Finish watching Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

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Trailer:

Finish watching the second half of the film. Take notes on the toxic worlding process you see in this film. What are the tensions between the different human communities. Notice how they all respond to toxicity in different ways. How would an ethnographer and chemist work together to understand the chemo-sociality of this Valley of the Wind? Hold onto your notes. You'll need them for the final week's assignment.

Reposted from Week 1: Why did we choose this anime to explore the theme of toxic worlding? Media scholar Denise Nunes explains the central process of toxic worlding -- living with the effect and affect of toxicity and the slow process of understanding and coming to terms with it in modern life. In "The Toxic Heroine in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind," Nunes explained:

The central event that laid the groundwork for Miyazaki’s story was the Minamata Bay mercury poisoning disaster (Cavallaro 2006, 48), which means that toxicity and the subsequent fear of it play a crucial role in the story. In the Minamata disaster of 1956, a Japanese chemical company dumped waste water with high levels of mercury into the bay, and both fish and humans eating the fish were subsequently severely poisoned. High levels of mercury were found in hair samples from the affected humans, and the poison caused severe neurological damage (Harada 1995, 7). Human bodies thus became containers of the poison, and the trans-corporeal reality of this event is painstakingly evident. The scary outside is now inside, and the human body cannot be perceived as a fixed bound-ary but should be seen instead as a “mediating membrane” (Alaimo 2010, 15). However, whilst humans became sick, contaminated marine life learned how to absorb the poison and continued to reproduce, showing evidence of a wonderful resilience (Cavallaro 2006, 48). The toxic forest in Nausicaä is inspired by these resilient fish that learned to adapt and flourish with the poison.