Reading Response 9/30

This week's reading was quite interesting for me as it offered a perspective from a seminal thinker which could then be applied to our readings about Chernobyl. Foucault writes at length about the concept of biopower, the sociopolitical power which can be exhibited over bodies by discussing the various ways in which biopower has manifested itself throughout history, finally discussing sex as the ultimate way in which people exhibit control over their own physical condition, saying "Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target...Power delineated it, aroused it, and employed it as the proliferating meaning that had always to be taken control of again lest it escape" (147-48). Invoking this viewpoint, we are now able to further appreciate sexual mores of pre-feminist times; being the harbinger of the species' future and a representation of such unwieldy power, the fact that sex is reined in behind a conservative ideology, kept behind closed doors and not really spoken of is hardly surprising. Sexuality is the most iconic and representative vehicle for biopower because creation of new life is lauded (within certain restrictive borders) while societal guidelines for engaging with ones peers about sex are quite restricted as well. The gravity and magnitude of society's biopower as it applies to our own continuance is thus transferred to tacit respect, subdued discussions, talk, and public behavior regarding our own sexuality.

Why this talk of biopower though? It's evident through both our Petryna readings that the disaster in Chernobyl represented a way of manifesting sociopolitical power on bodies. By having an almost nonexistent response at first, the Soviets demonstrated a profound lack of understanding of the catastrophic toll that the explosion of the nuclear core had. When Ukraine declared independence in the midst of the Soviet breakup, the lack of organization and chaos presented a perfect opportunity to present itself as an organizing force under the purview of techno-scientific detail. Those who felt they were eligible could apply for social welfare as a "sufferer," "disabled," or other labels, depending on the degree to which they were affected by the disaster. Through this process, Ukrainian citizens could take advantage of all the benefits awarded to a "biological citizen."

In this way, living bodies are affected by bureaucratic decisions of the government. In addition, systems of epistemology are altered so that those who are concretely aware of how much have the potential to be awarded more, as we see when Petryna states, "One had to know one's dose and be able torelate it to one's symptoms and work experiences in the Zone of Exclusion. The effectiveness of this knowledge determined the place one could occupy and how long one could occupy it in the system of management of Cherobyl populations" (255). Depending on your level of suffering, you were either entitled to more or less benefits. The fact that the degree of damage, short-term and long-term, to the health and lives of the Ukrainian people was unknown further exacerbated this complicated issue. What about those who simply didn't know their degree of exposure? What about those who weren't in the Zone of Exclusion but still suffered chronic low-level exposure? It's entirely possible that structural issues of socioeconomic disparity were engendered as a result of a reductionist system that relies on purported knowledge, and to a large degree, luck at working the system. When creating new policies for aid in catastrophe, we must take lessons from events like this, and consider it within the anthropology of development.

Reading reflection

The information from the Petryna readings was surprising, to say the least. You'd think that a somewhat recent nuclear disaster would yield the biggest trove of radiation-related data, ever, but as it turns out the events are all mired in socio-political factors, one being the identity of those affected. Wit the rapid changes in Western Europe in the years following the Chernobyl disaster, many were faced with a tough choice to work in the Zone for better payment but at the cost of exposure to radiation, and the ones already affected hoped that science would help them receive the best compensation possible. Many of the latter became seen as metaphorical leeches, who weren't really deserving of compensation but asked for it because of their "levels of stress" that didn't come from radiation, which is not unexpected when a nation makes a transition away from socialism toward capitalism.
I think this ties in well with Foucalt's point about power over life and death, and the shift from "wielding death" to "preserving or not preserving life". It is true that many officials have brushed aside claims of a much greater toll of the Chernobyl disaster, and that many have also enlisted "bio-robots" to clean up the worst of the contamination despite the risks. The concealment or muddling of data that could be used to justify further compensation, as well as the workers being treated as expendable, are all ways that those in power are exercising their ability to un-preserve life, so to speak. It's a clear example of Focault's idea that the human body is not just a biological mass but a platform for various outside agents to act upon.
But I'd also point out that this kind of power is a two-way street, thanks to its historical shift toward an emphasis on the preservation of life rather than the punishment of death: the "sufferers" could therefore manipulate the state's apparent mission to preserve life, and reap benefits from it, especially in a time of change and political/social flux.

Biological Citizens Readings

This week’s readings looked at the complex relationship between the biological and sociopolitical, specifically in the context of post-nuclear disaster reconstruction in the case of the Petryna readings. Science, rather than being an objective observer/bystander to these interactions, plays a very important and active role by facilitating control over bodies and entire social organizations. 

