While planning the relief event, I could not see the magnitude of our efforts – I was simply too busy. The total weigh-in of donations was undoubtedly impressive, but with no prior experience in planning disaster relief events, I pondered how I acted so quickly and without reservation. It was difficult to see where my actions stemmed from. Was I motivated out of human compassion or more so because of my profession? Or, was it a combination of both? Or, perhaps something else? Then I recalled why I was drawn to the field of anthropology – other cultures, people, and my own place within the world. Simply put, I recognized anthropology fulfills my sense of human interest and compassion. I have never considered myself an applied or public anthropologist per say because I think it is essential for all anthropologists to engage beyond professional rigor, academic or otherwise. It behooves us to harness our knowledge and skills within the scientific community and share it with others. As an anthropologist, I represent a field that is oftentimes misunderstood by the general public, so working outside the academy is essential for me and as I assert here, for the profession itself. Irrespective of the sub-field, public engagement is critical for anthropologists because we all strive for better understandings of the human condition. Without such engagement, our specialized skills and knowledge are only meaningful within the profession – a profession that values, above all else, the entirety of humanity. Public engagement ensures anthropological advancement by offering anthropologists the opportunity to learn and help others while honing their skills.

Humanitarian efforts move people toward action and I observed this with many people in the greater Valdosta area. Public outpouring made me realize even more clearly the importance of community and global solidarity in extraordinarily difficult times. My role as an educator aided me in cultivating and soliciting assistance from others at the university and beyond, and my role as an engaged cultural anthropologist provided me the necessary insight to work successfully with and for diverse populations. Whether serving as an educator, researcher, or humanitarian, a common thread is that my motivations are grounded in moral obligation. By moral I mean living, working, and adhering to the values within a cultural group, mine and otherwise. This sense of moral commitment is a responsibility we all share and one the American Anthropological Association supports as illustrated in the recently approved Code of Ethics (2009). Being an anthropologist is more than working in a traditional research setting or within the university. Only by extending our skills outside the academy, do we truly experience the full breadth of anthropological engagement. Consequently, utilizing anthropology in the public sphere has affirmed my compassion for people and my passion for the field which together permeates every aspect of my personal and professional lives.

This ends our 2 part series by Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart. Click here to read Part 1 if you missed it on Friday. Also, keep an eye out for a companion photo essay illustrating Valdosta’s Haiti water and food relief event – coming later this week!

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in
Rensselaer, Indiana.

While trained as a cultural anthropologist, I also work within linguistics and have worked as an archaeologist. This freedom to be more holistic in my research is, I feel, one of anthropology’s strongest attractions. Combining this with anthropology’s hands-on field research with Native American communities, I find it immensely meaningful to teach anthropology in the university and conduct research that is beneficial to others. Giving back to the community, for which anthropological research relies on, is always a concern. This is especially the case when longstanding oppression has taken a toll in communities, such as Native Americans, that not only face socio-economic, but health-related concerns. In spite of these longstanding problems though, Native American communities have continuously demonstrated their resiliency. It is this connection with Native American peoples and issues that drew me to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. I know no one in Haiti and have never been to Haiti, but as a cultural anthropologist and even more importantly as a humanist, I recognized the need to apply my knowledge and skills somehow.

Clean potable water has been a problem in Haiti for some time and although there are efforts to curtail continued environmental devastation, eroded land makes agriculture difficult. Socio-economic issues, such as imported commodity foods sold more cheaply than those produced in Haiti are coupled with cyclical poverty and result in significant food insecurity for many Haitians. They, too, are an oppressed community, but one marked with historical resiliency. I felt compelled to do something more for Haitians given their devastating circumstances, so organizing a water and food relief effort became evident. I envisioned organizing anthropology students from Valdosta State University (VSU) in south Georgia to collect rice, beans, and water for victims. Rice and beans are two important staples for Haitians, and consequently two affordable food sources for most Americans. Recognizing students have limited funds, I felt physical donations consisting of inexpensive bags of rice, beans, and bottled water made more sense than soliciting monetary donations. I also worked collaboratively with colleagues, administration, and student organizations from VSU as well as the American Red Cross and Second Harvest Food Bank. What began as a simple idea of collecting food and water grew into a city-wide relief effort. There was extensive media coverage including television, radio, and print media; and I began a Facebook group. Social networking quickly proved useful because it was an easy way for students and others from the community to post questions, concerns, and commentary about Valdosta’s response to the Haiti earthquake. It also enabled me to keep everyone abreast of continuing developments regarding the relief event.

The relief event took place ten days after the earthquake struck. We set up a drive-thru in the VSU baseball stadium parking lot to facilitate donation activity and the turn-out was remarkable. The American Red Cross’s disaster relief team collected monetary and blood donations, and Second Harvest Food Bank supplied a crew for collecting, palleting, and trucking donations to storage. Additionally, over 50 students from an area middle school volunteered. In all, we collected 35,000 pounds of food and water equivalent to 17 tons. Second Harvest Food Bank trucked 1/3 of the donations to Miami, Florida, where the State Department then flew the shipment to Haiti. The remaining 2/3 of the donations were picked up by the Feed the Children organization and then flown gratis by FedEX to Port au Prince where the shipment was immediately trucked to and distributed at the Feed the Children refugee camp housing 15,000 Haitians.

End of Part 1, look for Part 2 of this special 2 part article this coming Monday!

In the meantime, check out these other links about VSU’s rice, beans and water drive for Haiti:

VSU Continues to aid Haitian Disaster Relief Efforts

WCTV-TV article

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in Rensselaer, Indiana.

Outsmarting Risk: From Bonuses to Bailouts
By Karen Z. Ho

Recent criticisms of Wall Street bonuses and bailouts—whether they express incredulous disbelief, hopeless resignation, or unfortunate necessity—somehow leave us unsatisfied. Most explanations fail to satisfy us precisely because they accept the “common-sense” understanding of Wall Street risk—an “understanding” that itself fundamentally misapprehends the culture and practice of financial risk in the United States, especially as it pertains to the most powerful members of the financial elite.

The central “common-sense” logic undergirding these accounts of “financial risk” is that high risk and reward necessarily go together with high uncertainty and loss. Actors, from small-business entrepreneurs to Wall Street investment bankers, make the rational calculation that “those who can make an opportunity from risk can quickly fall prey to uncertainty’s blows” (Martin 2007, 41). Wall Streeters represent themselves as risk takers par excellence, constantly embracing risk and not clinging to security, stability, and by extension, stagnancy. Risk takers are defined as having a future orientation, an anticipation of loss, which “must be built into any calculation of risk, rendering contentment a particularly scarce commodity” (Martin 2007, 47).

Of course, this time, as the consensus goes, Wall Street went too far, took too much risk, engaged in too much leverage, and thereby instigated worldwide crises. The pervasiveness of these assumptions explains why many of us are at a loss to understand why Wall Street investment banks were bailed out. If the risk/reward/loss bargain holds true, then shouldn’t Wall Street, the exemplary risk takers, have accepted the consequences? Similarly, consider the public’s confusion over Wall Street’s ritual of the bonus, which focuses on this quandary: how can investment bankers command such high bonuses when their practices so often generate crisis and massive socioeconomic volatility, even decline? It is only a quandary, however, if we presume the connection between reward/risk and loss/uncertainty where Wall Streeters get “paid for performance” and thus should not get paid when they do not “perform.” The fact that despite depression, they still get paid brings to light the central contradictions underlying dominant assumptions of financial risk and the unequal effects of a finance-capital dominated social economy.

Yet could it be precisely our too easy acceptance of this bargain that prevents a more serious challenge to these powerful financial ideologies? Through a brief exploration of investment banks’ bonuses and Wall Street’s bailout, I attempt to chart another approach.

A Peculiar Culture: Bonuses, Measuring Performance, and Performing Smartness

I begin with Wall Street’s bonus and compensation practices, since they are perhaps the keenest expressions of their central ethos, before I turn to a discussion of their culture of risk in particular. I ask readers to turn their attention first to this press release from the New York State Comptroller’s Office, where in January 2009, the Office of the State Deputy Comptroller compiled a table of New York City securities industry bonuses from 1985 to 2008 (see table below). Although, admittedly, there are multiple ways to interpret and contextualize these numbers, I read them as indicative of the growing influence of financial values and practices. With a cursory glance, it is striking how Wall Street bonuses have been increasing exponentially in the past two decades: in the 1980s, the “decade of greed,” bonuses hovered around a “mere” $2 billion; in the mid-1990s, around $5 billion; in 1999, around $9 billion; in 2003, around $16 billion; and in 2007, almost $33 billion! Not surprisingly, the massive rise of the total bonus pool (which is based on the number and size of financial deals generated by Wall Street investment banks) is indicative of “the financialization of everyday life,” where corporations, institutions, and even individuals went from being separated and protected from, avoiding, and/or faddishly dabbling in the financial markets to nearly conflating all their hopes and labors for growth with constant financial transactions. Financial deal making has become the routine path for corporations to “demonstrate” growth, responsibility, and success, despite the fact that such narrow strategies often led to long-term decline in corporate productivity, not to mention shareholder value volatility. Simply comparing 2007 with 1987— 32.9 with 2.6 billion—gives a sense of Wall Street’s stakes and interests in restructuring the global economy, not to mention the acceleration and intensification of the widereaching effects of financial crises.

