The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-cold War New Mexico - Brossura

Masco, Joseph

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0691120773 ISBN 13: 9780691120775

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2006

Riassunto

The Nuclear Borderlands explores the sociocultural fallout of twentieth-century America's premier technoscientific project--the atomic bomb. Joseph Masco offers the first anthropological study of the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project for the people that live in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb, and the majority of weapons in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, were designed. Masco examines how diverse groups--weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, neighboring Pueblo Indian Nations and Nuevomexicano communities, and antinuclear activists--have engaged the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post-Cold War period, mobilizing to debate and redefine what constitutes "national security."

In a pathbreaking ethnographic analysis, Masco argues that the U.S. focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on American society. The atomic bomb, he demonstrates, is not just the engine of American technoscientific modernity; it has produced a new cognitive orientation toward everyday life, provoking cross-cultural experiences of what Masco calls a "nuclear uncanny." Revealing how the bomb has reconfigured concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship, the book provides new theoretical perspectives on the origin and logic of U.S. national security culture. The Nuclear Borderlands ultimately assesses the efforts of the nuclear security state to reinvent itself in a post-Cold War world, and in so doing exposes the nuclear logic supporting the twenty-first-century U.S. war on terrorism.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Winner of the 2014 J.I. Staley Prize, School of Advanced Research
Winner of the 2008 Rachel Carson Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science
Co-Winner of the 2006 Robert K. Merton Prize, Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention for the 2007 John G. Cawelti Award, American Culture Association

"Masco's important and impressive study ably demonstrates that nuclear weapons need not be detonated to have profound effects--effects that extend far beyond the well-studied realms of politics and international relations." --David Kaiser, American Scientist

"Masco seems to have taken to heart the tension between anthropology and science studies: on the one hand science studies too often fails in its understanding of what long-term intensive fieldwork can do; on the other anthropology too often fails to get directly into the heart of science and technology the way it always has language, spirituality, and economy. Masco's book is fusion (that impossible goal of our nuclear culture) of the best kind." --Christopher Kelty, Savage Minds

L'autore:

Joseph Masco is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0691120773
• ISBN 13: 9780691120775
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 425