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The Effects and Defects of Nuclear Cosmogeny

LAURENCE MARSHALL CARUCCI

Brugge, Doug, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis, eds. 2006. The NavajoPeople and Uranium Mining. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2004. People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Johnston, Barbara Rose and Holly M. Barker. 2008. Consequential Damages ofNuclear War: The Rongelap Report. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-ColdWar New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Perin, Constance. 2005. Shouldering Risks: The Culture of Control in the NuclearPower Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Joseph Masco suggests that nuclear weapons have become the iconof American technological superiority in the post-World War II era,and that their manufacture has transformed our worldview. Inso-far as this is true, the production, testing, and use of such weaponshas exposed the United States of America’s experiment in freedomand equality to some of its most brilliant and most tarnishedmoments. The five volumes considered in this review explore someof the reflections from that patina and uncover many layers oftarnish that accompanied the transformation of the United Statesinto a nuclear super-power.

KEYWORDS nuclear weapons, technology, United States ofAmerica

Address correspondence to Laurence Marshall Carucci, Department of Sociology andAnthropology, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717-2380, USA. E-mail: lamaca@montana.edu

Reviews in Anthropology, 40:134–164, 2011Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00938157.2011.572467

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PERSPECTIVES ON THE NUCLEAR LANDSCAPE

Among anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski (1944) was one of the earliestto point out how science transformed human consciousness to affect the cos-mological perspectives and daily activities of members of certain societies.The transformative effects of science and technology on human activitieswere clear to him. Ultimately, as Malinowski encountered the effects of colo-nialism in Africa he became more attuned to the differential effects of poweron local people’s daily lives.

The authors of the works reviewed below weave together Malinowski’sinterest in the transformative potency of a techno-scientific worldview and itseffects on local people’s lives. Focusing on nuclear technology, these worksmove beyond Malinowski’s concerns and those of most other anthropologi-cal studies of science and technology. Like other recent works on nuclearissues (Petryna 2002; Phillips 2002, 2004; Johnston 2007), each of the booksunder review draws attention to important ethical issues. All of these authorsalert readers to the ways that policy-makers and scientists, inspired byvarious motivations, may set aside questions that weigh the risks versusthe benefits of nuclear technologies.

The aims and claims of these authors vary, from documenting stories ofhardship and suffering among disempowered participants in the nuclearindustrial experiment, to analyzing the ways a techno-scientific regime hasredirected the episteme of contemporary American life. Included are narra-tives about the lives of Navajo people and Marshall Islanders of Rongelap,alongside accounts of U.S. National Laboratories’ scientists from Livermore,California, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the perspectives of nuclearpower plant employees in the United States.

In considering these works, anthropological readers must come to termswith the shifting landscape of ethnography itself. As Jim Clifford suggests(1983), critical engagement with ethnographic processes created openingsfor new voices and innovative and atypical ethnographic approaches.Indeed, these works alternate among several ethnographic methodologiesand styles but all of them share a common ground in the stories of theirsubjects and in the inevitable moral and ethical dilemmas raised by theirexperiences.

However politically threatening his research outcomes, Hugh Gusterson(2004) relies on familiar research strategies—tracking activities of his consul-tants as laborers at Livermore and following their casual conversations intoautomobiles and homes. While innovative, these methods feel familiar inrelation to Constance Perin’s (2005). From the analysis of corporate diagramsand flow charts to interviewing participants in nuclear power generation inci-dents, she gives readers an appreciation for conceptual approaches to risk.Joseph Masco (2006) analyzes the breadth of the ethnographic setting aroundLos Alamos, New Mexico, but is also philosophical and sweeping in his

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interpretations of the cultural and historical landscapes inhabited by socialactors in the region. More political and legal in emphasis are the accountsof Barbara Johnston and Holly Barker (2008) and of Doug Brugge et al.(2006). Johnston and Barker explore the Nuclear Tribunal case wherein Ron-gelap people tell of suffering from U.S. nuclear testing in the northern Mar-shall Islands. Similarly, Brugge et al. document an oral history project amongNavajo people who suffered the effects of uranium mining in the FourCorners area of New Mexico.

Nuclear disaster has become a hot-button issue for journalists and, notsurprisingly, interest in the topic has captured the imagination of legal scho-lars, human rights activists, and many others. Indeed, like the representativecollection of essays in Johnston’s Half-Lives and Half-Truths (2007), the var-iety of accounts under review here should not cause readers to dismiss any ofthem as vital sources of ethnographic material. Nevertheless, followingClifford’s insights, it is critical to carefully situate each account since eachone is positioned quite differently in the variegated landscape of contem-porary ethnographic products.

FROM COURT ROOM TO ETHNOGRAPHY

The work by Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly M. Barker, marketed under theinflated title Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report,provides a published version of the 2001 Nuclear Claims Tribunal case pre-sented by Johnston and Barker in behalf of the Rongelap community underthe guidance of Public Advocate Bill Graham. TheUnited States nuclear testingprogram conducted in the Marshall Islands following World War II may beseen as a complex war game; nevertheless, it is difficult to see how the authorsequate the unpaid settlement for damages resulting from nuclear testing in theMarshall Islands with damages from a nuclear war. Indeed, discriminatingreaders will figure out that the Consequential Damages of Nuclear War isreally an account of how the Rongelap Claims Tribunal case was constructedand presented. As such, it is an extremely valuable historical and ethnographicresearch document. However, for those who read Consequential Damages asa straightforward accounting of ethnographic or historical fact, or a metonymfor the damages from nuclear war, the book is more problematic.

Consequential Damages provides readers with an important interpret-ation of one component of the history of U.S. nuclear testing and the U.S.relationship with Marshall Islanders. In slightly reformatted form, the bookpresents to a wider audience ‘‘The Rongelap Report,’’ a core component ofthe legal case that was presented to the Marshall Islands Nuclear ClaimsTribunal by the Rongelap community and their legal representative.

Following a prologue and introduction that attempt to frame the courseof U.S. nuclear testing, the book begins with an exploration of factors that

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have led to the ‘‘loss of a healthy, sustainable way of life’’ for Rongelappeople (Johnston and Barker 2008:57). This is followed by an historicalreview of the Rongelap people’s encounter with nuclear testing and themedical and environmental problems faced by members of the communityfollowing that testing. The penultimate chapter summarizes the admissibleclaims for injury and damages and the legal framing of a variety of thecommunity’s concerns—from issues of stewardship and loss of a particularlifestyle to concerns with compensation. A final concluding chapter providessome broader framing of the Rongelap Nuclear Claims case and suggestshow precedents established in other cases may have relevance for MarshallIslanders.

The plethora of Marshallese voices in the book allows readers to assesshow Rongelap people fashion an ethnohistory of communal suffering inrelation to nuclear testing as shaped for the courtroom. From a linguistic per-spective, greater attention to the elicitation contexts for quotations would bevaluable, particularly the questions that were asked, as it is often difficult todetermine each speaker’s intent. Nevertheless, the stories give substance andfeeling to this work. As the authors note, one significant dilemma is thatcourts often consider personal accounts merely anecdotal. Rather than takingseriously the way people fashion viable histories and identities through stor-ies, Western courts frequently dismiss such accounts, considering themnon-factual. Even though the Nuclear Claims Tribunal was relatively under-standing in their admission of these stories, the way truth value is establishedand contested in legal contexts is an important topic that Johnston andBarker leave unexplored.

Consequential Damages demonstrates how the United States has limitedits responsibility for nuclear-related damages through legal agreements thatonly allow claims by the four Marshall Islands communities ‘‘directly affec-ted’’ by nuclear testing: Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap, and Utedik. This legalstrategy denies the fluidity of Marshallese residence patterns and unjustlydenies compensation to residents of other atolls also affected by nuclear test-ing. By including local people’s voices, the central chapters of ConsequentialDamages reiterate how community members currently see themselves as vic-tims of nuclear testing. At the end of the book, however, Johnston and Barkerclaim that community members have now moved beyond victimization andimagine themselves as survivors. Perhaps this is true, though the authors donot support their claim with Rongelap residents’ statements. Indeed, radio-nuclides are still embedded in Rongelap lands and bodies, producing uncer-tainties in people’s stories that suggest a more ambiguous reality than theidealism with which Johnston and Barker close their account.

Since Johnston and Barker do not see their work as an historical productin an emergent process of nuclear claims negotiations, they end up position-ing their account as a heroic narrative in which the authors develop inno-vative new interpretations of Marshall Islands life to save the Rongelap

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community from U.S. abuse. Rather than elucidate the micro-history ofemergent legal strategies, Johnston and Barker reduce the process to a simpledyadic contrast between their own enlightened Rongelap strategies and thebiased or inadequate legal strategies of earlier cases. In actuality, theRongelap case built on the successes and failures of the precedent Bikiniand Enewetak cases, and all of the cases necessarily relied on lawyers’assessments of the possible success of certain claims given the Western legalprinciples that might be considered viable by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal.For example, readers might imagine that Johnston and Barker were the firstto recognize that Marshallese notions of land tenure differ from U.S. notionsof individual rights and tenure (Johnston and Barker 2008:27). Yet, such aninterpretation overlooks earlier Nuclear Claims Tribunal testimony as wellas a century-long history of attempts to elucidate Marshall Islanders’ viewsof ownership and tenure.

