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Grappling with lead in Mexico City

Prof Elizabeth Roberts
How is lead related to social, economic, biological and technical processes in certain communities? Elizabeth Roberts shows us that lead influences culture and daily life in working-class neighbourhoods in Mexico City. However, the health problems are attributed by the interlocutors not to lead toxicity, as public health advocates, but to pesticides. Through “bioethnography”, a method that combines approaches from the social sciences such as ethnography and the life sciences such as long-term biomedical studies, this seminar draws our attention to the inequalities embodied by disadvantaged groups in Mexico City, such as the toxicity ingrained in food due to the abusive use of agrotoxics.
Elizabeth F.S. Roberts is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who investigates scientific and public health knowledge production and its embodied effects in Latin America and the United States. She currently collaborates with engineers and environmental health scientists in the United States and Mexico as part of two ongoing team-based projects in Mexico City that she directs: “Mexican Exposures: A Bioethnographic Approach to Health and Inequality” and “Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City” (NESTSMX). In these projects, she and her team trace the looping social, economic, biological, and technical processes that shape everyday life, health, and inequality in working class neighborhoods. One of the key aims of Professor Roberts’ current work is the development of bioethnography, a method that combines social and life sciences approaches in order to make better knowledge about health and inequality. Dr. Roberts is also the director of the Mexico’s Ethnographic Coding Lab where she trains undergraduates in qualitative coding methods using materials from her two multi-disciplinary collaborative projects in Mexico City.

Learning points

  • How important are clay pots in local culture?
  • What are these traditional clay pots accused of?
  • What do lower-class working women in Mexico City say about the toxicity responsible for the increase in cancer cases among their acquaintances?
  • What is the challenge for anthropology and public health when dealing with customs that are culturally localised but which, in the eyes of biomedical science, cause intoxication?

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