Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl [NOOK Book]

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Overview

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses ...
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Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl

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Overview

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?

Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. Life Exposed provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Editorial Reviews

Journal of the American Medical Association
The book presents exceptionally rich anthropological material generated through observations and interviews. . . . The true scope of the human tragedy caused by this man-made catastrophe comes to the fore via biological stories of Petryna's informants. . . . Most of the book's heroes were directly affected by radioactive fallout and often paid a terrible price, losing their physical and mental health.
— Larissa Remennick
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
[Chernobyl] is a dramatic and important story, and Life Exposed is a compelling book. . . . [A]n important study that will interest a wide anthropological audience.
— Jonathan P. Parry
Medical Humanities Review
Petryna's ethnographic approach consciously shapes her account and illuminates it with detail that historians of the future will treasure.
— Jeanne Guillemin
Medical Humanities Review - Jeanne Guillemin
Petryna's ethnographic approach consciously shapes her account and illuminates it with detail that historians of the future will treasure.
Journal of the American Medical Association - LARissa Remennick
The book presents exceptionally rich anthropological material generated through observations and interviews. . . . The true scope of the human tragedy caused by this man-made catastrophe comes to the fore via biological stories of Petryna's informants. . . . Most of the book's heroes were directly affected by radioactive fallout and often paid a terrible price, losing their physical and mental health.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - Jonathan P. Parry
[Chernobyl] is a dramatic and important story, and Life Exposed is a compelling book. . . . [A]n important study that will interest a wide anthropological audience.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781400841004
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publication date: 9/19/2011
  • Series: In-Formation
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 280
  • Sales rank: 739,303
  • File size: 2 MB

Meet the Author

Adriana Petryna is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School.
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Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Note on Transliteration xvii
Chapter 1: Life Politics after Chernobyl 1
Time Lapse 1
A Technogenic Catastrophe 9
Nation Building 20
Experimental Systems 25
Docta Ignorantia 27
The Unstoppable Course of Radiation Illness 32
Chapter 2: Technical Error: Measures of Life and Risk 34
A Foreign Burden 34
Saturated Grid 36
Institute of Biophysics, Moscow 39
Soviet-American Cooperation 41
Safe Living Politics 49
Life Sciences 55
Risk In Vivo 59
Chapter 3: Chernobyl in Historical Light 63
How to Remember Then 64
New City of Bila-Skala 66
Vitalii 67
Contracts of Truth 69
Oksana 70
Anna 72
Requiem for Storytelling 76
Chapter 4: Illness as Work: Human Market Transition 82
City of Sufferers 82
Capitalist Transition 92
Nothing to Buy and Nothing to Sell 94
Medical-Labor Committees 102
Disability Claims 107
Illness for Life113
Chapter 5: Biological Citizenship 115
Remediation Models 115
Normalizing Catastrophe119
Suffering and Medical Signs 121
Domestic Neurology 126
Disability Groups 130
Law, Medicine, and Corruption 138
Material Basis of Health 143
Chapter 6: Local Science and Organic Processes 149
Social Rebuilding 149
Radiation Research 151
Between the Lesional and the Psychosocial 156
New Sociality 165
Doctor-Patient Relations 174
No One Is Hiding Anything Anymore 176
In the Middle of the Experiment 181
Chapter 7: Self and Social Identity in Transition 191
Anton and Halia 191
Beyond the Family: Kvartyra and Public Voice 194
Medicalized Selves 201
Everyday Violence 206
Lifetime 212
Chapter 8: Conclusion 215
Notes 221
Bibliography 239
Index 253
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