Raj Patel
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2022
last heard May 2022
Raj Patel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If you're white and the government employee is someone nice from the post office, then you've got a birthday card.
And this is a a happy moment.
But if you are working class, a person of color, worried about being able to make rent and you've fallen behind, and the person at the door is a white marshal ready to kick you out, then that same knock portends very different inflammatory responses.
So the exposome is both absolutely the exposure to toxic chemicals and to gun violence and to low paying jobs and to
to the light of the night shift, but it is also the series of exposures to stories about how you belong in the world, particularly if you are in a group that has been historically oppressed by capitalism.
we delve deep into thinking about, for example, the microbiome and how it is that indigenous microbiomes, particularly the Yanamami community and nations in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil, are able to have such a range of diversity in their gut that's very strongly associated with low levels of inflammation.
We're not making the causal argument at the moment because the science isn't there yet.
In the global north, our microbiomes are denuded to the extent that they're associated with very high levels of inflammation.
And the lack of diversity that we have means that even the most privileged white folk in North America still live with denuded microbiomes.
And of course, just as our book came out, something that we prophesied in the book came to pass, where there was a report in the New York Times about some folk, I believe, in Stanford, who had decided that what they wanted to do was rewind.
Wild folks microbiome by essentially stealing indigenous poop from the Anamami community and turning it into a pill and encouraging its ingestion.
And of course, that's a return to the narratives that we were mentioning before about how Western medicine is really about understanding your body as isolated from the web of life, and then if anything needs to be remedied, some boffins will come in and give you the pill for that.
And in that example, it's an utter travesty of a representation of how it is that, in fact, the better way of having a rich micro.
microbiome is not to annihilated the plants and animals and beings around us that would have given us that rich microbiome.
This is a long way from coming from the exposome, but in a sense it's the same thing.
The reason that the exposome matters so much for our story is both for the material and biological interactions and friendships that we lack, but also the narratives around domination that form an integral part of our body's inflammatory response.
And I do think that there are certain things that are difficult for m the enterprise of medicine to recognise of itself.
And so to point out to medicine that your enterprise is a capitalist one is it's an uncomfortable thing to say.
I mean, yeah, I I was at Berkeley talking about the food system.
I said the word capitalism and it was as if I'd farted in a lift.
Showing 41–60 of 157 · page 3 of 8
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