Upon further examination, another interesting pattern and possible correlation emerges: notice how the bonuses peak and trough within the general upward climb. Reflecting on the multiple moments of crises and heightened financial market volatility that have characterized the past two decades, pay attention to how bonuses “peak” at precisely the moment of financial crisis. In 1987, bonuses culminate at $2.6 billion with the stock market crash of 1987 and the impending junk bond collapse. In 1993, bonuses rise to $5.8 billion, right before the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. In 1997, bonuses crest at $11.2 billion, at the moment of the Asian and Russian financial crises. In 2000, bonuses top out at $19.5 billion, right at the dot-com bust. And in 2006 and 2007, bonuses are at a record $34.1 billion and $32.9 billion, as the current subprime debacle implodes. Could bonuses, then, index crises; that is, could bonuses be used as an approximate predictor and indicator of impending financial disaster? In other words, to the extent that stratospheric bonus numbers demonstrate the frenzy of deal making that helps to constitute bubbles in the first place, they also set the stage for the impending crash.

Contrary to the dominant representation that Wall Streeters are masters of risk, their compensation culture indicates that they produce crises and pass on risk. Moreover, at issue here is a fundamental misapprehension of Wall Street’s practices of compensation, which is largely represented as “pay for performance.” I would argue that there is not so much a contradiction between Wall Street bonuses and the larger performance of our social economy as there is a misplaced understanding of what actually constitutes financial “performance.” Investment bankers and traders measure performance according to the number of deals executed, regardless of their impact on the corporation or society at large. Even in a recession, transactions such as selling off toxic assets or bankruptcy advice count toward the bonus.

As I argue in my 2009 ethnography, Liquidated, many of my Wall Street informants actually sensed the impending bubble burst. Through their daily practices, they often recognized that they had pushed through as many financial transactions as the markets could bear. And, yet, this knowledge did not so much curtail their deal making as it hastened their efforts to eke out even more deals that would count toward their year-end bonus. After all, investment bankers and traders themselves have jobs that are on the line, rife with insecurity. For them, a sacred cultural value is to “be one” with the market, to work simultaneously and in “real-time” with it as their cultural embodiment. They are culturally conditioned to mortgage the future through their bonuses. Of course, Wall Streeters’ experiences of financial crises and job insecurities have historically been much more cushioned than those of the average worker; they are amply resourced, highly networked and pedigreed, exorbitantly compensated, and valued as “the smartest.” As such, their understandings of what it takes to be a successful worker in the new economy, to act simultaneously with the market that they have had a strong hand in constructing, are internalized as challenges and sources of empowerment, however unstable and disruptive such standards are for most people. The dominance of short-term, transaction-led compensation schemes, the understanding that Wall Street investment bankers, as the smartest investors in the world, are deserving, and the taken-for-granted divorce of executive pay (and stock prices) from the livelihood of most workers in the service of quick shareholder value are all at work here.

Recently, we see the way bankers’ smartness is mystified and then marshaled to defend their bonuses. Despite their roles in failed deals and financial crises, bankers are depicted as indispensible, and bonuses are the crucial vehicle for retaining talent. And, precisely because bonuses are a core part of Wall Streeters’ sense of themselves, totally eliminating bonuses for still-employed bankers would be all but culturally unthinkable. Of course, the persistence of high bonuses despite Wall Street’s instigation of the global financial meltdown raises the question of who bears the brunt of high-risk practices, a question to which I now turn.

Reframing Risk

In the wake of the Russian and Asian financial crises in the late 1990s, veteran Wall Street observer Michael Lewis wondered why hedge funds didn’t lose credibility after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the world’s leading hedge fund. After all, this fund had been blamed for exacerbating these crises. He wrote, “But the panic—like all panics—did nothing but strengthen the booming hedge-fund industry.” Today, almost a decade later, with Wall Street at the helm of the subprime debacle and global financial crises, it is hard to believe that Goldman Sachs just posted astronomical profits and bonuses. Goldman Sachs was itself on the brink of elimination in 2008. To the extent that Wall Street’s continual regeneration seems mystifying, I offer two explanations: one is that mainstream economic and governmental structures accept Wall Street’s key cultural values that maintain and legitimate its success; the other is that, in practice, their confidence, survival, and extraordinary risk taking are only possible through subsidy.

Surely, the smartest in the world could be trusted with risk. In fact, Wall Streeters pride themselves in going beyond the simple risk/reward/loss bargain. For themselves and investors writ large, risk is marketed as mitigated by smartness. In one sense, their investments in subprime mortgages (and hedges against it) demonstrated for my informants their smartness in inventing new sources of profit taking that circumvented and outwitted both governmental regulators and risk managers in their own firm, while seeming to address the concerns of those they had circumvented and outwitted. As many investment bankers told me, “We are so much smarter than the folks in risk management and audit.” It is important to recall that at most investment banks risk management is a middle-office function, not part of the prestigious, revenue-generating front office. As such, until the meltdown, traders and bankers in structured finance and mortgage backed securities were lionized for profiting on both sides of the trade. Unlike the conventional risk managers, who were seen as dampening profitability, front-office bankers and traders were able sell their version of risk management as products, such as credit-default swaps that would allow buyers to recoup some of their investment in case they bought loans or bonds that defaulted. (Of course, since these swaps were not actual insurance policies, Wall Street did not set aside capital reserves as collateral for these products; therefore, such risk-hedging products actually exacerbated risk globally.)

Many Wall Streeters came to believe that they had in fact “mastered” risk. An informant from Lehman Brothers told me he did not believe that Lehman would go under precisely because the firm’s exposure to subprime was offset, “hedged,” by purchases of credit-default swaps and other derivatives. A few weeks before Lehman declared bankruptcy, he continued to claim, or perhaps hope, that Lehman was “market-neutral,” that its “value at risk” balance was effectively “zero.” The firm was, in his view, smart enough to control its exposure to risk even as it plunged as deeply into the market as possible. Wall Street leveraged claims of its own smartness and in the end also fell victim to its own self-representations.

Another core Wall Street value is the privileging of market identification and simultaneity, where the creation of constant, often short-term, transactions and products are the measures of corporate success. For Wall Street and evaluators of the financial markets, the commonsense understanding is that financial architects and innovators have demonstrated the ability to create entirely new market opportunities characterized by immediate exploitation and high growth. As such, according to this culture of expediency, even those implicated in the worst excesses of hedge funds, derivatives, junk bonds, and subprime mortgages are understood to have excelled in “making markets happen,” that is, generating a market and being “in it” as of yesterday. In this ethos, market simultaneity, not wisdom, is a central goal. The very structure of Wall Street encouraged the milking of the present and thus created exactly the conditions that rendered Wall Street’s financial modeling, “protection,” and predictions obsolete. Full speed expansion into subprime mortgages and buying and selling credit-default swaps without capital reserves, more for the purpose of generating profit than protecting against risk, might be called a strategy of no strategy.

In addition to smartness and the culture of market simultaneity, Wall Street risk-taking, I argue, is produced through government subsidy and the Wall Street–Washington consensus of “too big to fail.” Let me recount a conversation with Peter Felsenthal, a bond trader at Salomon Smith Barney, in the wake of the Russian and Asian financial crises in the late 1990s. When I asked him about how the emerging market crises affected his work, he replied that his trading desk “knew” that Russia “was not sustainable.” Feeling confused, I asked why they continued to trade the foreign debt of Russia, and he replied “We didn’t get burned” because “you have all of the upside when things go well,” and “if you do poorly, you don’t owe anybody any money, so you might as well take as much risk as possible.” Thrown off-balance, I further inquired how they knew that they wouldn’t fail, and how they guaranteed “only the upside” despite their massive risks. Felsenthal calmly explained that for five years, they happily rode the bull market, knowing that in the worst case scenario, the U.S. government or the IMF would bail them out because they could not let a major country fail. “Russia is in this sort of too-big-to-fail category. So, that’s what people say at U.S. banks. With Russia’s nuclear weapons, there is no way we are going to let them fail, not a chance.”

Throughout my fieldwork on Wall Street, I would hear of Wall Street banks and their trading partners being “too big to fail.” In their worldviews, countries (or, rather, Western “investors” in these countries) and global financial institutions were too global or powerful to fail. Before Lehman Brothers (where one could argue, the “free market” worked for one day—the day they went out of business), their predictions were correct: Long-Term Capital Management, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and AIG were all subsidized. From the third world debt crisis in the 1980s to the Asian and financial crises of the 1990s, the IMF and U.S. Treasury stepped in during emerging market crises to demand policies that enhanced repayment for western creditors, and compromised economic sovereignty.

