Dust inside: Fighting and living with asbestos‐related disasters in Brazil By AgataMazzeo, New York: Berghahn Books. 2020. 202 pp.
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Industrial disasters often unfold silently and remain hidden from public attention.Events such as the Bhopal (India) disaster in 1984 or the Seveso (Italy) disaster in 1976 represent exceptions, where industrial catastrophes became visible and spectacular.The long-term consequences of industrial asbestos production on public health and environment belong to the first category of disasters; slow, creeping, and dispersed across decades.Agata Mazzeo's book Dust Inside.Fighting and Living with Asbestos-Related Disasters in Brazil studies these long-term effects, tracing the human, social, and political afterlives of industrial asbestos production in Osasco (Brazil).Once widely used in construction and other industries until it was banned in most industrialized countries in the 1990s, asbestos fibers are highly carcinogenic and responsible for various cancers; primarily mesothelioma and asbestosis.As asbestos-related diseases typically have latency periods of several decades, asbestos production continues to claim its tolls among those exposed to it.Osasco is an industrial town of 700'000 inhabitants at the outskirts of São Paolo, where thousands of workers were exposed to the asbestos fiber between 1941 and 1993 in one of the biggest asbestoscement factories in Latin America.Originally, most of these workers are from Brazil's rural areas.Dust Inside narrates the ethnographer's encounters with retired workers, anti-asbestos-activists, and their family members.Through interviews, it reconstructs local experiences of living with the embodied deadly legacy and studies health-based grassroot anti-asbestos activism.It explores how the community continues to live with the toxic legacy, decades after asbestos production ceased and the company disappeared.Through the narratives of her interlocutors, Mazzeo explores how toxic exposure becomes part of bodily experience and collective identity.The book revolves around the central question of how people come to inhabit a world where the effects of industrial pollution remain invisible yet constantly present.Mazzeo employs the notion of absence-presence to articulate how disappearance-absence through death-itself becomes the condition through which the enduring and latent reality of the industrial disaster attains visibility and meaning.As such, death, loss, and mourning exceed the realm of the personal and reveal their inherently political dimension.
Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/maq.70058
Author: David Loher
Institution: Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7126266229