Weekly Reflection Post for 9/29 Class

In the first two chapters or her ethnographic study, Life Exposed, Adriana Petryna explores the political and scientific response to the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl.  She examines how the soviet government tried to downplay the scale of the disaster, saying that this only served to exacerbate the damage down by the radiation exposure.  She also examines the Ukrainian response to Chernobyl after becoming and independent state.  In Ukraine, she shows, a new culture has developed around the “suffering” who are in part supported by government welfare programs.  What strikes me as the most interesting aspect of the culture is that one’s level of suffering is proportional to one’s status within the culture and to one’s ability to access welfare.  People are essentially rewarded for suffering more, causing people to feel the need to exaggerate their medical problems in order to support their families.  This culture has also produced a backlash, where medical experts often claim that their syndromes are caused by something akin to panic disorder, meaning that their suffering is mostly psychological.

What I found most interesting from this section of the ethnography was Petryna’s discussion of the collaboration of American and Soviet medical experts (pgs. 45-47).  This discussion reminded me of the idea that the scientific laboratory encompasses everything and everyone presented in Bruno Latour in his “Give me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World.”  The American scientists were “uninterested in long-term assessments of the health impact of Chernobyl;” instead they treated the crisis as a scientific experiment, and forced across their research motives on the medical treatment of the ARS (acute radiation sickness) cohort.  This discussion also showed how science is seen as a cold and technical practice.  This is best summarized when Petryna says: “From this point of view, causes of death associated with the disaster except bone marrow failure became scientifically insignificant.”