For the Medical Record - Interview with Bharat Venkat (Colloq. Speaker)
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Mia Levenson: Hey y'all, welcome to another episode of For the Medical Record. My name is Mia Levenson.

Richard Del Rio: And I am Richard Del Rio.

Mia Levenson: And for today, we have a really great and exciting conversation with you all. We have a professor of anthropology from UCLA, Dr. Bharat Venkat, coming to talk to us about the papers he presented at a recent Hopkins colloquium.

Richard Del Rio: Which is all part of a larger book project. And it's going to be really interesting that we start this season off with some global history and a really interesting concept the idea of thermal inequality

Mia Levenson: And just a heads up I mentioned it during the podcast, but this was recorded back in January So this was during the LA wildfires And we get into that as well.

Richard Del Rio: I hope you all enjoy the conversation as much as we did [00:01:00]

Mia Levenson: Bharat, thank you so much for, for being here. The paper you presented at the Colloquium, were two chapters from your upcoming book, "Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World." Could you tell us a little bit about the chapters that you shared, as well as how they sort of fit into this larger book project that you're working on?

Bharat Venkat: So thank you both for having me. Yeah, and I'd be happy to talk about that. Swelter is about how we experience heat, not simply as something that's far away from us. This is not a book about melting icebergs or rising tides, although that's really important as well. But it's really about how the experience of heat is something that's incredibly intimate.

It's something that shapes the way our, our bodies function. it's foundational to the very possibility of life and it can cause death. It's also something that we are all familiar with. We all know what heat feels like even if we don't always know what that feeling means for our health, for our wellbeing. So this book is really about trying to [00:02:00] understand the ways in which our knowledge about the body and how the body responds to heat came to be, and how that knowledge shapes both the ways we respond currently to our climate crisis, but also how we could respond, how we can think about better ways to ensure that those who are most vulnerable are most protected. And that's a really core part of the book, what I call thermal inequality, which has three dimensions, right? First is the fact that the negative effects of heat are unequally distributed. The second dimension refers to the fact that that unequal distribution overlays preexisting forms of inequality.

Um, the Two chapters I shared are historical chapters really near the beginning of the book that help us understand the origins of this crisis. Not just the origins of climate change per se, but the origins of how we understand our bodies' response to heat. And so you know, as historians, you well know when you search for origins you can go back and back and back and back. You can find an infinite number of, of starting points. But [00:03:00] for me it's really the 1800s that feel incredibly important. And specifically what I write about is what's called the climatic theory of slavery. This is basically the idea that slavery is justified by both nature and God because certain kinds of people, specifically enslaved black folks were better suited to toil under the hot sun, whereas other kinds of people, specifically white overseers, were not. Right. And so this specific arrangement of society and of labor, of enslavement became sacralized as being somehow both divine but also deeply natural. And this is what was known as the climatic theory of slavery. This idea, and I'll, I talk about this later in the book is not one that we're passed, right? If you talk to folks today about work in food trucks, work in the automotive industry, work in fields across California, Oregon, Washington, you will hear over and over again this idea that specific racial groups are better suited to labor in hot conditions and other groups are [00:04:00] not. So these ideas of racial difference specifically racial resilience, racial vulnerability to heat are very much with us today. I'll say very briefly, the second chapter I shared was about vivisection. Totally a different topic, but looking at how scientists, physicians in the UK and Europe France, Germany specifically, were trying to understand how our bodies universally respond to heat. Why are there kind of these universal mechanisms, whether they be in the spinal cords, in the brains that help our bodies stay warm, but not too warm, help us cool down when we get too hot and try to locate where those centers were in the body that did that. And it's a really interesting story because it's really not only about finding these heat centers, but also about how we form knowledge, how we develop knowledge about the body through direct experimentation, through vivisection, and the ethics of cutting into animals to understand something better about humans.

It's really in an interesting way if the first chapter is about questions of, of racial difference. The [00:05:00] second chapter is really about this kind of universality that somehow cutting into a rabbit or a dog or a cat tells us something about humans.

Richard Del Rio: This is really fascinating stuff and I wanted to take a step back because something that stuck out to me is I think something that would help would be to , unpack this idea of inequality.

Even some people saying that it's something that we should, uh, throw away. Right? Um, this is kind of part of this backlash against the concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, it seems that both in the present and in the past, you're identifying this, this idea of inequality as just being something that is a matter of convenience. I can see a lay person making this the case that, well, we live in a world of biodiversity, heat is distributed, distributed differently across our planet.

Bharat Venkat: What, what was the moment in time where you saw this? What was the experience that you had that said, I'm identifying a [00:06:00] problem here and I need to kind of raise awareness about it, um, and tell the history of it.

