Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote an op-ed for The Japan Times and makes some thought-provoking observations about the connections between the stockpiling of whale-meat, plutonium and policiy making in japan:

OXFORD, England — Mount Fuji stands as a powerful eco-symbol in Japan, invoked frequently to describe elements of Japanese nature and culture. According to Japanese writers and others, Mount Fuji's towering summit-cone and elegantly balanced slopes convey the remote majesty of nature, the essence of purity, a trove of immutable values, a model of aesthetic perfection, and a store of Japanese reserve, to name but a few.

Yet in illustrating how contemporary Japanese society actually works, the sacred peak faces competition from two other mountainlike entities. Lurking out of the public eye are two problematic stockpiles — of plutonium and whale meat — whose mountainous bulk not only looms over Japanese environmental policy and international relations but speaks to the problems that led to the 3/11 disasters.

Read the rest here:

A year after whole neighborhoods were killed by the Japanese tsunami, rumors of ghosts swirl in Ishinomaki as the city struggles to come to terms with the tragedy.

One reconstruction project appears stalled because of fears the undead spirits of those who perished last March will bring bad luck.

”I heard people working to repair the store became sick because of ghosts,” Satoshi Abe, 64, says, gesturing to a half-repaired supermarket. ”People died everywhere, here and there. The city is full of such stories

…anthropologist Takeo Funabiki says it is only ”natural” that stories of the supernatural abound after such an event.

”Human beings find it very difficult to accept death, whether they are inclined by nature to superstition or are very scientifically minded,” he says. ”A sudden or abnormal death, anything other than someone dying in bed of old age, is particularly difficult for people to comprehend.”

Read the rest at The Sydney Morning Herald

Tsunami recedes but ghosts linger
March 10, 2012
Everything from building work to taxi services are still affected by fears of undead spirits, writes Miwa Suzuki.

John W. Hoopes, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, teaches a course on “Archaeological Myths and Realities” in which he tackles the 2012 myth among other doomsday premonitions:

The United States has always embraced religious freedom. Peculiar religious sects, including occult beliefs, have always been part of America,” Hoopes said. “End-of-the-world and transformative beliefs are found in many ancient cultures but have been a fundamental part of modern times since 1499,” Hoopes said. “They are also fundamentally American.”

In an attempt to distinguish myth from science, Hoopes uses the 2012 myth and other prophecies to teach students to think critically and learn to distinguish between science and myth. He explained that wishful or magical thinking often helps perpetuate myths and beliefs that have no basis in science.

Read more at International Business Times:

Critical Thinkers Demystify Doomsday Prophecies

By Sangeeta Ghosh Dastidar

Tricia Redeker Hepner, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee writes at CounterPunch about the plight of refugees:

The world’s attention is understandably fixed on the post-tsunami nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan and the equally seismic political transformations shaking North Africa and the Middle East. Much speculation swirls around the impact of these events regionally and globally. Will fallout reach the shores of Europe and North America? Will more dictatorships be swept aside by swells of democratization? What role should the international community and the United Nations play?

In at least one country, the answer to the first question is clear, if not the second. And the third is another story altogether

The Northeast African nation of Eritrea marks its 20th year of independence next month. But the festivities will be marred by mourning…

As an anthropologist who has lived in Eritrea and worked with Eritrean communities in Europe, Africa, and the U.S. for years, I dearly want to defend this country. But the best I can do is to help defend its displaced, abused, and often forgotten citizens… I struggle to place the people of this small African country on the global crisis radar. It’s a tall order in these days of perpetual disasters and mind-numbing statistics…But human experience is what anthropologists are always after – how to put life and breath and flesh onto the cold bones of statistics; how to illustrate the concrete meanings of political violence and migration policies and practices as people live them.

