Breathing Free: Chronicity, Pollution, and Imaginaries of Good Work in India

This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity, and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46 (1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. This paper examines how Delhi's air pollution crisis and its compounding impacts on residents' health disrupt normative ideas of work, generating a new hierarchy of values that centers the ability to breathe freely. Based on ethnographic research with two virtual activist groups, this study traces how white-collar professionals engage in labor-related activism that, while limited in scope, carries the emancipatory potential to subvert dominant preferences within late capitalist structures in the Global South. My interlocutors navigate shared challenges brought on by exposure to pollutants, including breathlessness, fatigue, asthma, headaches—ailments that have become chronic, recurring with the rise of pollution levels. Drawing on the anthropology of work and environmental anthropology, this paper shows how impaired bodies become an extension of the toxic landscape, and how the embodied experience of work leads to the desire to breathe freely through a reimagining of economic participation, as individuals seek alternative professional trajectories, advocate for workplace adaptations, and, in some cases, relocate in pursuit of cleaner environments. As my interlocutors find themselves reordering perceived values at work, it reveals how chronicity and crisis can disrupt normative economic practice and create distinct visions of a good life.