Simultaneously, as I suggested earlier, my informants often anticipated when the bubble would burst; they could sense from their own practices that they had committed as many transactions as their clients could bear. As Paul Flanagan, an M&A associate at Goldman Sachs, articulated, bankers are so worried for their own jobs and so plagued with job insecurity that their goals are to “get what you [can] out of it for a short term,” rushing to complete as many deals as possible to increase their bonus compensation. (It is important to note that what is understood to be at risk is mainly their own jobs, not the systemic risk they inflict on the financial markets.)

What I want to stress in this discussion of risk is that many of my informants anticipated not only a crash, but also an eventual bailout, on the grounds that Wall Street investment banks were “too big to fail.” Such an assumption demonstrates that, contrary to their free market discourses, investment banks embraced risk not because they had successfully hedged their bets or managed their exposure. Rather, they depend on the state to underwrite their risk and profit taking. A key question then becomes, to what extent, in the past fifteen years, did Wall Street models, expectations, and risk practices presume an eventual bailout? In my current research I entertain the provocative possibility that from Wall Street’s point of view, default no longer became a concern over the past fifteen years, allowing investment banks to reframe its risk culture and aspire to work “only on complete leverage.”

Of course, increasing the complexity of their product offerings, even to the point where they did not know what was on their own books, as well as the global spread and interconnection of their products helped to construct, enable, and codify “too big to fail.” In other worlds, financial hyper-specialization and intricacy as well as “the global” became insurance policies against their own leveraged practices and strategies to avoid regulation. It was precisely Wall Street investment banks’ involvement in and construction of global interconnection, their global spreading of risk, that both generated the crisis and assured its rescue: the more the world bought into Wall Street (from American investors to entire governments), the more leverage Wall Street had to hold the globe hostage. The complicity of our retirement funds, for example, the extent to which middle-class Americans’ security has been outsourced to the global capital markets, deters our ability to critique and reform Wall Street. What cushions Wall Street’s hard landing is not the bankers’ much-touted future orientation and risk management skills (which have largely been exposed as hype in any case) but the deliberate tethering of their fortunes to those of the global economy so that they can command state support and bailouts. It is in this light that the much-talked-about privatized gains and socialized losses make sense. It is through these subsidies that Wall Street financiers and economists believed that they had moved beyond boom and bust, that they had outsmarted crisis.

Further research on when and how “too big to fail” began is crucial to contextualize and fully analyze how Wall Street’s approach to risk in practice operates according to a no-default worldview. To the extent that the risk bargain was not a cost-benefit analysis and that losses were cushioned by definition, common cultural assumptions about risk are turned on their head. The unearthing and unpacking of such cultural assumptions would reframe the very foundations of the professed identities, skills, and even the cultural and economic legitimacy of both financial economics and finance capital.

References

Martin, Randy. 2007. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Karen Z. Ho is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her recent book is Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press 2009).

*This is a special feature from the third, Darwin themed print issue of Anthropology Now.*

spitting image, spit’n’ image. Informal. exact likeness; … bef. 950; (v.) ME spitten, OE spittan; c. G (dial.) spitzen to spit; akin to OE spætan to spit, spætl spittle …. (Dictionary. com 2009).

Last year, the California-based project 23andMe—a project that offers to estimate a person’s predisposition for a number of traits and diseases on the basis of a saliva test—held a “spit party” during New York fashion week; volunteers would spit into a test tube to provide their DNA for sequencing and analysis. The photo shows the vibrant scene, a young couple opening their kits and donating saliva, to explore what their genomic constitution might tell them about their identity and the kind of life they might lead. Apparently, they were publicly celebrating both their self and their genome, staging their persona and their bodily essence for the media, in the process of lobbying for personal genomics and the company responsible for 23andMe, an affiliate of Google. An article in The New York Times announced the launching event by saying that 23andMe “wants people to think of their genomes as a basis for social networking,” adding that “the company … hopes to make spitting into a test tube as stylish as ordering a ginger martini” (Salkin 2008). In November 2008, Time Magazine declared the retail DNA test of 23andMe the best innovation of the year. The year before, Apple’s iPhone was the winner. Several other companies have either started or scheduled one form or another of retail genomics. This is consuming genomics, a rapidly growing business receiving both substantial financial support and intense public attention. Clearly, something new is in the air.

The notion of spitting and related concepts has proved to be a powerful metaphor. Exploring its social history is like fol¬lowing the trajectories of ancient DNA. The English verb to “spit”—to “spew” or to “expel saliva”—is of early medieval origin. The noun “spit,” in the meaning “the very likeness,” is more recent, attested from 1602, while “spitting image” is a twentieth-century thing, apparently from as early as 1901. It may be interesting to note that there has been some debate on the etymology of the phrase. Some have suggested it is derived from “splitting image,” based on the two identical parts of a split plank of wood. Such an account would resonate perfectly with the modern concept of the double he¬lix and the splitting of DNA, underlining the relevance of the idea of the “spitting image” for both modern gene talk and the genealogical tree. The discovery of the structure of DNA material has been heralded as the key to the understanding of the continuity and change of life forms, as the missing conceptual link of evolutionary theory finally solving the mystery of the “tree of life.” Also, “splitting” might highlight the Western notion of the duality of the individual as a natural body and a social person, a notion often challenged nowadays by the monistic concept of the biosocial (Rabinow 1996). Given such reasoning, the 23andMe “spit party” might just as well have been called a “split party.” It seems, however, that the reference to spitting was based on “spit,” not “split,” an allusion to someone who is so similar to another as to appear to have been spat out of his or her mouth (Martin 2009).

The spit party and the notion of spitting image invite interesting anthropological questions: What are the overall spin-offs from personal genomics, especially with respect to the understanding of self, person¬hood, relationships, and ancestry? Despite sustained criticisms of the gene talk current in the West and the determinisms it implies, personal genomics along the lines of 23andMe seems to have a substantial public appeal. At the same time, the services offered by genomics companies give rise to new kinds of relations and networks based on genetic signatures presumed to be en¬coded in DNA. Like many others, I decided to indulge in a kind of spitting, mixing ethnographic observation, theoretical reflection, and narcissistic pleasure. One of the key companies in the development of personal genomics, deCODE genetics, hap¬pens to be located on the outskirts of my campus in Reykjavik, Iceland—within spit¬ting distance, if you like.

deCODEme: “Dig into Your DNA!”

A few days before the launching of 23andMe, deCODE genetics announced a similar service—deCODEme. The project now offers both a “complete” scan ($985) and two more narrow scans focusing on specific conditions, cancer ($225) and cardiovascular problems ($195). I signed up for the complete scan, eager to find out how anthropological understanding of humans and their differences was being used and developed in the project, to explore the assumptions about cultures and bodies on which analyses would be based, to see what the scan might tell me about myself and my roots, and to follow the development of the virtual community of people who subscribe to services of this kind. For some months I resisted the narcissism of personal genomics. Both of my parents had struggled with cancer and I wasn’t terribly keen on the kind of fortune telling offered by personal genomics. I guess news of the New York spit party helped to change my mind. Somehow collective spitting and the bonding involved appealed to the anthropologist, curious about the implications of the new genetics for modern life. In my case, how¬ever, there was no formal party. Extracting the cheek swabs, signing the relevant forms, and mailing the lot to the lab was a solitary event.

Two weeks later, I received an email from the company. The results were now available and I would be able to access them through the password provided. Once I logged on, I was urged to “have fun browsing [my] … genome,” “dig into [my] … DNA,” explore my ancestry and my “genetic risks,” play with fancy maps and other visuals, search for specific genetic variants (SNPs or “snips”), and download my genotypes for 1.2 million SNPs (a 33Mb datafile). The comparison of my genetic code with that of populations covered in the “Genetic Atlas,” I was told, was based on several hundred thousand genetic variants and more than 1,000 reference individuals from 50 different populations worldwide (see the illustration). My genome, not surprisingly, turned out to have most in common with “European” reference groups (a genetic similarity of 83.99%), in particular those of Iceland, the Orkneys, France, and Russia.

More astonishingly, another feature of deCODEme, “ancestral origins,” indicated that judging from chromosomes 1 to 22 my ancestry was no less than 7% East Asian, 16% according to the X chromosome, considerably higher than for most Icelanders. I found this an interesting and puzzling revelation. To speak of “genealogical dis-ease” (Rapp, Heath, and Taussig 2001)—to use a term developed by anthropologists studying what people make of genetic information about their roots and ancestry—would, however, be an overstatement.

