カテゴリー「anthropology, literature, art」
Title: Worse Than Radiation and 7 Odd Chernobyl Stories
Author: Sergii Mirnyi. Ed. Frank Williams, trans. Igor Ilyin, Alexander Kalinichenko, Sergii Mirnyi, Frank Williams, and Victor Yevmenov
Reference: Budapest: Bogar Kiado, 2001. 77 pp
Keywords: Chernobyl, stories, novel, liquidators
Abstract: In the days, weeks, and months following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, an untold number of civilians and military personnel suffered radiation poisoning and died trying to seal Chernobyl’s collapsed fourth reactor and decontaminate the surrounding countryside. Among those who witnessed this haphazard and dangerous clean-up effort firsthand was writer, scientist, and former platoon commander Sergii Mirnyi. His short novel, Worse Than Radiation, is a two-part account of one reconnaissance platoon’s efforts to meticulously document the radioactive fallout near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Unlike the narrative of heroic liquidators featured in state propaganda, it is a tale not of sacrifice and selfless deeds but of daily routine that offers glimpses into the life of workers in “the zone“.
URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2001/1972
http://www.mirnyi.arwis.com/book_1/content_hr_e.html
Title: Coming to Terms with the Soviet Myth of Heroism Twenty-five Years After the Chernobyl’ Nuclear Disaster: An Interpretation of Aleksandr Mindadze’s Existential Action Movie Innocent Saturday
Author: Johanna Lindbladh
Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)
Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, Soviet Union, film, reception, Chernobyl’, nuclear accident, Mindadze, Innocent Saturday, myth of heroism, existentialism, Bakhtin, non-alibi in Being
Abstract: This essay presents an analysis of the Russian director Alexandr Mindadze’s feature film Innocent Saturday, released precisely 25 years after the Chernobyl’ accident in Ukraine. In a comparative study between the Russian-speaking and non-Russian-speaking reception of the film, I will show that the philosophical dimension, depicting Chernobyl’ not as a “great” historical, technological event, but in terms of how it affected peoples’ minds and feelings, constitutes the main theme in the Russian reception, but is more or less absent in the non-Russian-speaking reception. Building upon this divergence in reception, I will further explore the theme of Soviet heroism in a hermeneutical analysis of the film. My conclusions are that Mindadze, in depicting a hero who “does not escape”, points towards the existential impossibility of “escaping from your own self”, thus challenging not only the rules of an action movie, but also the Soviet myth of heroism, still a politically intense debate in the former Soviet Union.
URL: http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2002/1965
Title: Approaching the Void – Chernobyl’ in Text and Image
Author: Andrea Zink
Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)
Keywords: documentary (works of art), (inapt) comparisons, questions, perplexity, nothingness
Abstract: How, if at all, can the worst-case scenario nuclear accident be represented artistically? Chernobyl’ poses problems for writers, visual artists and film makers alike. For all the eventfulness of the first days and weeks following the accident, the area now seems devoid of life and activity. Nevertheless, the documentary prose writers Jurij Ščerbak and Svetlana Aleksievich, the photographer Robert Polidori and the documentary film maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter have managed to capture in text and image the events of 26 April 1986 and their consequences. Above all, they convey the sense of shock and helplessness that reigned following the accident. They achieve this by working with monologues, underscoring the isolation of those affected, subverting supposedly apt comparisons (for example with the First World War) and revealing the emptiness of existence through a carefully calculated silence.
URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2007
Title: Chernobyl in the eyes: mythology as a basis of individual memories and social imaginaries of a “Chernobyl child”
Author: Svetlana Bodrunova
Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)
Keywords: mythologization of culture, social myths, Chernobyl disaster, Chernobyl children, social memory
Abstract: Some five to seven years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, a whole culture of helping “Chernobyl children” grew in the regions most affected by the radioactive fallout, fuelled by the presence of several international charity bodies such as the Red Cross and national charities of some Western countries. For the generation of Belarusian children who travelled abroad via ‘health trips’, this activity was both a positive and a traumatic cross-cultural experience that contributed to the growth of the Chernobyl mythology and subculture. Based on personal memories of the author’s five trips to Germany, France, and Italy, evidence given by her friends and relatives interviewed on their travels to Germany and Italy, as well as on the content analysis of online communities in the biggest Russian-speaking social network Vkontakte, the author argues that all aspects of living in the Chernobyl-affected area, which was subject to the special care of both domestic and foreign authorities(including the ‘humanitarian aid’ aspect), were (to varying extents) based on a Chernobyl mythology that played a big role in constructing the “Chernobyl zeitgeist” for the young inhabitants of the “zone”.
URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/1994
Title: Ordinary Tragedy: “Perestroika” of Collective Memory about Chernobyl Disaster in Belarusian History Textbooks
Author: Andrei Dudchik, Marharyta Fabrykant
Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)
Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, perestroika, Belarus, discourse, narrative, biopolitics, collective memory.
