Movements and Militant Memory. Ethnography and Anti-Asbestos Activism in Brazil

The thesis is based on an ethnographic fieldwork of ten months conducted in Osasco (São Paulo, Brazil) where I researched the practices of activism undertaken by the members of the Associação Brasileira dos Expostos ao Amianto-ABREA [Brazilian Association of Exposed to Asbestos]. The movement for the global asbestos ban, on one hand, and the asbestos market, on the other, transverse multiple transnational trajectories. I followed the one connecting Casale Monferrato in Italy (context of my previous study) and Osasco in Brazil, where I collected the data discussed in this thesis. Both Casale Monferrato and Osasco have been sites of the largest Eternit asbestos-cement plants in Europe and Latin America, respectively. Asbestos minerals are carcinogenic, and exposure to their fibres can cause serious and fatal diseases. In Italy, asbestos has been prohibited since 1992, while in Brazil asbestos extraction and use is still permitted. From an anthropological perspective focused on the practices and discourses of the body, I consider the relationship between the experiences of the social and individual suffering provoked by the global asbestos market, and the sufferers’ engagement with the activism. My hypothesis is that, in certain contexts, social actors involved in a―bodily―suffering experience can feel the urgency to engage with practices of socio-political actions to cope with the crises triggered by that suffering and that upset one’s world (physical, social, and affective). This engagement, motivated by the actor’s personal reasons, can have a relevant impact on the socio-political context (local, national, and international), even beyond the actor’s awareness and volition. I explored the practices, and discourses characterising the activism performed by the sufferer-activists, ABREA members in Osasco. Their stories of life, work, suffering, and activism are illustrative of the processes through which the transnational dynamics of asbestos-related disasters are locally experienced and contested.