According to the analysis of my maternal DNA, I belong to “mitogroup R*.” This is a category shared by 4.8% of deCODEme users, all of whom can trace their mitochondrial DNA to a woman thought to have lived about 60 thousand years ago, probably somewhere in the Near East. Analysis of my paternal DNA, on the other hand, shows that I belong to “Y-group R1a,” a category shared with 10.3% of deCODEme users tracing their Y chromosomes back to one man who is thought to have lived about 10 to 15 thousand years ago, probably in Western Asia. A further feature allows users to explore their “map of kinship,” a visual representation of genetic space on the basis of so-called principal component analysis (PCA, for short). This method compares the genetic code of many individuals to uncover genetic patterns or dimensions involving many different SNPs. On the basis of this evidence, I seem to occupy a somewhat marginal position, neither firmly within the European reference group nor any of the others, probably reflecting the puzzling observation about my partial East Asian ancestry.

The other main service offered by de-CODEme is that of analyzing the genome with respect to specific traits and health risks. The current list of risks analyzed by deCODEme is a mixed bag of forty diseases and traits, including alcohol flush reaction, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attack, lactose in¬tolerance, male pattern baldness, multiple sclerosis, prostate cancer, and psoriasis. My results for the diseases and traits covered are based on calculations comparing my genetic sequence to sequences of participants in studies published in the scholarly literature. To access results for some diseases I was invited to read about the genetic and medical details and to sign a statement about informed consent, by clicking on “Accept.”

I need not bore the reader with the personal details. Suffice it to say that some of the information provided sounds trivial (no alcohol flush reaction), some of it resonates with what I thought I already knew (I am less likely than the general population “to become nicotine dependent [15% or less]”), some results are encouraging (I have low lifetime risks for some diseases, much less than for males of European ancestry in general), and some details may encourage the hypochondriac in me to request further medical information (my risks for some dis¬eases are significantly higher than those of my genetically significant others).

When presented with these results, I was offered details on the mathematics of risk analysis. Also, I was invited to zoom in on my genomic landscape, focusing on a part of a chromosome and the location of specific mutations reportedly responsible for potential traits or diseases. The website drew the parallels of the two universes of in¬side and outside: “In the same manner as Google Earth allows you to explore the world map, the deCODEme Genome Browser enables you to visualize the genome.” The tour was far more fun than the mathematics. Again, there were some surprises and some food for thought.

Emergent Communities and Technologies of the Self

It seems reasonable to argue, as Hacking observes (2009), that personal genomics represent one example of what Michel Foucault referred to as “technologies of the self.” For Foucault, technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (1988:18). One of the pioneers of the genetics of ancestry is Bryan Sykes of Oxford University. Significantly, his book on ancestry (2001) opens with the question “Where do I come from?” and closes with a chapter on “A Sense of Self.”

For many people, then, hereditary material provides an important avenue into identity and personhood. Knowing our genetic constitution and where we come from, we apparently also know who we are. As Pinker observes (2009): “Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question ‘Who am I?’—our ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.” This is a theme underlined by Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder of 23andMe: the 600,000 genetic markers interpreted by 23andMe, she argues, are “the digital manifestation of you” (see Hamilton 2008).

One may object to the rhetoric of self-discovery evident in the marketing of personal genomics by saying that personhood is not a matter of genetics, whatever people say at modern spit parties. Indeed, many ethnographies would testify to other ways of establishing personhood. For many Canadian Inuit, for instance, personhood is largely framed in the context of name talk, not gene talk (Pálsson 2008); the essence of the person, it is assumed, is constructed through a highly communal project heavily dependent on personal naming. During the life course, a person acquires a series of recycled names from friends and relatives that collectively establish the identity, personality, and fate of the individual concerned. An Inuit spit party, as a result, is likely to have a radically different meaning from that of many New York spit parties. Perhaps one should keep in mind that gene talk has only been around for half a century or so while name talk has probably followed culture since the beginning of humanity. New York celebrities, however, much like Inuit and everybody else, construct their personhood and identities in the course of everyday life, possibly through “Facebook” kinds of networking based on genome sequencing. The virtual becomes the real thing.

Personal genomics not only establishes, it is assumed, who we are, but it also generates new networks and communities. Indeed, a thriving imagined community of the users of personal genomics projects has been developing on the Internet. The Genome Browser of deCODEme allows users to compare their complete data with friends and family. While my reference group of friends and family includes both hypochondriacs and anthropologists, so far they have seen few good reasons to participate and, as a result, there isn’t much to compare. The Web site, however, allowed me to examine my genetic sharing with three “famous” people: Kári Stefánsson (the president, CEO, and cofounder of deCODE genetics), Craig Venter (founder of the Institute for Genomic Research), and James D. Watson (codiscoverer of the structure of DNA). Here, sharing is indicated visually by the coloring of the relevant bits of the chromosomes. Not surprisingly, I had more in common with my fellow Icelander than with Venter and Watson. So, after all, I did have a kind of spit party, online in absentia.

No doubt personal genomics is becoming both a family affair and a global concern. A number of websites testify to a lively discourse on the issues involved, including thinkgene.com, dna-forums.org, Eye on DNA, Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, and Urban Semiotics. Users can draw their own conclusions from the analyses provided and engage in dialogues with genomic experts, sometimes becoming experts themselves in the process. Several users have tried two or more services to explore the extent to which their results on health risks and ancestry might agree or disagree. Sometimes people check if they are being cheated. One blogger claimed to know of “at least one case … where a customer deliberately submitted a dog’s DNA just to ‘test’ the company. He was willing to pay for his little experiment, and yes, the company figured out exactly what had happened!”

Many people have little interest in exploring their health risks in public. Judging from the websites, there seems to be more interest in discussing ancestry. Sykes’s service (Oxford Ancestry), which offers people an opportunity to see which “clan” they belong to, to trace their ancestry to one of the seven daughters of Eve, has generated extensive discussion. Here is a reference from one of the blog sites:

I received my DNA results earlier this year and was surprised to find myself in clan Ulrike. I have traced six generations of ma¬ternal ancestors in the Beds/Northants bor¬ders region. The Viking invaders did travel into this area…. I have always been at¬tracted to northern wilderness and have visited Alaska, Greenland/Iceland and Siberia. Is this my DNA speaking?!

Some bloggers take a playful attitude to genome testing. One woman had her husband “tested” for fun:

I admit it. I have no self-discipline when it comes to genetic genealogy. When de-CODEme launched, I had to be one of the first in line to get tested. So I ordered … and received results … —my husband’s results, that is. I thought this might be a little more interesting since he sports a Y chromosome.

Clearly, there is a rapidly growing interest in personal genomics, for the purpose of celebrating our past and for managing our lives and our future.

Analyses of ancestry are likely to remain more or less intact, despite some anthropological doubts about important issues (Bolnick et al. 2007, Marks 2008), including the identification and sampling of populations and the shape of the family tree, partly because there is not so much at stake and, in any case, it is play. Studies of the genomics of diseases, in contrast, are riddled with contests, doubts, and conflict. Most common diseases are only minimally explained by genetic factors and in each case a great number of genes are likely to be involved. Also, the exact constellation of genes seems important, which further complicates analyses. Last, but not least, there is growing evidence for the importance of “epigenetic” factors, way beyond the simple concept of DNA sequence.

Given the evidence, and the growing public awareness of it (see, for instance, Hall 2009), why would people bother to measure their health risks with personal genomics services? While the hype may have faded, there seems to be a continued market for the kinds of services provided. The narcissistic pleasures of late modernity are reaching levels that Foucault could not possibly anticipate, and personal genomics is just one example of the fascination with the body. Also, the power of computing machinery continues to expand and cheap complete sequencing is within reach. Moreover, there are immense financial stakes and concerns on the global level, for biotechnical and pharmaceutical companies. As a result, one may expect personal genomics projects to expand. Although deCODE genetics has been in dire financial shape for some time, burdened with the excessive costs of its scientific work and its laboratory, and its future remains uncertain, other companies specializing in personal genomics seem to thrive. New services continue to be added to the menu.

Laboring Consumers

The companies involved in personal genomics emphasize consumers’ relative autonomy and independence from the medical establishment. Indeed, personal genomics of the kind discussed here may involve an element of empowerment. The virtual community of genetic citizens actively debates and negotiates roots, identities, and health risks fusing the expertise of professional and “lay” geneticists for the purpose of scrutinizing genomes. In a sense, then, this is science from below (Harding 2008). The forums involved are reasonably democratic social networks based on identification with genomic characteristics.

While giving people an opportunity to become active explorers and governors of their genomes is a good idea, the arguments about individual freedom, informed choices, and the unregulated genomic marketplace emphasized by genomic companies should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, they disguise the fact, as Prainsack et al. argue (2008: 34), that personal genomics is pushing the individualization of responsibilities a bit too far. Public authorities, they suggest, should “make it a priority to fund empirical research exploring what individuals expect from personal genomics, and in what way genetic susceptibility information is likely to affect practices and lifestyle choices.” Here, anthropology can play an important role (Nelson 2008, Santos et al. 2009).

