“The company has brought illness to everything”: The politics of knowing contamination in the Peruvian Amazon

For years, Indigenous communities living within Peru’s most productive oil concession in the Amazon encountered crude oil in their territories and consumed contaminated water and fish, without understanding these phenomena as contamination. This article traces the historical and political process through which contamination became collectively known and conceptualized. This article draws on four years of ethnographic research in accompaniment of four Indigenous federations in the northern Peruvian Amazon. It shows how Indigenous communities came to conceptualize contaminación as an all-encompassing illness spreading through territories, bodies, and relationships. This conceptualization foregrounds relational, epistemic, and intergenerational dimensions of toxic harm that threaten Indigenous collective continuance and exceed dominant toxicological frameworks. The article argues that while knowing contamination enabled new forms of contestation, it also created new dependencies and compelled communities to translate their experiences into regulatory regimes that only offer partial recognition and redress. The case highlights the ambivalence of knowing contamination and presents it not only as a material condition, but also as a transformative process that reshapes relationships, political possibilities, and the terms through which harm is understood and contested.