Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:
“Lead as Pharmakon: IQ, Violence, and the Racialization of a Toxic Element.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Online Preview. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70009.
This article tracks medical knowledge of lead toxicology from the United States to Peru to show how contemporary discourses and politics of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline and paint, lead poisoning remains a systemic health problem in marginalized communities throughout the world. While scientific research linking lead to decreased IQ and increased violent behavior has attempted to animate broader public interest in the inequitable spread of lead exposure, it does so by reanimating racist tropes of biogeographic inferiority. Rather than dehumanizing lead-exposed individuals and communities, this article argues that lead toxicity narratives of lead intoxication must acknowledge it as a symptom of systemic racial injustice at a global scale.
"Infrastructural Incorporations: Toxic Storage, Corporate Indemnity, and Ethical Deferral in Peru’s Neo-extractive Era." American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 21-26.
Ports provide transport and storage for metal particulates awaiting foreign markets, but also generate conditions of leakage and exposure. This article discusses how lead-exposed residents at the Peruvian seaport of El Callao act as human infrastructures of toxic storage, a service for which they are selectively paid through ad-hoc indemnification practices by metal-trading corporations. Through its ethnographic portrayal of infrastructural incorporations––how infrastructure mediates connection and exchange between bodies, minerals, and value––the article analyzes the moral economies that sustain transnational practices of racial extractive capitalism.
In 2022, I expanded the digital components of my work at the Port of Callao with a photo essay in the E-Journal, Roadsides, in the peer reviewed, special issue #Logistics, edited by Julie Y Chu and Tina Harris. You can view the essay open-access here: https://roadsides.net/graeter-007/
"To Revive an Abundant Life: Catholic Science and Neoextractivist Politics in Peru's Mantaro Valley," Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 1 (2017): 117–148.
(Open source publication!)
This article examines a Catholic scientific project that undertook research on human and environmental toxicity in the Peruvian Andes. In the context of divisive mining politics, the article considers why the Catholic Church became an apt institution for the production of scientific knowledge on toxic exposures. I argue that the Church, as a moral accompaniment, provided the science with a situated objectivity needed to overcome pervasive suspicions of corruption––political and scientific. In turn, science provided Catholic practitioners a medium to enact a simultaneously pragmatic and otherworldly democratic, evidence-based politics of "abundant life".
Other writings and published thoughts:
In "To Build this other World Upon" I discuss my 2017 article further in a supplemental interview with Marianinna Villavicencio and Liliana Gil on the Cultural Anthropology website, available here.
Related thoughts on the scientific life politics of Peru's Catholic Church also appear in the online humanities publication, E-misférica (also in Spanish):
“Mining’s Moral Hazards: The Catholic Church, Toxicity Science, and Anti-Extractivist Politics in Peru,” E-misférica 13 (2017): States of Devotion Issue. (En Castellano)
In 2019, I published a short essay, "Mineralized Biologies" in the series "Embodied Ecologies" (ed. Andrea Ford), featured in Cultural Anthropology's online editor's forum, Theorizing the Contemporary.
A short reflection on the contemporary use of lead for energy storage in lead-acid batteries was published in Cultural Anthropology's online series Fieldsites.
de Seta, Gabriele, Graeter, Stefanie and Cross, Jamie. "Our Electric Backup." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, December 19, 2017.
In 2014, my essay, "Metallic Ecologies, Alchemies of the Self," won the Roy A. Rapport Prize of the Society for Anthropology and the Environment. The essay offers a comparative analysis of materiality, landscapes, and race through divergent representations of lead's neurotoxic effect in the Peruvian Andes and the Coast. An interview about the article and my research is available on the Society for Anthropology and the Environment website.
I am also in the process of redrafting my book manuscript tentatively entitled, Mineral Incorporations: Toxicity, Science, and Neoextractive Politics in Peru.