Given the many forms of environmental pollution that have accompanied the global spread of industrial capitalism, there is an urgent need to carry out extensive assessments of the potential toxicity of many compounds on human and nonhuman populations. However, the scientific procedures developed to carry out such assessments present several critical shortcomings that greatly diminish their capacity to protect populations at risk. Through an ethnographic analysis of two field campaigns centered on the assessment of polluted sites in northern Chile, this article will reveal that these campaigns are embedded in what we can call samplism. Contrary to approaches that see fieldwork as generative spaces for knowledge creation, samplism radically simplifies the field into a neutral space for the collection of singular and well-defined lab-bound samples. However, samplism entails that multiple field phenomena relevant for assessing pollution levels are left completely unaccounted for, which greatly diminishes exposure science’s overall capacity to help improve the lives of those in need. Thus, exposure science urgently needs todevelop more capacious forms of engagement with the field, an ecological fieldwork that truly represents the complexity of forces and processes behind contemporary processes of pollution and damage.

中文翻译：

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超越采样：重新思考暴露科学领域


鉴于工业资本主义的全球传播伴随着多种形式的环境污染，迫切需要对许多化合物对人类和非人类人群的潜在毒性进行广泛评估。然而，为进行此类评估而开发的科学程序存在几个关键缺陷，这些缺陷大大降低了它们保护处于危险中的人群的能力。通过对智利北部污染场地评估的两项实地活动进行人种学分析，本文将揭示这些活动嵌入了我们可以称之为样本主义的东西。与将田野工作视为知识创造的生成空间的方法相反，抽样主义从根本上将田野简化为一个中立空间，用于收集单一且定义明确的实验室样本。然而，抽样意味着与评估污染水平相关的多个现场现象完全没有得到解释，这大大降低了暴露科学帮助改善有需要的人的生活的整体能力。因此，暴露科学迫切需要发展更广阔的实地参与形式，一种真正代表当代污染和损害过程背后力量和过程复杂性的生态田野工作。