Abstract: The paper focuses on discursive strategies that are used by authors of history textbooks to construct Belarusian collective memory of Chernobyl disaster within the more general narrative framework of the historical legacy of “perestroika”. Discourse and narrative analysis of the relevant chapters of five secondary school and nine university textbooks of the time period between 1995 and 2011 has revealed two distinct discursive strategies within a common narrative framework. First, the “organicist” discourse positions Chernobyl disaster as a threat to the Belarusian gene pool and thus invokes the sociobiological version of ethnic nationalism within biopower and biopolitics discourse. This strategy emphasizes the preserver of collective memory as a passive sufferer. The second, opposing strategy presents the Chernobyl disaster as one of the initial conditions, rather than the consequence of the preceding historical period, and offers a role of active struggler. Both strategies construct collective memories of tragedy as a form of historical continuity.
URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/1998
Title: An Illustrated Guide to the Post-catastrophe Future
Author: Sarah D. Phillips, Sarah Ostaszewski
Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)
Keywords: Chernobyl, Pripyat, tourism, revitalization, satire, visual anthropology, Ukraine
Abstract: This article is a satirical consideration of real and hypothetical projects to “revitalize” parts of the 30 kilometer zone of alienation around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This tongue-in-cheek treatment reveals that projects for “redevelopment” and “exploitation” of the contaminated zone are about many things: money, ideology, memory, fantasy, safety, power, ethics, and the value of life itself.
URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2005
Title: Chernobyl’s Aftermath in Political Symbols, Monuments and Rituals: Remembering the Disaster in Belarus
Author: Tatiana Kasperski
Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)
Keywords: Belarus, Chernobyl accident, nuclear disaster, memory, politics
Abstract: In spite of the still on-going health and environmental impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, this tragic event occupies only a minor place in the present-day political life of Belarus, the former Soviet republic most affected by the radioactive fallout. To understand the apparent weakness in public memory of the disaster, this paper provides an analysis of several kinds of commemorative events that have been organized by opposition political forces and by state officials since the end of the 1990s, and of the monuments dedicated to the Chernobyl accident in Belarus. It shows how these different forms of memory contributed to the erasure of the specific meaning of the accident by framing the disaster’s past in terms of a tragedy among other national tragedies, and by reducing it merely to a tool to attack political opponents and legitimize one’s own aspirations to power or by suggesting this past should be overcome as soon as possible.
URL: http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2000
Title: Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city
Author: Paul Dobraszczyk
Reference: City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Volume 14, Issue 4, 2010, pages 370-389
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.496190
Keywords: Chernobyl, urban apocalypse, industrial ruins, representation, cinema
Abstract: This paper offers a reading of urban ruin through a personal experience: a visit I made to the Chernobyl site in October 2007—first to the destroyed reactor and then to the ruined buildings of Pripyat, using my own photographs as documents. The paper situates this experience in the context of wider representations of technological ruin and the city. Pripyat may not be a city, let alone a metropolis, but its scale as a ruin is unique in the post‐war period. In the West, the ruined city usually only presents itself in fictive representations: that is, in literature and film and not in the flesh, so to speak. Experiencing the ruins of Pripyat may invite thoughts about the value, or otherwise, of industrial ruin; its unprecedented scale invites an altogether different meditation on the ruin of the city as a whole and perhaps, too, of civilisation itself.
URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2010.496190#.Ub6JDthLOM0
Title: Chernobyl: Living with risk and uncertainty
Author: Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace, Professor Matthias Beck
Reference: Health, Risk & Society , Volume 8, Issue 2, 2006, pages 105-121
DOI:10.1080/13698570600677167
Keywords: Nuclear accidents, risk society, biographical disruption
Abstract: The nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 is a dramatic example of the type of incidents that are characteristic of a ‘risk society’. The consequences of the incident are indeterminate, the causes complex and future developments unpredictable. Nothing can compensate for its effects and it affects a broad population indiscriminately. This paper examines the lived experience of those who experienced biographical disruption as residents of the region on the basis of qualitative case studies carried out in 2003 in the Chernobyl regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Our analysis indicates that informants tend to view their future as highly uncertain and unpredictable; they experience uncertainty about whether they are already contaminated, and they have to take hazardous decisions about where to go and what to eat. Fear, rumours and experts compete in supplying information to residents about the actual and potential consequences of the disaster, but there is little trust in, and only limited awareness of, the information that is provided. Most informants continue with their lives and ‘do what they must’ or even ‘what they like’, even where the risks are known. They often describe their behaviour as being due to economic circumstances; where there is extreme poverty, even hazardous food sources are better than none. Unlike previous studies, we identify a pronounced tendency among informants not to separate the problems associated with the disaster from the hardships that have resulted from the break-up of the USSR, with both events creating a deep-seated sense of resignation and fatalism. Although most informants hold their governments to blame for lack of information, support and preventive measures, there is little or no collective action to have these put in place. This contrasts with previous research which has suggested that populations affected by disasters attribute crucial significance to that incident and, as a consequence, become increasingly politicized with regard to related policy agendas.
URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698570600677167#.Ub5-XdhLOM1
Title: Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl: Introduction
Author: Melanie Arndt
Reference: Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam; Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30 (1) Spring 2012
Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy, memories, commemoration, Belarus
Abstract: This special issue of AEER is dedicated to memories, commemoration practices, and representations of Chernobyl. The idea for the issue was born during the final conference of the international research project “Politics and Society after Chernobyl” in Potsdam, Germany, in April 2011.The conference took place barely a month after the tsunami and the following nuclear accidents in Japan and just a few weeks before the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
URL:http://scholarworks.dlib.indiana.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/viewFile/2009/1959
