Citas Petryna -h-

- Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations-

"These anthropological concerns illustrate the extent to which definitions of health and illness are embedded within spheres of politics and economics and are almost always connected with dimensions that go beyond the immediate body, such as interpersonal and domestic relationships. Arthur Kleinman has elucidated the "social course" of illness. Other anthropologists, such as Veena Das and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, have been concerned with constructions of health as they indicate discrepancies in power, social position, and inequality, particularly as lived by marginal groups and individuals. Recent ethnographies of science have portrayed how, more and more, biomedical technologies play a key role in that constructedness. PET scans, genetically based diagnostics, and sonograms image biological facts and are therefore inseparable from the objects they recognize and remake as disease.

(...) Indeed, "social forces and processes come to be embodied as biological events."  In Ukraine, efforts to remediate the health effects of Chernobyl have themselves contributed to social and biological indeterminacy and novel formations of power. Radiation exposures and their unaccountability, bureaucratic interventions by the state and failures to intervene, the growth of clinical regimes, and harsh market changes intensified the course of illness and suffering."