Siting the un-sitable: Conceptualising air through contamination across two remote field sites

This article explores how the atmosphere may allow for collaborative connections within and across two distant places, emerging as pollution in Delhi, India, and as wind in Chubut, Argentinian Patagonia. When ethnographically situated, these two versions of air remain incommensurable and yet coexist in a dynamic planetary atmosphere. In order to make sense of our individual field sites in relation to each other and the political ramifications of air in both, we lean on contamination as the conceptual tool of influential exchange. We argue that to observe the contrasting manifestations of air, what they achieve and how they seep into each other through our work is to shed light on unequal enactments of the atmospheric.