Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (New in Paper) (In-Formation) - Softcover

Petryna, Adriana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691151660 ISBN 13: 9780691151663

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Adriana Petryna is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects and the coeditor of When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health (both Princeton).

From the Back Cover

"An ethnographic triumph. Life Exposed is as powerful an analysis of national technical processes of managing risks as I have ever read. Yet it is also a moving meditation on the aftermath of disaster, including the moral and medical morass faced by those who negotiate its world of disability."--Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Life Exposed

Biological Citizens after Chernobyl

By Adriana Petryna

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15166-3

Contents

List of Figures and Tables.................................................
xi
Introduction to the 2013 Edition...........................................
xiii
Acknowledgments............................................................
xxxiii
Note on Transliteration....................................................
xxxvii
Chapter 1 Life Politics Chernobyl..........................................
1
Chapter 2 Technical Error: Measures of Life and Risk.......................
34
Chapter 3 Chernobyl in Historical Light....................................
63
Chapter 4 Illness as Work: Human Market Transition.........................
82
Chapter 5 Biological Citizenship...........................................
115
Chapter 6 Local Science and Organic Processes..............................
149
Chapter 7 Self and Social Identity in Transition...........................
191
Chapter 8 Conclusion.......................................................
215
Notes......................................................................
221
Bibliography...............................................................
239
Index......................................................................
253

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Life Politics after Chernobyl

Time Lapse

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explodedin Ukraine, damaging human immunities and the genetic structure ofcells, contaminating soils and waterways. The main reason for the accidentis by now well known. Soviet engineers wanted to test how longgenerators of Unit Four could operate without steam supply in the case ofa power failure. During the test, operators sharply reduced power andblocked steam to the reactor's generators and disabled many of its safetysystems. A huge power surge followed, and at 1:23 A.M. the unit explodedonce and then again. Large-scale pressure gradients carried the radioactiveplume to as high as eight kilometers by some estimates. The graphitecore burned for days. Helicopter pilots dropped over five thousand tonsof boron carbide, dolomite, sand, clay, and lead in an attempt to suffocatethe flames of the reactor's burning core. These interventions are nowknown to have compounded risk and uncertainty. With suffocation, thetemperature of the nuclear core increased. This in turn caused radioactivesubstances to ascend more rapidly, forming a radioactive cloud thatspread over Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Western Europe, and other areas ofthe Northern Hemisphere.

Eighteen days elapsed before Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary,appeared on Soviet television and acknowledged the nuclear releaseto the populace. Within that period, tens of thousands of people wereeither knowingly or unknowingly exposed to radioactive iodine-131,absorbed rapidly in the thyroid and resulting, among other things, in asudden and massive onset of thyroid cancers in children and adults assoon as four years later. Such onsets could have been curtailed had thegovernment distributed nonradioactive iodine pills within the first weekof the disaster. S Contradicting assessments generated by English andAmerican meteorological groups, Soviet administrators downplayed theextent of the plume and characterized Chernobyl as a controlled biomedicalcrisis. Soviet medical efforts focused on a group of 237 victims selectedat the disaster site by Dr. Angelina Guskova; they were airlifted tothe acute radiation sickness ward of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow.Of those, 134 were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Officialreports set the death toll at thirty-one workers (IAEA 1991, WHO1996). Behind such seemingly definite numbers lies a web of scientific,moral, and political uncertainties.

The fact is that over the years, 600,000 or more soldiers, firemen, andother workers, men and women, continued to be exposed to radiation.Many were dispatched to the disaster site to carry out cleanup work rangingfrom bulldozing contaminated topsoil and disposing it as waste toworking in one-minute intervals on the roof of an adjacent unit and shovelingradioactive debris into the mouth of the ruined one. Some of theseso-called volunteers referred to themselves as "bio-robots," a term whichsuggests that the one-minute rule was not well enforced. Others were relativelywell paid to construct the so-called Sarcophagus (Sarkofag, nowsimply called the Shelter), a structure enclosing the ruined fourth unit ofthe reactor and containing 216 tons of uranium and plutonium. Currently,fifteen thousand people work at the now decommissioned powerplant or are paid to provide technical assistance in the Zone of Exclusion.The Zone is an area thirty kilometers in diameter circumscribing the disastersite. Access to the Zone is restricted to the plant's maintenanceworkers, engineers, health professionals, and researchers.

