The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico | New Edition - Softcover

Masco, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691202176 ISBN 13: 9780691202174

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2020

Synopsis

An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bomb

In The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project. Masco examines how diverse groups in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico understood and responded to the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post-Cold War period. He shows that the American focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on society, and that the atomic bomb produced a new cognitive orientation toward daily life, reconfiguring concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship. This updated edition includes a brand-new preface by the author discussing current developments in nuclear politics and the scientific impact of the nuclear age on the present epoch of a human-altered climate.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Masco is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Theater of Operations.

From the Back Cover

The Nuclear Borderlands alters the meaning of 'ethnography' in a way that will challenge all of us in anthropology. It will certainly take its place among the classic texts assessing the cultural politics of the bomb, and it will join the must-read ranks in the literature on American nationalism and nation-making in the late twentieth century."--Susan Harding, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Book of Jerry Falwell and Remaking Ibieca

"No account of the post Cold War environment can afford to ignore this study and the tangle of economic, political, and cultural rights, interests, and imperatives it maps. Joe Masco pushes the ethnographic agenda firmly forward into an ambivalent twenty-first century, where Los Alamos is both dangerous polluter and lifeline employer, where rival eco-cultures, ethnicities, and social hierarchies fight over control of nature, and where the technological future can exacerbate or redeem the nuclear past. Neither antinuclear environmentalists, nor Native Americans, nor Nuevomexicanos, nor the Los Alamos scientists, nor the Washington politicians have a monopoly on the answers, and Masco shows us why."--Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

"Joseph Masco's argument that nuclear weapons are no longer a technology subject to scientific challenge but rather exist primarily as powerful cultural constructs takes us a long way toward understanding post-Cold War continuities in U.S. security strategies, as well as some of the astounding aspects of American exceptionalism in international politics."--John Borneman, Princeton University

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691202176
• ISBN 13: 9780691202174
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 456