Consequential Damages would have been strengthened if its authorshad paid closer attention to the dynamic fashion in which the MarshallIslands Nuclear Claims process produced an innovative genre of culturalmaterials for nearly two decades within a complex trans-cultural matrix ofnegotiated relationships. In fashioning their own contributions as heroic,the authors sacrifice an opportunity to produce a dynamic historical accountof this process.

Johnston and Barker use a number of semiotic methods that will be ofinterest to linguistic anthropologists and, indeed, the book is greatly enrichedby the way in which the history of nuclear abuses is framed around the state-ments of Rongelap residents. Nevertheless, the book would be strengthenedhad the authors exercised greater caution in their interpretation of Rongelappeople’s statements. For example, Johnston and Barker suggest thatMarshallese relationships to land and sea are distinctive, a point supportedby ethnographic materials that go back for more than a century. They notethat land=sea relations are often misinterpreted by outsiders who see theminimal amount of land as a source of shortage. In support, the authors citeseveral Rongelap people who bring this ‘‘slender’’ resource theory into ques-tion. Lijon Eknilang, for example, depicts Rongelap as a ‘‘garden island’’ withplenty of resources on which people relied for their daily lives (2008:58). ButKajim Abija contends, ironically, that there were times of shortage, eventhough, during these times, there was no hunger since there was plenty ofpandanus and coconut. While the authors note that these local perspectivesdiffer, rather than explore their distinctiveness, the authors return to theircontrast between the continental image of shortage versus the local viewin which the land provides ‘‘access to an immense array of resources’’(2008:59). The problem is, the authors work to find local support for along-standing anthropological theme: that local people, even in marginallocales, envision their environment as rich in resources. In so doing, how-ever, Johnston and Barker disregard a model of semiotic analysis dating back

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at least to the work of Sapir (1927), which stresses the requirement tointerpret utterances within their particular historical and contextual framesof reference.

Marshall Islanders frequently couch their stories in long-standing col-onial histories, and both multilayered histories and contemporary situationsmust be consulted to make sense of statements like those of Lijon and Kajim.Rongelap Nuclear Claims advisor Lijon fashions her account to highlightRongelap Tribunal concerns, stressing the contrast between present sufferingand her construction of an idyllic past that differs from documented historiesof Rongelap life. Kajim less readily dismisses a corpus of Marshallese storiesthat emphasize past shortage and periods of famine. Nevertheless, hisaccount is also framed in terms of his understanding of the Rongelap NuclearClaim and suggests that past hunger was not really hunger at all becauseof abundant coconut and pandanus (2008:58). The ironies in Kajim’s state-ment beg a nuanced linguistic interpretation that considers the history ofMarshallese stories of plentitude and shortage as well as the desires andrequirements of the Rongelap Nuclear Claim interviews and strategy ses-sions. Lijon’s and Kajim’s statements clearly reference far more than theinadequacies of a continental interpretation of islander’s relationships to landand sea. The statements are readily understood as utterances that contributeto the legal claim. To frame them differently obscures the richness and valueof local people’s words.

Land is one central concern in the Rongelap claim for compensation,and the authors present their interpretation of land as exemplary of the trueindigenous view, cognizant of ‘‘social and cultural values, meanings, anduses of land’’ (Johnston and Barker 2008:57). The importance of establishingthe credence of their interpretation for the Nuclear Claims Tribunal is undis-puted. It is part of the reason Johnston and Barker were hired for this job.

Rather than a radical new interpretation that captures the indigenousview, however, Johnston and Barker rely on Jack Tobin’s 1958 analysis ofMarshallese land tenure to ‘‘document’’ the real relationships to land. As aproduct of its time, Tobin’s view of land overlooked numerous local ‘‘values,meanings, and uses of land.’’ While he noted that land=person relationshipswere collective, an idea with some validity, the formulation relies on the 19thcentury individual=collective contrast, contradicted by Tobin’s own analysisof certain Marshallese land=human relationships.

Tobin also contended that ‘‘alienation of lands by sale, lease, or rentalwas ‘introduced by foreigners’’’ (2008:60), but it requires a static, isolationist,view of culture to believe that this 19th century introduction has not affectedMarshall Islands’ practices. In Majuro today (the government center of theMarshalls), Marshall Islanders have designed a lease tenure system thatallows the alienation of land for up to 99 years. In 1955, Marshallese mayhave seemed unlikely to accept the ‘‘complete alienation of their lands’’(Johnston and Barker 2008:60), but 40 years earlier, Marshallese chiefs

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considered selling entire atolls to their German overlords. However con-tested the practice, the alienation of land is now routine under MarshallIslands law, and leasing lands to foreigners is commonplace. Indeed, far fromaccounting for cultural practices of his era, Tobin’s social theory presumedculture was largely unchanging. His theory simply cannot account for thedynamic changes that have actually occurred in the Marshall Islands duringthe past two centuries.

Like many others, Tobin also imported Radcliffe-Brown’s lineage dis-courses into the Pacific, suggesting that Marshallese bwij were lineages andcorporate land-holding groups. While professing to give readers Marshallese‘‘values, meanings, and uses,’’ Johnston and Barker never question Tobin’sinterpretation even though Barnes (1967), Silverman (1970), Labby (1976),Schneider (1984), and others have critiqued the applicability of this modelto Pacific societies. Prior to Tobin, Spoehr (1949) noted problems with thelineage concept on Majuro, and my own Marshall Islands research suggeststhat interwoven relationships among humans, land, productive activities,eating, mortuary practices, and non-corporeal life necessitate a far more com-plex formula than the collective ownership of lands by corporate groups(Radcliffe-Brown 1952[1940]).

Marshallese land=person relationships have undergone continualmodification in the past 150 years. Yet, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal requireslitigants to demonstrate and quantify the magnitude of cultural loss. Withinthis legal framework, Johnston and Barker use Tobin’s depiction of MarshallIslands traditional life as a baseline against which the disruptions of nucleartesting may be readily measured. Unfortunately, this model lacks histori-cal and contextual sensitivity. However untrue to the dynamic nature ofMarshallese practices, the projection of fixed-feature tradition is a familiarprocedure in court cases where environmental damage must be demon-strated. Therefore, as a salvo within the Rongelap Nuclear Claim, the depic-tions of land=human relations deployed by the authors makes perfectsense. As an innovative new way to understand local ‘‘values, meanings,and uses’’ of land, the description is far too static and one-dimensional tocapture the array of Rongelap practices over the past century.

Perhaps the largest shortcoming of Consequential Damages is itsunivocality, the suggestion that all Rongelap people at all historical momentsshare common interpretations of the consequences of U.S. nuclear testing.As I have noted in a review of Barker’s earlier work (Carucci 2004), Bravofor the Marshallese (Barker 2003), Marshall Islanders have multi-layeredinterpretations of nuclear testing, and multiple renderings of their encountersas a result of testing and of the U.S. response to the testing. These diversediscourses are deployed in very different ways depending upon context. Iraise this critique not to question the suffering northern Marshall Islandersendured as a result of U.S. nuclear testing. The evidences of suffering areindisputable.

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Nevertheless, while Rongelap people readily describe communal suffer-ing in the context of eliciting accounts to be included as evidence for theNuclear Claims Tribunal, many other interpretations are heard in differentsocial settings. By conflating the distinction between their ethnographyof the Rongelap Nuclear Claims Tribunal case and a history of Rongelappeople’s lives in the nuclear testing era, Johnston and Barker leave the broadrange of Rongelap people’s attitudes and experiences unexplored.

Whatever shortcomings Consequential Damagesmay have in investigat-ing the full range of Rongelap people’s discourses about Marshall Islandsnuclear testing, whatever unfulfilled promises remain vis-a-vis the book’soverly-dramatized title, there is little doubt the work is quite valuable andthe individual interviews are extremely evocative. Consequential Damages‘‘challenge(s) the official U.S. government account of the activities and con-sequences of the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program in the MarshallIslands’’ (Johnston and Barker 2008:238). It properly notes that ‘‘it is difficult,if not impossible, to establish a clear-cut distinction between the ‘direct’and ‘indirect’ health consequences of the testing program’’ (2008:239). Itpoints out the ‘‘inadequate and (woefully) underfunded medical assistance’’available to Marshall Islanders, and the unquestionable need for ‘‘a high-quality medical care program that would address direct and indirect healthproblems caused by U.S. activities during the nuclear test period’’(2008:240–243).

Consequential Damages notes that the Changed Circumstancesprovision of the Compact of Free Association has not been acted on byCongress. Rather, the Bush administration contended that its legal obligationsto the Marshallese were met (2008:244) in spite of the Nuclear ClaimsTribunal’s determination that well over $2 billion in additional compensationwas required simply to fulfill U.S. obligations to the four atolls. This excludesclaims by other Marshall Islanders who suffered as a result of nuclear testing.Even today, there is ‘‘no political will in the U.S. government to right thesewrongs’’ (2008:245). Finally, they properly note the importance of includingRongelap people as co-developers of any future remedial efforts in thecommunity.