In 1992, during my first field trip to Ukraine, I mer one of the maintenanceworkers who was on a two-week break from work in the Zone. Helived in a housing complex in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, located abouteighty miles south of the disaster site. Filled with anger, he said, "NowI'm a 'sufferer.'" He used the word "sufferer" in reference to a legalcategory introduced the previous year by a newly independent Ukrainianstate for persons affected by the Chernobyl disaster. "I get five dollars amonth compensation. What can I buy for that?" He said he had no otheroption but to continue working in the Zone. Because of his work history,no firm outside the Zone would hire him. "This is from radiation," hesaid. He lifted his pant-leg and stuck his cigarette through skin that hadpuckered up to form a ring above his ankle. It was the result, he said, ofdirect contact with a radiation source, and what clinicians would call a"local skin burn." "This happened in the Zone ... We're people no oneunderstands, in hospitals, in clinics." He characterized himself as one ofthe "living dead." "Our memory is gone. You forget everything—wewalk like corpses."

In spite of the country's publicized efforts to improve safety standardsin the Zone, a director of the Shelter complex told me in an interview,"there are no norms of radiation safety here." The country's Ministry ofHealth sets annual allowable norms of dose exposures, but, according tothe director, these norms are not strictly adhered to. That is because inUkraine's current period of sharp economic decline, employment in theZone is considered premium. Referring to the plant workers, he told me,"Taking this risk is their individual problem. No one else is responsiblefor it." When I asked him to compare his country's enforcement ofworker safety norms with those of Western Europe, he told me quitesomberly, "No one has ever defined the price of a dose exposure here. Noone has ever defined the value of a person here." In a situation whereeconomic forces drive people to become preoccupied with physical survival,the effects of leaving the value of a person undefined are far-reaching.In such a world, physical risks, abuses, and uncertainties escalate.The labor of the bio-robot appears ever more acceptable, desirable, andeven normal.

* * *

In an effort to map environmental contamination, to measure individualand populationwide exposures, and to arbitrate claims of illness, governmentand scientific interventions have recast the Chernobyl aftermath asa complex political and health experience with its own bureaucratic andlegal contours. The initial—contested—scientific and medical assessmentsof the disaster's extent and biological impact, the choice to delaypublic announcement, and the economic incentives to work in the Zonehave uniquely shaped Chernobyl as a tekhnohenna katastrofa (a technogeniccatastrophe), in the words of many of my informants, includingpeople fighting for disability status, local physicians, and scientists. Thisterm suggests that not only excessive exposures to radiation but policyinterventions themselves have caused new biological uncertainties. Rational-technicalresponses have exacerbated the biological and socialproblems they tried to resolve, even generated new ones. This process, inturn, contributes to further uncertainty concerning a resolution to thecrisis, an increase in illness claims, and social suffering among affectedindividuals and groups.

Chernobyl was an "anthropological shock" for Western Europe,bringing the efficacy of everyday knowledge to a state of collapse andunderscoring how much the conditions for secure living in what havebeen termed risk societies lie in the hands of experts of all kinds (Beck1987). This collapse also took place, but in a different form, in the otherEurope. Chernobyl was closely associated with the collapse of the Sovietsystem as a whole. In this process Chernobyl, or risk itself, became animportant resource to be tinkered with. Though this technological disasterhas generated a strange world, difficult to comprehend, in its aftermatha postsocialist state, social mobilization, and local knowledge andexperiences of health have been constituted anew. This book explores theways people have learned to engage with Chernobyl-related bureaucraciesand medical and scientific procedures as a matter of everyday survival—and,particularly, with how biology, scientific knowledge, and sufferinghave become cultural resources through which citizens stake theirclaims for social equity in a harsh market transition. Access to such resourcesis refracted through the fault lines of gender, class, and socialstatus, to be sure. More broadly, these interactions illustrate how in themodern state, spheres of scientific production and politics are engaged ina constant process of exchange and mutual stabilization.

