Bodily time, material time: Battling with asbestos in South Korea

• In Event: Time-Scapes of Toxicity (2): Time of Knowing

Abstract

Battling with asbestos is battling with the time. Asbestos is one of the tenacious hazards around the world, as the industry finds its place where recognition of toxicity has not yet developed. While the banning the use of asbestos is important, it does not accomplish the battle. The used asbestos-containing materials in the buildings, cars, and ships, slowly, but continuously break down, causing secondary pollution. The long latency period of asbestos-related diseases makes the battle even more difficult, especially for the victims who need to build the causal relationship for any form of compensation.


This paper analyzes South Korea’s asbestos pollution and asbestos activism as a revealing case of multiple times of toxicity. On the one hand, bodily time was addressed by the victims. In court, in worker’s compensation, and in environmental relief scheme, the process of proving victims’ bodily harms for compensation was a continuous work of reconstructing the past. On the other hand, material time of asbestos was emphasized by the activists. Activists have argued the entanglement of temporal and spatial scales of asbestos pollution, throughout its lifetime from mining to disposal. In doing so, asbestos activists successfully redefined and expanded the toxic time of asbestos from past to future and the toxic space of asbestos from working space to living space. With asbestos pollution, multiple time-scapes of toxicity—bodily time, and material time—overlap with one another in South Korea.

Author

• Yeonsil Kang, The Catholic University of Korea