Radiation illness representation and experience: The aftermath of the Goiânia radiological disaster.
Item
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Title
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Radiation illness representation and experience: The aftermath of the Goiânia radiological disaster.
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Identifier
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AAI3047208
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identifier
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3047208
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Creator
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da Silva, Telma Camargo.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Shirley Lindenbaum
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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This work explores the ways in which radiation illness, caused by the collection and break-up of an abandoned medical radioactivity unit in Goiânia (Brazil), in 1987, is framed during ten years (1987--1997) by the different social actors involved: the state government, the Brazilian nuclear experts, the "radioacidentados" and the policemen who worked in the response to the catastrophe. Drawing upon extensive field research done from 1996 to 1997, I argue that a disaster is a processual event, and its understanding implies a long term observation of the field of forces that shape the official knowledge of the disaster and produce the social suffering of those groups that are in positions of vulnerability. In Chapter one I introduce the 1987 events, make comments on doing fieldwork as a native anthropologist and present the theoretical framework of my ethnographic approach. I focus on narrativization as a medium through which the lifeworld is reconstituted and revealed in the disaster aftermath. Chapter two discusses the 1997 identification of the "cesium policemen" and the interpretive production of the various disturbances that afflict them in the aftermath of the disaster. I show that the vulnerability of this police subgroup is echoed in the manifestation of institutional power undertaken for delegitimizing their claims and for disqualifying them as professionals at risk of radiation. Chapter three presents the scenario of the disaster as well as the institutional agents responsible for the official categorization of the affected populations and reveals the experiences of being a radiation survivor. Chapter four shows that the production of the disaster knowledge results from the confrontation between official memory, sustained by the institutional power, and subjugated knowledges experienced by survivors' memories. In Chapter five I maintain that disasters rather than events isolated and temporally demarcated in exact time frames resulted from a social dynamic allowing for multiple interpretations of the disaster which were not confined to the emergency phase. I conclude that along with the metric suffering established by the biomedical understanding, radiation disaster brought trauma, distress, and disorders which were provoked not exclusively by the physical and mental pain, but also by the struggles people undertook concerning health, legal, and moral issues arising in the disaster's aftermath.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
