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This chapter looks at the advocacy groups that emerged as a result of IBM's contamination in Endicott. It specifically highlights three groups: the Citizens Acting to Restore Endicott's Environment (CARE), the Residents Action Group of Endicott (RAGE), and the Western Broome Environmental Stakeholders Coalition (WBESC), the only remaining group active today. The founders of these groups were severely affected by the TCE contamination as their relatives suffered from illnesses caused by it. While public health has always been a concern, the WBESC has focused much of its recent efforts on the occupational health of former employees of IBM who worked at the Endicott plant, the place with the most concentration of TCE. The chapter also looks at local activism in relation to and in tension with the environmental justice frame and movement as the advocacy groups remain devoid of any environmental justice discourse or intentionality.

This chapter examines women from the Portuguese colony of Macao who inherited property under the protection of British law. It traces the case of Ng Akew in the mid-nineteenth century, a Dan woman in Macao who lived with and bore children by James Bridges Endicott, an American ship captain who engaged in opium trade. Starting from the social and economic fringes of both British and Chinese society, she thrived in an interracial relationship and fully exploited her power among British colonial officials, American traders, Muslim shopkeepers, and Chinese pirates. Her social mobility illustrates the opportunities open to some women who were able to enrich their lives by claiming protection from British colonial institutions and a relatively open mercantile society.

This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century Fiji. It discusses its anthropophagy, its cannibalism, and its political developments in the early nineteenth century. The first section of the chapter discusses the metaphysics of savagism. The second section discusses Fijian cannibalism, focusing on eye-witnesses of anthropophagy-cannibalism. It looks at John Jackson and William Endicott, who described cannibal feasts so persuasively that their accounts were regarded as “unimpeachable testimony” of the truth of Fijian cannibalism. In this section, the narratives of the two writers are ridded of their “unimpeachable” nature and regarded as fictional narratives based on the tradition of yarning of ships and islands. The third section of the chapter investigates whether Henry Fowler confirmed he was the author of the Danvers Courier, which was believed to have been written by Endicott. The fourth section focuses on the cannibal narratives of John Jackson. It discusses his books, Jack, the Cannibal Killer and Cannibal Jack. The fifth section of the chapter tackles yarning and narrative fiction in John Jackson's adventures. It discusses the beginnings of adventure stories whose imaginary locale is an idyllic island in the South Seas where Englishmen thwart cannibalism and savagery and exemplify in their own lives Evangelical morality and the “message of the empire.”

This chapter traces Endicott's industrial history by examining the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (EJ)—the company that made Endicott into the “Magic City” as it transformed the village into a vibrant and profitable commercial and manufacturing center. Both EJ and IBM played critical roles in the area's industrial facelift. By the 1920s, an estimated 20,000 people worked in EJ's factories, with the labor population booming during EJ's golden years in the mid-1940s. This growth spurt was a direct outcome of World War II, since EJ produced an abundance of military footwear during the war years. After the midpoint of the twentieth century, EJ closed due to the rise of the service and information economy. The chapter then describes the emergence of IBM in Endicott, highlighting how the company created some of the earliest computing technologies that set off the “third industrial revolution” and the so-called Information Age.

This chapter discusses the ways in which the toxic plume residents understand and make sense of the impacts of the IBM pollution they live with. It draws from both qualitative and quantitative data and from interviews. The interviews showed that the residents were unanimous in the sentiment that Endicott was waning. These reflections bring to the fore the enduring interconnections between the inversions of economy, environment, health, and social life. Local discourses on the certain and uncertain impacts of the IBM plume invoked a rethinking of sorts, a renegotiation of Endicott as a desirable community and place to live. The chapter presents how intersubjective experience informs plume residents' understandings of TCE risk, as well as how these risk understandings and perspectives expose certain contradictions and dynamics. Additionally, it presents a discourse on concerns about mortality trends for former IBM employees who worked at the IBM Endicott plant.

In this chapter, the authors seek to show that legal speech is best seen not as a radically distinct verbal phenomenon but rather as one variety of verbal interaction, albeit with various distinctive properties that follow from the institutional nature and goals of the legal domain. The authors first sketch a general picture of verbal communication as essentially inferential, drawing on recent work in linguistic pragmatics that takes its inspiration from the work of Paul Grice. The authors then focus on the complex activity of adjudication. The authors analyse adjudication in speech act terms as a “verdictive”, explaining how this act encompasses a number of sub-activities. In doing so, the authors pay particular attention to Endicott’s (2012) claims about the “interpretative” and “non-interpretative” aspects of judging. Significantly, the authors reject some specific claims of his regarding the “non-interpretative” nature of certain components of adjudication. The authors argue (i) that the general picture of verbal communication implies that understanding the speech act content of the law is an interpretative, inferential activity; and (ii) that a court creatively determining extensions of vague terms is also performing interpretation, if it is attempting to respect certain intentions of the legislature in doing so.

