Reckoning with Harm

An empathetic and reflexive ethnography of the expansiveness of the socioenvironmental burdens—physical, emotional, generational—borne by peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon because of the oil industry’s presence in the region. Recognizing the responsibility required to respectfully tell stories about harm, Fiske goes beyond technocratic explanations of regulatory science and law and instead traces the myriad relations through which harm is constituted and evaluated, intimately and expansively. In a search for larger truths that “open up” harm from narrow understandings of culpability and damage, Fiske moves toward a theory of relational accountability—a reckoning—that calls for collective acts of reparation, remediation, and justice.

~Gabriela Valdivia, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, coauthor of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

In her agenda-setting study of oil’s transformation of Amazonian Ecuador, Amelia Fiske brilliantly demonstrates the power of medical anthropology and science studies by combining nuanced ethnography, textual analysis, and theoretical engagement to reveal the harms of industrial toxins as well as their scientific, legal, and regulatory concealment. For anyone interested in understanding the complex question of how we can become certain of the petroleum industry’s impacts on this planet and its peoples, Reckoning with Harm is an essential source that will guide scholarship, activism, and public debate for decades to come. ~Michael L. Cepek, University of Texas at San Antonio, author of Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia

Reckoning with Harm disarms, revealing that the wounded worlds that issue from oil extraction are deeply relational. A keen ethnographer, Amelia Fiske demonstrates in moving prose how the unbounded, yet embodied, effects of oil operations on everyday lives confound techno-industrial-scientific logics that seek to contain contamination.

~Suzana Sawyer, University of California, Davis, author of The Small Matter of Suing Chevron