Another qualification concerns the labor that users of genomics services perform for personal-genomics services. I suggest that genomic services engage the bodies and labor power of their consumers in what may be called biosocial relations of production (Pálsson 2009). The spokespersons for 23andMe, unlike most of the other projects, including deCODEme, have been quite open about the issue of alternative uses of their data. Wojcicki suggests signing up for 23andMe is “a great way for individuals to be involved in the research world….

You will have a profile, and something almost like a ribbon marking participation in these different research papers. It will be like, ‘How many Nature articles have you been part of?’” (pimm.wordpress.com 2007). The people contributing spits and cheek swabs to personal genomics services, then, take part in a labor process that ultimately may result in other projects, including large-scale biobanking. Whatever their current ambitions, personal genomics projects are likely to connect with larger bio¬medical projects in the future. Spitting and snipping, after all, is work, potentially contributing to the global networks and hierarchies involved in the manufacture of biovalue.

Recombinant Metaphors

The image and the report in the New York Times regarding the launching of 23andMe draw attention to the role of metaphors. Reporters quickly drew upon a series of related metaphors; the event was described as a “spit party,” the message of 23andMe and personal genomics in general, it was argued, was “when in doubt, spit it out,” personal medicine was said to be “within spitting distance,” and so on. The people of 23andMe now have a blog site called “The Spittoon,” drawing its name from an object also called “spitter,” a receptacle for spitting into: “Using nothing more than a bit of saliva (Get it? The Spittoon!), the genotyping process we use analyzes more than 580,000 locations in a person’s genome” (The Spittoon 2009). It is tempting to assume that the spit is becoming one of the key metaphors we live by, informing our speech and our thoughts. Metaphors, however, just like DNA, frequently undergo mutations, re¬combining available material from everyday language and experience. The notion of the “spitting image” as we have seen, is a case in point.

While 23andMe is probably the only personal genomics project that uses “spittoon” samples and the others seem generally to draw upon buccal swabs, the “spit party” seems to nicely capture various aspects of personal genomics. It captures the gene talk on which it is based, the mechanisms of inheritance, the matching or mismatching disclosed through the sequencing of DNA material, and the establishing of distance and ancestry, both genetic and social. When spitting out one’s saliva, one is presumed to provide a spitting image of oneself, encoded in DNA. The transparent metaphor has, finally, been elevated above the debates of etymologists. The emphasis, on the other hand, is no longer on spitting at someone (usually a gesture of contempt) but on the conviviality of spitting with a fellow human being, for the purpose of celebrating biosocial bonds, for founding social networks based on bodily signatures—with a ginger martini!

References

Bolnick, Deborah A., et al. 2007. “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing.” Science 318 (19 October): 399–400.

Dictionary.com. 2009. http://dictionary.reference. com/browse/. Accessed 29 May.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Technologies of the Self. 16–50. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Hacking, Ian. 2009. “What Will Commercial Genome-Reading—from Cheap 23andMe to Costly but Complete Knome—Do to Middle-Class Conceptions of Personal Identity? On the Human Forum: Current Controversies in the Study of Humans, Animals, and Machines. http:// onthehuman.org/humannature/?p=176&cpage= 1#comment-295. 30 March.

Hall, Stephen S. 2009. “Beyond the Book of Life.” Newsweek, July 6/July 13: 38–41.

Hamilton, Anita. 2008. “The Retail DNA Test.” Time Magazine. November 3. http://www.time. com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804 ,1852747_1854493,00.html.

Harding, Sandra. 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marks, Jonathan. 2008. “Recreational Ancestry-Caveat Emptor? Relatedness Is More Complex Than Commercial Gene-Based Family Trees Would Suggest.” Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News 21, no. 11.

Martin, Gary. 2009. “Spitting Image.” The Phrase Finder. www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spitting -image.html. Accessed 11 May.

Nelson, Alondra. 2008. “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry.” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5: 759–783.

Pálsson, Gísli. 2008. “Genomic Anthropology: Coming in from the Cold?” Current Anthropology 49, no. 4:545–568.

———. 2009. “Biosocial Relations of Production.” Comparative Studies in Society and His¬tory 51, no. 2:288–313.

pimm.wordpress.com. 2007. “23andMe’s Mission: Connecting All People on the DNA Level or Social Networking XY.0.” November 19.

Pinker, Stephen. 2009. “My Genome, My Self.” The New York Times, January 11.

Prainsack, Barbara, et al. 2008. “Misdirected Precaution.” Nature 456 (6): 34–35.

Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rapp, Rayna, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig. 2001. “Genealogical Dis-ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet.” In Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 384–412.

Santos, Ricardo Ventura, et al. 2009. “Color, Race and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics.” Current Anthropology. In press.

Salkin, Allen. 2008. “When in Doubt, Spit It Out.” The New York Times, 12 September.

The Spittoon. 2009. http://spittoon.23andme. com/. Accessed 29 May.
Sykes, Bryan. 2001. The Seven Daughters of Eve. London: Bantam Press.

Gísli Pálsson is professor, Department of Anthro¬pology, Gimli, University of Iceland, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland. His most recent book is Anthropology and the New Genetics (2007). Currently, Pálsson’s research focuses on the social implications of biotechnology, genetic history, and environmental change.

*This is a special feature from the second, atomic themed print issue of Anthropology Now.*

“Nothing happened”
When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in the early morning of April 26, 1986, it blasted a radioactive plume as high as eight kilometers into the sky. In a failed attempt to suffocate the flames of the reactor’s burning graphite core, helicopter pilots dropped several thousand tons of boron carbide, dolomite, sand and clay on the raging fire. Winds carried a radioactive cloud over Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Europe, setting off alarms in a Swedish nuclear facility 1100 km away. Chernobyl is now widely acknowledged as the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster. At the time, however, it took the Soviet government 18 days to acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary had transpired. And although the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere was four hundred times the amount of dispersed by the bombing of Hiroshima, according to official reports, only 237 people, airlifted from the disaster site to a hospital in Moscow, required medical attention.

Of those, 134 were diagnosed with acute radiation sickness; the death toll was set at thirty-one. This number became a mantra of sorts, invoked by international scientific bodies every year on the anniversary of the disaster. Chernobyl’s public health effects, the official story goes, “are not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared” (United Nations Report 2005); radiation exposures that populations received were insignificant to their health. That nothing of widespread medical significance had happened here echoes what Dr. Robert Gale, an American radiation specialist who traveled to the disaster site in 1986, told me in an interview a decade later. With the exception of the initial acute radiation victims he attempted to treat, from a medical point of view, “Basically nothing happened here. Nothing happened here…and nothing is going to happen here.”

Yet something did happen here. Over two decades, 600,000 soldiers, firemen, and other workers were dispatched to the disaster site to physically contain the radiation. They razed contaminated buildings and forests, disposing of contaminated topsoil and irradiated materials. Some worked in one-minute shifts on the roof of an adjacent unit, shoveling radioactive debris into the mouth of the ruined one. These volunteers referred to themselves as bio-robots, a term that suggests that the one-minute time limit was not well enforced.

In 1992 I met a nuclear worker who was on a two-week break from work in the Chernobyl Zone in Kiev, Ukraine. Filled with despair, he told me: “Now I’m a sufferer.” He used the word “sufferer” in reference to a legal category introduced the previous year by a newly independent Ukrainian state for persons affected by the Chernobyl disaster.
“I get five dollars a month compensation. What can I buy for that?” He said he had no option but to continue working in the Zone, an area 30 kilometers in diameter marking out the infamous disaster site. Because of his work history, no firm would hire him.
He lifted his pant-leg and stuck his cigarette through a ring made of skin that had puckered up above his ankle. “This is from radiation,” he said. It was the result, he told me, of direct contact with a radiation source, and what clinicians would call a “local skin burn.”

“This happened in the Zone … We’re people no one understands, in hospitals, in clinics.” He saw himself as one of the “living dead.” “Our memory is gone. You forget everything—we walk like corpses.” As a member of the living dead, he spoke of the invisibility of the Chernobyl disaster to the outside world, and of the complicated damages that followed.

Twenty three years after this devastating event, many sufferers have died, and new sufferers are emerging, telling a different story about the extent of the fallout and its effect on human life. This calamity is not just a story about a devastating nuclear explosion and subsequent cover-up or denial, but rather, a more complicated story about health and disease and how they become, like bread, milk, or medicine, traded for value in a post-Soviet marketplace. I began studying a world where risks, abuses, and uncertainties escalated, and where economic forces drove people to become solely preoccupied with survival. What, then, became of the value of a human person here?