By failing to embed Marshall Islands nuclear testing within the largerframework of American neo-colonialism, the authors are freed to engagein fanciful idealism vested in their idea that Rongelap people are transformedbeings, well on their way to controlling their own futures. Along the way,Rongelap people will be assisted by the real scientific facts about the MarshallIslands. Now seeing themselves as survivors rather than victims of nuclearabuse (2008:246–7), Rongelap people need only implement the recommen-dations of The Rongelap Report to emerge with a fulfilling sense ofthemselves and their position in the world.

Having worked with northern Marshall Islanders for 35 years, the happyending these authors envision seems to me shortsighted. Given levels of

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dependency and inequality manifest in the Marshall Islands today, given thelack of political will on behalf of the United States to deal with its ongoingobligations to the Marshallese, I see a rockier path for Rongelap peopleand for other Marshall Islanders. Johnston and Barker simplify these issuesas if they have revealed the singular cause of contemporary social problems.

The authors end their book ironically, valorizing the cultural work doneby the community to develop a cohesive identity, yet also treating the com-munity as a social science experiment, as if their ability to exist on Rongelapcould be measured and judged ‘‘viable’’ or ‘‘non-viable’’ by a team of outsidelawyers and researchers (Johnston and Barker 2008:246). But is this scienceor is it courtroom theater that uses scientific trappings to create a sense oflegitimacy? When the authors ask, rhetorically, if Rongelap people will ‘‘sur-vive and thrive’’ when they return to their homeland (2008:246) or when theyask if ‘‘the younger generation, born . . . in the more developed islands . . .[will] have an interest in returning to a simpler life on an outer island?’’(2008:247), they tilt toward courtroom theater.

The comparable experiences of Enewetak, Bikini, and Utedik people,like Rongelap people’s lives on Mejatto, provide evidence that the outcomesfor resettled Rongelap villagers will be messy and problematic. Yet, theauthors do not consider the extraordinary complexities of those circum-stances. Rather, courtroom theater must posit an imagined traditional wayof life positioned in stark outline to the destructive effects of the nucleartesting program. To see nuclear testing as part of a larger set of colonial pro-cedures compromises the product, with multivalent discourses and practicespointing in discordant directions. In this work, Johnston and Barker keepreaders’ eyes on the imagined legal product, the destructive effects of nucleartesting. It is not an entirely false product, but it is simplified, political-legaltheater, now available to a new audience.

LIVES AT LIVERMORE

In comparison to The Rongelap Report, Hugh Gusterson’s essays, collected inPeople of the Bomb (2004), present several complementary edges of life in thenuclear age. Gusterson provides an innovative and reflexive approach to theethnographic project, a process that includes an assessment of Gusterson’sown positionality that lends texture to his interactions with several key con-sultants and explores the conflicting grounds from which ethnographic mate-rials are shaped. Gusterson’s own changed circumstances are apparent as heshifts from anti-nuclear activist to anthropologist. He is energized as heattempts to understand people directly involved in research that supportsthe production of nuclear weapons. Complementing his ethnographicendeavors, Gusterson dedicates several essays to cultural criticism, providinginsightful analyses of the way in which the ethos of the United States is

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shaped by nuclear concerns. Other essays engage researchers in strategic stu-dies from an anthropological perspective.

If Johnston and Barker give us the unsettling idea that Rongelap peoplehave a shared view of nuclear testing, Gusterson’s Livermore work allowsreaders access to the multi-layered, conflicting grounds that Livermoreemployees use to rationalize their work as ethical and peace-promoting. Intwo sections he tracks his interactions with Sylvia and Ray, forcing readersto move beyond simplistic notions of stereotype to explore the dynamic con-tours of the discourses and social practices of these employees. Manyemployees weigh Livermore’s academic freedoms against the constraints ofacademia (Gusterson 2004:14), but Sylvia, a liberal-thinking young scientistwhom Gusterson portrays as an upwardly mobile Japanese-American femin-ist (Gusterson 2004:16), used Livermore to test many essentialist ideas aboutthe employees and social causalities at the laboratory. Ultimately, Gustersonsees Livermore as ‘‘a place of political diversity’’ and Sylvia, an employeewho contradicted his initial stereotypes, inspires him to consider ‘‘practicesthrough which the laboratory re-socializes recruits’’ (Gusterson 2004:10),‘‘teach[ing] scientists new ways of thinking, to positively reshape theidentities and discourses, (even the feelings and emotions) of its employees’’(Gusterson 2004:11). Through such mechanisms power is inscribed withinthis social milieu.

While Ray fits the conservative nuclear scientist stereotype far more thanSylvia, Gusterson recognizes that making sense of Ray’s daily practicesrequires the same nuanced social analysis employed with Sylvia. Gustersonis intrigued by the radically different ways that he and Ray lend varied inter-pretations to the world, particularly to several science fiction films he and Rayviewed together. Ultimately, Gusterson uses these varied interpretations toemphasize the ‘‘fractile multipleness of human social and cultural life’’(2004:60), an interpretative view with far greater potency than a simple roletheory. While the latter perspective leads to reductionist explanations of liveslike Ray’s, Gusterson’s analytic frame allows him to make sense of Ray’sinconsistent discourses, pointing out that Ray’s life, like all lives, is ‘‘obsti-nately complex and contradictory’’ (Gusterson 2004:52). Gusterson and Rayhave entirely different interpretations of Short Circuit, causing Gusterson torecognize that people’s ideologies and interpretations are frequently‘‘unstable and fissured’’ (2004:60) in ways that force researchers who analyzesocial actors and social scenes to similarly complicate their interpretativeframes.

At the opposite edge of his work, some of Gusterson’s chapters lead hisreaders into the analysis of written texts. He proposes the term ‘‘NuclearOrientalism’’ to describe how the United States and other Western nuclearpowers framed India and Pakistan as examples of radical others whose dif-ferences from Western nuclear powers made their possession of the bombunacceptably threatening. Four primary logics underlie this othering, and

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Gusterson debunks each of them. The initial logic suggests that nations likeIndia are too poor to spend money on nuclear weapons, ironic in that‘‘thirty-six million Americans live below the official poverty line’’ (Gusterson2004:28). Moreover, in the west, nuclear weapons are said to offer more bangfor the buck than conventional arms, and military spending is claimed to pro-vide support for economic development (Gusterson 2004:28). Such argu-ments must also hold true in the Orient. Deterrence supposedly workedbetween Cold War superpowers, but was proclaimed a source of instabilityin the Third World. India and Pakistan were envisioned as lacking thetechnical maturity to deal with nuclear weapons. Yet a plethora of technicalmishaps in the United States suggests there is no clear-cut division betweenthe ‘‘high-tech, safe ‘us’’’ and the low tech, unsafe ‘‘them’’ (Gusterson2004:33).

Finally, the Third World supposedly lacks the political maturity to betrusted with nuclear weapons. Gusterson demonstrates how the us=themdivide is discursively constructed yet presumed to be an ‘‘unquestionablynatural’’ distinction (2004:39). Yet, Gusterson’s inquiry into politically imma-ture past actions in the West leads us to seriously question the dichotomy.Gusterson ends by noting that the way our conversations on the nuclearissue are structured unthinkingly incorporates a series of neocolonial hierar-chies and assumptions that are simply not supported by the facts.

Rather than conclude with a prescriptive policy, Gusterson outlines thethree logical pathways: exclusion, participation, and renunciation. If his ownstance is left unexposed, Gusterson’s past stance as an anti-nuclear activist is,perhaps, foregrounded by giving Geroge Kennan, former ambassador to theSoviet Union, the final word. Kennan states his own logical conclusion: ‘‘I seeno solution to the problem [of nuclear weapons and their distribution] otherthan the complete elimination of these and all other weapons of massdestruction’’ (Gusterson 2004:47).

The argument in the middle of Gusterson’s People of the Bomb straystoward issues of concern within strategic studies, but is only tangentiallyrelated to the varied edges of life in the nuclear era. Gusterson ends his col-lection with a section entitled ‘‘Life around the Barbed Wire Fence,’’ com-prised of two thoughtful essays. The first deals with the dilemmas ofauthorship at the national labs and in parts of the nuclear industry moregenerally. The second essay analyzes a confrontation between LivermoreLaboratory and CARE (Tri-Valley Citizens against a Radioactive Environ-ment), a sort of David and Golaith confrontation over a proposed nuclearwaste incinerator. In both instances, Gusterson brings a refined historicalsensibility to the multiple ways the national nuclear project has had impor-tant effects on citizens in the contemporary era.

A brief postscript follows these chapters, but two earlier chapters,‘‘Nuclear Weapons Testing as Scientific Ritual’’ and ‘‘The Virtual NuclearWeapons Laboratory in the New World Order’’ focus on one core thesis of

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Gusterson’s work. The first piece deals with nuclear testing and the accom-panying metaphoric labor as culturally reproductive practices that structurehierarchies of power and knowledge. Gusterson shows how such activitiesreflect on their producers as well as positioning the United States withinthe contemporary world.

The second piece more narrowly focuses on the post-Cold War orderand repositioning the weapons labs within that ‘‘securityscape.’’ Consideringthree primary counter-narratives in relation to one another, Gusterson pro-vides readers with an incisive overview of the position of nuclear sciencein the post-Cold War nuclear era. The official narrative rationalizes increasedspending on weapons labs to promote ‘‘stockpile stewardship’’ that will‘‘maintain deterrence without nuclear testing.’’ The plan claims to allowscientists to better ‘‘understand the underlying physics of nuclear weapons,’’and to ‘‘verify the . . . integrity of aging nuclear weapons,’’ ‘‘validate minordesign changes,’’ and attract new scientists to maintain knowledge aboutnuclear weapons design (Gusterson 2004:170–171).

