Elizabeth Roberts (2025) offers a richly detailed ethnography of how people in working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City live with toxicity, especially with lead that seeps from traditional cooking pots. Roberts conceptualizes this porous, multisensory ecology as a “Great Swirl” and criticizes bioscientific models of toxicity that treat exposure as enclosed, isolable, and measurable within bounded bodies. Her ethnography shows something more powerful than environmental mixture. It shows health as continuous multimediation: the ongoing coordination of sensing, being-with, making, dwelling, and signing across multiple temporal scales.
This essay offers two conceptual extensions of Roberts’ argument. First, what Roberts calls the Great Swirl can be specified as a multimediated process of living-valuing-remediating (Ecks 2025). Second, the “enclosed exposure” model of toxicology can be understood as a specific instance of modernity’s dominant value cosmology: transactive dualism (Ecks 2025). This cosmology imagines the world as composed of discrete entities that enter into measurable transactions. Bodies become containers, chemicals become inputs, exposure becomes a transaction, and remediation becomes the removal or substitution of a harmful item. Roberts’ ethnography shows why this ontology fails. Health in Mexico City is not organized around isolated bodies receiving isolated exposures. It is coordinated through dense, recursive relations among taste, memory, kinship, material practice, urban infrastructure, national history, and household care.
Living Value Theory begins from the claim that life is coordinated through five irreducible mediations. These are multisensorial embodiment, being-with, multimaterial making, multiversal dwelling, and multisymbolic signing. Health is the temporary and always precarious coordination of these mediations. It is most fully present when it does not have to announce itself. A person does not usually notice health as a proposition. Health is the quiet capacity to cook, eat, remember, move, sleep, care, breathe, and belong without these acts becoming objects of urgent reflection. Disease, toxicity, and danger appear when coordination becomes difficult. They force living processes upward through levels of recursivity: from seamless participation, to felt misalignment, to symbolic articulation, to institutional classification, and finally to expert meta-interpretation.
Roberts’ ethnography is especially valuable because it does not begin with abstract toxicological categories and then look for local responses. It begins with the lived difficulty of coordinating health in a world where the sources of harm are also sources of value. Lead-glazed trastes de barro can be dangerous, but they also hold warmth, produce flavor, carry memory, and sustain relations across generations. They are not simply contaminated utensils. They are mediators of life. Their danger cannot be separated from their value without damaging the very world in which that value is lived.
The first mediation is sensing. Food cooked in lead-glazed clay pots tastes better and retains warmth longer. This is not an incidental preference layered over a more basic toxicological reality. Taste, warmth, smell, texture, weight, and timing are part of how health is known. When Beatriz compares aluminum pots with clay ones, she is making a precise embodied judgment. Aluminum may appear safer within a chemical exposure model, but it fails other criteria of livability. It heats differently, feels different, cooks differently, and participates differently in the meal. Toxicology can measure lead leaching, but it cannot by that measurement alone grasp why a pot matters. The multisensorial field is already a field of valuation.
The second mediation is being-with. Roberts shows that health in these households is not an individual possession. It is lived relationally. Beatriz’s family confronts toxicity as a family, not as a set of isolated bodies calculating individual exposure. The pots appear at shared meals, special occasions, and moments of intergenerational memory. They help sustain belonging between grandparents, parents, children, rural origins, and urban life. This relational field changes the meaning of risk. A biomedical model that counts exposure per body cannot understand why a family may continue to use a risky object selectively, ceremonially, or affectionately. Such use is not ignorance. It is a relational calibration of value under conditions where every available choice carries some form of harm.
The third mediation is making. Trastes de barro are made things, but they are not inert objects. They participate in cooking, storage, flavor, memory, and care. They form households and are formed by them. Years of use, breakage, repair, replacement, and inheritance give them a practical density that no “safe swap” can simply replace. Enamelware, aluminum, Teflon, and clay do not merely differ in chemical composition. They make different forms of life possible. When NGOs propose replacing clay pots with supposedly safer alternatives, they introduce more than a technical solution. They introduce a new value cosmology. They assume that the relevant transaction is between a hazardous object and a vulnerable body, and that health will improve when the object is replaced. Roberts’ ethnography shows why this can fail. A substitute that does not hold heat, produce flavor, carry memory, or sustain ritual continuity may reduce one measurable exposure while damaging several mediations at once.
