In a presidential election year such as this, I as an American citizen am constantly inundated by the displays of political theater that have come to mark the quadrennial spectacle of our democracy: the conventions, photo ops, caricatures, impassioned speeches, and more. 2016 has been unique in that the specter of populism—which, to paraphrase Marx, has long haunted the United States of America—has come to overshadow “politics as usual.” Americans have watched in wonder on television and social media as populists Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders took the nation by storm (albeit with a few major ideological and strategic differences between them). However, with all of the showmanship and wonder surrounding the election of our country’s most powerful individual, it cannot be forgotten that the currents that drive national waves are playing out in unique ways across our country, in communities large and small alike.
During the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to watch these currents unfold at the local level. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ashtabula County, Ohio, with a small group of social justice activists who called themselves the Vincina Protocol Project (VPP). They had a history of engaging in anti-drug activism in their community and were beginning to change fronts to focus on public health and environmental justice. VPP’s leader, Mike, founded the project in response to his experience with his wife Vincina’s diagnosis with and eventual death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). At the beginning of my research tenure, I was both alarmed and confused by the seemingly random directions VPP leaders took: the group was notable for sudden changes in course, and it quickly became clear to me that the ragtag group was stretched thin by other commitments in addition to being largely inexperienced activists.
However, as I dug deeper, I discovered that the motivations for VPP’s actions could only be explained as a series of relationships among people. VPP activism was driven by subjective motivations in their relationships to community members, loved ones, and what they called broadly “politicians.” The attachments have varying degrees of affection associated with them: some attachments are affinitive and loving, while others are antagonistic. For instance, while Vincina served as the inspiration for the project and was used as a means of connecting to residents, an equally important relationship was the one of distrust for local government and corporations. Nonetheless, I consider the entanglements that bind people’s social worlds together to be of the utmost importance in understanding how populist movements—characterized by their rejection of technocratic elites—fruit and frolic in contemporary America (see Nading 2014). The antipathy Ashtabula County residents convey toward governance by science is not limited to environmental justice, which I initially set out to understand. Instead, it is a form of embodied inequality, visible in bodies inscribed by chemicals—drugs and effluents alike. Anthropologists understand how and why certain bodies become inscribed through relations of power among individuals, particularly their affections and affinities for them.
As anthropologists, we refer to this process by which ordinary people engage and attempt to change the political context of their lives as cultural activism (Ginsburg 2004). Mike formed VPP in response to his wife’s death from ALS; the stated mission of VPP has two tenets:
- Assist medical professionals in designing a universal protocol for diagnosing ALS, especially focusing on achieving an early diagnosis. According to my interviews with both the professional caretakers and family members of ALS sufferers, ALS is notoriously difficult to diagnose because it manifests differently for different patients. The symptoms often mimic other less severe and more common illnesses. This means that Mike and Vincina’s experience, in which she was sent to several specialists and given a litany of diagnoses over the course of a few months, is common.
- Mobilize citizens not only of Ashtabula County but also statewide and nationally to become aware of and challenge what VPP activists see as political and economic exploitation by a class of elites. This exploitation is far-reaching in its implications for Ashtabula County residents’ lives. My interviews revealed that not only activists but also non-activists in this area see their lives as dictated by powerful politicians, drug lords, corporations, industrialists, and bankers. Control is exerted literally over and inscribed into the bodies of Ashtabula residents in the form of pollution-borne illness, drug addiction, malnutrition, an aging populace, and other markers of poor health.
You might immediately notice the grandiosity and breadth of each goal, let alone the feasibility of achieving them in tandem. However, my fieldwork revealed an even broader mission than that. As it turns out, many of the individuals who worked on VPP were previously involved in Mike and Vincina’s project called the Conneaut Drug-Free Commission (CDFC). CDFC’s goal was similar to VPP’s: “awaken” residents of Ashtabula County (particularly the city of Conneaut, in which the Helfinstines lived) to the plight of power drug traffickers afflicting the health and bodies of their quaint little town (Media Magic Ohio 2012). And even now, one year later, while VPP has mostly disintegrated due to the daily commitments of those initially on board (including, admittedly, myself) Mike has redirected to fighting a bank foreclosure that stemmed from financial difficulties incurred during Vincina’s illness and death.
There are three inescapable parallels between the two narratives. First, there is a perception of a threat in the form of a chemical intruder; the chemical intruder, whether it is a drug or the byproduct of some industrial process, inflicts harm upon and alters the bodies of those it inhabits against their will (Deluca 2014). Second, the flow of chemicals into and out of the Ashtabula County environment is controlled by power brokers generally outside of the county: local politicians are viewed as puppets to state and national politicians, drug traffickers, and businesspeople, resulting in a perception of geographic alienation from the individuals and decisions that implicate the lives of real people living in this rural area. Third and finally, there is a barrier of uncertainty erected by both the risks involved in the possibility of exposure and the distance between elite technocrats and Ashtabula County residents (Pillsbury-Foster 2012).