In contrast, the anti-nuclear critique contends that the Test Ban Treatyactually enables new nuclear weapons development. Activists point to theB61 mod 11 as such a weapon whereas weapons scientists contend that thisweapon was a repackaged B61. But even weapons scientists disagree aboutwhether nuclear weapons redesign is possible based on computer extrapola-tions from earlier nuclear devices. Such uncertainties lead to a ‘‘revolt againstthe hyperreal’’ (Gusterson 2004:175), a worry about the performance of‘‘hypothetical weapons’’ that have never been tested. Ultimately, Gustersonsuggests that while the post-Cold War era has transformed the contemporary‘‘securityscape,’’ Baudrillard’s vision of ‘‘war as a celibate machine’’ is notnecessarily true. For Gusterson (2004:181), nuclear deterrence does not, ofnecessity, ‘‘exclude the real atomic clash.’’

TRANSFORMATIONS OF LIVES AND LANDSCAPESAT LOS ALAMOS

If Gusterson explores the multi-faceted edges of life in the nuclear era,Joseph Masco’s The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project inPost-Cold War New Mexico (2006), provides the most focused, multidimen-sional account of a single social scene and a theoretically probing explo-ration of a cultural milieu wherein nuclear weapons stand as the supremeobject of national power. Such a world is neither simple nor univocal, andMasco explores several of the semiotically elaborated scenes that constitutethe social and physical landscape in northern New Mexico, U.S.A., the areasurrounding Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Masco envisions thebomb as a symbolic project directly tied to power and identity. FollowingWalter Benjamin, Masco explores the simultaneously liberating and

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anesthetizing effects of technology, particularly nuclear technology. Notonly does this ‘‘enable new kinds of mass control,’’ it makes ‘‘industrialwarfare . . . seem beautiful, and therefore, seductive’’ (Masco 2006:8).

In Masco’s analysis, then, the bomb is imagined as a techno-aesthetic pro-ject, both terrifying and banal (2006:14) that becomes fetishized and hypnotic,forming the taken-for-granted background of life in contemporary America.With the nuclear arsenal as the core symbol that mobilizes the national culturalimaginary, upgrading the arsenal becomes an unquestioned good. Yet, para-doxically, the exchange value of the good does not establish its value. Rather,the display value as a deterrent ‘‘in a war that remains ‘unthinkable’’’ is over-determined (2006:22). Simultaneously, with radionuclides dispersed in theatmosphere, spread across the landscape, and embedded in the food chain,all Americans, indeed, all Earthlings, are co-participants in the nuclear com-plex. This sense of being outside of, protected by, yet entirely within and partof ‘‘a perceptual space caught between apocalyptic expectation and sensoryfulfillment’’ constitutes what Masco (2006:28) calls the nuclear uncanny, ‘‘apsychic effect produced . . .by living within the temporal ellipsis, separatinga nuclear attack and the actual end of the world, and . . . inhabiting an environ-mental space threatened by military-industrial radiation.’’

Masco tracks the plutonium economy in the Los Alamos region, wherethe Manhattan Project was nurtured from infancy through its contemporary,transformed maturity. Rather than being seduced by the views of any parti-cular imagined community within this sphere, he analyzes the perspectivesof four groups of central performers. Masco (2006:38–39) takes his readerson an exploration of the ‘‘different cultural experiences of the nuclearuncanny’’ in order to demonstrate that ‘‘the plutonium economy not onlyprovides the technological basis of American power globally, it defineshow citizens engage their government and understand their long-term bio-logical, ecological, and cultural security in New Mexico.’’

Finally, Masco investigates two contingent events that not only clearlyoutline the parameters of life at Los Alamos National Laboratory, but also helpreorder relationships that are anchor points of that life, relationshipsgrounded in the antinomies between fear and security, power and risk. Thesetwo events, the espionage allegations in 1999 and the Cerro Grande fire in2000 are telling components of the ‘‘fundamental mutation in American life’’(2006:39) that constitute the lived legacies of the bomb. Masco’s explorationof this mutation and its multidimensional legacies provide an example of con-temporary ethnography at its best—historically enveloping, performativelygrounded, probingly theoretical, and incisively analytical.

Masco begins with a four-part survey of everyday life around LosAlamos. From an historically-grounded analysis of the ‘‘internal narrative ofweapons scientists’’ he moves to a consideration of local Pueblo perspec-tives, then a deeply historical Hispanic Nuevomexicano view and, finally,to a consideration of Santa Fe anti-nuclear activists.

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First, Masco attempts to understand the intellectual appeal of nuclearweapons science, a science increasingly detached from experimentalgrounding, where the most basic experiment—the detonation of a nucleardevice—is prohibited, and where discussions of scientific principles amongcolleagues are equally forbidden. Given these constraints, given the fact thatU.S. nuclear weapons ‘‘exist primarily as political constructs’’ (2006:43),Masco suggests that ‘‘it is in the realm of technoaesthetics that both the mean-ing of the bomb and the pleasures of conducting nuclear weapons scienceare constituted and expressed’’ (2006:44).

Since Oppenheimer’s day, nuclear science has been about the future,building increasingly sophisticated weapons with such perfectly destructiveforce that scientists came to believe the bomb was a ‘‘peaceful, even nonvio-lent project’’ (2006:48). Transposing senses of time and space, such weaponswere markers of incredible power, produced confusion and anxiety and,particularly in the post-Cold War era, have resulted in newly imagined threatsand contemplated symbolic trajectories among nuclear scientists. During theClinton presidency, protecting and securing nuclear weapons until the end ofthe Nuclear Age became the new charge, freeing nuclear weapons of nega-tive connotation, moving them from their imagined position as a project toforestall an impending emergency to an artistic endeavor with no definiteend (2006:54).

In opposition to David Nye’s contention that the bomb invokes pureterror, Masco’s nuclear science consultants demonstrate that this technologyalso brings a sense of the sublime. If those who first witnessed nuclear deto-nations fashioned accounts of their feelings into mytho-religious statements,experiential understandings of the bomb since 1963 are detached fromimmediate experience, giving the nuclear sublime a mathematical and emi-nently political character. As Gusterson also notes, a substantial transpo-sition has occurred as nuclear science moved from active above-groundtesting, through the era when above-ground tests were banned, into thepost-Cold War era with its computer simulations of nuclear explosions.Twenty-first century weapons laboratories, Masco suggests, will allowweapons scientists to physically experience the unimaginable destructiveforce of virtual hydrogen bombs. Rather than being vaporized, the scientistswill be attuned to the aesthetic properties of the simulation. This ‘‘tech-noaesthetic spectacle in virtual reality’’ (Masco 2006:95) refashions the bombin the shape of the weapon’s scientists themselves. Therefore, just asScience-Based Stockpile Stewardship indefinitely extends the lifespan ofnuclear weapons science, it also vastly increases ‘‘slippage between the vir-tual and the real, [becoming the ascendant aspect of weapons science in thetwenty-first century’’ (Masco 2006:97). Rather than alter the possibility thatnuclear weapons will be used, Masco (2006:97) suggests this moves us intoa time when the bomb is no longer informed by ‘‘an understanding of theconsequences of’’ its use.

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Masco next exposes his readers to some dimensions of Pueblo universesthat can be encountered around Los Alamos. Not surprisingly, these are fash-ioned around very different ecologies of place. Masco suggests that, likeLANL, the Pueblo universe is one that hyper-values knowledge on accountof its secrecy. Shrines and sacred sites are critical to Pueblo people aroundLos Alamos, and their sacredness lies in the way that they serve as historicalmarkers that can be traced back to a universe that began when Pueblogroups first emerged from the bowels of the earth.

From the Manhattan Project’s inception, there were virtually no interac-tions between LANL and Pueblo nations on whose land the facility was built.However, monitoring the concerns of Santa Fe environmental groups in thepost-Cold War era, Pueblo people began to raise their own health andenvironmental concerns. San Idelfonso Pueblo, for example, contestedLANL’s claim that there were no health risks to their group inasmuch as‘‘studies conducted by the Eight Northern Pueblos Office of EnvironmentalProtection found ‘alarmingly high levels of radiation’ on tribal lands’’ (Masco2006:114). The Native American Religious Freedom Act and the Graves andRepatriation Act (NAGPRA), along with other environmental laws, gavePueblos legitimate new ways to negotiate about the activities of the labora-tory (2006:114–115).

Both Pueblo relationships to LANL and the relationships of LANL andPueblo groups to the landscape have shifted and Masco provides his readerswith an insightful analysis of these social and eco-cultural processes as theyrelate to the Cold War economy and to the post-Cold War era. Far beyondhealth risks to Pueblo peoples, Masco suggests that significant cosmologicalrepercussions accompany the material and symbolic colonization experi-enced by Pueblo groups. Equally, however, Masco recognizes that Pueblopeople are fully embedded participants in the contemporary scene. There-fore, pursuing Department of Energy (DOE) economic enticement, PojoaquePueblo considered storing U.S. nuclear waste as a form of economic devel-opment in the mid-1990s. (Analogous positions were taken by Marshalleseat about the same time.) Masco demonstrates that local Pueblo groups arenot tradition-bound preservationists with unchanging relationships to theirenvironment. Rather their ecological stance is inextricably linked to theIndian Gaming debate. They are astute negotiators of their own future, fullyembedded within the plutonium economy, not simply resistant to its effects.

