This timely and engaging volume contributes to a number of important academic and public debates. Based on an ethnographic study of a poor neighbourhood on the edge of the city of Buenos Aires, it speaks to the literature on urban poverty, marginality, risk, environment and activism, to name the most salient themes. The book aims to convey the complexity of the context and capture the experiences of the inhabitants of ‘Flammable’ (Villa Inflamable) as a scholarly contribution that will also stimulate public awareness about environmental suffering and its entanglement with poverty and urban marginality.

The book provides a thoughtful and well-documented account of the everyday lives of the people of Flammable. The settlement is located in the Matanza–Riachuelo basin, close to the centre of Buenos Aires, in an area that older residents recall as having been rich in flora and fauna, a bountiful source of food and a place of beauty and enjoyment. The vivid narratives and the photos taken by informants and researchers testify to the profound changes that have taken place there. These must be understood in relation to the evolution of the industrial and petrochemical hub of Dock Sud, which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century – Shell, for example, established a refinery there in 1931. The hub has expanded over a vast area in which an unknown number of enterprises operate, largely unhindered by laws and regulations. The resident population has also grown, in spite of the increasingly hostile environment. Poverty and unemployment have driven people to Flammable and trapped them there in an uneasy coexistence between the recent shanty-town settlers and the longer-term residents who see them as a source of danger and pollution.

The combination of toxicity and social and economic deprivation has drawn attention to Flammable and beckoned outsiders and experts such as politicians, the media, lawyers and social workers. These outsiders have generally shown only a sporadic and instrumental interest in the place, leading the researchers and residents to ponder on their fate and how they are subject to the vagaries of power. At the same time, attention from the media and other outsiders has promoted the circulation of a homogeneous, ‘community’ discourse about pollution and affected bodies. While taking this discourse seriously, the authors reveal the underlying diversity of views, experiences and interpretations about the causes and effects of toxicity and show how, despite the seriousness of the situation, the routinisation of everyday life displaces or postpones action on the issue. They also document the perspectives of outsiders to produce an account that reflects the fragmentary and incomplete quality of all narratives and interpretations regarding Flammable.

The text offers an abundance of excerpts taken from interviews, field notes and diaries. These tell us something about the research process as well as the outcome, regarding the quality of the relations established in the field. The collaboration of the two researchers is relevant here, as are their unique personal characteristics: Auyero is a tenured sociologist working in the United States, while Swistun is a recent anthropology graduate from the University of La Plata, with strong personal roots in Flammable. Both provide a candid and thoughtful account of their experience in Flammable and its enduring effects on them.

From their detailed ethnographic account, the authors raise a crucial question: why don't the residents work collectively to seek redress for their plight? They suggest several factors that might account for the absence of a united response. There are diverse and contradictory views regarding the source of the contamination and therefore who should be held responsible (some accuse Shell, while others claim it is ‘the best’ company), or what might constitute a satisfactory solution. Rumours, contradictory reports, broken promises and hopes of relocation and financial compensation also militate against finding common goals. These factors collude with poverty and powerlessness to produce an effect of ‘hopeful submission’ and the delegation of responsibility to more powerful actors. There are also loyalties, roots that tie individuals and families to the place and the people. The effects of time are relevant too. There was no specific, identifiable event that could provide an explanation for the problem; instead, the effects of toxicity have reached Flammable slowly, by stealth, invisibilised and unrecognised until revealed and named by outsiders (such as the Japanese International Cooperation Agency report and the tests on children that detected high levels of lead in their bloodstreams).

Ultimately, what Das refers to as the ‘illegibility of the state’ and the inability or unwillingness of state actors to intervene effectively is identified as a key source of the confusion experienced by residents and the main factor in the reproduction of social suffering in Flammable. This is an important point that could be developed in important ways. The authors show that the law and the government are simultaneously perceived as the enemy and the only source of hope. We also know that some state actors have intervened and that some families have been relocated. These circumstances demand an analysis that takes into account the historicity of state institutions and policy and that addresses the state from a more nuanced perspective that can account for the fragmented and contradictory interventions of state actors. This also relates to the pressing issue of the power relations that obtain between states and global economic actors such as large corporations.

This rich ethnography offers a complex account of the expression of power relations in a specific place and time. It shows how confusion, partial knowledge, ambivalence and ambiguity shape the ways in which the inhabitants come to terms with their embodied experiences of toxicity and its causes. The vivid portrayal of Flammable connects us to the place and its people and leads us to reflect on the key question at the heart of the book, that of how domination works and how it is experienced. It also offers us ways to think about how scholarly work can contribute, effectively and enduringly, to the work of challenging its effects.