While reading Petryna’s “Biological Citizenship,” I was struck by how much concurrent social, political and economic change was happening in the period immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. The Soviet Union dissolved only a few years after the disaster and Ukraine was forced to confront the legacy of such a huge, destructive event while still in the process of establishing its statehood and transitioning to a free-market economy. Petryna argues that the handling of the aftermath of Chernobyl was hugely influenced by these political and economic changes. In particular, the production of scientific knowledge--but also nonknowledge--was an important tool for creating authority and maintaining power (also mentioned by Foucault). For the average Ukrainian citizen, science--being able to “objectively” prove that you were affected by the radiation--allowed them access to a “biological citizenship” which gave them free healthcare, as well as other social benefits that were becomingly increasingly more rare as the country moved away from socialism. 

I found the politics and morality of this biological citizenship to be very complex and difficult to judge. In “Introduction to the 2013 Edition,” written two decades removed from the disaster, Petryna describes shifts in attitudes towards victims as a function of changes in society: “Opinions about how the state should address the fate of these Chernobyl victims also serve as a kind of barometer of the country's changing moral fabric. Among inhabitants of Kyiv and other urban centers, there is a growing consensus that the invalids are ‘parasites of the state, damaging the economy, not paying taxes.’” What was a (somewhat dubiously) enviable citizenship before is more and more seen as selfishness, perhaps because the country is further along the road towards full-fledged capitalism. 

In “Introduction to the 2013 Edition,” Petryna mainly focuses on the lack of broad, all-encompassing scientific study of the effects of the disaster and how damaging that is to our collective understanding about the consequences of the disaster. I agree that more socially and culturally conscious, longitudinal, human-based work should be conducted, but I wonder if that was done, if we would be worried about its reception and audiences taking the results out of context without fully accounting the whole host of confounding variables. Especially knowing now, after the Fukushima disaster, that accidents like this are not one-off flukes, I think there’s a responsibility of scientists to not overgeneralize findings from one situation to another, since the effects of such events are so socially and politically bound.

Wildlife in Chernobyl

Tim Mosseau is one of the few western scientists researching the impact of the Chernobyl disaster on wildlife. While he believes his findings show that life has been slow to recover and biodiversity has suffered greatly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG-nwQBBfmc), others question his findings. One reason is because Mosseau was researching the most contaminated areas but only sampled one in particular, a patch of forest that turned red due to destroyed chlorophyll, and the birds could very well be simply avoiding a strange-looking habitat http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/wildlife_in_chernobyl_debate_over_mutations_and_populations_of_plants_and.single.html
For the most part, despite high internal radiation levels, animals have lived on without much issue; the major mutations were only found in plants.

Readings - Jonah

In the readings for today, “Biological Citizenship,” and the introduction to the 2013 edition detail the accounts of Chernobyl and the aftermath that ensued.  The affected area around Chernobyl, as Petryna puts it, became the best place to study “the relations between rink, rational-technical power, and the emergence of new populations.”  What seemed to ensue was an aura of proper victimization tactics, where people, rightly so, expected compensation for the health effects they were forced to endure, either as bystanders in the surrounding areas or as actual members of the clean-up crew, the radiation effects of the released contaminants.  This creates a concept they use as “biological citizenship,” wherein if you can prove that you have been affected by the Chernobyl incident, you are able to reap certain social benefits like free health care and education.  In doing so, the individual became interested, and even reliant, on the body of scientific knowledge soon thereafter presented in order to place himself on this newly created social scale.  The “internationalization” of knowledge, as the author puts it, is taking place concurrently, trying to explain scientifically, but also in a realm of socio-political tensions, the exact happenings and detriments experienced by the local community.  What came to be a huge and unjust issue is the state’s capacity to conjure up and questionably appropriately use scientific knowledge and “nonknowledge,” as they put it, to maintain political order and to keep the national population, and the international community.  What came of the issue is a big disarray of (pseudo)scientific knowledge related to the exact affects, consequences, and scale of the Chernobyl incident and groups of people still unrelieved by the lack of discourse the issue on a grassroots level has received.

