By Lachlan Summers, Ph.D., University of California Santa Cruz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of […]

By Lachlan Summers, Ph.D., University of California Santa Cruz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2022 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the argument they made in their submission and to situate their work in relation to the field of environmental anthropology.

Abstract: In Mexico City, earthquakes make people sick. Referred to as being tocado (touched), the illness might be considered part of the “culture-bound syndrome” known as susto throughout the Americas, where acute experiences of shock – such as being trapped in a shaking building – induce chronic negative health outcomes, like anxiety, migraines, wasting, insomnia, and diabetes. Since the city’s 2017 earthquake*, many residents deal with the long-term health fallout of seismic exposure. Where most studies explain fright sicknesses as a maladaptive individual psychology, an idiom of social distress, or a cultural interpretation of a biomedical affliction, I draw on 27 months’ ethnographic research with earthquake victim advocates across Mexico City to suggest we might better understand tocado’s symptoms by following the fright itself. Because corrupt developers sign off on dangerous construction blueprints and earthly motions never cease, destruction is seldom an absolute condition for buildings in Mexico City. I examine the signs that los tocados discern in the space between relative and absolute destruction: puckering potholes, sidewalk fissures cutting into building foundations, cracks spiralling through apartments, and gaps opening between subsiding buildings. Using feminist STS studies of toxicity to bring together medical and environmental anthropologies, I argue that los tocados’ seismic attunement generates an embodied apprehension of human vulnerability to earthly processes. Instead of collapsing the human and geological scales through material semiotic frameworks, or holding them distinct with concepts like “withdrawnness” or “hyperobjects”, I show how los tocados are sickened by everyday deep time, in a city riven with abyssal scalar difference.

*On Wednesday, September 19, 2017, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Central Mexico. This severe seismic event caused buildings to collapse, trapping many individuals in the debris, and killed approximately 350 people in Mexico City and the states of Puebla, Mexico, and Morelos. 

In the middle of 2018, nine months or so after the city had last shaken with a major earthquake, Elena lay in bed in her apartment, wide awake for what must be the fourth night in a row. “It was as if I could hear the walls,” she would later tell me, noting that such sleepless nights had become routine since the quake. That quake was a magnitude 7.1 shake — comparatively moderate for Mexico, but because it was centered on the capital, one of the deadliest. It had frightened Elena but she was fine, as were her friends and family. Her building too was ostensibly unharmed.

And yet, as time passed, cracks began appearing in the walls of her apartment, deep, alarming fissures that wrapped silently around the room. More troubling was that these cracks extended to the apartments above and below — not isolated, superficial damage, but markers that some hidden thing had gone wrong in the building itself. As if its slow disintegration was too loud, Elena got in the habit of leaving her apartment in the middle of the night, driving to the office where she worked, putting her head on her desk and falling asleep until her colleagues arrived. 

Elena, by her own admission, is “tocada.” “Tocada” or “tocado” translates as “touched” but is often used to mean “crazy,” like the English phrase “touched in the head.” In her 50s, Elena has lived in Mexico City all her life and has experienced many of the city’s tremors and earthquakes. But during the 40 seconds or so that she lay on the floor that September 19, arms wrapped tightly around her head, something changed in her. Since then, she has been affected by a peculiar range of health issues: She has lost more than 30 pounds, she is plagued by dizzy spells and she suffers long bouts of insomnia. Though years have now passed, she told me that for her, the earthquake never really ended.

Rather than understanding this as a simple earthquake-induced PTSD, I have been tracing for the last few years the knowledge and dispositions that fear generates in Mexico City, visiting buildings that are slowly falling, conducting dozens of transect walks with people who consider themselves tocado, and documenting how their fear materialises through the city. What I realised was that people who are tocado are not just traumatised by their earthquake experience and fearful of future seismicity, but are compelled to notice the ongoing signs of a building’s decline–cracks, fissures, subsidence, potholes–that point toward the slow geophysical and infrastructural processes that might, one day, bring their building down. 

Being attuned to–and sickened by–the geophysical and material dynamics that extend an earthquake long after the event itself suggests to me that people who are tocado have developed something like a geological sensorium, in which–in visceral, embodied ways–they have learned to apprehend the material presence of deep time in the city. Being attuned of a building’s gradual transformation from a site of domestic security to an indifferent geological entity, being tocado is less something like an earthquake-induced PTSD, and something more akin to an earthly seasickness induced by how people perceive and experience through their bodies and senses the geophysical kinaesthetics of city, its geological movements, and its process of change and decay. 

Deep Time Exposures forms part of my dissertation project Mexico City is Two Hours from Mexico City, examining Mexico City’s 2017 earthquake–which uncannily fell on the anniversary of the most destructive earthquake in the city’s history–to explore the relationship between historical time and deep time. At its most abstract level, this dissertation is about the relationship between time and history; at its most concrete, it’s about how that relationship is embodied. While deep time is often described as something that exceeds perception, residents of Mexico City point toward how inhuman processes take root in cities, buildings, and bodies, and are actively creating the conceptual apparatuses that its presence demands. By examining how people make sense of processes whose scales prevent them from being unequivocally known, my research suggests that anthropologists can study “the geological” through careful attention to the non-discursive knowledge people generate as they conceive of themselves and their city within deep time. 

This post is part of our series, 2022 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists.

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