The long-term health effects of Chernobyl have been the subject of ongoing dispute. International scientific organizations insist that contamination from the Chernobyl reactor has been contained. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, which relies on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has acknowledged the increase in thyroid cancers among children living in affected areas. Most other disorders continue to be characterized as products of “informational stress,” “somatization of fear,” or lack of proper “risk perception.” Fear alone can create organic disease. Yet the nuclear worker’s puckered up skin suggests otherwise. In fact, the fallout unleashed in this medical disaster exceeded the ability of any single agency to bring it under control, let alone account for its public health consequences.

For instance, high doses absorbed by at least 200,000 Chernobyl clean-up workers between 1986 and 1987 were insufficiently documented due, in part, to a lack of available functioning monitoring equipment and lax radiological scrutiny. One biochemist told me in 1996 that many of the workers received 6 to 8 times the lethal dose of radiation. “They are alive,” he said. “The workers know that they didn’t die. But they don’t know how they survived.” Over two decades out from the disaster, Ukrainian and Belarussian scientists acknowledge rampant stress among affected populations but continue to criticize international health assessments for ignoring the contribution radiation makes—even in low doses—to adverse biological change.

By the time I had arrived in Ukraine in 1992, the political situation had dramatically changed, and with it, understandings of Chernobyl’s effects. The Soviet Union had collapsed, but memories of the Soviet mishandling of the disaster as in, for example, the state’s famous battle against “radiophobia” were still raw. A post-Soviet (Ukrainian) parliament denounced the preceding Soviet management of Chernobyl as “an act of genocide.” Lawmakers were lowering the Soviet “threshold dose” from 35 rem to 7 rem, comparable to what an average American would be exposed to in his or her lifetime. Maps of the radioactive fall-out that justified limited or ad hoc human evacuations in the Soviet era were being revised and expanded. More people were claiming themselves as part of a state-protected post-Soviet citizenry. The state’s social welfare system swelled to accommodate the large influx of newly designated Chernobyl sufferers.

One biophysicist responsible for conducting retrospective dose analyses on affected groups told me that when the new laws appeared: “Long lines of resettlers extended from our laboratory doors. It wasn’t enough that the resettlers were evacuated to ‘clean’ areas. People got tangled up in the category of victim, by law. They had unpredictable futures and each of them wanted to know their dose.” Compensation (kompensatsiia) became the order of the day, and post-Soviet politics became enmeshed with the ten-year old calamity to produce new concepts of self, health, citizenship, and belonging.

Desperate Appeals
For five years (1992-1997), I worked in this convoluted world of science, statistics, and bureaucracy, and in which international scientists were adjudicating the validity of citizens’ claims to Chernobyl suffering and seeking to close the matter. I had a little less wishful agenda and asked open-ended questions like: how did a catastrophe of unimaginable scope become manageable? How did some kinds of suffering become acknowledged and visible, and why, while others remained invisible?

These questions about the everyday lived aspects of the Chernobyl aftermath led me to extended conversations with resettled families and radiation-exposed workers and their families. I interviewed key scientific and political actors in Kiev and Moscow, comparing scientific standards informing concepts of biological risk and safety in the Soviet and post-Soviet administrations of the aftermath. How was scientific knowledge about radiation risk being promulgated? How was the disaster being recognized or “made visible” as Ukraine developed a new national identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Meanwhile, across the region, the Soviet industrial framework fell apart. Household financial savings were wiped out by hyperinflation. Social protection systems were overburdened and inadequate to address fast-paced changes in which a core group of long-term poor emerged. What I also discovered was that the very framing of injury was now intimately linked with the region’s economic restructuring: “If a person needs medicines, a person needs money. The diagnosis we write is money,” one administrator told me. Chernobyl workers realized they faced fewer job prospects outside the Zone and continued working there, hiding their illnesses until they could no more. For evacuees and those still living on contaminated territories, illness became a “form of work.” Both groups (not to mention the citizenry) wanted the state to defend them not only against the risks of contamination, but also against the worst effects of a brutal market transition. Kompensatsiia was no longer just payment for past damages, but a body politic’s attempt to balance or neutralize forces that gave or took life.

“There are a lot of people out of work,” an administrator who ruled on claims, told me. “People don’t have enough money to eat. The state doesn’t give medicines for free anymore. Drugs stores are commercialized.” He likened his work to that of a bank. “The diagnosis we write is money.”

Dr. Demeshko allowed me to take notes and to ask questions of claimants entering his office over a week in 1996. Around this time, the Ukrainian laws on procuring Chernobyl compensation were getting tighter. The World Bank, promoting drastic reductions of the state’s social welfare coffers, called the Chernobyl compensation system a “dead weight” on Ukraine’s less than ideal market transition. The following interactions capture the sense and flow of desperate appeals.

A rural woman walks in. She was evacuated from her village in the Zone. When she says how her daughter was pregnant at the time of the disaster, she starts to cry. “The little girl,” she says, “now ten years old, has a dry mouth, she’s weak, her thinking is slow, her thyroid is swollen, her legs hurt, her blood is poor.” She works hard to elicit sympathy from Demeshko, who will eventually decide whether the girl will become state-protected. Demeshko interrupts the grandmother and tells her that she is in the wrong place and should go to the Chernobyl children’s hospital for the evaluation of the child’s status.

A man in his mid-50s enters. He says that he has worked at the reactor site since 1978, and that he regularly checks-in at the local clinic of the Chernobyl plant for monitoring and treatment. The man makes a reasonably good salary working in the Zone but he also keeps careful records of his illnesses. He shows evidence of his dose, a high 73 rem. When I asked him why he was seeing Demeshko now he says, “I’m sick.” Demeshko then asks him, “And before?” The man answered that he was sick, but that he “hid it.” When I ask him why, he answers, “So I could work in the Zone, I’m used to working.”

A middle-aged urban woman enters the office. She says that her husband died 3 days ago and that she is seeking additional state protections. Her husband, a driver by profession, worked in the Zone in 2-week shifts, transporting contaminated building materials from the reactor to “burial pits” scattered throughout the Zone. She lives on a pension of $26.00. He collected a pension of $75.00 before his cancer-related death. “Was there a Chernobyl pension already calculated in his regular pension?” Demeshko asks her.
“Yes, an added $16.00 a month for work in the Zone,” she answers.
“Did you get compensation for his death?” he asks.
“Just for his funeral,” she says.
“What do you want here?” Demeshko asks.
The woman answers, “My husband said to me, ‘When I die, get the Chernobyl privileges.’”

In this case, the deceased calculated in advance the benefits to his family of his Chernobyl-related death. His wife “inherited” his medical documents, using them to advocate for more social protections from the state. She claims his disability is linked to his death.

Another man enters the room. He shows Demeshko documents from a specialized examination. The man worked at the Chernobyl plant for 8 months. He alleges that he has acute radiation dermatitis, “diagnosed in Moscow.” Demeshko tells him that there are no disability privileges associated with acute radiation dermatitis. The diagnosis he needs is skin cancer. After the man leaves, Demeshko explains that “in general, disability is no longer given for acute radiation sickness. However, if a person shows complications from the effects of acute radiation sickness, he would be entitled to consideration. Skin cancer would count.”

An exhausted and sallow looking man steps into the room. He throws a document on the table indicating his dose. The estimate was made on the basis of the roads that he traveled to get to the Zone and their levels of contamination. “I worked in the garbage pits [of irradiated materials].” He says that he has had two heart attacks. Demeshko asks him to show documentation of his hospital stays starting in 1990. The man answers that he failed to have his diagnoses registered annually. “You will get no tie,” Demeshko tells him. “But people are busy harvesting their potatoes now,” he added, “so maybe there’s a bed for you in the neurology ward. You can get a diagnosis there.” The man leaves, and Demeshko comments, “He’s on the border with death, we have many like that.”

Biological Citizenship
Citizens poured into offices such as this one. The social course of radiation illness was unstoppable. In the daily deciphering of what counts and does not count as a disaster-related ailment, of who is and is not on the border with death, a new relationship was being forged between a sickened citizenry and the state. Acutely aware of themselves as having lesser prospects for work and health in the marketplace, they inventoried those elements in their lives (measures, numbers, symptoms) that could connect to a broader history of the disaster’s mismanagement and risk.

I called the complex bureaucratic process by which a population attempts to secure a status as harmfully exposed and deserving of compensation a “biological citizenship” (2002). It entailed massive demands for, but narrowing access to, a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that acknowledge and compensate biological injury. Where an emergent democracy was yoked to a harsh market transition, the damaged biology of a population became grounds for social membership and a basis for staking citizenship claims. In this labyrinthine world of protection-seeking, health was selectively promoted for some while downward health spirals accelerated for others. People fell into or out of categories haphazardly or were subjected to ones that they did not choose or could not escape.