The vision of an elite class, geographically isolated from the consequences of their decisions and seemingly unaccountable to the public at large, mimics many of the themes we have been seeing and hearing in this year’s presidential election. Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and (increasingly) Hillary Clinton have all rallied around campaign themes such as rejecting the status quo, kicking unaccountable bureaucrats out, and putting the wants and needs of average working Americans first. Examples of this not only apply to environmental justice and the presidency but also occur in countless other movements like Black Lives Matter. People around the country, not just in Ashtabula County, feel as though the people who are supposed to protect them—police, scientists, politicians, and the list goes on—are not doing so. “Expert knowledge” counts less and less when the experts are seemingly wrong; the decisions made are less trusted when populations feel they have little control and are subjected to bear the consequences (Szerszynski et al. 1996).
I argue that the process by which individuals are alienated from one another in democratic society is driven by fraying interpersonal relationships. Distrust of elites is both symptomatic and causal. At present, these relationships are founded on disagreements and misunderstandings that place much of the public at odds with the scientific class. Part of the nature of ALS is its inherent uncertainty: as yet, scientists do not know what causes it, and so identifying risk factors is uncertain, in addition to the earlier anecdote indicating uncertainty in its diagnosis. VPP, for instance, seemed hitched to a hypothesis that toxins released during algal blooms had caused the illnesses in Ashtabula County. Algal blooms often appear when large amounts of phosphorus leech into freshwater from agricultural and industrial waste. Because both of these economic drivers are present in the county, this idea made sense to VPP. However, when evidence contradicts assumption, the tendency is to fill in those knowledge gaps with some other explanation. To VPP, a lack of algal blooms in Lake Erie near Ashtabula County could be explained by the possibility that algal blooms near Toledo, Ohio, had caused the toxins to travel. Uncertainty translates to unboundedness, which manifests in the form of fear and anxiety.
Populist movements like VPP activism are driven primarily by a belief in power and inequality, namely that power is being concentrated and usurped by a privileged few whose decisions are consequential for many. The perception of inequality transcends typical lines of race, sex, and ethnicity: most of the activists with whom I worked were white, which is reflective of Ashtabula County’s 93 percent white populace (US Census Bureau 2015). Knowing how people come to understand environmental illness is instrumental if we wish to engage our public in behaviors that will result in improved environmental health for both individuals and the landscape. Through my work, I hope to show how what may be conceived as objective scientific knowledge is actually laced with political, social, and emotional understandings about community, nature, and self-determination.
As anthropologists, we have an indispensable tool—cultural relativism—at our hands that allows us to compare and contrast differing strains of thought in order to explain behavior. By approaching science communication as a form of intercultural communication and citizenship, it may be possible for scientists to find ways of bridging this divide so they can work with the public to establish a scientifically informed democracy. I argue that the responsibility for this lies with the scientific class and could have important benefits for our national struggles to address such issues as climate change, water quality, Superfund cleanup, and more. As an activist ethnographer, I share my informants’ conviction that greater participation in the democratic process is necessary to liberate the oppressed; in terms of environmental justice, this can only be possible by disintegrating barriers between the academic and working class and by including the public in the social relations of science making.
The populist waves making their way through our country present anthropologists an opportunity to make our case as drivers of social change who are able to negotiate the lines between experts and laypeople. By conceiving science as a form of culture, it becomes possible to understand why binaries of “right” and “wrong” create opposition and animosity for an average citizen with little to no formal scientific training. Instead, today’s environmental challenges demand the cultural sensitivity and inclusive communication style of anthropologists if we are to work toward public goals that ensure the prosperity and safety of all people.
The author would like to thank Mike Helfinstine and Joshua Smalley for their feedback and contributions in writing this blog post.
Richard Bargielski is a PhD student in applied anthropology at the University of South Florida. He researches environmental justice, democracy, and the anthropology of knowledge in the United States.
References
Bargielski, Richard. 2016. Attachment, Risk, and Entanglement in Ashtabula County, Ohio. M.A. thesis, The Ohio State University.
Deluca, Dave. 2014. “Occurrences of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) High in Conneaut.” Star Beacon, 14 July.
Ginsburg, Faye. 2004. “Foreword.” Pp. ix–xvii in Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America, ed. M. Checker and M. Fishman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Media Magic Ohio. 2012. Meth-dot-Com: A Documentary Film by Media Magic Productions and the Conneaut Drug Free Commission. 4 March.
Milton, Kay. 2002. Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London: Routledge.
Nading, Alex M. 2014. Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pillsbury-Foster, Melinda. 2012. “Ashtabula: A Sacrifice Zone to Greed.” Freedom’s Phoenix, 12 April (accessed 23 February 2016).
Szerszynski, Bronislaw, et al. 1996. “Ecology, Realism and the Social Sciences.” Pp. 1–26 in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. S. Lash et al. London: SAGE.
United States Census Bureau. 2015. “Ashtabula County, Ohio.” Census.gov QuickFacts, 5 December 2015 (accessed 23 February 2016).
United States Environmental Protection Agency. 2016. “What Is Environmental Justice?” EPA Environmental Justice Home, 22 February (accessed 23 February 2016).
Cite as: Bargielski, Richard. 2016. “Where the Grass Is Greener: The Case for Anthropology in an Age of Populist Sentiment.” EnviroSociety, 11 August. www.envirosociety.org/2016/09/where-the-grass-is-greener-the-case-for-anthropology-in-an-age-of-populist-sentiment.