This book is based on eighteen months of field research in Ukraine,Russia, and in the United States between 1992 and 1997, with an additionalone-month follow-up visit to Ukraine in 2000. It is a historical andethnographic account of the rational-technical administrations of theChernobyl aftermath (both in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods) and ofthese administrations' economic, social, and biological impact on thepopulations affected, displaced, or sickened by the disaster. My particularfocus is on Ukraine, a country that inherited the nuclear powerplant—along with a politically and scientifically unresolved Chernobylcrisis—when it declared independence from the Soviet Union. Approximately8.9 percent of Ukraine's territory is considered contaminated.Most of the Exclusion Zone is located in Ukraine (see figure 3). Duringthe period of my field research, the country witnessed [he rapid growth ofa population claiming radiation exposure that made them eligible forsome form of social protection. Social protections include cash subsidies,family allowances, free medical care and education, and pension benefitsfor sufferers and the disabled. This new population, legally designated aspoterpili (sufferers) number 3.5 million and constitutes a full 5 percent ofthe Ukrainian population.

On average, Ukraine expends about 5 percent of its budget on costsrelated to the Chernobyl aftermath, including the cleanup and technicalmaintenance of the ruined reactor. In 1995, over 65 percent of that outlaywas spent on social compensations for sufferers and on maintaining amassive legal-medical, scientific, and welfare apparatus. Neighboring Belarus,by contrast, spends considerably less than Ukraine does on the socialwelfare of its sufferers and has limited the number of Chernobylclaimants. Twenty-three percent of this country's territory is consideredcontaminated, almost three times the percentage of contaminated Ukrainianland. The Belarussian government has tended to suppress or ignorescientific research; it downplays the extent of the disaster and fails toprovide enough funds for the medical surveillance of nearly two millionpeople who live in contaminated areas.

Unlike Belarus, Ukraine has used the legacy of Chernobyl as a meansof signaling its domestic and international legitimacy and staking territorialclaims. It developed a politics of national autonomy through theChernobyl crisis, devaluing Soviet responses to the disaster as irresponsible.The state established new social welfare and scientific institutionsdedicated to a Chernobyl population and began to provide sufferers andthe disabled relatively generous cash entitlements drawn from a statewideChernobyl tax. Moreover, the new government defined new and ambitioussafety measures for Zone workers. This meant stabilizing the deterioratingShelter, following norms of workers' safety, mitigating futurecontamination, and closing the last remaining working units of the Chernobylplant. The implementation of this new program had also become akey asset in Ukraine's foreign policy. In response to these efforts, WesternEuropean countries and the United States continue to promise Ukrainefurther technical assistance, loans, and potential trading partnerships.Such exchanges have legitimated a new political-economic arena in whichprofit, political influence, and corruption loom in the already powerfuland tax-evading energy sector.

Ukraine's response to the Chernobyl legacy is unique in that it combineshumanism with strategies of governance and state building, marketstrategies with forms of economic and political corruption. Such interrelatedprocesses have generated new kinds of formal and informal socialnetworks and economies that have allowed some segments of the populationto survive on and benefit from politically guaranteed subsidies. Iworked in clinical and laboratory settings and in the now sizable socialwelfare apparatus dedicated to those affected by Chernobyl—in its stateagencies, and in the offices of nongovernmental interest groups in Kyiv.Together, these sites make up a subsystem of the state's public health andwelfare infrastructure where increasingly poor citizens—former and currentChernobyl plant workers and populations resettled from contaminatedzones—mobilize around their claims of radiation-induced injuries.

