A Life Without Flowers: Toxic Ambivalence, Travellers’ Ways, and Insalubrious Attachments in an Urban Travellers’ Camp

Travellers’ toxic attachments correspond to the literature on ‘toxic ambivalence’, particularly how pollution can be both constraining and enabling. Although toxic ambivalence theorists provide more nuanced engagements with toxicity than previous anthropological approaches, they still privilege how toxicity constrains participants’ lives – which are shaped by structural conditions – rather than how it can enable them. The toxic ambivalence literature’s framework regarding pollution’s constraining and enabling capacities owes its conceptual approach to long-standing engagements with structure and agency. Through underpinning their analyses with this enduring framework, toxic ambivalence theorists have disregarded significant epistemological histories that have structured their conceptual approach. By demonstrating how ‘Travellers’ ways’ constituted Travellers’ life-building projects, this article not only provides conceptualisations that move beyond the epistemological stickiness of structure and agency frameworks but also extends constraint and enablement approaches in toxic ambivalence literatures. In doing so, the article also expands upon a foundational and enduring social theoretical problematic.