Masco shifts his attention to members of the Nuevomexicano com-munity, pointing out their position as critical actors in Northern New Mexico.Nuevomexicanos do not have the primordial linkages to the landscape as dothe local Pueblo people. Nevertheless, they do have a ‘‘unique experience ofplace, of negotiating environmental and social change from within a livedspace filled with social and cultural markers accrued from over four centuriesof everyday practice’’ (2006:163). Thus, their claims have more depth thanthose of the United States government. Certainly, Nuevomexicanos are an

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integral part of LANL, whose effects are ‘‘not only economic, political, andenvironmental but also profoundly cultural’’ (2006:165). During the ColdWar years, many Nuevomexicanos working in agriculture shifted to laborpositions at LANL. Entering this cash-based economy placed Nuevomexicanolaborers at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but they worked hard to shiftthe fortunes of their offspring. Nonetheless, hierarchies established early inthe Manhattan Project have been difficult to overturn.

While Los Alamos County has long been supported by DOE, in 1996they attempted to end this support with a $22.6 million buyout to the county.The settlement offer proved highly unsettling, highlighting the multifacetedland claims to this area, claims that often had greater depth than those ofthe United States. It would be easy to see LANL as the invaders in this case,with both Nuevomexicanos and Pueblos having much longer relationshipswith this land, but Masco queries the multiple layers of this colonial situationin a more nuanced way. At one juncture, upscale environmentalists andanti-nuclear groups are seen as the invaders and neo-colonizers, withNuevomexicano loggers and firewood-gathering villagers upset by thesenewcomers.

But, work as LANL laborers also creates ambivalence that points inmultiple directions. Working labor jobs that brought Nuevomexicanos intocontact with radionuclides or scavenging in the LANL dump creates trouble-some uncertainties about their own bodies. For Nuevomexicano residents a‘‘long term effect of living in the shadow of a major nuclear facility’’ may berevealed ‘‘in the form of a proliferating imaginary, one that is unable to con-tain the psychosocial, let alone the environmental, effects of the plutoniumeconomy’’ (2006:194). Masco questions whether LANL is not really a typeof ‘‘nuclear maquiladora,’’ operating in the borderlands, creating opport-unity, but at great social and environmental cost, and therefore, a highlyunsustainable type of industry. In the imagined future of the lab’s own spec-ulations (Masco 2006:197 et seq.), LANL and the United States as a sovereignnation, become nothing more than a distant memory long before theself-proclaimed 10,000 year safety plan required to monitor radionuclidesin the northern New Mexico landscape can be realized.

Inasmuch as Nuevomexicano residents became highly dependent on alife of security provided by LANL, they now are the most vulnerable majority=minority in the region, bearing on their collective shoulders an undue part ofthe ‘‘national insecurity’’ (2006:207) provided by LANL. Will ‘‘radioactivenation-building’’ (2006:213) in Northern New Mexico prove unsustainableor will revitalizing elements of LANL ultimately benefit Nuevomexicano resi-dents, re-imagining them not as a threat to ‘‘territorial borders of the state,’’but as part of a ‘‘diverse citizenry’’ allowed to ‘‘feel politically, economically,culturally, and territorially secure?’’ (2006:214). From an analysis of localdiscourses to televised productions, from ritual marches to billboards, fromland claims centuries old to government-funded science fiction, this chapter

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allows Masco to display his impressive array of interpretational tools, fashion-ing an ethnography with a complex image of cultural emergence andproduction, with unpredictable features yet, within their performativecontexts, forms that are fully comprehensible.

Before delving into an analysis of the fire and the breach of security sce-narios, Masco dedicates his final portrait of the Los Alamos social landscapeto environmental and anti-nuclear activists. These activists were late to targetLANL, highlighting the hinterland location of the lab, the activists’ newcomerstatus, and the global agenda they brought to northern New Mexico. Thus,while both Pueblos and Nuevomexicanos had long-standing claims withinthe region, anti-nuclear activists, much like LANL scientists, had no suchclaims. Both groups were newcomers, both were of a different class, andboth were motivated by a consciousness grounded at the national ortransnational level as compared with Pueblos and Nuevomexicanos. Never-theless, while the locals critiqued the eco-sensitive anti-nuclear activists asforeigners, they also learned from them how resistance and critique couldbe embedded in powerful discourses of social disruption and environmentalabuse.

If anti-nuclear activists were late in targeting LANL, they proved a formi-dable foe. Driven by mission-like commitment to their cause, anti-nucleargroups staged a ‘‘die in’’ in Santa Fe in 1995, and were successful in theirinsistence that the Bradbury Museum at LANL include a space where alterna-tive views could be expressed. They were also partially successful in alawsuit that raised concerns about the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydro-dynamic Test Facility (DARHT). The latter two actions did not gounanswered, as LANL-associated groups created organizations to counterthe anti-nuclear groups’ claims. Nevertheless, drawing on the experienceof past anti-nuclear organizations and their own accomplishments, in 1999Peace Action organized ‘‘the largest protest in Los Alamos history,’’ ‘‘unlikeanything Los Alamos had seen in the six decades since the start of the Man-hattan Project’’ (2006:258). The successes of these anti-nuclear activities wereoften symbolic. Nevertheless, the presence of such groups has significantlyaltered the social and political landscape in Northern New Mexico. In Masco’swords, by (preventing LANL) from ‘‘returning to a normalized structure ineveryday New Mexican life . . . alternative visions of security and risk, identityand nation’’ have become part of the discursive landscape in Los Alamos(2006:260).

Overall, Masco’s ethnographic account of LANL is extraordinary. Heoffers an inspiring model of how to depict both vertical and lateral connec-tions in a model of cultural practice, investigating a plethora of symbolicforms and discursive events that allow him to inform his readers of the psy-chosocial landscape, everyday concerns, and ritual events. At the same time,he remains sensitive to dynamic concerns that deal with shifting and inter-twined representations in perpetual negotiation and open to change.

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Of course, certain dimensions must always be left out or underrepre-sented. Certainly, Masco might pay greater attention to a range of local voicesamong each of the groups he considers. Equally, while the ‘‘econationalisms’’of local Pueblo groups certainly differ from the LANL perspective, there arealso significant distinctions among Acoma, and Tewa, San Idelfonso, andSanta Clara as well as interesting variants within each. Masco clearly recog-nizes such distinctions exist as he describes ‘‘Pueblo geospiritual orders’’(plural) (2006:108), and ‘‘uniquely Pueblo universes’’ (2006:110) but, at othermoments, he comes too close to a ‘‘west versus the generic Pueblo’’ contrast:‘‘A profound cosmological divide separates northereastern Pueblo conceptsof nature from the new residents on the plateau. Part of the sacredness ofmountains, lakes, springs and caves for Pueblo peoples is their very wild-ness’’ (2006:108). In contrast, ‘‘As Euro-American cultures emphasize the builtover the natural, there is an enormous problem of translation for Pueblocommunities’’ (2006:109). Yet, anti-nuclear and environmental activists mayalso believe that ‘‘part of the sacredness of mountains, lakes, [etc.] is theirvery wildness’’. In short, Masco’s contrast is too essentialized to fully accountfor cross-cutting similarities in these multidimensional perspectives.

Finally, I suspect that historians and development theorists will critiqueMasco’s work by suggesting it is economic realities that push the overall out-comes in Northern New Mexico. As Masco (2006:256) notes, the ‘‘nationalsecurity discourse and classification . . . can always trump the public legalprocess.’’ Moreover, the nuclear activists also speak from a position of classadvantage. There is little doubt that Masco offers a much more nuanced andproductive analysis of the dynamic interactions among these groups, butthose with a sole interest in hegemonic outcomes will undoubtedly claimthat, ultimately, Masco really pays too little attention to issues of power,particularly economic power.

NAVAJO SACRIFICE AND NUCLEAR FISSION

Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis’s co-edited volumeThe Navajo People and Uranium Mining (2006) is the only piece underreview that is not an anthropological work. Rather, the collection provideshighlights of the Navajo Uranium Miner Oral History and Photography Pro-ject. Certainly, one of its core accomplishments is to disseminate the materialsgathered as part of this project to a broader audience. This is critical inas-much as the largest nuclear accident in the United States, the United NuclearCorporation’s Church Rock, New Mexico, dam incident is barely recognizedby most Americans (Markstrom and Charley 2006:96; Yazzie-Lewis and Zion2006:4), and Navajo experiences with uranium are far less well known thanthose of ‘‘downwinders’’ in Nevada and Utah. The oral history chapters arecounter-balanced by chapters that elaborate on the historical, political, and

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psychological frameworks within which Navajo experiences with uraniummining and milling can be understood, as well as a chapter on social inter-ventions and advocacy.

