Abstract
This chapter describes how coming into contact with the narratives of environmental victims—promoted by the use of photography—helps to develop different forms of reflexivity also useful for imagining and confronting the present environmental crisis. This challenge cannot really be undertaken without developing an active listening attitude towards the voices of lay people (“folk voices”), enhancing depth and complexity, visual imagination, the ability to dream, differently shaped ideas, new words and languages, and new ways of “taking care.”
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Notes
- 1.
On this, see A.A. V.V. (2008).
- 2.
These results are congruent with those obtained by Auyero and Swistun (2009), albeit in a different context.
- 3.
On the use of the case study method, see Becker (2014).
- 4.
On the notion of “thick description,” see Geertz (1973).
- 5.
Carol Weisbrod (1999), reminding us of how music has provided and continues to provide metaphors useful in the legal field, poses a question that resonates with my inquiries: How do the official system, or high culture, view unofficial or folk materials? She underlines that folk culture, often seen as a “deviant” culture, will be ignored or suppressed because uniformity—or the musical unison—is required at the social and institutional level.
- 6.
My notion of “folk criminology” differs partially from the one introduced into the criminological discourse by Alfredo Verde (2008, 2010), who writes about a “folk criminology”: while the latter marks a distance between “naïve” criminology (of the media and of the “spectators”) and learned (scientific) criminology, the notion of “folk green criminology”—applied to the more restricted field of green criminology—enhances the value of the reflexive knowledge belonging to the people implicated in contexts of environmental crimes or conflicts. Certainly, these reflexive narratives are often interwoven with strategies of a defensive kind and with techniques of neutralization. Nevertheless, it seems to me that at least in the environmental field and within the narrative horizon articulated by green criminology, it makes sense to investigate its heuristic potential.
- 7.
Gramsci’s notion of folklore—understood as a phenomenon to be studied and taken seriously (Angioni 2011: 206–213)—could also be useful in exploring environmental crime and harm. Today, in fact, we have to deal with new forms of subordination, with new aspects of “common sense” that directly concern man–environment relationships. The idea of “folk green criminology,” then, is consonant with the central notion of “indigenous knowledge” (see White 2011: 117–121).
- 8.
- 9.
On this point, I have already stated that the aim of my investigation is not to assess the veracity of the narratives and of the significant vocabularies emerging in the course of the interviews or to determine, for example, whether the cases of cancer reported were really caused by the chemical plant and if there were really cases of children born with deformities caused by the pollution. Rather, my goal was to understand the meanings and the experiences that appear in these “contaminated” lives. See Chaps. 2 and 4.
- 10.
We certainly cannot believe that words are a transparent vehicle for reaching “reality” (see Silverman 2000: 822).
- 11.
On these aspects see also Sandberg and Presser (2015).
- 12.
These two ways of “asking” are, indeed, different as they work on levels that are not immediately super-imposable (see Berger 1991 [1980]).
- 13.
These are just some of the significant questions that a visual approach to green criminology can explore. I return to this in Chap. 7.
- 14.
In doing so, my perspective as a social researcher changed during the interviews (see, in particular, Chap. 4).
- 15.
I am not trying to present an alternative to green criminological epistemologies but I wish to propose a visual approach that might enlarge the methodological toolbox of green criminologists.
- 16.
- 17.
In the specific context of Huelva, the victims’ answers were, in a certain way, paradoxical if we consider that “[i]t was in Huelva, in the sunny southern Spanish region of Andalucia in the 1880s, years before the words ‘environment’ and ‘ecology’ became common social coniage, that the first big environmental conflict associated with the name of Rio Tinto took place” (Martínez Alier 2003: 60–61). In the history of Andalusia, such conflict is associated with the massacre of some farmers, smallholders, workers and trade unionists, carried out by the Spanish army on the 4th of February 1888 to quash the protest against the pollution caused by sulphur dioxide (see Martínez Alier 2003: 61).
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Natali, L. (2016). What Do You Mean When You Show and Say This? Where Does It Take You?. In: A Visual Approach for Green Criminology. Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54668-5_5
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