Today is Better than Tomorrow: Repair and Toxicity in Iraq

ABSTRACT

What is most violating about military environmental manipulation is not the initial shock of damage, but rather the incapacitation of recovery from that shock. In Iraq, the US military introduced less-than-lethal counterinsurgency tactics to subdue populations not only at gunpoint, but also along the soft contours of everyday bodies; through the frequencies of mass emotion; and through re-arrangement of living and life-giving relations among humans, plants, animals, and molecules. Here, war is visible as an ongoing toxic structure rather than as an event with an aftermath: lives only endure via antagonistic, unworkable, and disruptive relations that incapacitate thriving. 

During ethnographic fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 with Anbari families in Iraq, I learned that social and environmental antagonism is not only a barrier to survival; it is also a route. Amidst irreparable damage, projects of repair are no longer efforts to restore things to a former, non-toxic condition. Instead, repair is a mode of survival that embraces undesirable outcomes as a core feature of endurance. 

When “today is better than tomorrow,” repair makes no gesture toward a hopeful future or a nostalgic past. Rather, it rearranges the ethical stakes of living and dying, right now. Through glimpses at daily life amidst ecological and social collapse, this talk foregrounds the theories of Iraqis who are cultivating a politics of biomedical, social and ecological repair in the face of bleak prospects.

BIO: 

I am a cultural anthropologist who studies the materiality of structural violence, especially ecological arrangements between living and nonliving things. My purpose is to sharpen resistance strategies that target the vulnerable nexus between coercive power and the physical world. 

My most recent project explores the environmental impacts of less-than-lethal counterinsurgency in Iraq. My book project, Counter-resurgency: The Ecology of Coercion, examines how displaced Anbari farmers in Iraq survive war-made landscapes designed to preclude possibilities for organized resistance. Working through five modes of coercion (preemption, divide-and-conquer, suspense, abstraction, and counter-resurgence), this ethnography follows militarized relations among humans, ghosts, plants, animals and molecular agents. My next project approaches the joint corporate-military enterprise of cement production in post-invasion Iraq, and how the cement industry enforces global regimes of race, class, and extraction. 

I have a joint appointment as Assistant Professor at Purdue University, and Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Davis.