The fourth mediation is dwelling. Beatriz’s family lives in relation to Mexico City, Guerrero, national infrastructures, polluted air, food systems, sewage, traffic, agriculture, and histories of migration. The lead pot is not enclosed within the kitchen. It connects city and countryside, ancestors and descendants, earth and household. Roberts’ descriptions of pesticides, NAFTA, US hegemony, yellow corn, burned earth, and swelling rats extend toxicity far beyond the object. Dwelling is not a passive background. It is a lived arrangement of place, history, atmosphere, infrastructure, and power. Environmental health science often treats dwelling as a location where exposure occurs. Roberts shows dwelling as one of the mediations through which exposure becomes meaningful, dangerous, tolerated, resisted, or transformed.
The fifth mediation is signing. Beatriz tells stories about lead, family, nationhood, memory, loss, and inheritance. The trastes signify absent relatives, older ways of cooking, giant mole pots, and what has been taken away. Symbols are not decorative additions to material health. They are part of how health is coordinated. Roberts’ discussion of the Winnie-the-Pooh meme used by a Mexican NGO to promote safe cookware is revealing because the meme fails at precisely this level. It treats communication as the delivery of a simple message: some pots are unsafe, safer alternatives are available. But the symbol arrives without adequate relation to the mediations it seeks to reorganize. It does not speak from within the household’s sensory, relational, material, and dwelling world. It therefore becomes symbolic overreach: an intervention that assumes a sign can reorganize life because it has named a risk.
The recursive structure matters here. At L1, the family cooks, eats, remembers, and belongs through ordinary coordination. At L2, toxicity appears as disturbance: something feels wrong, worrying, harmful, uncertain. At L3, people articulate this disturbance through stories, comparisons, memories, suspicions, and judgments. At L4, institutions introduce stabilizing categories: safe versus unsafe, exposed versus unexposed, compliant versus noncompliant, traditional versus modern. At L5, experts produce meta-accounts of exposure, risk, education, policy, and intervention. The danger arises when L4 and L5 forms return downward and attempt to overwrite L1 coordination without understanding it. The household is then judged by categories that fail to register the living processes they classify.
This is where transactive dualism becomes crucial. The enclosed exposure model imagines health as a transaction between a bounded body and a hazardous substance. A dose enters a body. A risk is calculated. An intervention removes, blocks, or compensates for the exposure. This is an immensely powerful form of symbolic compression. It can save lives when the domain is sufficiently narrow. But in Roberts’ ethnography, the model expands beyond its proper range and becomes ontological. It begins to define what counts as health, what counts as harm, what counts as evidence, and what counts as a remedy. In doing so, it renders multimediated life illegible.
Transactive dualism structures many modern institutions. In law, it imagines responsibility as assignable between discrete parties. In bureaucracy, it imagines cases as classifiable units. In economics, it imagines value as transaction between agents. In toxicology, it imagines exposure as contact between a bounded organism and a measurable contaminant. These forms are not identical, but they share the same underlying cosmology: life becomes intelligible when it is divided into units, transactions, inputs, outputs, liabilities, and remedies. Roberts’ ethnography matters because it shows the violence of this cosmology in an intimate register. The pot is not merely a source of lead. It is a mediator of taste, memory, relation, place, and care. To classify it only as a hazardous object is to amputate the world in which it lives.
This does not mean that lead is harmless, nor that toxicology is wrong to measure it. The point is more exacting. Lead toxicity is real, but the reality of lead does not exhaust the reality of health. The danger of the enclosed exposure model lies in its claim to sufficiency. It assumes that once exposure has been measured, the essential problem has been grasped. Roberts shows that this is false. Measurement captures one mediation at one recursive level. It does not capture the work of living with danger across mediations.
The same problem appears in the language of intervention. A policy, a pot swap, a chelation treatment, or a health education campaign can be imagined as a discrete remedy. But remedies in lived health are rarely discrete. They are tested through recursive remediation. A new pot changes flavor, time, labor, sociality, memory, and domestic authority. A new warning changes self-understanding, shame, anxiety, and relations with experts. A new policy changes trust in institutions. A new biomedical metric may make some harms visible while making other harms harder to defend. Every intervention enters a living field and is revalued there.
This is why refusal becomes analytically central. Beatriz’s family and others do not simply accept or reject expert advice. They selectively adopt, reinterpret, delay, modify, and domesticate it. Such responses should not be reduced to ignorance, resistance, or cultural attachment. They are forms of mesocosmic boundary maintenance. The household protects the coordinations through which life remains livable, even when those coordinations include danger. Refusal here is often quiet, practical, and partial. A pot may be used less often, used only for certain dishes, kept for memory, replaced for daily cooking, or defended against condescending education campaigns. These are not failures of compliance. They are recursive acts of valuation.
