The Anthropology of Toxicity

I’m signed up to do a Neighborhood Biography for the digital storytelling project. Even though I don’t know what neighborhood I’ll be working in/with just yet, I do have some reflections on how I’ve come to know about Houston’s neighborhoods and the way they are storied already. 

As I become more situated, oriented, and familiar with Houston, the particular forms of transportation I use as well as types of storytelling/narrative I consume shape my map of the city and the language I map onto it. Specifically in my case, the language of neighborhoods with which I communicates and perform my type of familiarity. 

For example, I don’t own a car, so I have never comprehensively learned the language of highway names and numbers which many Houstonians use to communicate familiarity with the city and their orientation within it. I mostly get around by walking, running, biking, and using public transportation, which means that I know and map my orientation of the city according to streets, rail lines, and bayous. The signposts and landmarks along these routes thus become the vocabulary with which I communicate about where I live, spend time, come, and go. But it’s the media and stories I consume, on twitter or the local news or even apple maps, that I think really fills in this vocabulary with neighborhood names. When I first ran from Rice down Main Street, or down Mandel, I experienced the shift into Midtown or into Montrose (“wow everything really changed after I passed the rainbow bridge!”), but I didn’t know to call it Montrose until I came across some article about the neighborhood’s history. When I first ran along the bayou from Hermann Park to Manchester (but not back because I can’t run that far), I didn’t know that the beautiful grassy stretch full of families and friends out walking and fishing was Gulfgate until I looked at the map on my phone. As meetings and events take me on new bus routes to new locations, and as my running/biking radius gradually expands, and as my engagement with local sociopolitical issues grows, so does my neighborhood language expand. 

For the Neighborhood Biography project, we’ll be working for/with One Breath Partnership, which is also affiliated with #OurSharedHou. On Twitter, Allyn West has proposed the #OurSharedHou Challenge as the heir to the #RowdyChallenge, a game of I-spy where people post pictures of the landmarks marked by the locally ubiquitous Rowdy graffiti tag. It seems to me anecdotally that the Rowdy Challenge is most fun when the picture situates the tag in a location tied to a neighborhood. Or maybe not a neighborhood per se, but some other designation such as “The Ship Channel” or “Pierce Elevated.”

After seeing a few #RowdyChallenge posts, I imagined how interesting it might be to arrange an informative tour of Houston with Rowdy as the facilitator. The tours would be car-free, thus subverting the dominant stereotype of Houston to show the “real Houston” from the street level, the bus level, the embodied in people and built environment level. At each stop, the tour group would hear about the social histories and futures of the neighborhood or place that the tag is situated in. 

Perhaps the #OurSharedHou challenge could fulfill some parts of this fantasy Rowdy Challenge tour of mine. (As Allyn puts it, this is #OurSharedRowdy.”) Anyway, I’ll be continuing to think about this project and the language it maps on to the city because this mapping is a very consequential part of storytelling. The spatial logics and languages of this mapping will have consequences for those of whom it’s told, those who tell it, those who don’t (get to) tell it, and those who listen to it.