Abstract
Situated in neo-democratic globalizing Northeast Brazil, this anthropological study probes the role of ecological context in framing, experiencing, and expressing human distress. Ethnographic interviews, narratives, and "contextualized semantic analysis" reveal the lived experience of childhood respiratory diseases among 22 urban mangrove dwellers. Informants speak an "eco-idiom of respiratory distress" based on a popular "eco-logic", reflecting the harsh reality of "living in dampness". "Higher-up" residents legitimize their feelings of superiority by stigmatizing "lowlanders" as taboo, diseased (with porcine cysticercosis, swine flu) "filthy pigs, stuck in the muck" (atolados na lama). Animalizing inhabitants' identities demotes them to nonpersons. Besides infections, children suffer social stigma, ostracism, and barriers for accessing care. Promoting a "favorable environment" requires reducing ecological risk, challenging class-based prejudice, and restoring human dignity.
Highlights
In Northeast Brazil, with its booming capitalist economy, rapid disordered growth, and new imperfect democracy, respiratory diseases threaten children’s lives 1, as in other globalizing regions 2
Situated in neo-democratic globalizing Northeast Brazil, this anthropological study probes the role of ecological context in framing, experiencing, and expressing human distress
In Fortaleza in 2005, 46.1% of public hospital admissions of children less than four years of age were due to respiratory conditions; 90% of these were for pneumonia
Summary
In Northeast Brazil, with its booming capitalist economy, rapid disordered growth, and new imperfect democracy, respiratory diseases threaten children’s lives 1, as in other globalizing regions 2. 2.4 million) in 2005, 46.1% of public hospital admissions of children less than four years of age were due to respiratory conditions; 90% of these were for pneumonia Cyclical droughts in the state’s interior have fueled migration to the capital, causing its 83 shantytowns (favelas) in 1972 3 to swell to 317 by 2010 Recent migrants crowd into impoverished slums like Gato Morto (literally “Dead Cat”), Favela do Rato (“Rat Slum”), and Jangurussu, a resettlement community on the periphery of a garbage dump. The poorest of the poor, some 69,000 families in 2004, are squeezed into “risk areas” 4, including polluted soggy mangroves castigated by downpours, flash floods, and inundations during the rainy season
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