The temporality of this process is equally important. Toxicological models often operate through exposure time, accumulation, and dose-response relations. These temporalities matter, but they are not the only ones in play. The sensory time of cooking is immediate. The relational time of family meals is recurrent. The material time of pots extends through years of use and breakage. The dwelling time of migration and environmental degradation extends across generations. The symbolic time of national loss and memory may extend even further. Conflict arises because these temporalities do not align. A public health campaign often speaks in urgent future risk. The household lives within layered temporal obligations: feed the child now, honor the grandparents, preserve taste, avoid harm, remember Guerrero, survive Mexico City. Health is negotiated across these uneven clocks.
This temporal differentiation prevents a sentimental reading of the trastes. The pots do not simply represent tradition against modernity. They gather incompatible temporal demands. They can nourish and poison. They can sustain memory and endanger children. They can preserve belonging and provoke anxiety. This is precisely why Roberts’ ethnography is so powerful. It refuses the flattening comfort of a single answer. Multimediation does not harmonize everything. It reveals why health often consists in managing misalignment rather than achieving integration.
This also clarifies the limits of complexity language. One might say that Roberts shows health to be complex. That is true but insufficient. Complexity often means that many factors interact. Multimediation means something stronger: different ontological mediations, with different temporalities and recursive structures, are entangled in the same lived process. Taste is not a variable of the same kind as blood lead level. Kinship is not a variable of the same kind as cookware composition. Memory is not a variable of the same kind as dose. They can be related, but they cannot be rendered commensurable without loss. The failure of enclosed exposure models lies in treating multi-mediated life as if it were merely multi-factorial.
Roberts’ “grappling” is therefore best understood as recursive revaluation across mediations. People do not live inside the Great Swirl as passive recipients of mixture. They evaluate, compare, narrate, repair, substitute, defend, and adjust. They move between L1 coordination, L2 unease, L3 articulation, and encounters with L4 and L5 institutional categories. Their health is not an enclosed state. It is a living capacity to continue remediation under polluted, unequal, historically burdened conditions.
The concept of biocommensuration (Ecks 2022) helps name this process. Value is not imposed from outside by price, policy, or metric. Value appears through the lived question of what makes life better, more bearable, more flavorful, more continuous, more protected, more possible. In Roberts’ ethnography, value is not reducible to safety, because safety itself must be mediated through taste, kinship, place, memory, and material practice. A life made chemically safer but relationally thinner, sensorially poorer, and symbolically humiliated has not simply become healthier. Health has to be assessed across the mediations that make life livable.
The strongest implication of Roberts’ work is therefore not merely that bodies are porous. Porosity remains too close to the body-container model, even when it loosens the boundary. The deeper point is that health was never properly enclosed to begin with. Bodies, pots, air, soil, taste, kinship, state power, memory, and symbols co-mediate the conditions under which health becomes possible or impossible. The enclosed exposure model fails because it begins after the wrong cut has already been made. It first separates body, object, chemical, environment, and meaning, then tries to reconnect them through risk analysis. Roberts’ ethnography allows another starting point: living beings are already coordinated through multimediation, and toxicity is one form of disruption within that coordination.
Seen in this light, the Great Swirl is not a metaphor for messy mixture. It is an ethnographic glimpse of living value under toxic modernity. Roberts shows a world in which people know that harm cannot always be separated from care, that danger may dwell inside what sustains continuity, and that expert remedies may arrive as new forms of injury. Living Value Theory gives this insight a more precise vocabulary: multimediation, recursivity, symbolic overreach, temporal misalignment, transactive dualism, and mesocosmic refusal.
The final lesson is one of symbolic modesty. Environmental health science needs measurement, but measurement must descend back into the world it seeks to help. Public health needs categories, but categories must remain answerable to the mediations they reorganize. Toxicology needs thresholds, but thresholds must not pretend to exhaust the lived reality of harm. Roberts’ families do not offer a romantic alternative to science. They reveal the conditions under which science becomes livable. Health is not secured by enclosure. It is sustained through ongoing, fragile, multimediated remediation.
An abridged version of this text was published in Current Anthropology 66(6) as an invited commentary on Roberts (2025).
References
Ecks, S. 2022. Living Worth: Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ecks, S. 2025. “The Suppression of Depression as Multimediation: Psychiatric Diagnoses Under Myanmar's Military Dictatorship.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-025-09899-3
Roberts, E. F. 2025. “Grappling with Exposure in Mexico City.” Current Anthropology 66(6): 891-915.