“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS”: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America

Masco, Joseph

doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00012.x

Cited by 145 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…This approach to food allergy preparedness -prescribing a technological object as a quick fix to a complex problem -echoes what science studies scholars have found in studies looking at the technological management of risk in a wide variety of contexts (Jasanoff 1990;Beck 1992;Gusterson 2008;Lakoff 2008;Masco 2008;Adams, Murphy and Clarke 2009;Anderson 2010), including in other areas of biomedicine (Jain 2007;Dumit 2012). As Stefan Timmermans (1999) describes in his history of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), it takes a great deal of work among medical researchers, educators, and advocates to make a single, heroic medical intervention seem like the obvious solution to a medical crisis.…”

Section: Epinephrine In the Clinicmentioning

confidence: 97%

The moral life of epinephrine in the United States

Glabau¹

2016

MAT

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This paper follows the 'moral life' of epinephrine auto-injectors, devices that people with food allergies and their caretakers use to administer emergency medication to stop serious allergic reactions, in the United States. These devices are potent signifiers of the seemingly precarious nature of life with food allergies. I follow auto-injectors from their social birth as a commodity object, through how they structure doctor-patient interactions and parenting, to the ways that parents and illness advocates talk about their life-saving properties. At every step of the way, their significance is influenced by the political-economic context of health care in the United States, which places significant burdens of financial cost and responsibility for deciding what constitutes 'good' care upon individual patients and caretakers. The moral life of epinephrine serves as a model for thinking about how medical devices take on meaning that is at once practical, moral, and economic as they circulate through manufacturing and distribution channels and into the lives and social worlds of users.

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Section: Epinephrine In the Clinicmentioning

confidence: 97%

The moral life of epinephrine in the United States

Glabau¹

2016

MAT

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“…The concept of a "safety chain" establishes a process where individuals or communities mitigate, prepare for, and then recover from a "natural hazard" to return to a "normal" condition (Kellens et al 2013). Governments attune less to controlling the biophysical phenomenon and more to managing citizens who work for their own survival (Masco 2008), although people desire to believe the opposite. Protecting people's rights to life and property includes ensuring that they can quickly return to their normal practices of living following any disruption.…”

Section: History Matters: Homo Sapiensmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Realism

Cockerill

Armstrong

Richter

et al. 2017

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“…To cite a recent anthropological example, a special issue of Cultural Anthropology (edited by Ann Laura Stoler) is devoted to "ruins and ruination" and includes contributions on the aftereffects of colonialism (Stoler 2008), the efforts to preserve the rubble of slavery in Bahía (Collins 2008), and the ruinous imagery of atomic America (Masco 2008). And within anthropological archaeology itself there is a turn toward the ruins of the contemporary past, as reviewed in González-Ruibal's (2008) recent contribution to Current Anthropology, as well as an epistemological reassessment of archaeology most daringly proffered in contributions to a special issue of Modernism/Modernity (Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews 2004a).…”

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confidence: 99%

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

Dawdy¹

2010

Current Anthropology

263

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology-and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin's insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism's creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a direct engagement with recent ruins. What! Ruins so soon! (Alexis de Tocqueville (2003 [1835])Alexis de Tocqueville was speaking of a ruined log cabin he stumbled on in his exploration of the woods of New York. He marveled at the restless American frontier and was enchanted by the oddness of new ruins. Until recently, such enchantment has been rare. More often, Western observers of recent ruins have found them banal, tragic, or noisome. Romantic views are usually reserved for the ruins of a more distant past. One of the unique attributes of Walter Benjamin was his ability to turn romanticism on its head. His aesthetic contemplation of the recent ruins of the shopping arcades of Paris and the artifacts they housed in dusty whatnot shops inspired him to rethink the temporality of capitalism and the dialectic of history, among other things (Benjamin 1999;Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999). The resurrection of Benjamin as a philosophical provocateur in the present intellectual moment is not unrelated to a growing aesthetic sensibility that shares Benjamin's and de Tocqueville's fascination with recent ruins. Nor does it seem unrelated to a growing cross-disciplinary interest in archaeology, a practice grounded in the study of ruins. Intensely personal encounters, both mediated and immediate, with large-scale recent ruins such as those of 9/11, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the blooming global rust belt of postindustrial cities may also feed this preoccupation. In Benjamin's terms, ruins ar...

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“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS”: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America

Cited by 145 publications

References 36 publications

The moral life of epinephrine in the United States

The moral life of epinephrine in the United States

Environmental Realism

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

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