Limits of Knowledge, The by Nancy Arden McHugh

Author:Nancy Arden McHugh [McHugh, Nancy Arden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438457802
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

SITUATING AGENT ORANGE IN THE ALUOI VALLEY

As I stated in Chapter 4, the transactionally situated approach that I advocate does not suggest that we throw out these studies, but that we need a more nuanced understanding of evidence to better understand the effects of dioxin on humans in this community. Unlike practices, such as toxic risk assessment, that initiate their inquiry from the artificial conditions of the laboratory, this approach begins from the conditions of a community and initiates its inquiry from the conditions of the everyday world and the materiality of daily lives. We thus should start inquiry from the situatedness of the community and think about how particular communities and particular members of the community can be affected.

Like all inquiry, a transactional approach initiates from a series of questions. The questions a researcher should ask in the case of Agent Orange in the Aluoi Valley in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam would be: How long were/are the members of this community exposed? How long would it exist in the ecosystem of the Central Highlands of Viet Nam that has particular rainfall patterns, soil, vegetation, and animal life? How does spilled and leaking Agent Orange interact in the environment differently than Agent Orange that was sprayed four decades ago in the 1960s through the early 1970s? What practices and occupations of this community are conducive to exposure of dioxin? Practices include things like diet, food preparation, length of infant and child nursing, bathing, recreation, transportation, and home construction. Furthermore, what does it mean to live with a toxin? Unlike U.S. soldiers who had acute exposure, the Vietnamese have experienced generations of lived exposure. What role does gender play in exposure? Does the higher body fat of women make them more susceptible to dioxin than men? Does the dioxin in their body fat affect ovum, fetal growth, and nursing infants? How are children, the elderly, and the infirmed differently affected by dioxin than healthy adults? Each of these questions is united by the need to understand the transactional nature of these communities to develop an understanding of the effects of dioxin with goal to improve their lives and the lives of future generations.

The material I use to address these questions is generated by Vietnamese, U.S., and Canadian researchers. Some projects were collaborative efforts; others were not. All of the scientific research is from 2001 to 2006.44 The researchers rely heavily on working with the communities not only to get the samples needed but also to understand their ways of living. The Aluoi Valley has been the subject of study because it was heavily sprayed by U.S. forces and there were three U.S. military bases in the valley with large amounts of Agent Orange leakage from barrels left at the end of the American War.

Though it has been labeled an Agent Orange “hot spot” because of heavy aerial spraying, at this point, overall, the region does not contain high levels of dioxin in the soil.45 This is attributed to “tropical rains, erosion, and chemical degradation.

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