That's a great question. I think the backlash we're seeing from the right, specifically around DEI at the moment, much of it operates through this logic of representation and inclusion. What I'm talking about here is something quite distinct, which is about, an empirical inequality that leads to specific forms of outcomes and those outcomes are ill health, discomfort and death. Right. Those outcomes are also the positioning of certain people in certain kinds of jobs and certain people and others, not based on any sort of real qualification or capacity, but based on suppositions, based on ideas about certain kinds of bodies. So you were saying, you know, there's something about convenience, the convenience of, of other people doing certain kinds of work, but it's not based on a kind of biological reality. Right.

Bharat Venkat: So, even though I do historical work, I do a lot of work in the present. I talk to a lot of people. I do ethnographic work interviews, so on and so forth. I also do [00:07:00] kind of remote sensing and of our early projects through the UCLA Heat Lab, which I run, was with food truck workers. And when we asked folks about how they experience heated food trucks, which can get to be 30 degrees hotter than the outside. A lot of these folks who are migrant workers or descended from folks who've migrated recently from Latin America, from Asia, they would say, well, you know, something about the way I am. You know, my, my family's from Indonesia, my family's from Mexico, I'm from Mexico. We can just handle this, right? Whereas white folks faint on the first day at the job. And so these ideas around racialized difference are so persistent in the present and they create vulnerability, right?

This is tied on one hand to a certain kind of science or scientificity that kind of gets, ossified or crystallized and becomes common sense to a lot of folks that, of course, you know, I'm from a hotter place, therefore I can deal with hotter situations. Which is not quite how acclimatization works, right? It's really complicated as to why it is that certain people are better [00:08:00] able to handle certain thermal conditions which is not simply reducible to this thing that we call race. Right. But there are also, of course, really important gender dimensions, ideas about, you know, as a man, I should be able to handle this without complaining. Which also, you know interestingly enough in the history of thermal science and thermal physiology makes it really hard to use men as test subjects because when asked, you know, do you feel comfortable? Do you feel hot? Do you feel cold? They're going to, in general, avoid complaining.

And by avoiding complaining, they're not producing the kind of data that scientists could use to understand how their bodies are responding. Right? So it's absolutely true that that folks who are on the losing side of thermal inequality, will often speak about their own resilience.

Bharat Venkat: So I can understand the, you know, a lot of reasons why folks might speak about things in this way, but nevertheless, there is a real danger of overlooking one's own vulnerabilities, right? To say to, if someone says, I can work in a food [00:09:00] truck for eight hours at over a hundred degrees, I'll be fine, because my family's from Indonesia. They're putting themselves at serious risk of heart attack, of stroke of pulmonary conditions, of all sorts of things, right?. And that's a kind of universal phenomenon, especially when it comes to heat.

However this idea that some of us are, are more prepared or more kind of equipped biologically to deal with this because of race. That's a really specific kind of ideology that compounds this already physiological difficulty we have of assessing danger, right? So it's like that kind of biological incapacity is layered on with a kind of social ideology that makes some people even at greater risk than others.

Mia Levenson: You know, it's, it's, it's so interesting. It's so wonderful to have this kind of work right now, right. As we're, as we're thinking through the effects of climate change seemingly in, in real time. It's somewhat hard to, to have this conversation and not think about what's going on in LA right [00:10:00] now.

You're working at UCLA I just wanna note we're recording this on January 27th. There are still wildfires going on even with the rain so I just wanna hear sort of, and you know, if you don't have a full answer for this, that's absolutely fine, but just hearing your perspective of, how is this present moment shaping the way that you're approaching this book project?

Bharat Venkat: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm a bit of a slow thinker and so I'm, I'm kind of still wading my way through all of this. , And you know, we had to evict, um, evacuate ourselves for a couple of days um,, in the midst of the fires. I'm still kind of processing what that means and kind of what it means to see ash falling from the sky and, and how experientially something maybe has changed.

Although I did have a colleague tell me that, you know ash raining from the sky is a very common California phenomenon, so perhaps I should get used to it. Right. That said, you know, I think what the fires have made me kind of think about really is what counts as heat related and what counts as a heat related [00:11:00] consequence.

What I mean by this is, is, you know we, when it comes to physiology and health, there are certain kinds of outcomes that we expect from extreme heat exposure heat exhaustion, heat stroke, death. We expect the piggybacking off of pre-existing conditions. We expect increased vulnerability due to, uh., you know, people taking certain kinds of medications or non-prescription or prescription drugs that might increase vulnerability. We expect to see the heart pumping harder. We expect to see certain organ systems failing, et cetera, et cetera. What the fire is pointing to for me is these more kinds of distal consequences of heat that still impact the body.

