This is the introductory article to the special issue ‘Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene’, published by Medicine Anthropology Theory in 2021. The authors question the very concept of Anthropocene as it has initially been conceived in the scientific milieu, and argue that more than a geological-biological event, the Anthropocene is a social and political experience. Therefore, its analysis demands a conjoint critical study of ecological catastrophes, extreme events, citizenship, health, socio-environmental risks, and economic ‘development’. 

By understanding a community’s medical system we are able to see their body ontology and how they live in relation to the world. Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Wixárika communities the author proposes that by centring Indigenous sociality that is more-than-human, we can reconceive our planetary relationships in the broadest sense.

Bringing together ethnographic research with Mbya Guarani communities from Argentina’s Atlantic Forest and data from a microbiome expedition to the Amazonian human and non-human communities this paper argues that Indigenous people have been viewed as potential reservoirs for novel probiotics and proposes that we must challenge the racialised and colonial histories of life and geological sciences where such practices continue to be reproduced.

This paper draws on research in Mexico and Italy to deconstruct embodiments and social histories of toxicity and reflect on the commercial determinants of health and their impacts on wellbeing.  Through a focus on food and water consumption in regions at the margins or borders defined as ‘toxic wastelands’ Calestani illuminates the multi-dimensional power structures of the global economy that underscore the Anthropocene.

Rizpah Hollowell writes of how ThyssenKrupp’s steel mill in Rio de Janeiro employed public relations language and ‘corporate social responsibility’ to hide the violence it exerted on surrounding landscapes, human and non-human neighbours that had become covered in a fine metallic dust. Centring on the less visible dynamics of power this article examines how emotions can shape experiences of environmental conflict, form coalitional politics and contribute to the very landscapes of the Anthropocene.

In recent years the Tijuana riverbed has been inhabited by homeless and drug using communities, many deported from the U.S. In response, rehabilitation of the canal and forced drug rehabilitation have been conjoined. In this paper Martinez takes the deployment of the term ‘rehabilitation’ targeting both homeless deportees and the canal as an opportunity to consider how the concurrent disciplining of landscapes and human populations has been a central and evolving feature of the Anthropocene.

Central American sugarcane plantations have become ‘hotspots’ of chronic kidney disease (CKD), with work-related heat stress the factor most strongly associated with the disease. Drawing on ethnographic research on CKD in Nicaragua and a close reading of scientific and policy documents, this article frames the plantation as a health ‘hotspot’ in three ways: as a site of intensive environment altering investment, sites of public health scrutiny and as hotspots of political action.

Plantations are understood as examples of ‘modular simplifications’ in ‘patchy Anthropocene’ landscapes, where attempts to reduce diversity may have feral social and ecological effects as diseases and toxins spread. In Uruguay soybean expansionist processes correlate with an increased use of pesticides. Based on an ethnographic study (2016–2018) carried out in the main Uruguayan agricultural region, this Research Article analyses the experiences of toxicity among agricultural workers and rural inhabitants in the soybeanisation context.

In Mato Grosso do Sul, COVID-19 brought a substantial increase in the disease burden of Indigenous people, in a context where maternal and child health, nutritional and parasitic diseases, were already higher than in the non-Indigenous population. The synergistic interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 virus, other pathogens, and biosocial factors resulted in what Singer (2010) terms ‘syndemics’. Efforts by Indigenous Peoples to address the pandemic reveal ‘a clash’ between Indigenous and Colonial cosmographies with regard to notions of the body and health.

Taking COVID-19 as ‘a paradigmatic example of an Anthropocene disease’ and drawing on ethnographic research gathered in Brazil and Mexico during vaccination campaigns with Indigenous Peoples, this paper reviews and analyses the scope and limits of Latin American critical epidemiology in addressing Anthropocene health. The authors make the case that the relatively differential focus on political economy, political ecology, and colonialism/coloniality in Latin American critical epidemiology, alongside the attention to non-western disease experiences and understandings, constitute a counterpoint to biomedical and specific ‘Euro-American’ epidemiological approaches.

The Anthropocene is a cosmopolitical question. It manifests in the form of microplastics and toxicities in the flesh of people and the Earth. It is found in streams, rivers and oceans, and in the diseases caused by predatory relations with forests, such as malaria. It is more than human footprints left on the planet’s crust and in its geo-thermodynamics; it is a concern integral to different modes of existing and relating to vitalities, both human and other-than-human. It is also a question of reproductive justice. In this piece, the author presents ethnographic data showing how the restricted access to Indigenous territories and their devastation are intrinsically related to the medicalisation of Indigenous women’s reproductive and sexual health. “The territory is our life, our body, our spirit”: this and similar statements are found in the outcome document of the first Indigenous Women’s March held in Brazil, in August 2019, and assertively expresses the conception of life for these collectives.

In this paper, reflections and experiences of Guarani Mbya’s interlocutors are reunited to address the topic of vulnerability in the pandemic context and beyond it. Particularly, Covid-19 and other illnesses are thematized based on reflections on spaces and the relationality they enact (involving people, spirits and other agents or materialities) through the flows of the winds. Our interlocutors brought up issues that have crossed them since primordial times. However, during the pandemic period, these questions became more poignant within its political, sanitary, and environmental adversities. As part of a collective investigation engaging indigenous and non-indigenous, we also elaborate our argument from guarani questioning about individualized and indiscriminate distancing. Instead of “staying in your own home”, the village’s collective life was strengthened in parallel to distancing from the urban centers, rising reflections about vulnerability management in these spaces.