As with Consequential Damages, this book allows readers to hear localvoices, in this case, the voices of Navajo workers and family members whoselives were transformed by the mining of uranium. Also in accord with Masco’sand Johnston and Barker’s works, the authors in Brugge et al. stress the way inwhich systematic marginalization consistently disadvantages Navajo people.Psycho-cultural worries about the long-term effects of radon exposure are alsoanalogous to the concerns of Marshallese, Pueblos, and Nuevomexicanos. Aswith these other groups, no education programs informed people in advanceabout the risks of radiation. For Navajo people, this meant that children playedon mine tailings, brought contaminated clothing into their homes, and theNavajo built their homes with mining waste. The book by Brugge, Benally,and Yazzie-Lewis is part of a larger effort to increase awareness among Navajopeople about radon risks; nevertheless, with over 1,000 abandoned mine siteson the Navajo reservation, and numerous others in the region, environmentaleffects and long-term health risks will continue for centuries.

While the contributions of Navajo People and Uranium Mining are sig-nificant, reading it as an ethnographic account presents certain problems.Largest among these is the repeated use of lead-in questions in the inter-views. The authors’ decision to include both questions and responses iscommendable and useful. However, having an interviewer share his or herbias on an issue in framing questions clearly has effects on consultants’responses. For example, Benally, interacting with George Lapahie, a uraniumminer, queries:

Okay. You worked with the black and white people. Washington was whothey worked for in the mine. There were many people used. The peoplefrom Washingdoon [sic] knew the health effects, but did not want thepeople [workers] to know about the health effects. This is what we knowtoday. So there were lies; we were used in that way. The way the Navajoswere treated in that way, what do you think about that? (Benally 2006:84)

Lapahie responds: ‘‘It is not right. It is like that all over’’ and he gives anexample of the use of a hazardous substance that was not explained inadvance (Benally 2006:84–85). While Lapahie’s example is valuable, Benallyhas already set the scene in such a way as to all but foreclose any disagree-ment. Numerous other examples point to the same problem among severaldifferent interviewers. This practice becomes particularly problematic sinceBrugge et al., state that ‘‘Oral history was chosen because it lets the peoplespeak for themselves’’ (Brugge and Benally 2006:177).

A question of voice also leaves readers uncertain about the position ofthe authors. Benally and Yazzie-Lewis state that they are Navajo tribal

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members whereas Brugge clearly is not. Nevertheless, the outsider=insiderclassification is far too essentialist and, certainly does not depict the nuancedways researchers are positioned vis-a-vis their consultants. Such problemsare unavoidable when one attempts to interpret the text. In chapter one,for example, Yazzie-Lewis and Zion (2006:2) state that the

Navajo word for monster is nayee, . . . ‘that which gets in the way of a suc-cessful life.’ . . .Every evil—each monster—has a name. Uranium has aname in Navajo. It is leetso, which means ‘yellow brown’ or ‘yellowdirt.’ . . . Sometimes when we translate a Navajo word into English wesay it ‘sounds like’ something. We think leetso sounds like a reptile, likea monster. It is a monster, as we will explain.

One semiotic question of central importance is ‘‘who is this ‘we’?’’ Does ‘‘we’’imply all speakers of Navajo? Is it only Navajo people positioned to translatebetween English and Navajo? Or is ‘‘we’’ only the authors—the ‘‘we’’ refer-enced by ‘‘as we will explain?’’ Disambiguating the referents of this particular‘‘we’’ provides a condensed example of problems with context and voice thatconfront the reader of this book.

Distinctions of voice are particularly important given the goals of theoral history project. As one goal, project members hoped to ‘‘educate bothNavajo and non-Navajo audiences,’’ particularly those who ‘‘live at a distancefrom mining areas, are too young to know first-hand, or were never told thehistory of uranium mining’’ (Brugge and Benally 2006:179). The idea thatthere is a (singular) history, and that the project takes part of its aim to beto indoctrinate those who do not know the history with its contours andeffects stands in direct contradiction to the idea that their are manyinterwoven types of histories, each related to the positionality of thosewho produce a certain version.

The fact that the versions of history most valued by the editors of thisvolume are not shared by all community members is particularly evident inthe accounts of Rita and Mitchell Capitan. In organizing a community meet-ing to discuss a proposed in situ leach mine, they say:

Rita Capitan: We talked about having a community meeting.Mitchell Capitan: And we decided to do something about it.

Rita Capitan: We put an article in the newspaper. To our surprise, atour first meeting, close to 50 community memberscame to that meeting. There were so many peoplethere, a lot of faces I’ve never seen before. But whenwe went up there to talk about it, right away we hadlandowners start to tell us we should stay out of theirbusiness—that’s their land, they can do whatever theywant. It was scary. It was humiliating. It felt like thewhole community just split.

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Chris Shuey: There were people who stood up and accused them ofanything from witchcraft to taking food out of themouths of their grandchildren, and standing in theway of people making lots of money off of the ura-nium leases.

This proposal split families. It didn’t just split thecommunity, and it didn’t split clans, it split bloodfamilies. (Shuey 2006:169)

While Masco and Gusterson pay close attention to contested discoursesin their ethnographic analyses, it is difficult to know how to position intervie-wee’s voices in Navajo People and Uranium Mining. Brugge, Benally, andYazzie-Lewis certainly provide readers with an important account of Navajoexperiences with uranium mining. They allow us to hear perspectives fromthose who suffered directly as a result of these experiences. However, thereare untold stories about Navajos more concerned with feeding their grand-children than they are with the effects of leach mining. There are otherswho, however much they may venerate Changing Woman, ‘‘our’’ EarthMother (Yazzie-Lewis and Zion 2006:6), do not want people ‘‘standing inthe way of people making lots of money off of the uranium leases’’ (Shuey2006:169). As is nicely depicted by Masco for Los Alamos, less than 200 milesto the east, there are multiple perspectives, many layers of experiences, manyperspectives, and many contested histories. This volume leaves the contra-dictory perspectives and contested histories unexplored.

PROBLEMATIC EDGES OF PEACEFUL NUCLEAR POWER

Constance Perin’s Shouldering Risk (2005), is the most distinct account underreview. Her work deals directly with safety and risk rather than with nuclearissues directly, though, certainly, her focus is on the nuclear power industry.Equally, her analysis deals with contradictions in organizations and the inter-actions of those within—far different from the cultural and cosmological con-cerns of Masco or Gusterson. Nevertheless, Perin also offers an in-depthethnographic inquiry, with lengthy quotations from participants within theorganizational hierarchy of three nuclear power plants. While the interviewformat creates its own formalized constraints, Perin includes her own voice,allowing readers some preliminary assessment of context.

Still, this ethnography is difficult reading, not the concise topical essayspresented in Gusterson, or the multi-layered contextualization that framessocial actions in The Nuclear Borderlands. Perin’s subtitle suggests that heraccount explores the ‘‘culture of control in the nuclear power industry,’’ butthis formulation of culture is far different from the perspectives of Masco orGusterson. For Masco, the shapes of the cultural imaginary emerge from asemiotic analysis of written documents, ritual performances, films, etc. In

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Perin’s case, ‘‘control’’ is an analytic imposition, a catch-phrase for the waysrisk management has been theorized. Control has no dynamic quality, nor isit a condensation symbol with demonstrable links to the array of interviewsused to ground her analysis. If Masco allows readers to see the connectionsbetween mundane human activities and abstract constructs in his theoreticalmodel, Perin provides an analysis of the ethnographic materials and then takesa quantum leap to the theoretical constructs of risk management theorists.

Perin nicely overviews the range of ways other scholars have describedrisk, industrial management, or the structural order of work environments,but she also imports their construct of culture. These non-anthropologists,however, use culture as a label for generic behavioral practices. Therefore,risk is a problem in the nuclear power industry and similar industries.Controlling risk is critical. Ergo, any activities engendered in this pursuit mustbe part of ‘‘control culture.’’ This is not a productive view of culture. It isnearly unrecognizable as an anthropological view. For example, Perin beingsthe ‘‘Logics of Control’’ chapter in search of a meaningful approach to‘‘probabilistic risk assessments.’’ Yet, having established that control of a lar-gely unknowable future is a core aim of risk assessment, her first subsectionis ‘‘Three Logics of Control Culture’’ (2005:198). Much of Perin’s first chapterestablishes that ‘‘control’’ is central in attempts to engineer approaches torisk; no analogous arguments are made for ‘‘culture.’’ No ethnographicevidence suggests that people on the ground use ‘‘culture’’ or think of theiractions as constrained by a particular cultural logic.

Masco discusses the ‘‘man in control of nature’’ theme that ClaudeLevi-Strauss and others identified as a central Euro-American trope, butPerin’s analysis is unclear on this point. Is the control of risk a cultural fetish,a cultural logic hyper-elaborated by engineers in high-risk industries, or aconceptual framework emerging within structural conditions unique tohigh-risk industries like nuclear power production? ‘‘Control Culture’’ con-flates these possibilities rather than separating them out contextually ordelineating them in some historically emergent fashion.