I term this social practice that has emerged in Ukraine a "biologicalcitizenship" (1999). In Ukraine, where an emergent democracy is yokedto a harsh market transition, the damaged biology of a population hasbecome the grounds for social membership and the basis for stakingcitizenship claims. By examining how state-operated research and clinicalinstitutions and nongovernmental organizations of "the disabled"(invalidy) mediate individual and collective claims to biological damage,I show how rights and entitlements are contested, normed, and propagated.I also delineate the ways prior Soviet managements and scientificinterventions into the lives of affected populations have patterned thesedynamics. One can describe biological citizenship as a massive demandfor but selective access to a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific,and legal criteria that both acknowledge biological injury and compensatefor it. Such demands are also being formulated in the context offundamental losses—losses of primary securities such as employment andstate protections against inflation and a general corrosion of legal-politicalcategories. Struggles over scarce medical goods and over the criteriathat constitute a legitimate claim to citizenship are part of postsocialism'suncharted terrain. A stark order of social and economic exclusion nowcoexists with a generalized discourse of human rights.

The concept of biological citizenship sheds light on a fundamentalpractice of polity building in postsocialism. Recent ethnographies ofpostsocialist and market transitions have revealed the varying ways newnation-states find legitimacy in people's lives. These ethnographies havetraced the way local narratives address the collapse of state socialism andthe sudden conjuncture of capitalism, globalism, and new laws (Verdery1996, Humphrey 1999, Wanner 1998, Ries 1997, Grant 1995). Contestedforms of social indusion and exclusion emerge through these processes.In the Ukrainian context, I consider the emergent form of biologicalcitizenship from the following perspective: What is the value of life inthat new political economy? How does scientific knowledge politicallyempower those seeking to set that value relatively high? What kinds ofrationalities and biomedical practices are emerging with respect to novelsocial, economic, and somatic indeterminacies?

Existing ethnographic work shows that postsocialisms and conceptionsof their future cannot be based on predictive models or treated asinevitably flowing toward free markets and democracy. MichaelBurawoy and Katherine Verdery (1999) examine continuities between socialistand postsocialist societies as well as the evolving dependencies betweenstate formations and global economics. Such dependencies, theynote, "have radically shifted the rules of the game, the parameters of actionwithin which actors pursue their daily routines and practices" (2).Ethnographic research methods remain fu ndamental for elucidating thedynamics of these processes at a local level, particularly where we aredealing with informal aspects of power relations and assessing the decisionspeople make based on limited choices available to them (Gledhill2000:8).

Such "experience near" (Geertz 1983) studies of these transitioningpolitical and economic worlds also reveal a fundamental reconfigurationof human conditions and conditions of citizenship. The traditional conceptof citizenship casts citizens as bearers of natural and legal rights thatare (and must be) protected as a matter of birthright. Such rights wereindeed extended to all inhabitants of Ukraine, regardless of nationality, atthe time of independence. Yet the issue of birthright as it relates to statelegal protection remains vexed, particularly given the fact that personsborn in some parts of Ukraine are arguably disadvantaged on the basis ofintractable environmental and health threats. For these groups, the veryidea of citizenship is now charged with the superadded burden of survival.Thus what is particular to Ukraine, what I will be illustratingthroughout this work, is not just the forms given to a new democratic wayof life (openness, freedom of expression, and the right to information) butthe fact that a large and largely impoverished segment of the populationhas learned to negotiate the terms of its economic and social inclusion inthe most rudimentary life-and-death terms. Moreover, these citizens' experiencesexpose the existence of patterns that ought to be traced in otherpostsocialist contexts: the role of science in legitimating democratic institutions;increasingly limited access to health care and welfare as the capitalisttrends take over; and the uneasy correlation of human rights withbiological self-preservation. This book guides the reader through some ofthe contested spaces and politics of population management in the Chernobylaftermath, highlighting the patterns by which science has becomea key resource in the management of risk and in democratic polity building,and showing how Ukrainians employ knowledge of biological injuryas a means of negotiating public accountability, political power, and furtherstate protections in the form of financial compensation and medicalcare.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691151660
• ISBN 13: 9780691151663
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304