The Nuclear Borderlands - The Manhattan Project In Post-Cold War New Mexico - Masco Joseph

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Résumé :
The Nuclear Borderlands exploros the sociocultural fallout of twentieth-century America's premier technoscientific project-the atomic bomb. Joseph Masco otters the first anthropological study of the long-tens 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 et Las 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 technoscienlific modemity . it has produced a new cognitive orientation toward everyday life, provoking cons-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 theoretic I perspectives on the unpin and logic of U.S. national security culture. The Nuclear Borderlands ultimately assesses the efforts of the nuclear security state to reinvent de in a post-Cold War world, and in so doing exposes the nuclear logic supporting the twenty-first-century U.S. war on terrorism.

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