So what I mean by this is as follows, right? So part of the, the causal chain that led to these fires has to do with the fact that there was initially a lot of rain that led to bushes and trees kind of growing, expanding, right. And that was followed by a period of drought and [00:12:00] extreme temperatures, which led to that same kind of bush drying out, becoming kindling. And that allowed for an ample source of kind of biofuel when the fire started and then kind of spread and took off. . And so heat is part of that equation. Heat is what transformed bushes and shrubs into kindling, right in the absence of rain. And now the consequences that we're seeing in LA beyond, you know, the immediate fires themselves the destruction and the taking of lives is we're also seeing air quality issues.

So there's a big kind of debate right now about what exactly is in the air. Are we breathing in someone's car? Are we breathing in someone's siding? Are we breathing in, you know, the doors, the handles, the asbestos, the lead, all of that coming out of someone's property, right? Someone's things. And if we're breathing that in, what is that doing to us? And this puts me in a situation where I'm thinking [00:13:00] about something, you know, something kinda odd, which is that, you know, is inhaling asbestos or lead or what have you, a consequence of extreme heat? And that is a strange thought. That's not really how we, you know, in the history of medicine, you know, there, there are kinds of resources to draw upon. You know, if you think about histories of causality, histories of social medicine, and thinking about broader causes beyond narrow etiologies focused on, say, microbes, right? So it's not always just you know, a virus or a bacteria comes at you and you fall ill in a predictable way. But there are these more kind of complex causal pathways that require multiple causes and different kinds of social foundations. How do we think about heat as a cause of, contamination? And I don't quite have an answer for that, but I, I have been thinking a lot about , this idea of climatic medicine and climatic health. How does that require us to rethink our fundamental concepts? Everything from, you know, something like prescription to [00:14:00] something like disease etiology.

Richard Del Rio: So I, I don't, I don't think, I don't think it's strange at all to think that way, Barat, because if any, if, if Covid taught me anything, it was that the problems that we're experiencing require interdisciplinary approaches. No one discipline has the answer.

And something about this work is, or something I think is appealing about it, is the inter interdisciplinary approach. You have a long scope of time, you have a lot of different geographic fields that you're working with here. And I guess a question that I have based on that would be, given the scope and range of this work, who is the ideal reader for you? Who is the person that really needs to read this and learn about it? Who you know when you identified your problem, who is it that you thought needed to know what you found?

Bharat Venkat: That's a great question. You know, so, so Swelter is a trade book, and what that means is I'm trying to write to the broadest possible [00:15:00] audience. It really grew out of a course I taught on Heat and society where I, you know I took students from the level of the cell all the way through the body, through the home, through the neighborhood, and then thinking kind of globally, right? To really kind of understand how heat impacts us, how it percolates across scales, and how we need to think through, you know, as you rightly put it, think interdisciplinarily to understand this.

So. This is all to say, you know, I initially had thought about this as something that I was writing, you know, for my students as part of this class. And then it kind of thought to myself, well, there's a lot of other folks in the world who are like my students, people who have already experienced the effects of climate change and don't quite have a vocabulary for it. They don't have the words yet to describe what they're experiencing. And I've been spending the last several years developing that language outta this kind of interdisciplinary framework. And so the way I'm thinking about it's, I'm writing it for anybody who's experienced the impacts of extreme heat, which is. All of us, right? To some degree or another. [00:16:00] Many of us have air conditioning in our homes, in our cars, in our schools, in our workplaces, so we can avoid maybe the worst impacts, but we're all kind of sensing that it's there. It's unavoidable. I mean, 2024 they recently announced was the hottest year in recorded human history. Before that it was 2023. I venture that 2025 was not gonna be far off. Right. So I think that there's a lot of people who would benefit from reading this book and would hopefully find it interesting. I also think that, you know, one of the, one of the fun things I get to do at UCLA, because I'm appointed across three different departments um, in life sciences as well as in history and anthropology is I get to work interdisciplinarily and I think that the ways I get to think and the ways my lab gets to think and work.

Would surprise even folks who might think of themselves as experts, right? So you might be an expert in history or an expert in anthropology or an expert in say, climate science or biology. But I venture that most folks wouldn't have put all of these pieces [00:17:00] together.

And that I think is something that changes how you look at all of this. Once you start to kind of see the pieces come together from the kind of social, the biological, historical, it paints a different kind of picture. Right? And that I think is the value of the book and maybe also what makes it exciting for folks at least. I hope.

Mia Levenson: I, I really genuinely think it will. Bharat, thank you so much for being here. This has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.

Bharat Venkat: My pleasure. Thank you.