Go to CounterPunch for the rest of the article by Tricia Redeker Hepner, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee

Refugees and the Failure of Forced Migration Policy
Human Tsunamis
By TRICIA REDEKER HEPNER

In the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese often proclaimed their society to be “allergic” to nuclear technology—particularly nuclear weapons. What has been far less acknowledged in Japan is a persistent pattern of discrimination against those deemed “contaminated” (including atomic-bomb survivors, descendants of the customary “untouchable” outcaste, certain foreigners, and other stigmatized groups). One potentially explosive question in the aftermath of the tsunami and nuclear crisis is whether the shock of the disaster will continue to encourage cohesion and altruism—or whether, in time, the taint of radiation will lead to exclusion in a society fixated on purity.

Press here to read the rest of this Daily Beast editorial by Peter Wynn Kirby, a researcher with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford and a research fellow at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

The Human Fallout for Japan
Peter Wynn Kirby

One of the most interesting turn of events during the current nuclear crisis in Japan is how by Thursday, March 17, 2011 the ongoing drama of the catastrophe was displaced from the headlines by stories about the rebellion in Libya. Just as it seemed the story of the nuclear crisis came to a head with startling revelations about more widespread damages to the reactors, higher levels of radiation than previously detected, flaws in Japanese leadership and the contamination of food crops as far as ninety miles from the stricken Fukushima plant the media seems to have turned its attention to a different front.

By the end of the week stories about the escalation of the nuclear crisis and to a lesser degree, the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami still appeared the media, but the headline grabbing story in the media has become the conflict in Libya. As catastrophic and unprecedented as the tragedy in Japan is, the media’s attention seems to have waned. One wonders if media gatekeepers sense that their consumers have tired of the drama in Japan, or perhaps because of the US’s primary role in the no-fly over zone, American and audiences are more concerned about events in Libya than in Japan. Or perhaps that warfare is more vivid than the invisible threat of radiation.

Historically, the media has always had a fairly short attention span for disasters, including even catastrophic ones like those that have occurred in the last year; beginning with the nightmarish earthquake in Haiti which destroyed the fragile infrastructure of a nation and whose toll took over 300,000 lives. The Haitian earthquake is a tragedy that is far from over and whose misery continues to unravel largely because of the lack of continued aid and attention from the international community.

As stunned as the world was by misfortune of Haitian people attention quickly turned to the more powerful, but less destructive quake in Chile. Then came the terrible floods in Pakistan, which killed of thousands and left a nation in anguish but received only little more than passing attention from the international press. The horrific and relentless floods in Australia captured the world’s attention very briefly despite the disturbing magnitude of the disaster. Next up was the recent earthquake in Christ Church, New Zealand. It made front-page news for a few days but now seems to have lapsed form the media and the public’s view.

None of this is new. The monstrous tsunami that that shocked the world and unleashed a flurry of destruction on several Southeast Asian nations made headlines for sometime. Nevertheless, despite the horrific magnitude of the event it slipped from the media’s radar. Eight months after the event, while the stricken nations were still struggling to recover Hurricane Katrina came ashore in the gulf. Almost without looking back, the media’s attention turned to the Gulf Coast and forgot the unparalleled tragedy in Southeast Asia.

As shocking as the media’s headlong pursuit of reporting the most recent sensational story and rapid abandonment of previous disasters it is an all too common pattern. One that perhaps reflects our modern day culture’s increasingly desensitized attention span for suffering and our addiction to ever more sensational stories.

The public, politicians and especially the media have a penchant for what seems like short-term memories when it comes to disasters. We tend to neglect the fact that major disasters have long-term, often second generation impacts that require us to invest in long-term recovery efforts rather than to take the band aid approach that typifies most modern day disaster response.

The media tends to only revisit earlier calamities with occasional anniversary stories. Such coverage often only consists of a retelling of the early days of the event and neglects the continuing plight of the disaster victims; thereby ignoring the fact that in the wake of calamity disasters continue to unfold for extended periods of time. Thus, the cascading series of events that unfold in the wake of most disasters are all but ignored except by the local media. Unfortunately, at times media retrospective accounts can downplay the seriousness of previous disasters as have some recent accounts that have surfaced during the current Japanese nuclear crisis. It causes one to wonder if revisionists accounts of Chernobyl are possible what future revisionist accounts might be made of the current nuclear crisis.