              What is concerning about the whole issue, as the author aptly puts it, is how “individuals and populations become part of new cooperative regimes in scientific research and in local state-sponsored forms of human subjects protection.”  A disastrous consequence of such an entanglement is that suffering and the ailments a person received passively by living in this area can only now be examined in a strongly political and socio-economically relevant lens.  The average sufferer must not only learn of the previously foreign - for a relatively educated person - science behind nuclear radiation, but they also most play appropriately into the socially and politically constructed systems that, only when followed, allow you to “reap” the benefits you so desperately need (or not, the categorizations of the extreme suffers and only mildly afflicted is still unclear to me).  In the introduction to the 2013 edition, these consequences seem more teased out as we are able to gain a new perspective.  The most chilling issue of it all remains, to me, to be the fact that in relation to the Fukishima nuclear reactor, in which the plant was not scientifically contested before-hand as unreliable and there is essentially no debate about the responsibility involving the situation, the Chernobyl incident seems to be mirroring the story quite nicely; this seems to make an unfortunate statement about the further muddied situation of socio-political entities that have been extant in some capacity since long before Chernobyl, that interrupt the stream of scientific inquiry when requiring aid to a nation’s citizens; it also further exacerbates the unfortunate dilemma of biological citizenship and the consequences of such an ideology.  As a concluding statement that shows the utter disarray and erroneous handling of a very sentient and modernly moral issue, “it is iroinic that we have better knowledge about recovering ecosystems of the Chernobyl dead zone…than we do about recovering people and human conditions on the ground.”  All I can assume is that the human condition is definitely strained.

Discussion Notes 9/24

-       Turning in assignments: 

o   When you turn in the final draft of a paper in this class, please turn in previous copies with comments as well

-       Syllabus changes: Virtual worlds, social media portion will stay intact (tweaks are still possible)

-       Keeping session on radiation sickness and Chernobyl

-       For next week – Continue to read what is on the syllabus.  Rather than read the entire book, read ch1, 2 from Petryna. 

-       Medical tourism/global organ trafficking and experimental stem cell studies in China will be a part of the new syllabus

-       More changes upcoming to syllabus – Dr. Song will send it out

From last week: Ways that Race is being Changed via Genetic Research

-       Big business tied up in commercialization of personal genetics.  We concluded that we as consumers should be skeptical of these companies

-       Native American genetic testing:  DNA testing changing the ways that tribes define themselves. 

-       What are the dangers of equating genetic markers with cultural/historical groups?

o   There are a lot of pitfalls along this argument

o   As this research becomes more commercialized and widespread, we must be more and more careful

DNA Fingerprinting in Forensics:

-       Alec Jefferies: developed method to identify individuals based on their DNA

-       RFLP Analysis (Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms)

o   Measures length of DNA fragments called VNTRs (variable number tandem repeats) derived by using restriction enzymes to digest DNA

o   These are highly specific sequences.  If they compare more and more sequences it reduces the likelihood of the DNA matching by chance

o   Technology used to solve the Pitchfork Double Rape-Murder investigation in the 80s

-       OJ Simpson Trial: first widely publicized use of DNA evidence. 

o   Because of doubts about the validity of the results obtained via DNA evidence, among other things, he was eventually acquitted.   

Session 5: Technologies of Repair

Sarah Wagner – To Know Where He Lies

- DNA analysis used to identify bodies that were exhumed (in pieces or otherwise)

- DNA profile match only begins the process of matching.  Short Tandem Repeat (STR) Analysis is the technique of choice.  Use PCR to amplify small pieces of DNA that are extracted.

- more sites that have the same number of repeats – higher the chance that the sample matches

à trying to match victims with families.

-       Wagner originally researched whether Bosnians are returning to their homes after the war.  Found out that families of most people had been killed, and they were interested in finding answer about what happened to their loved ones. 

Historical Background:

-       Formerly Yugoslavia.  Federation of 6 republics bringing together groups under Communist regime.  President Tito kept the tension down but when he died in 1990, these groups tried to establish their own identity.

-       à outright armed conflict when two of these states declare their own independence

-       Conflict between Bosnians (Muslims), Bosnian Serbs (Christian), Bosnian Croats, in close proximity. 

-       The Serbian army targeted the Bosniacs (Muslims) and destroyed the capital city, put many of them into concentration camps, genocide, violence.

-       Violence ended in December 1995 – Dayton Peace Agreement. 

-       St. Louis chosen by the US state department as a place to resettle some of the Bosnian refugees.  Over 50,000 in St. Louis

-       There is still tension in the country between the Serbs and Bosnians

Secondary Graves: An “innovation” – Called this by Wagner

-       very deliberately done by the Serbs to further dehumanize their victims

-       Wagner comparing the practice to the Nazis for effect, contrasting with the technology being used to identify the scattered remains of victims.

-       Body parts all mixed up and scattered, same done with possessions as well.

ICMP (international commission on missing persons) Blood Collection – Trying to create a large enough database to make DNA identification possible via matching

-       ideal match: Very hard to tell if someone is part of a family.  To do so convincingly, they need blood samples from many family members

Discussion:
- Why keep looking for their families’ remains?