The men who were leaders in the board school movement during its golden age—roughly the Civil War to the Great Depression—saw their goals as community rather than alienation, and as selfless service to a society that they denounced for its arrant materialism. Headmasters of prep schools were frequently priests of the Episcopal Church who saw their mission as the shaping of new generations of leaders who embodied all of the qualities they associated with the “Christian gentleman.” Although Episcopalians did not invent the private boarding school in the United States, their relationship with it has been intimate. Episcopalians were not the first religious community to be involved in the shaping of an urban elite, although arguable they were the first to do so on a national scale. Church and school became closely allied as parts of the nexus of institutions that were developing among a nascent upper class, largely nouveaux riches. But the founding headmasters of these schools were profoundly ambivalent about their roles as gatekeepers for a sector of American society whose values and practices they often found odious. The boarding schools would adapt and thrive, but the church would not be able to sustain that tension indefinitely.

This chapter explores peoples' understandings of, negotiations with, and reactions to high-tech industrial pollution in Endicott, New York, the “birthplace” of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Decades of chipboard manufacturing led to an increase of trichloroethylene (TCE) in an area locally referred to as “the plume”—a 300-acre toxic plume filled with TCE, a cancer-causing chlorine cleaning solvent heavily used by the company. IBM's contamination of Endicott and how the local residents are affected calls for a perspective on socio-environmental experience that discerns the tangle of social, political, economic, and scientific forces shaping situations and events of technological disaster. In many ways, the struggle of residents living in the IBM–Endicott plume is also a response to transformations in the political economy and ecology of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century.

This chapter describes the village of Endicott as a “mitigated landscape” due to the contamination of TCE by IBM. It also sheds light on to the struggles of the local residents as they face deindustrialization, contamination, and risk mitigation. Because of contamination, local homeowners feel anchored to residential properties with no value and are also concerned about devaluation of their investments. Additionally, they are left to cope with the stigma that goes with living in “the plume.” The chapter also discusses how the contamination relates to the tangle of politics of science, risk, and neoliberalism in communities tainted by technological disaster. It argues that Endicott also represents a “microcosm of social relations” or even an actor network landscape. The mitigation landscape is a resorted environment of quarrelsome subject-object or citizen-technology relations that inform resident negotiations with and translations of life and living in a “modified problematic landscape.”

This chapter continues to draw on narratives from interviews with the residents of the toxic plume in exploring their understandings of the mitigation effort and their lived experience in “mitigated” homes. It also describes the vapor intrusion mitigation systems (VMS) currently utilized in Endicott and the ways in which “pro-mitigation” discourse plays out among regulators and activists alike. The VMS used in Endicott are the same mitigation technologies used to mitigate radon gas, which is overseen by IBM, local officials of Endicott, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC). VMS technologies are designed to continuously lower pressure directly underneath a building floor relative to the pressure within the building. The resulting sub-slab negative pressure inhibits soil gases from flowing into the building, thus reducing emissions. The chapter analyzes the “nuisance” brought by the VMS, and how they contributed in the devaluation of the property of the homeowners.

This chapter sheds light on the practice of vapor intrusion (VI) and examines the different roles of citizens and experts in VI debates. It showcases the experience of scientists, community leaders, and regulators engaged in emerging vapor intrusion science and policy, with the goal of illustrating how the toxic struggle in the IBM Endicott toxic plume goes beyond Endicott and exposes the broader complexities of vapor intrusion science and policy. Essentially, VI is another form of toxic appropriation where scientists and engineers generally use what they call attenuation factors to formulate an estimation of the amount of vapor that might be entering a building. Additionally, the chapter provides its own prescriptions for democratizing the science and policy of vapor intrusion, illustrating how as a new and emerging health risk, it is open to fruitful anthropological insight and critique.

This concluding chapter critically reflects on IBM's recent business goal of “Building a Smarter Planet.” It argues that the continuing contamination crisis at Endicott sets in bold relief the paradox of this ambitious planetary intelligence mission. Such a “global” corporate responsibility effort, one aimed at extending beyond the boundaries of the city and the nation-state, misses critical ecologies of concern and care that matter in the world IBM inhabits and wishes to transform and make “smarter.” If what is unfolding in Endicott is an example of a “Smarter Planet,” it only shows that the planet is shaped by an “ethos of technocapitalism” that harbors vibrant contradictions and uncertainties—a planet of many difficult landscapes and troubled spaces, even disaster landscapes of perturbed and precarious mitigation. In general, it could be argued that the political ecology that emerges in IBM's vision navigates the paradoxical play of economic “gains” and socio-environmental “losses”.

American POWs initially acquiesced to the Chinese political education classes. However, since the Chinese sought genuine converts, they had to engage in give and take; there was no actual brainwashing. As POWs realized what they could get away with, they either tuned out or became increasingly resistant, arguing with their instructors or even mocking them. The prisoners especially resented how insufferably long and boring the politics classes were. The communist instructors adapted by toning down the Marxist theory and focusing instead on the ugliness of war and the brutality of the United Nations forces led by America. Nevertheless, they had little success in bridging the gaps between races, cultures, or between captive and captor. Mandatory study ended after one year. Some prisoners known as “Progressives” continued studying voluntarily, but they retained little of the indoctrination after returning to the United States. The postwar impression of unprecedented capitulation and assistance to the enemy was wrong. What collaboration occurred was comparable to what happened in other wars.