On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, ...are still suffering the effects.Life Exposedis the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?
Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights.Life Exposedprovides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. Our ...hope for medical progress increasingly depends on the willingness of the world's poor to participate in clinical drug trials. While these experiments often provide those in need with vital and previously unattainable medical resources, the outsourcing and offshoring of trials also create new problems. In this groundbreaking book, anthropologist Adriana Petryna takes us deep into the clinical trials industry as it brings together players separated by vast economic and cultural differences. Moving between corporate and scientific offices in the United States and research and public health sites in Poland and Brazil,When Experiments Traveldocuments the complex ways that commercial medical science, with all its benefits and risks, is being integrated into local health systems and emerging drug markets.
Providing a unique perspective on globalized clinical trials,When Experiments Travelraises central questions: Are such trials exploitative or are they social goods? How are experiments controlled and how is drug safety ensured? And do these experiments help or harm public health in the countries where they are conducted? Empirically rich and theoretically innovative, the book shows that neither the language of coercion nor that of rational choice fully captures the range of situations and value systems at work in medical experiments today.When Experiments Travelchallenges conventional understandings of the ethics and politics of transnational science and changes the way we think about global medicine and the new infrastructures of our lives.
When people come first Biehl, Joao; Petryna, Adriana
2013., 20130707, 2013, 2013-07-07
eBook
When People Come Firstcritically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, ...and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach.
Topics include the limits of technological quick fixes in disease control, the moral economy of global health science, the unexpected effects of massive treatment rollouts in resource-poor contexts, and how right-to-health activism coalesces with the increased influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care. The contributors explore the altered landscapes left behind after programs scale up, break down, or move on. We learn that disease is really never just one thing, technology delivery does not equate with care, and biology and technology interact in ways we cannot always predict. The most effective solutions may well be found in people themselves, who consistently exceed the projections of experts and the medical-scientific, political, and humanitarian frameworks in which they are cast.
When People Come Firstsets a new research agenda in global health and social theory and challenges us to rethink the relationships between care, rights, health, and economic futures.
The impacts of climate change are accelerating worldwide, but emergency agencies and political bodies are not always equipped to anticipate where, when, or how severe the next unnatural disaster will ...be. Amid megafire seasons, for example, scientists are revising models of fire behavior that were calibrated to natures that increasingly diverge from known baselines and trends. Emergency responders’ trust in patterns has become an occupational hazard. At these edges of knowledge, struggles to maintain responsive capacity in disrupted ecologies are at play; a larger reckoning with runaway climate change as a relational problem space is in order. Rather than making me resort to despair about the world’s “end,” such labors redirect my attention toward horizons of expectation in which knowledges are still actionable, not obsolete, and where capacities for future interventions are viable and not denied. These activities, enmeshed in a rubric of horizon work, shift expert authority and promote critical realignments across political, activist, and Indigenous spheres.
En la transición del socialismo al capitalismo de mercado, los cuerpos, las poblaciones y las categorías de ciudadanía han sido reordenados. La gestión racional y técnica de los grupos afectados por ...el desastre de Chernóbil en Ucrania es una ventana a este controvertido proceso. Chernóbil ejemplifica un momento en el que el conocimiento científico se colapsó y emergieron nuevos mapas y categorías. Los modelos antiguos de bienestar dependen de definiciones precisas que sitúan a los ciudadanos y sus atributos en un embrollo cruzado de categorías conocidas en las que se basan las reclamaciones de derechos. En ello se observa cómo las ambigüedades relacionadas con la categorización del sufrimiento crearon un campo político en el que un estado, formas de ciudadanía y economías informales fueron reconstruidos.
ABSTRACT
Ecosystem changes are happening with surprising speed and on much shorter‐than‐projected time scales. This essay explores the complexities of such abrupt environmental shifts, how scientists ...conceptualize a runaway nature, and how uncertainty poses a problem of projection and action. Its ethnographic material engages contexts where rapidly faltering projections and policies interface in unsettled ways with the realities of emergency response, especially to wildfires. Attuned to the political and existential hazards at work in a science of critical transitions, the essay argues for the importance of a distinct kind of intellectual and ethical labor, horizoning work, amid physical worlds on edge.
Abstract
Russia's attempted occupation of Ukraine informs a concept of de‐occupation in an age of 21st‐century planetary wars. The tide of war crimes committed in Ukraine is beyond dispute, having ...been identified by legal scholars as genocidal attempts to condemn the very foundations of livelihood. I discuss the precedents that have allowed such crimes to occur and describe how Ukrainians are trying to counter these crimes, forming a particular kind of resistance that strikes against impunity. I locate impunity's persistence within post‐Soviet spheres, where solidarities among civilians who have been subject to Russian militarization complicate the view that the war in Ukraine is just another proxy war between superpowers. Given the dearth of architectures of peace and security to prevent genocide, de‐occupation emerges as a process in which de‐occupied people not only restore their territory but also play a central role in asserting less ruinous, more livable planetary futures.
Prompted by long-standing realities that have recently erupted during the pandemic and ongoing protests against racial injustice in the US, this Special Section’s essays evolved out of conversations ...around the theme of the ‘COVID Horizon’. Authored by physician-anthropologists at various stages of their training, the Position Pieces describe vital searches for liveability in domains of emergency response. Moving beyond the walls of the clinical, they track medicine as an institution embedded in and shoring up other institutions linked to human rights, carceral detention, reproductive unfreedoms, and/or pandemic biocontainment—all of which define the scope of democratic freedoms and determine who exactly is afforded said freedoms. Within institutions of deferred or dislocated responsibility, the essays probe tensions between action and abstention, distance and proximity, futility and hope, and containment and freedom with the objective of dismantling forms of ‘démission’ (Fanon 1952) or abdication and locating an actionable ‘otherwise’ allowing for accountability and solidarity. The contributors’ ‘horizoning work’ (Petryna 2018) imagines a different ground from which to anticipate the role of medicine in the 21st century.
Russia's attempted occupation of Ukraine informs a concept of de‐occupation in an age of 21st‐century planetary wars. The tide of war crimes committed in Ukraine is beyond dispute, having been ...identified by legal scholars as genocidal attempts to condemn the very foundations of livelihood. I discuss the precedents that have allowed such crimes to occur and describe how Ukrainians are trying to counter these crimes, forming a particular kind of resistance that strikes against impunity. I locate impunity's persistence within post‐Soviet spheres, where solidarities among civilians who have been subject to Russian militarization complicate the view that the war in Ukraine is just another proxy war between superpowers. Given the dearth of architectures of peace and security to prevent genocide, de‐occupation emerges as a process in which de‐occupied people not only restore their territory but also play a central role in asserting less ruinous, more livable planetary futures.
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