-       psychological benefits to closure:  Knowing what happened to a lost family member

-       having that knowledge is important as well. 

-       Having an open question in your life about the death of a loved one is extremely difficult. 

-       Talked about how, from a public model, once an idea takes hold, it is hard to halt public discourse and opinion.  There was a public outcry about the missing members so the government sought assistance from other sources to help out. 

o   Public was not giving the government the option to ignore this crisis.  Other governments have tried to push something like this under the rug. 

-       Religious importance: finding remains and something to bury.  There must be some kind of ceremony and ritual.  Having the full body of the victim is important to some religious groups, this may be the case here

-       Maybe there is an element of race here.  Cosovo(?) was saved from invasion by the Serbs by a US bombing campaign, this likely prevented a similar level of destruction that happened to the Bosnians

o   Clinton now has almost hero status there, statue erected and memorialized. 

-       Bringing identity back to a mass of victims is a way to reclaim individual identity

Comments on the Ethnography:
- Use of statistics as a form of knowledge – way that it is used to establish the credibility and believability of science

-       gives the results this ‘aura’ of credibility?

-       How to convince the family that these are the remains of their loved ones?

-       Different forms of knowledge brought up

-       Extrasensory memories of family members

-       The contrast between casual nature of the anthropologists vs her fear and her reaction to the grave sites

o   Example: anthropologist almost falls face-first into the gravesite but brushes it off casually.  Author’s reaction to something like that happening would have been much more severe

-       Having the visualization of these scenes when reading the book is very useful.

-       Organization felt the necessity to explain necessity of DNA testing to verify, differing from the websites that we looked at last week.  Explaining the results and trying to translate them using a cultural and experiential methodology is extremely important to establishing differing forms of knowledge

-       Passage describing process of how scientists go through sequences.  Requires scientist and technician to look at the dataset, not automated at all.  Technicians perform “genetic detection work”. 

-       Describes this passage, identities must be described by numbers before they can be translated back into actual people/real identities.

-       Contrast between types of knowledge: going to fortune tellers/witch doctors versus getting DNA testing.  Even the director was someone who “paid their 3 marks” when trying to figure out what had happened to a loved one.  Possibility that going to a witch doctor added closure to the families before empirical testing was even possible

-       “To be absent is to be missing in time and space”. 

-       Does the government have responsibility to these people?  Opinion seems to think so, and there is a push for the DNA project

-       presence of US-funded organization in the country may bring back memories of the event?

-       Guilt in the European context in failing to save a lot of the Bosnians that were murdered by the Serbs

-       Psychological aspects of this effort:  Example – trying to figure out which of the two sons the remains belonged to. 

-       They brought in the mother, and she denied that the remains were either of her sons

-       Fixation on the physical body:

o   People need remains of family members

o   Muslims (bosniacs) have a great reverence for the dead, so finding the remains is especially important

-       Focus on the body also comes from medical traditions.  Religious tradition also shaping their acceptance of this

-       What role do we give DNA, is it useful, detrimental, etc?

o   What are the unintended consequences of DNA technology?

-       More broadly, what are the unintended consequences of advancement in technology?

The Process of Politicizing and Socializing our Biological Bodies

The readings for this week focused on the process through which human bodies, biological entities which are seen as the site of human morality and identity, are given their social and political meanings which transform across changing historical contexts. The human body and its innate biology becomes a site of power - in relation to the state, in relation to neighbors and in relation to international actors.

The two pieces we ready by Adriana Petryna for today, her article on Biological Citizenship and her 2013 Introduction, relate to her book about the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. In Biological Citizenship, she hones in on the way that the government reaction to the disaster and the politics and economics around the Zone of Exclusion were significant due to the fact that Ukraine gained legitimacy on an international scope. What is particularly interesting in this article is what Petryna frames in terms of the "state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and non knowledge to maintain political order" (258). Essentially, the state of the country was unstable recovery, thus the state had the grounds to exercise more power over its citizens. The sick and suffering individuals gained legitimacy as people of this nation, thereby enabling them to claim welfare benefits from the state. Because the after effects of nuclear disaster was unknown, there was no way to measure or legitimize illness, thus those who made a claim of suffering were entitled to benefits from the state, becoming "the basis for social membership and for staking claims to citizenship" (261). The understandings of state functions and the relationships of individuals to the state are framed according to relationships with and aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster. The 2013 Introduction emphasizes the point of "non knowledge", the constructed exceptionalism of Chernobyl and the ways in which technology and science can be ignorant of human experience. Petryna claims that science can be used to avoid the real issue facing our societies, holding us back instead of actually looking for solutions to these sorts of problems.

