossing a nearby river, circulate here as 

evidence of the continuum of human and nonhuman vulnerabilities alongside 

extraction. The chicken in the yard or the hunting dog on the run becomes a 

sentinel of the dangers that lurk in the smoke that clouds the horizon, settling 

around them like the remains of the incinerated waste pits that light up the skies. 



 

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A Horrible Smell, and Then Tsaac! 
Living next to industry places Lidia and her family in relation to toxicants. These 

are not voluntary relations, rather more along the lines of “chemical kinships” 

(Agard-Jones, 2016), illustrating the non-linear effects of chemicals on those least 

equipped to prevent toxicants from penetrating bodily limits (Roberts, 2017b). 

Exposures in the Amazon are multiple, differentiated, and infrequently recorded 

when they occur. From the time they arrived in the Amazon, Lidia and other 

women spent hours washing laundry by hand in the streams nearby. Sitting on 

the riverbank, partially or completely submerged in the water, women’s bodies 

were awash in toxicants running with the current. She described countless days 

when the water changed color to a frothy gray, or when they would arrive at the 

stream to find an awful stench flowing downstream; contamination from 

formation waters, crude oil, and other production chemicals ran across their 

bodies: barium, mercury, arsenic, selenium, antimony, chromium, cadmium, 

cobalt, lead, manganese, vanadium, and zinc. Formation waters contain many 

salts and heavy metals, which are highly toxic to humans and can bio-accumulate 

in fish and other animals. Other radioactive elements, such as strontium 90 or 

radium 226, flowed in and around them, linking the daily routines of scrubbing 

laundry to aromatic hydrocarbons of benzene, xylene, and toluene.  

 

It did not take long before people in the area started experiencing health 

problems. Others living in the areas outside of Lago Agrio told me of skin rashes 

from bathing in the river, persistent coughs and respiratory problems, 

miscarriages and malformed infants. For some, ill health began as a vague series 

of complaints. When they went to the river to bathe, Lidia and others noted, 

rashes and skin spots would coat the arms, bellies, and backs of their young 

children.  

 

Lidia’s story is marked by the pain of three miscarriages. Each is remembered in 

exacting relation to the industrial operations and daily routines at the time, 

bringing her to tears as she recalls these days decades later: 

 
The first miscarriage was because I crossed the stream. I had been 
washing [laundry]. I was washing when before we knew it a stain of 
black oil was floating downstream. And we got out of the water. But 
since I had left the clothes on the other side, a whole tub of clothes on 
the other side, I risked crossing the stream. I got wet up to here 
[indicating the height with her hand] on my legs, covered in oil. The 
water was floating down with a black layer on top, but underneath the 



 

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water was a gray color. It stunk. A horrible smell. And then I started 
getting dizzy, vomiting, dizziness with vomiting, and then tsaac! All of 
a sudden I had pain in my stomach, pain in my hips, all through the 
middle of the night. 
 

In another instance, she went on to describe how at just over three months 

pregnant, she miscarried. Each miscarriage is inextricable from an oil spill, a river 

crossing, or, in one case, pulling a fallen bull out of a waste pit. The experience of 

poisoning—from headaches, to vomiting, to the sensation of feeling like she was 

going crazy from the ensuing pain, to the loss of each child—is permeated with 

memories of specific industrial events and encounters with toxicants. Moments of 

agony mark this history of routine oil spills and industrial accidents; these are 

accounts that have no official traces within legal or scientific reckonings with the 

history of contamination in this place.  

 

The capacity of toxic substances to transgress boundaries (Tuana, 2008), whether 

through their accumulation in the fatty tissue of fish to their movement through 

the air and into our lungs, have other effects as well. Exposures remind us that 

distinctions between subject and object, human and nonhuman, mother and river, 

memory and the present, are not fixed. Here, Lidia and her neighbors’ bodies 

were submerged, surrounded, and infiltrated by industrial contaminants while 

working and bathing in the river. This capacity for toxic particles to affect us, as 

Chen (2012) suggests, involves the shifting relations of both affect and being 

affected that are central to the experience of being exposed to a chemical. This is 

the “viscous porosity of flesh” (Tuana, 2008, p. 199); those moments when we are 

made sick by toxic substances that remind us of the ways that we are in and of the 

world. Such porosity, in the words of Simmons (2017), “becomes a site of 

potential, exposure, and entanglement all at once, questioning the stability of our 

worlds, human and nonhuman.” Here, there is no way to extract the bodily 

memories of loss, pain, and agony from the industrial register of this place.  