If Perin is unconvincing in her claim to analyze the culture of control,her work has profound implications for the study of risk. Indeed, her eth-nography allows a variety of voices to be heard, particularly the perspectivesof employees at three exemplary nuclear power plants. These plants aredescribed under the pseudonyms Charles Station, Arrow, and OvertonStation. Most of the stories result from interviews that concentrate on ex postfacto interpretations of social structural contradictions, or on contradictionsbetween formal regulations and the pragmatic encounters of daily life withina nuclear power plant. These accounts provide strong grounding for Perin’swork. Both the accounts and Perin’s analysis are filled with arcane termin-ology from the nuclear industrial complex, making the book a difficult read.Nevertheless, patient readers will clearly grasp the many locations in the gen-eration of nuclear energy where risk management is likely to break down.

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Perin’s core aim is voiced most clearly in the final chapter. She suggestsshe wants to provide ‘‘an anthropology of knowledge and meanings,’’ a pur-suit that necessarily also furnishes ‘‘an anthropology of one risky technologyin operation.’’ To accomplish this, she poses a seemingly ‘‘settled question—what it takes to operate and maintain a nuclear power plant at least risk.’’Exploring the ‘‘thinking and kinds of knowledge on which that depends’’directs Perin’s inquiry. This leads her to investigate ‘‘industry experts’ waysof understanding a complicated and hazardous technology, the conceptson which they rely, their ways of comprehending their own mistakes andthe technology’s malfunctions, the kinds of evidence they credit—all thoseand more in the context of physical, social, political, and financial dynamicsbringing the world into their work’’ (all quotes from Perin 2005:240). In thisendeavor, she hopes to move readers, particularly people involved in theanalysis of risk-laden enterprises, from functional analyses to analyses thatlend greater credence to meanings and understandings.

Throughout, Shouldering Risks concentrates on what Perin calls the‘‘tradeoff quandary.’’ In the era of self-regulation in the power industry, costconcerns inevitably come into conflict with issues of safety, particularly whenmaximizing safety means shutting down a plant or significantly reducing pro-ductive capacity. Thus, the nuclear industry sees its ‘‘regulatory burden’’ asoverly constrained by ‘‘conservative and expensive shutdown requirements’’(Perin 2005:10). Nevertheless, ‘‘the first industrial rule of thumb for keepingcosts low, ‘run it until it breaks’ ’’ has special implications in the nuclearpower industry (Perin 2005:3). While it may be very expensive to pay forforced outages, the costs of a Chernobyl are inestimably higher.

Ultimately, Perin spent substantial timewith employees at different organi-zational levels of the three nuclear facilities she uses as case studies. Each exem-plifies the different types of dilemmas that nuclear facilities may face and manyof the reported problems come back to the tradeoff quandary. For example, atArrow, a facility that had a relatively minor safety breach, the tradeoff quandaryis manifest in the way a faulty valve replacement was handled. By attempting torepair the valve as routine maintenance rather than understanding it as an eventthat potentially could lead to the exposure of the reactor’s core, numerous pro-blems were revealed. Clearly, non-nuclear components frequently haveimpacts on critical nuclear components, and the interdependencies are notalways recognized by people working in different domains within a plant.Not only are there people of different ranks in any plant, these differential rankshave distinct effects on how people respond in particular emergency situations.The ‘‘same’’ issues are understood very differently by managers, engineers, andmaintenance workers at any nuclear facility. The tendency to organize into‘‘silos’’ (Perin 2005:74), each group with its own understandings, solidarities,and hubris, and often opposed to one another in ways that hinder communica-tions, can lead to serious problems as nuclear plants operate in accord with amodel that presumes functional harmony among all workers.

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Thus, the analogies between Arrow’s minor problem and seriousbreaches like the near disaster in 2002 at Davis-Besse Station, must not beoverlooked. At Davis-Besse, a disaster was narrowly averted when ‘‘a holeon the head of its reactor vessel’’ went unnoticed. The hole was ‘‘about sixinches deep, five inches long, and seven inches wide,’’ it had pulverized‘‘70 pounds of carbon steel . . . leaving 3=16-inch stainless steel cladding asthe sole boundary of a vessel kept under pressure up to 2,500 pounds persquare inch’’ (Perin 2005:4–5). In spite of significant differences that separateArrow and Davis-Besse, Perin shows that both involve similar operationalprotocols and organizational understandings. Such an understanding pre-sumes that high-risk enterprises can be managed and that dilemmas areunderstood in functional terms. Ultimately, Perin demonstrates that people’sunderstandings are symbolic, contextual, and interrelational. Therefore,functional models provide a false sense that risk can be managed in ways thatwill be successful because the structural=functional relationships in onenuclear plant, or one high-risk industrial operation, will be essentially thesame in any industrial setting of a similar type.

Perin tracks other dilemmas at a facility she calls Bowie Station, includingan incident where an employee inadvertently tripped a breaker that shut downthe nuclear reactor and a case where a lapse in security allowed an unauthor-ized worker to enter the plant. Again, in the larger picture, these were bothminor lapses, but either may have resulted in much larger problems. Perintracks the official ‘‘blame scenarios’’ for these events—over-confidence, initiat-ing work late in the night shift, applying an incorrect electrical theory, andinconsistent labeling of electrical panels. Perin then demonstrates the inad-equacy of these explanations, contrasting them with how participants rep-resent the same problem—including the distinction between newbees andseasoned laborers, the value of peer work-checking teams, the amount ofbriefing before work is done, and changes in ownership or corporate reorga-nizations that lead to cutbacks in personnel. Many of these concerns lead backto the tradeoff-quandary, though each from a different quadrant.

The security breach, while quite different in its orientation, also comesback to the tradeoff-quandary. As Perin shows, nuclear plants really operatein two modes, one oriented to shutdown and repair, the second towardongoing generation of nuclear power. As a self-regulating business, theaim is always to make money. Anything that shortens maintenance timewhen a plant is shut down increases profits, unless too much rush resultedin a problem that required another shutdown. Nuclear plants, therefore,work in a schizophrenic manner, with pressures to increase work speedwhen a plant is shut down. The inadequate oversight that led Bowie Stationto allow an unauthorized worker into the plant thus comes back to the trade-off quandary. In their rush, Bowie employees failed to adequately review thework history of a short-term employee, thus leading to a breach of NuclearRegulatory Commission rules.

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Ultimately, Perin utilizes ethnographic interviews to explore employees’perspectives as they come to understand the numerous contradictionsimposed on them in the workplace. Readers gain an appreciation of the con-tested nature of understandings in various interactional scenes in nuclearplants, an understanding of the inadequacies of functional approaches to riskmanagement, and an unsettling sense that neither nation states, nor thenuclear power industry with whom they are closely aligned, can actuallycontrol the dangers to which they expose ordinary people. Recent eventsat Fukushima only serve to underline this message.

HOT TOPIC, COOL ANALYSES

Indeed, all of the works reviewed point to a number of very rough edgeswhere the control of products of the nuclear industrial complex has runaground. That the negative effects often create the greatest suffering on mar-ginal people is clearly demonstrated by the works of Johnston and Barkerand Brugge, Benally, and Yazzie-Lewis. That those involved in productionare equally driven by variants of a culturally fashioned ethos is made appar-ent in Perin, Gusterson, and Masco. The fact that the nuclear age has trans-formed core cultural sensibilities is clarified by Masco and Gusterson. If theeffects of a techno-scientific approach to the world were not as apparentto Malinowski on Kirwinia as was the impact of gardening magic, if it tookyears of reflection and time in Africa to make the importance of differentialpower relations under colonialism apparent to him, such is no longer thecase. Much as ethics has become a central concern of many medical anthro-pologists, ethics is a core concern for all of the authors whose works arereviewed herein. Therefore, not only do nuclear technologies have trans-formative effects on the lives of those involved, a complementary set of trans-formative effects has also accompanied the way that social and culturalanthropologists have come to interact with and write about the personsand communities with whom they work.

None of the authors under reviewdirectly addresses biological, archaeologi-cal, or linguistic anthropology’s concerns through theirwork.Nevertheless, a simi-lar set of challenges and opportunities for further research in each of theseanthropological domainsoozes throughbetween the linesof this corpusofworks.Indeed, Masco imagines what will happen as the radiological traces of nucleartesting outlive the commitments of theUnited States to oversee its effects and, cer-tainly, by that time, as regimesof surveillancebreakdown, theentiredevelopmentof the nuclear industrial complex, not only in Northern New Mexico, but in theMarshall Islands, at Livermore Labs, and at a plethora of nuclear power plants willbe of central concern to industrial archaeologists. The nuclear industrial complexhas required monumental structures, and massive logistical and subsistencesupport efforts, and entailed staggering transformations of environments.

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Johnston and Barker outline the social consequences of this type ofenvironmental transformation for Rongelap people, but the full details ofhow the contours of a place like Rongelap were necessarily re-imaginedand recontoured through nuclear testing and rehabilitation provide materialof substantial archaeological interest. Johnston and Barker speculate on a fewof the quandaries that will be faced by a repatriated group of Rongelap resi-dents when they are able to return to Rongelap Atoll. Nevertheless, the entireway in which such a community will both fashion and interact with itsenvironment will be substantially different from the set of practicesdeveloped by Rongelap people at the time of European contact, in the midstof the German and Japanese copra extraction eras, during the Naval admin-istration years immediately following World War II, or in the years thatpeople lived on Rongelap prior to their 1985 departure. All of these topicsare worthy of archaeological attention.