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality explores the way in which the human body becomes a site where the power of the state can be focused and exercised. He works his way through historical progressions of punishment - life and death, fostering life, disallowing death - and goes into a discussion of how the body is disciplined and the population regulated; thus sex itself becomes an integral focus. Foucault draws a distinction between sex and sexuality, and argues, "Sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexually organized power in its group on bodies and materiality, their faces, energies, sensations, and pleasures" (155).

Both authors argue that the body is a site of social and political influence and identity; our own biology is not a neutral or objective entity. It is shaped by historical forces, political powers, economics and new science itself - which is also subject to socialization and politicalization. I would love to talk more about suffering and victimhood as a vehicle for citizenship - does this create a type of second class (Casualties of Care - M. Ticktin)? Especially for something that is "unknown" how is disease framed and our inability to cure it? We can look at the way HIV/AIDS was and is talked about in the United States - domestically and in Africa. Also, can we use this framework to talk about women's health and the legislative battles going on around Planned Parenthood?

Facebook Hoax

Perhaps this speaks to my interests in virtual communities, but I'd like to talk about something pretty weird.

A rumor has been surfacing around Facebook, saying in some form or another (the words vary from post to post) that a $5.99 monthly premium will be required from now on, otherwise all photos and posts on your account will be considered public domain. Other posts have gone around, with people posting a status as a legal disclaimer, saying everything on their profile is theirs. Lack of such us a post would result in de-facto permission to use anything on one's profile.

Obviously both these ideas are flat out incorrect. We hear as teenagers the adage "don't always believe what you read on the internet" and the potentially deleterious effects of taking everything on the internet for face value. The same applies here. The fact of the matter is that these fears are unfounded. Piggy-backing off the recent news of water on Mars, the company released a statement saying "While there may be water on Mars, don't believe everything you read on the Internet today. Facebook is free and it always will be...and the thing about copying and pasting a legal notice is just a hoax. Stay safe out there Earthlings!"
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Why, then, do these things keep resurfacing? I remember at one point a couple years ago, the phenomenon became so widespread that even I was convinced to put up a disclaimer status. It would seem that social construction of knowledge and the nature of relationships with one's peers plays a massive role. When this was going around my various social circles, I remember talking about if the predicted changes would actually be taking place -- nobody seemed to know, but one thing was always certain. Someone had been convinced by someone or multiple people they had seen and respect, and this change in belief then inspired their own mentality shift. In a sort of way, people were rationalizing it, saying, "well if this person thinks it's true and a big deal, then I suppose it is." In this way, people are sensationalizing an event that is not going to happen, or is simply untrue.

Does this in any way have to do with the fact that there's an interface with technology? If we were to hear this simply by word of mouth, would we actually believe it? I tend to think not. The thought is almost comical, for why would they alienate their users and lose out on ad revenue now? In this age, where news events pass from person to person online quicker than they do by word of mouth, I'm betting that a multitude of posts regarding the new legal status of information on Facebook happened as a result of those people being convinced it was relevant by someone they know and respect. Further, the barrage of posts and peer pressure to maintain collective mentality plays a seminal role in the shifting of belief systems, particularly behind a screen when nobody is there to tell us we are buying in to something faulty. Our social relationships are an incredibly powerful psychological tool, and sometimes results in us conflating truth with fiction, particularly when rumors abound, and especially when technology is involved.

Biological Citizenship in the Aftermath of Chernobyl

Adriana Petryna’s writings on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster focus on the ways in which biological citizenship came to supplant other systems of rights and welfare between the populace and the government. She discusses the utter lack of knowledge surrounding the impact of the disaster on those affected and how this lead to a reframing of the ways in which citizens viewed their lives and their government.

            Petryna seems to argue that the Soviet government’s cover up of how little knowledge they had about the impact of radiation was a major factor in leaving people searching desperately for answers. While the government’s lack of honesty about its knowledge of the health effects was problematic in other arenas such as sending workers into situations of high exposure, it seems to me that it did not play that large of a role in the public quest for information. Whether or not they said they had the information, the Soviet government (or really anyone else for that matter) could not provide any answers to public questions about the role of radiation in disease. The general confusion among the public about health effects would exist regardless of what the government said if there was still no information to be had.

            Arguments about biological citizenship made much more sense to me. In a system in which the people are severely underpaid for work with serious impacts on their health, members of that society are left with very few options. As the idea of a right to compensation from the government develops, people begin to see desperately needed options. The public’s investment in their eligibility for this compensation is amplified by the fact that the eligibility requirements were constantly changing. Many began to consider themselves deserving of government support and tracking the broadening eligibility status was necessary to find out if they would eventually receive that support.