{"title":"Lead as pharmakon: IQ, violence, and the racialization of a toxic element.","authors":"Stefanie Toney Graeter","doi":"10.1111/maq.70009","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>By tracking lead toxicology and politics from the United States to Peru, this article shows how contemporary discourses of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline and paint, lead poisoning remains a systemic health problem in marginalized communities throughout the world. Viewed as a \"social pharmakon,\" lead's ongoing \"cures\" outweigh current social valuations of its systemic physiological harm in racially devalued communities. While scientific research linking lead to decreased IQ and increased violent behavior has attempted to animate broader public interest in the inequitable spread of lead exposure, it does so by reanimating racist tropes of biogeographic inferiority. Rather than dehumanizing lead-exposed individuals and communities, narratives of lead intoxication must integrate its immediate social and material harms in specific locales and as a symptom of systemic racial injustice at a global scale.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70009"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70009","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
By tracking lead toxicology and politics from the United States to Peru, this article shows how contemporary discourses of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline and paint, lead poisoning remains a systemic health problem in marginalized communities throughout the world. Viewed as a "social pharmakon," lead's ongoing "cures" outweigh current social valuations of its systemic physiological harm in racially devalued communities. While scientific research linking lead to decreased IQ and increased violent behavior has attempted to animate broader public interest in the inequitable spread of lead exposure, it does so by reanimating racist tropes of biogeographic inferiority. Rather than dehumanizing lead-exposed individuals and communities, narratives of lead intoxication must integrate its immediate social and material harms in specific locales and as a symptom of systemic racial injustice at a global scale.
期刊介绍：
Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health publishes research and theory in the field of medical anthropology. This broad field views all inquiries into health and disease in human individuals and populations from the holistic and cross-cultural perspective distinctive of anthropology as a discipline -- that is, with an awareness of species" biological, cultural, linguistic, and historical uniformity and variation. It encompasses studies of ethnomedicine, epidemiology, maternal and child health, population, nutrition, human development in relation to health and disease, health-care providers and services, public health, health policy, and the language and speech of health and health care.
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号
