Overview

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity. Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators' work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes when living in a toxic world.

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9781477327777

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Reviews

Reckoning with Harm paints a vivid and distressing picture of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the entwining of oil and life has left an enduring impact on both the environment and the people who call this place home . . . The lessons within this book are immeasurable. * Latina Republic *

Reckoning with Harm paints a vivid and distressing picture of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the entwining of oil and life has left an enduring impact on both the environment and the people who call this place home . . . The lessons within this book are immeasurable. * Latina Republic * Reckoning with Harm is an exceptional study of the production of socioecological suffering arising from predatory oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon...[Fiske] skillfully weaves scholarship across disciplines, presenting a novel exploration of how such forms are being attended to, verified, and contested...[Reckoning with Harm] poses crucial questions about responsibility and the long shadows of resource extraction while offering nuanced analysis of the complexities. A must-read for students and scholars of Latin American history and environmental injustice in contexts of resource extraction. * CHOICE *

Author Information

Amelia M. Fiske is a senior research associate at the Institute for History and Ethics in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

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