Tiresias in Flammable Shantytown: Toward a Tempography of Domination¹

Based on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Flammable shantytown, a highly contaminated poor barrio in Argentina, this article examines the links between environmental suffering, social domination, and collective perceptions of time. We show that the ways residents think and feel about (and cope with) pollution are deeply entangled with their perceptions of the past and of the future. We thus argue that an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of contamination should also be a tempography, that is, a thick description of the vernacular sociotemporal order.