"An ethnographic triumph. Life Exposed is as much a cultural study of science as it is a history of a nuclear
disaster and a story of the politics of nation making in Ukraine. As powerful an analysis of biological citizenship
and national technical processes of managing risks as I have ever read. Yet also a moving meditation on the aftermath
of disaster for a poor Eastern European state, including the moral and medical morass faced by those who negotiate
its world of disability."
--Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University
"This extremely interesting work treats the social, political, and personal implications of Chernobyl as a
prism--reflecting the political-economic, clinical, legal, and biographical processes that characterize this 'open-ended'
catastrophe. There is nothing comparable. Very well written, it will be of major interest to readers in risk analysis
and risk sociology, science studies, political science, as well as to anyone interested in the consequences of
megatechnologies."
--Ulrich Beck, author of The Brave New World of Work and What is Globalization?
Publisher Web Site, February, 2004
Summary
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 Exposed is 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 Exposed provides 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.