The Council on Southeast Asia Studies presents
Alyssa Paredes, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan:
“Air-conditioned People” and their Others: Class and Environmental Litigation in the Southern Philippines.”
In Filipino, naka-aircon or “air-conditioned person” is a pejorative phrase describing someone as apathetic or detached from reality. It captures classed inequalities in access to cooled and sealed environments protected from the outside world. In Davao City, activists engaged in legal battles over chemical drift use the phrase to explain how the indifference of the elite dealt a fatal blow to their court case. This essay uses the idiomatic expression to argue that classed disparities in the experience of the environment bear repercussions for the delivery of the law. While scholarship on the atmospheric uncommons has investigated how the privatization of cooling technologies is the result of state weakness, this work challenges scholars to consider how environmental disparity is the root of bureaucratic inertia as well. It also invites reflection on the air-conditioned condition of modes of field-based research in which even the anthropologist is uninnocent.