It is troubling to wonder how the media and our culture seem to take such vicarious interest in disasters. For disaster researchers like myself I am disturbed by what may be another tendency: our refusal, despite irrevocable empirical evidence to the contrary, to recognize that in recent years the frequency, magnitude and severity of disasters has increased tremendously,

The recent tide of major catastrophic events underscore the emerging reality that there is an urgent need to develop the conceptual tools, strategic and material tools to confront the increasing challenges of disasters which have been made more potent and complex by environmental degradation, climate change, and the increasing production of technological hazards. In another words, rather than continuing to view catastrophic events as isolated episodes we need to systematically examine the cumulative forces that confront us in the guise of disasters and begin to address the larger issue: why is it that disasters of such magnitude are becoming so commonplace?

Gregory Button has been researching disasters for over three decades. His most recent book is: Disaster Culture: Knowledge and Uncertainty in the Wake of Human and Environmental Disasters (Left Coast Press 2010). He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Tennessee Knoxville.

Barbara Rose Johnston and Hugh Gusterson ponder nuclear realities at the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences

Barbara Rose Johnston:

Radiation is invisible, how do you know when you are in danger? How long will this danger persist? How can you reduce the hazard to yourself and family? What level of exposure is safe? How do you get access to vital information in time to prevent or minimize exposure? What are the potential risks of acute and chronic exposures? What are the related consequential damages of exposure? Whose information do you trust? How do you rebuild a healthy way of life in the aftermath of nuclear disaster?

Hugh Gusterson:

As an anthropologist, I am always interested in what humans learn from their mistakes. Can humans change their behavior, thereby improving their chances of survival, not just through natural selection, but also through cultural learning? Or are we hardwired to repeat our mistakes over and over, like humanoid lemmings?

More to the point, what lessons will we learn from the nuclear accident at Fukushima, an accident thought to be impossible just two weeks ago?

In this nuclear world, what is the meaning of ’safe’?

By Barbara Rose Johnston | 18 March 2011

The lessons of Fukushima

By Hugh Gusterson | 16 March 2011

Keibo Oiwa, a Japanese cultural anthropologist and environmentalist, speaks to Democracy Now about the current nuclear crisis:

And I’m really realizing again that, you know, democracy is so hollow now. I mean, we don’t have power. This is not democracy. We are controlled—we have been controlled by the government and the Tokyo Electric Company, you know, a private company. This is a big lesson to be—for us to be humble, in front of a natural—big natural power, power of nature. And we have to really look for a lifestyle and a way of thinking again, to live again with harmony, in harmony with nature.

Read the rest here.

In addition, see how Ruth Benedict is being used in The Telegraph to argue “Why the Japanese behave better than Westerners,” and in the National Journal to argue “Why Japan probably isn’t telling us the worst about its nuclear disaster.”

“In Japanese culture, there’s a sort of nobility in suffering with a stiff upper lip, in mustering the spiritual, psychological resources internally,” said John Nelson, a cultural anthropologist and chairman of the department of theology and religion at the University of San Francisco.

“There’s even a word for quietly enduring difficult situations: Gaman.”

Read the rest at the National Post.

John Nelson also spoke to USA Today about faith and pray:

Just as Americans flooded into their churches and synagogues, turning to God in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Japanese, too, turn to their gods in times of trouble, says Nelson.

They are praying for repose, for the spirit of the dead to find peace and comfort in the Pure Land — a kind of Buddhist paradise.

They pray to Amida, the Buddha in the Pure Land, and to Kannon, the bodhisattva (goddess) of compassion who is an intermediary with Amida.

They will pray, “Praise to the Buddha of the Pure Land.” Or, “Help me, Kannon (goddess of compassio). Save me. Bring me food. Make me warm.”

And like people everywhere, Nelson says,

They will pray for miracles.

*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