"Air-conditioned People" and their Others: Class and Environmental Litigation in the Southern Philippines
Friday, October 24, 3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
UCI HG 1030
In Filipino, naka-aircon or “air-conditioned person” is a pejorative phrase describing someone as apathetic or detached from reality. It captures classed inequalities in access to cooled and sealed environments protected from the outside world. In Davao City, activists engaged in legal battles over chemical drift use the phrase to explain how the indifference of the elite dealt a fatal blow to their court case. This presentation uses the idiomatic expression to argue that classed disparities in the experience of the environment bear repercussions for the delivery of the law. While scholarship on the atmospheric uncommons has investigated how the privatization of cooling technologies is the result of state weakness, this work challenges scholars to consider how environmental disparity is the root of bureaucratic inertia as well. It also invites reflection on the air-conditioned condition of modes of field-based research in which even the anthropologist is uninnocent.
Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of industrial agriculture, transnational supply chains, and environmental litigation between the Southern Philippines and Japan. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Bananapocalypse: An Ethnography of the Commodity for the 21st Century, is under contract with the University of California Press. Her work appears in journals in anthropology, history, geography, food studies, and Asian studies, as well as in the edited collections The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press 2022) and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press 2020). She is also co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food (University of Hawaii Press 2025).