AGATA MAZZEO, 2020, Dust Inside: Fighting and Living with Asbestos-Related Disasters in Brazil, New York: Berghahn Books. 202 pp., ISBN 978-1-78920-931-0

Keywords: Activism; Disease; Asbestos; Brazil; Bodies

Agata Mazzeo opens the book with the shared feeling of disappointment and indignation among activists over the Eternit trial, the first trial of an AC corporation accused of environmental disaster manslaughter. On these feelings of disappointment and indignation hinges a story of activism around the anti-asbestos movement. A poignant and layered ethnographic work shows how the anti- asbestos movement based in Brazil which is formed in relation with local, national, and international activism. Tracing the connections between Italy’s anti-asbestos movement to Brazil, the author explores the history of migration, material and knowledge transfer between Italy and Brazil. They settle on Osasco, where Eternit built its first asbestos cement plant in Brazil, as a place to explore the lives and relations formed in the production and activism against asbestos.

Asbestos tells the story of bodily debilitation over time. Asbestos is the generic term that indicates a group of fibrous silicate minerals including amphibole, chrysotile, amosite, and crocidolite. It lingers on clothes and laces lungs. It causes a condition of incessant painful suffering caused by asbestos related diseases (ARD), exacerbated by the company’s concealment of their rights. The knowledge created from this embodied experience and the activism stemming from that connects the Brazilian activist movement with a struggle for global health. Through this, the book explores a case of health-based activism from an anthropological perspective centered on the bodily experience of disasters and activism.

The author conducted interviews with professionals in the field of public health (biomedical doctors, epidemiologists, and lung specialists), lawyers, trade unionists and members of NGOs and associations of workers who had been exposed to other toxic substances. Most