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.