There is nothing laudable about being a biological citizen. It is not an achieved status, and it is something I personally would not like to become. Biological citizenship speaks to health as a political project on the one hand. But more centrally, it speaks to a profound failure of politics to account for human welfare, compounding vulnerability for those who not make the cut.

In the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, citizens are looking beyond the state to safeguard their health. Their particular characteristics make them resources visible not only to the state, but to capital as well. My book, When Experiments Travel (2009), tracks the global offshoring of clinical trials and the drug industry’s quest for human subjects. What I found was that these experiments offer short-term and previously unattainable medical goods in Eastern Europe and Brazil, compensating for state deficits or dysfunctional public health care systems. But as clinical trials become surrogates to health care, do they let local health authorities off the hook and limit other sorts of interventions? International ethical and regulatory bodies have opened the floodgates to ethical recruitment. But after the trial, patent and drug pricing regimes foreclose patient access to high-cost drugs. The world is becoming a series of interlocking laboratories and data-producing sites, yet citizens still go to local pharmacies only to find that essential medicines are out of stock. This new for-profit medical cartography brings together players separated by vast economic differences, but is global recruitment legitimating a new sort of biological citizenship? One Moscow-based physician running trials for a major drug firm recounted to me as one of her trial subjects ran to her one day. Exhilarated and relieved, he declared: “‘Professor, I have a 38 degree Celsius fever, which means that I am definitely not on the placebo arm of the trial!’ I had to laugh,” she told me. “He didn’t know that he needed a 40 degree fever!’” Medicinal shortages and opaque drug pricing structures unfortunately do not enter into the joke.

I was fortunate to have had the kind of access to the machinations of the state and nuclear state science that I had in the former Soviet Union. I guess that a post-Soviet requesting similar access to U.S. down winder clinics would be denied access in the name of national security. Today anthropologists lament the closing down of fieldwork frontiers. The tribunals where justice is supposedly meted out are closed to scrutiny (Greenhouse 2005). Corporate meetings where the value of drugs is determined are off-limits. Restricting access to knowledge and power is nothing new. But the cover up of the devastating consequences of power, the “invisibilizing” of crisis, makes accountability a central challenge of our time. Too often responsibility for nuclear disasters like Chernobyl is eluded, or arrives decades too late. Obligation is reduced to a mere occasional payout. Our challenge is to move beyond the mantras and to reestablish relations with the imperceptible disasters. We need to train our eyes on the practices, ethics, and politics that promise protection, for they can just as easily devastate lives. Our burden is to unearth the convoluted field of “what happens.”

Adriana Petryna is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Interested readers can visit her webpage here and/or contact her at petryna@sas.upenn.edu

This is a special feature from the first print issue of Anthropology Now.

The following piece is drawn from a forthcoming book written by Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz with the assistance of Betsy Brinson and Jose Vasquez entitled War Epiphanies. This group of researchers interviewed dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have become vocal opponents of those wars. The book traces the lives of five men and one woman who enlisted like millions of other young people—to get money for college, to seek adventure, to serve their country, and hoping to find a way to do good in the world—and the conclusions they have drawn from their military work and their return to civilian life.

Many U.S. soldiers who return home from Iraq have or will develop crippling psychological problems—by one estimate, fully 40 percent of combat veterans. Among the most common diagnoses given them is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an affliction resulting from exposure to traumatic events that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, have “involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.” The cause here, of course, is exposure to combat itself, more universal among the troops in this than any previous U.S. war. Factors that exacerbate PTSD include frustration and anger because of insufficient preparations, equipment, and training; the feeling that there is no end in sight; discomfort and deprivations of life in a war zone; worries about careers and families back home; racism and sexual harassment within the military; and extended tours of duty.

Over the years, the military has called soldiers’ traumatic response to war shell shock, combat neurosis, battle fatigue, or war-zone stress reaction. In addition, officers have often refused the diagnosis claiming it is an excuse for malingering, or in more contemporary language, “anger dysregulation.” Nonetheless, and despite the continuing stigma of mental illness, many accept and even welcome a diagnosis of PTSD as part of the process of recovery from the mental wounds of the Iraq war. Why then would a group of veterans declare that in fact PTSD is normal and, in some sense, good?

For a growing number of anti-war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD is not an unhealthy or abnormal condition but a reasonable and normal human reaction to what they saw and did while serving in the United States military. While many returning vets reject treatment because of the stigma attached to it or find it inaccessible, some anti-war vets accept treatment and medications but reject how the Veterans Administration (VA) understands their diagnosis. Some refuse standard treatment and argue that other methods will help them move beyond their suffering. These anti-war vets all agree with VA doctors that they have received a traumatic injury to the self, but they see the injury as an assault not simply on their mind but on their whole person. What the medical establishment calls a disorder, they call a form of dehumanization. In coming to this conclusion, these dissenting soldiers focus on the fate of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the U.S. military. In fact, what makes the lives of these troops distinct from the rest of the armed forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan is not so much their experiences of such civilian harm, which is ubiquitous, but rather the conclusions they have drawn. It turns out that how soldiers react to civilian war injuries and death is decisive for their emerging critique of the war and to understanding the injuries of war to themselves and others. Ultimately veterans who reject the diagnosis of PTSD as being a disorder are making a political statement more than a medical or personal psychological diagnosis. The point for both anti-war veterans who seek counseling and medication for post-traumatic stress, as well as those who prefer to avoid such treatment even though they may suffer from the same symptoms, is that, regardless of medicalized analysis, the fundamental cause of their affliction is that they have witnessed and participated in dehumanizing crimes against people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Charlie Anderson

Navy medic Charlie Anderson, originally from Rossford, Ohio, crossed into Iraq in March 2003 with the Marines. Like most everyone around him in uniform, he was full of fear and curiosity, anger and resignation, excitement and ambivalence about the mission. Trained as a medic, he especially relished the idea of helping his buddies if they got hit. Looking back later, though, he said, “I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.” The learning curve would soon rise steeply in front of him.

On an early convoy operation in 2003, his unit began taking casualties on the outskirts of Sadr City. Someone radioed that they were looking for a young Arab male wearing black pants, white shirt, and sandals, and carrying an AK-47—in other words, almost anybody. From the back of the column came machine gun fire. One of Anderson’s sergeants had been telling the younger men a story. Suddenly he opened fire with his weapon, apparently aiming at nothing and no one in particular. Then he went back to telling his story right where he left it mid-sentence only seconds before, pausing now and then to sip his coffee. “A lot of people would think that was cool,” says Anderson. “I thought it was scary.” This was the first of a set of political and moral epiphanies Charlie Anderson underwent in combat and after.

Later that same day, Anderson relates, orders came through to load up and drive into Sadr City. They had high hopes for what was to come. Given the standard American diet of World War II movies, he and his comrades expected to find “a kind of air of liberation parades in Holland and France.” They believed that they would be rewarded for protecting the population from further depredations by Saddam Hussein and his “bad guys,” but the civilian reception was quite different from what they expected. The thousands of civilians out in the streets of Sadr City didn’t seem excited to see them— except the kids. “There are kids running up and down the sides of streets begging for food.” The Marines were still looking for the young Arab male carrying an assault rifle. And there were people everywhere. “You’re looking at the kids, at the doorways, at the windows, and the rooftops. You’re trying to scan the alleys, looking for a guy [who wants to kill you] in this crowd of 5,000.” Anderson was riding on the passenger side of a Humvee with his weapon in his left hand, safety off, finger on the trigger, pointed at the vehicle’s door. With his right hand he was throwing food out and waving at the kids. After rounding a corner, the crowd seemed to thin. Then all hell broke loose and Marines began shooting in all directions. “We’re trying to figure out what one guy is firing at, and he yells, ‘Don’t ask me what I’m shooting. I’m shooting at fucking people!’” Anderson pulled the trigger on his gun until someone said he could stop. “There’s all this pandemonium. Women. Children. Mostly women and children. And it seems so cliché. But that’s really what was happening. Mostly women and children. And a few old men running every which direction screaming and yelling.… My thoughts were the black and white photograph of the little girl running down the street in Viet Nam. She’d been napalmed. All her skin’s falling off.”

Five years later, in January 2008, as we sat in his home in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina, Charlie Anderson still looked shell-shocked in recounting those operations around Sadr City. Whether he shivered from the cold outside that winter day, or from the still painful memory of having been a part of the military force that caused terrified civilians to flee through the streets of an Iraqi city, he didn’t say. In either case, even in 2008, Anderson was continually trying to come to grips with his early tour of duty in Iraq. Regardless of what the ground troops were ordered to do in the war, he remained convinced their motivations were noble. “Most of us thought that we were there to do something good. I don’t think anybody joins an army or goes off to war thinking they are going to do evil.” Like thousands of other veterans, Anderson sought counseling from time to time after he returned. “I did go through one support group meeting at the VA, and I didn’t find any support. I spent most of the night talking about why it was okay for me to be a veteran against the war, and listening to some of the other members of this group talk about how we should just have a policy of genocide because if we don’t kill everybody in Iraq, then they’re going to come over here and kill our kids. It didn’t even make sense.” Beyond feeling like an alien in this group of vets, he nonetheless shared much in common with them. Like the others, Anderson, too, had to cope with the traumas of war including what he called “survivor’s guilt,” and the feeling that he was personally responsible for helping other returning vets with their own cycles of depression. Eventually, after return to the United States, Charlie Anderson was given an honorable discharge from the Navy after being diagnosed with PTSD.

