Elizabeth Hoover is an anthropologist and associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkley, who long claimed to be native (receiving grants and research access under this assumption) but has recently admitted otherwise. She has a PhD in anthropology from Brown University with a focus on Environmental and critical Medical Anthropology.
Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department
“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)
Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118)
“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)
Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)
“Akwesasne residents’ main criticism of the Mount Sinai study was that at its conclusion, the researchers packed up and left, and community members felt they had not received any useful information.” (76)
“As scholars of tribal health risk evaluation Stuart Harris and Barbara Harper explain, among most tribal people, individual and collective well-being comes from being part of a healthy community with access to heritage resources and ancestral lands, which allow community members to satisfy the personal responsibilities of participating in traditional activities and providing for their families.” (96)
“By placing “race/ethnicity” on a list of diabetes causes without qualifying why it is there, the CDC neglects the underlying root cause—that race/ethnicity is often associated also with class, education, levels of stress, and access to health care and fresh foods.” (231)
“Chaufan argues that to counter the focus on the medicalized aspects of diabetes, which has led to the individualization and depoliticization of the issue, a political ecology framework needs to be applied to the disease, one that is concerned with the social, economic, and political institutions of the human environments where diabetes is emerging.39 Such a framework would highlight how diabetes rates among Mohawk people are influenced more by changes in the natural environment and home environments than by genetic makeup.” (231 - 232)
“Understanding community conceptions of this intertwined “social and biological history” is important because, as Juliet McMullin notes, examining the intersections of health, identity, family, and the environment helps to “denaturalize biomedical definitions of health and moves us toward including knowledge that is based on a shared history of sovereignty, capitalist encounters, resistance, and integrated innovation.”61 The inclusion of this knowledge can lead to the crafting of interventions that community members see as addressing the root causes of their health conditions and promoting better health.” (249)
Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements. Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering.
Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.
Individualizing and psychologizing the suicides, ignoring the publicness of the action and the structural causes, took away from its extreme emotional potency. Although it did spawn a good deal of activism and research, the profit margins of Apple continue to grow and Foxconn’s are shrinking.
Automation is ignored - this topic was raised in the Dialectical Anthropology article that responded to something else that Ngai wrote and cited this piece.
Apple ”released its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report in February 2011 to show the remedial measures taken by Foxconn, its largest supplier, in the aftermath of the suicides. However, none of the ‘remedial measures’ addressed such core issues as speed-up, illegal levels of compulsory overtime work, dangerous conditions in the Foxconn factories, the humiliation of workers, and illegal practices associated with the use of student interns as workers.” -p1263
I think the corporations had extremely little regard for the Chinese factory workers, including the higher-ups at Foxconn and the people of Apple and the other companies that contract their manufacturing with Foxconn. It seemed like pure damage control.
Really just denying responsibility hard: Foxconn’s “public responses to workers’ suicides were uniform: the workers who attempted suicides suffered from individual psychological problems such as depression, distress over heavy debts, or family and other personal problems (Li, 2010). Foxconn hired Western and Chinese psychologists and psychiatrists to defend it in the wake of the plague of worker suicides at the company.” p1260
As more specified in news articles, like Heffernan 2013, Foxconn increased wages but increased the quotas by even more. They started making workers sign anti-suicide pledges that said they wouldn’t blame the company or sue or ask for compensation. They retracted that because of outcry but then just put up nets. “Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away.”
In this economist article I can’t access, but that is cited in the Wikipedia article on this topic, they also mentioned that Buddhist monks were brought in for prayer sessions.
The activists “condemned the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government and trade unions to enforce labor law and protection of the migrant workers and hence urged Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions.” p1261 - so they are turning to the brands for labor conditions to improve.