The Site of Lead: Social Poisoning in El Salvador

Authors

  • Hugo De Burgos University of British Columbia

Keywords:

El Salvador, lead contamination, social poisoning, corporate irresponsibility, social suffering, medical bad faith

Abstract

This article explores lead contamination, or plumbism, as both an illness and a symptom of social suffering caused by unscrupulous corporations operating with the complicity of corrupt governments and backed up by medical bad faith in El Salvador. I explore how the biomedical model of disease (as a quantifiable phenomenon) is used politically to contest and delegitimize victims of plumbism, privileging economic progress over human welfare. I examine the tensions between official narratives and people's narratives of illness and their relationship to an ideology of industrial development and economic prosperity in El Salvador.

Downloads

Downloads

Published

2015-04-30

How to Cite

De Burgos, H. (2015). The Site of Lead: Social Poisoning in El Salvador. Anthropologica, 57(1), 185–198. Retrieved from https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/515

Issue

Vol. 57 No. 1 (2015): Kinship Travel: Relatedness through International Tourism and Travel Networks

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Hugo De Burgos

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to Anthropologica agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.