Garett Reppenhagen

Like thousands of other soldiers, Garett Reppenhagen put in time at checkpoints. Trained as a sniper and born to a military father in Fort Hood, Texas, Reppenhagen found himself one day flagging down a quickly approaching vehicle, and trying to get its Iraqi driver to leave his vehicle. As this car, like many before it, had approached, Reppenhagen recalled, “You’re thinking there could be a car bomb. And you got your heart pumping and your adrenaline flowing because you think you’re just going to get bombed. And the car screeches to a stop. And you go over and you’re yelling at the guy in the car. Only he doesn’t speak English, so he’s not getting out of his car, you know? You’re trying to open the door, but the door’s jammed because his car sucks. It’s junk. And you’re frustrated because you can’t open the door. You’re embarrassed that you’re trying to open a door that doesn’t open. So you just grab the guy and pull him out the window and you throw him on the ground and you zip-strip him [with plastic ties used by U.S. forces]. And then you realize, out of the corner of your eye, that his wife and kids are staring at you with this intense hatred in their eye. You just realize you are part of the problem. And you don’t mean to be, and you don’t want to be, but you’re there, you know? And that’s the crime. The crime is that you’re there.”

Many soldiers, says Reppenhagen, “started to loathe themselves. But instead of changing to make it better, some changed for the worse. They just dove into it and became monsters.”

Like those of other dissident U.S. veterans who have come out against the war, Reppenhagen’s stories focus on the hubris of this war, how the war destroyed some part of him and violated the trust that he, as a citizen soldier, once had in the U.S. military. As Garett Reppenhagen says, “I always saw myself as doing the right thing, taking the proper course of action, as thinking about ethics and morality. And here I was, the one with my hands on this dude, feeling justified to rip him out of his car and throw him on the ground and put him in handcuffs. It made me feel like an asshole. I’m the guy acting like a Nazi.” Although some troops and veterans have sought relief from their post-traumatic nightmares by popping what medics in Iraq sarcastically call “happy pills,” Reppenhagen is staunchly opposed.

I’m certainly not going to take any medication. I am flat against that. Personally, I don’t want to separate myself from my war experience. I think my war experience is part of who I am now, and I’ve got to learn to carry that. My healing comes through helping other veterans, being part of the movement. IVAW [Iraq Veterans Against the War] is redeeming me. Garett Reppenhagen was the first active- duty soldier to join IVAW while still in Iraq.

Men experience trauma, he knows, when their buddy is blown up in front of them, when someone is shot and no one can get to him. Or, as he puts it, “When innocent people get waxed.” But, Reppenhagen insists, for the most part, the average American soldier is not the victim.

“He’s the victimizer. And I think he feels like a criminal, honestly. He feels like the killer and the rapist and the thief, and he comes back to America and it’s, “Thank you for your service.” But we’re, like, “You have no idea what you’re thanking me for. You don’t know what I did.”

If men did the same things in the streets of the United States they did with no repercussions in the cities and villages of Iraq, they would be imprisoned or even executed, Reppenhagen believes. But since they are not punished by others, they punish themselves. “They start drinking themselves to death and doing drugs and being abusive to their family—and committing suicide, because they can’t find redemption.”

So what’s a medical practitioner going to do for a veteran in this situation? “If you’re a clinical doctor, you cannot fix a problem that’s social and political. Let’s say you sit down with a counselor and say, “I’ve been betrayed by my government and I’m fucking pissed off, and this is debilitating. I am unable to fit into society. And it’s directly because of the war.” Well, they’re gonna be like, “Here’s a pill. Don’t be so pissed off.” They try to make it your problem. And it’s not your problem. It’s society’s problem. You don’t have to readjust to society; society’s going to have to readjust to you.”

Ricky Clousing

When Ricky Clousing deployed to Iraq in December 2004 at age 22, he didn’t rely on the media to understand the situation in Iraq: “I kind of wanted to formulate my own idea about what was going on.” He had high expectations that his military intelligence training would help identify people who were threats to Iraqi freedom. Years before, Clousing had become a born-again Christian and done missionary work in Latin America and Thailand. He was eager to find a way to help the Iraqis as he had helped farmers in Mexico on several earlier trips. Soon after arrival in Iraq, Clousing saw civilians killed and harassed with impunity by U.S. soldiers. He began to mistrust the mission that used such methods, and went to his command with serious questions about whether to continue to participate in the war or even in the Army itself. It was recommended he speak with counselors and chaplains, and he did so. He told them “about the spiritual basis for my conflict of conscience [but] they came back with all these cliché statements, and even Bible verses taken out of context, justifying war and saying God is favoring us, and that I should just trust in his plan. Just surface-y, watered down statements that didn’t answer anything that I was really feeling.” His commanders asked Clousing if he was trying to get out of the Army. “There’s ways to do that, such as saying you’re gay or saying you have mental problems. I was insulted, to tell you the truth. I wasn’t trying to play that card to get a ticket out of the military.” Clousing tattooed the word “Veritas” on his arm to signify his quest, and started reading books about the run-up to the war in Iraq and on U.S. foreign policy in general. In addition, he read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience. After returning to the United States, Ricky continued to be tormented by his time in Iraq. He talked to more counselors and chaplains and commanders.

All to no avail. He went AWOL and after a year he turned himself in. Following his military trial, he served three months in the Camp Lejeune brig in North Carolina. During the entire period after his tour in Iraq, Army officers proposed various options to Clousing such as filing for conscientious objector status or a diagnosis of PTSD, any one of which would have allowed him to serve out his remaining time in non-combat assignments—and the military would have avoided further embarrassment (Clousing’s case had become international news). He refused conscientious objector status because he does not oppose all wars. He rejected the PTSD diagnosis because he considers post-traumatic stress not a disorder but, as he called it, “a patch” that conceals deeper problems: “I mean, it’s a natural reaction of culture shock, of being in a combat zone, and the realities and the expectations of fighting, and being expected to kill people, and then coming back home to what we have here.” Far from representing an abnormal adaptation to civilian life, he adds, traumatized soldiers are the norm: “They’re actually tapped into their human and spiritual and emotional side enough to feel the effects of [the war]. They’re not numb enough to just blow it off like it doesn’t matter.”

Anti-war vets like Ricky Clousing, Garett Reppenhagen, and Charlie Anderson may be no more or less traumatized by what they saw and did than other service members. However, their distinctive understanding of the problem and of the remedies available to them—particularly political action and helping other vets—allows them to reshape their sense of self in crucial ways. Each has been an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and has worked in a variety of ways, including recruiting for IVAW from within the active duty military and others, lobbying Congress, and long public marches and talks to educate the public. They are working to advance the goals of the organization, which includes campaigning for an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq; reparations to the Iraqi people that they, rather than corporate profiteers, would administer; and lobbying for full benefits and adequate healthcare for returning vets. They have also forged strong bonds of advice and help with dissident Vietnam War era vets and organizations and are helping with counter-recruitment efforts in high schools around the country.

Each is also trying to reestablish himself in work and/or school: in winter 2008, Charlie Anderson was attending Appalachian State University in Boone and working with the VA nearby, Garett Reppenhagen was studying at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs and working as a parttime organizer and consultant for Veterans for America, and Ricky Clousing was working in a gift shop and learning to be a dealer in Las Vegas.

As another anti-war veteran said about his emerging recovery-through-activism from the war, “I am no longer the monster I once was.” These vets are convinced they have found a kind of redemption and balm by breaking ranks and speaking out against the war, by forging a new kind of comradeship with their fellow dissenters, and by beginning to make amends with the Iraqi and Afghani peoples. Some might say that these veterans were dehumanized from the moment they began basic training, and that by turning against the war in Iraq and what they saw and did there, they are simply reclaiming their humanity. But that conclusion would be too easy. Because if anything these anti-war veterans were among the most idealistic of soldiers, committed to the idea of armed service in defense of the nation and indeed serving humankind through their participation in military operations in Iraq.

As contradictory as it might seem, and despite all the questions they had from the beginning about military service and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, these men at the same time believed that they would be doing good for others through their participation in the war. In the end, however, they do not want their post-traumatic stress to be neatly boxed off by a medicalized diagnosis that separates their condition from the total experience of the war in Iraq and from a moral and political critique of its impact on the people of that country.