 

Once, I asked Lidia if she had ever considered leaving the home she had made in 

the Amazon. This was a question that I dreaded asking, for it smacked of the 

convenience of the transient, foreign researcher who presumed that one could 

simply pack life into a bag and move away from adversity. Yet when I asked, Lidia 

and others interlocutors always answered with a definitive no: some stated that 

they were proud of the lives they had carved out of nothing; others stated that 

they felt that god had chosen this place for them and they would persevere; 

others told me that it would be far too difficult to move. “Where would I go?” one 

man asked me rhetorically, telling me how some twenty years prior he and his 



 

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family had moved to their current farm in an effort to escape the contamination 

they were facing in a different community—only to find that the contamination, 

struggles with oil in their well, and health problems followed them with dogged 

insistence. For many of the settlers living here, their livelihoods and financial 

resources are tied up in their farms; some families only had one person making a 

salary of $400 per month, others had to sell farm animals when medical 

emergencies came up. Economic constraints, as well as personal feelings of 

attachment, a devout resolution in the face of adversity, or even resignation to 

life’s course, led families to stay.  

 

The complexity of settler relations to the place—often informed by feelings of 

initial audacity they recalled when setting off to colonize the Amazon—both made 

it difficult to leave and underlined the burdens of working poor farmers occupying 

the region. The lived knowledge they now possessed of the difficulty of life 

alongside an industry whose effects they had not previously contemplated had 

opened their eyes to exposure but had left them no better protected in its wake. 

To be naked in the face of contamination, after all these years, is not contingent 

on a lack of knowledge of the potential risks like when they first arrived, but rather 

the social, material, historical conditions that make some more vulnerable than 

others. While Lidia makes different choices today than when she first moved to 

the Amazon based on her accumulated knowledge and experience alongside oil 

extraction, the principal health risks to her and her family remain unavoidable as 

they farm and eat vegetables grown in contaminated land, bathe and wash 

clothes in contaminated rivers, or breathe poisonous gases from the flares next 

door. Avoiding toxic exposures altogether is not possible. 

The examples offered by Lidia, her son, and other residents illustrate how difficult 

it is to encapsulate exposure as a bounded moment; these are accounts that 

center on the permeability of bodies, rivers, houses, and animal kin to chemical 

agents. Toxicants flow around Lidia and her family in the water and the air; the 

flash of pain in her womb and tsaac! refracts the lived burden of chemical 

onslaught through moments of loss. If, following Mol (2002), “to be is to be 

related” (p. 54), then to live here is to live in relation to industry.  

 

Conclusions: Ecuador’s Polluted Kid  
Sitting on the side of the road, the bare feet of “Ecuador’s polluted kid” in the 

PowerPoint image illustrate the differential ways that individuals are exposed to 

industrial chemicals in the Amazon. In contrast to traditional models of risk 

assessment that involve “pathways” of exposure, what we see from Lidia’s life 

history is that toxic exposure cannot be isolated from the place and history in 



 

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which it occurs. This is not only a matter of differentiating chronic, long-term 

exposures from acute chemical intoxications, nor of asserting that there are 

multiple variables at play. Rather, in order to understand the nature of exposure in 

the Amazon, we must also consider how settlement and oil extraction unfolded 

together such that homes were built in close proximity to wells and flares while 

displacing Indigenous inhabitants from ancestral territory; how backyards today 

have come to include waste pits; how habitual movements such as walking to 

school meant traversing slicked roads and oil pipelines; how memories of washing 

laundry are filtered through the pain of miscarriages; or how poverty means that 

some families continue to drink unsafe well water today.  