Masco touches on the symbolic significance of work structures knownas ‘‘kivas’’ at Los Alamos, but a comprehensive understanding of the dailypractices of LANL residents who worked in these kivas remains for historicalarchaeologists to assess once classified documents that might assist with suchan inquiry are declassified. Other, more monumental structures are alsopresent at LANL, but a strict set of contemporary taboos will prevent archae-ological inquiry until some future day when researchers will have to excavatethe remains of today’s structures, mine the diaries of former employees, andseek out design and renovation diagrams for these structures to ascertain thecontours of day-to-day use.

Situated among mineralogical drives (Diamond and Mercury) andSpanish-designated roads (Jemez and Pajarito) other routes indexically con-nect LANL with the Marshall Islands test sites (Bikini Road, Eniwetok Drive,and Parry Road) that provided LANL with its most straightforward raisond’etre. Indeed, Parry (the U.S. military designation for Meden Islet on Enewe-tak Atoll) was, during the height of nuclear testing, inhabited by over 12,000military personnel. Given local subsistence constraints, this islet, approxi-mately 2 miles in length and, at most, 100 yards wide, could support, per-haps, 120 Enewetak people. The fashioning of this islet as an entirelydifferent place during the nuclear testing era, and now its ‘‘rehabilitation’’as a native residence islet for Enewetak people, offers archaeologists an idealnuclear-industrial case study where theories of the relationship betweenworldview and human activity might be developed.

Perrin’s work shuttles between depictions of ideally depicted social rela-tions and actual practices, often focusing on the way in which a malfunctionin a specific valve or other industrially fashioned object forces a renegotiationof the relationship between the ideal and the real. Clearly, the nuclear facili-ties where she has conducted her work attempt to manage risk throughmonumental structures of incredible complexity. While the taboos that sur-round such facilities are not quite as rigorous as the prohibitions surrounding

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the nuclear weapons labs and testing facilities, the restrictions still keeparchaeologists at a distance. With aging facilities, however, this will eventu-ally change, opening up these sites to archaeological inquiry.

Of course, current institutional practices in archaeology point investigatorsin other directions. For exampleOlinger and Howard (2009:22–25), working onTennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sites, concentrate their efforts on prehistoricmaterials, seemingly blind to the fact that the nuclear structures and other powerplants are themselves highly impressive architectural features. Similarly, in thecase of Yankee Rowe, the third-built nuclear plant in the United States, full‘‘de-comissioning’’ meant leveling the entire nuclear plant, a monumental struc-ture for this part of Massachusetts. An archaeological survey, required by law,discovered ‘‘12 historic period sites including two impressive farm complexes,an early nineteenth-century cemetery, sugarhouses, and a sawmill’’ (PublicArchaeology Laboratory, Incorporated [PAL Inc.] n.d.), but, governed by a dif-ferent sense of cultural and historic value, the massive structure that was oncea central power-generating facility for New England was obliterated, leavingonly its most insidious residue, a two-acre ‘‘Independent Spent Fuel StorageInstallation site’’ (Yankee Rowe n.d.).

From Chernobyl to Bikini and Enewetak, a host of insidious residuesbegins to bridge the boundaries between archaeology and biological anthro-pology, for traces of such materials are mutually embedded in landscapesand persons. Children playing in uranium mine dumps in Navajo country,Marshall Islands residents, those who live downstream from LANL and,certainly, those most intimately associated with any nuclear power generationdisaster share the radiogenic effects of nuclear activities within their bodies.Each of the books under review deals with psycho-cultural parts of this issueto a greater or lesser degree, but they leave ample gaps for inquiry by biologi-cal anthropologists. Indeed, as is clear from a close reading of Johnston andBarker, indigenous theories about the mutagenic effects of radioactivity maydiffer from those of current scientific research. Both Masco and Gustersonhighlight the perduring effects of such mutagenic agents. Unfortunately,there are few areas of inquiry that exist in a more highly charged politicalatmosphere. Therefore, cautious inquiry by biological anthropologists andgeneticists will be required, with research funded from a broad array ofsources in order to ensure that the outcomes remain closely aligned with theevidence.

Lastly, while none of these authors provides us with linguistic accounts,several of them employ linguistic methodologies in their analyses and eachbook points to the potential for further research in this domain. Johnstonand Barker employ a large number of utterances and interpretations in theiranalysis of the ways that Rongelap people describe their experiences duringand after the Bravo Test on Bikini. As already noted, I would only suggestthat readers recall that this manuscript that began its life as part of a largercourt case. Therefore, it is invaluable in coming to understand how the

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Rongelap Nuclear Claims case was constructed and far less viable as an eth-nographic account of Rongelap people during the past 60 years. From alinguistic perspective, the full array of meanings, including the deictic com-ponents, of each utterance must be carefully analyzed in order to understandhow this set of Rongelap stories might be situated within a wider set oflinguistic accounts by Marshall Islanders in many different settings, both var-ied contemporary settings and wider historical ones. In-depth linguisticinquiry into the discourses produced during the Nuclear Claims processwould prove to be incredibly productive.

In Shouldering Risks, Perrin certainly relies on linguistic methods tocompare utterances with written dicta and to think about some of the junc-tures where a situation-specific worldview may lead people to interpret utter-ances and written documents in conflicting ways. Numerous sources ofsemantic ambiguity are revealed in her work, but hidden just behind the sur-face of the materials she presents are a whole plethora of face-to-faceencounters that must embed far richer materials for linguistic analysis thanthe stories and readings of documents she utilizes. Undoubtedly, consider-able difficulty might be encountered in gaining access to these performativematerials, but their richness for linguistic inquiry is certainly readily apparentin the research information used by Perrin.

If Brugge et al. struggle most significantly with linguistic analyses, thisdoes not mean that the material with which they deal does not offer greatpotential for linguistic inquiry. Pro and con arguments involved in publicmeetings about uranium mining, the front stage=back stage managementof utterances, and the code switching involved in a variety of settings wherediscussions of Navajo encounters with uranium take place would all be ofworthy of further inquiry by linguists.

Both Gusterson and Masco rely on a variety of semiotic methods to lendtexture to their accounts, and the richness of their respective analyses is theresult. Nevertheless, as with the other works, a sociolinguistic analysis of spe-cific interactions and social performances would prove to be incredibly richand revealing. Both authors deal with highly charged political settings andinteractions within Livermore or Los Alamos, settings that are undoubtedlygoverned by such strict surveillance that gaining access to detailed utterancesand sequences of social interaction might be impossible. However, notuncommonly, surveillance also produces video or audio-recorded sequencesthat may provide future linguists with an incredibly rich source of material ifand when such recordings are declassified. Clearly, both Gusterson andMasco work along the fringes of such surveillance, interviewing workersonce they have left the gates that enclose the labs, analyzing materials andsettings that reveal the more public face of the labs, and working with thosewho are affected by the activities of the labs but are not employed directly bythem. Perhaps Gusterson comes closest to a sociolinguistic analysis in hisinteractions with Sylvia or Ray, but settings that are even more revealing of

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daily interaction—where lab employees are engaged in discussions amongthemselves about issues of mutual concern or where they are involved in dis-putes—would be especially revealing sites for sociolinguistic inquiry. In sum,Masco’s and Gusterson’s use of semiotic and linguistic tools is quite sophis-ticated and valuable, but they also point to other levels of analysis that couldbe conducted by linguists.

There are many who suggest that ideas about holism are little more thana founding anthropological myth and that the projects of social and culturalanthropologists are nowadays fully divorced from those of biological anthro-pologists or even archaeologists. Frequently, this may seem to be the case.However, given the all-encompassing nature of nuclear technologies, andthe irrevocable consequences of human relationships to those technologies,the way in which anthropologists come to inquire about their effects onhuman lives will require a holistic effort. If social and cultural anthropologistshave been first attracted to this domain on account of the ravages of nuclearprojects on people’s lives, their voices will only be the first to reflect upon theongoing consequences of these projects. From testimonials of hardship andabuse, to court documents, to philosophical treatises on the way in whichnuclear testing has begun to impact contemporary worldviews, the accountsreviewed above already point to a new ethnographic landscape that requiresconsiderable reassessment and re-contextualization. At the same time, all ofthe authors whose works are reviewed herein agree that inquiries of this sortrequire ethical choices and moral commitments that differentiate studies ofnuclear activity from other forms of inquiry. The nuclear industrial complexentails effects that are felt from center to periphery, leaving all bodies, allenvironments, and all sorts of cultural relationships transformed. Theaccounts reviewed above coerce readers to contemplate several ways thatthe nuclear project, a prototypically American project, has changed us all.For this reason, if none other, these books must be read.

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LAURENCE MARSHALL CARUCCI, Professor of Anthropology at MontanaState University, holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from The University of Chi-cago and has conducted ongoing research with Marshall Islanders since1976. The focus of his research has been on issues of social and culturalchange among Enewetak people and the members of other communitieswho suffered through World War II and the subsequent era of United Statesnuclear testing in the Northern Marshall Islands. The results of his researchappear in numerous articles, book chapters, and books including NuclearNativity, The Typhoon of War, and Memories of War (the latter booksco-authored with Lin Poyer and Suzanne Falgout). His current researchfocuses on diet and sedentary illness among Enewetak Marshallese in theMarshall Islands and Hawai’i.

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