Weekly Reflection Post for 10/6 Class

The final eight chapters of Adriana Petryna’s Life Exposed focus on the citizens of Ukraine and the social systems that have risen up after the Chernobyl disaster.  She investigates the idea of “illness as work,” saying that the social and government systems that have surrounded the Chernobyl victims in Ukraine have facilitated a world where it is more beneficial to be too sick to work than to be able bodied.  She goes on to examine the idea of biological citizenship, where people are defined in terms of their status of suffering and specific disabilities.  The term “biological citizen” seems to imply that these people need to be treated as biological entities, meaning that their most important value is the illnesses they have both in terms of maintaining their livelihood and n terms of offering chances for biological and medical research.  She also reflects on how Chernobyl has changed the local medical knowledge of Ukrainians.  What I found most interesting from this section was how uneducated, poor farmers became well versed in medical terminology showing how need facilitates knowledge.

From the study of cultures of science and technology, I found the section of Petryna’s ethnography dealing with illness as work and the status of sufferers to be the most noteworthy.  On page 78, Petryna describes a meeting of the Chernobyl minister with mothers of children with thyroid cancer.  During that meeting, a woman began crying about her situation but, when told to “promise to put [her] emotions aside” she immediately goes into a seemingly well rehearsed speech about her family members in very bureaucratic terms.  This seemed to me to show just how important the relative status of sufferers and suffering was to the Ukrainians; this makes sense considering that suffering was often the primary source of income for such families.  I also found a comment made by Maria Ivanivna on page 91 to be especially interesting.  She said that, upon achieving level three disability, she “had the right not to work” in a manner that caused Petryna to describe this right as an “achieved status.”  This exemplifies the idea that being ill is in many ways a benefit, providing an individual or family with a social and governmental “status” that guarantees them a certain amount of economic security.