 

Reflecting on these relations as toxic becomings (Chen, 2012; Tuana, 2008), 

scholars and activists have seized the moment to contemplate new possibilities 

for figuring toxicity: “Between the rising tides and chemical burns, our bodies are 

stew pots cooking up a new form of posthuman politics with new forms of 

posthuman corporealities” (Povinelli, 2017, p. 509). What emerges in this process 

is that current models of toxicity employed in regulatory science and law are 

insufficient for conceptualizing and acting upon the role of toxicants in our lives. 

 

Drawing on scholarship that has insisted on the spatially and temporally specific 

nature of toxicity, I read Lidia’s account as a call to recognize the plurality of ways 

of knowing the toxicants in the worlds in which we live. Thinking with Tuck and 

Yang’s (2012) argument on decolonization, the deconstruction of models of 

exposure that marginalize and maintain the status quo cannot occur in abstract or 

metaphorical terms; advancing more nuanced concepts of toxicity is both a 

material and epistemological struggle over the relationship between knowledge, 

power, and struggles for justice. The continued insistence on defining the effects 

of toxicity through techno-scientific, mechanistic chemical pathways and market-

oriented understandings of risk is another space through which the experiences, 

suffering, and struggles of communities affected by industrial toxicants have been 

repeatedly marginalized. Reframing toxicity prompts us to ask questions of whose 

bodies are visible, valued, or imagined as “toxic,” as well as who is able to speak 

from and within geopolitical centers of knowledge production.  

 

Far from insisting that vernacular knowledge demonstrate equivalence with 

modern sciences, this article has explored how experiences of toxic exposures are 

tied up in histories of extraction and inequality. Understanding exposure requires 

appreciating how history and inequality are woven into the very fabric of toxicity, 

yet often ignored or rationalized in official determinations. Given the tangled 



 

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relations of toxic exposures illustrated in the accounts of someone like Lidia, or 

the contrasts of ways of understanding those exposures presented by Camilo, we 

must be more attentive to the epistemic limits of tools for accounting for the 

harm resulting from oil. Attending to everyday experience can point us to those 

places where our assumptions cause us to miss vital elements of toxicity. How is 

exposure minimized, for instance, if we assume that exposed subjects all wear 

shoes? What are the cumulative effects of consuming plant and animal products 

that were grown and fed with contaminated water sources? Or where washing the 

laundry means one’s body is completely submerged in chemicals?  

 

In seeking to move towards a more expansive concept of toxicity, it is time to ask 

what we might learn from the explanatory metaphors used by those living 

alongside extraction: How could an understanding of toxicity, based on the 

premise of bodies submerged and swimming in the toxic substances of their 

lifeworlds, differently inform political, regulatory, or scientific action? All our 

means of assessment—legal, technoscientific, or anthropological—must attend to 

the ways that poverty, history, and profit are woven into the relations of who is 

exposed to toxic substances, and how certain relations are rationalized through 

distinctions between what is natural, cultural, technological, or material (Tuana, 

2008). Toxicity must be refigured—not as a property of chemicals alone—but as 

emerging within particular relations between people and places that hinge on 

everyday experience. 

 

Acknowledgements 
I am immensely grateful for the time that the individuals I refer to as Lidia and 

Camilo took to share with me their experiences living and working in the Amazon. 

I am indebted to their commitment, as well as that of many of their compañeros, 

to making life more liveable. Careful reading and insight were provided on earlier 

versions of this article by Margaret Wiener, Peter Redfield, Dragana Lassiter, 

Paolo Bocci, Vincent Joos, Lindsay Ofrias, as well as two anonymous reviewers. 

 

Notes 
1 All names and identifying features have been changed. 

 
2  His words in Spanish were, “la gente aquí está mucho más desnuda frente a la 

contaminación.”  

 
3 A paujil is a curassow, and guatusa is an agouti.  

 



 

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4 For similar accounts among the Cofán people of Dureno, see Cepek 2018. 

 
5 Lighting waste pits on fire was a means of emptying the pits when they became 

too full and was reportedly common practice from the 1970s to 2000. Burning pits 

is not permitted under current regulations. 

 

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Author Bio 
Amelia Fiske is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History and Ethics 

in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich (Germany). Her work is situated 

at the intersection of cultural anthropology, feminist science and technology 

studies, and environmental humanities. 

 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18820296
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0971721818762895