BRIAN FREER:  MY PROJECT AND ANTHROPOLOGY

      This research project contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science and technology studies.  The primary contribution to anthropology will be the study’s ethnographic case-study material and analysis.  Four key points of the proposed fieldwork are worthy of mention. 
      First, global environmental threats accompanying the demise of the Cold War need to be understood in the context of knowledge practices and policies that used to be ‘national security’ concerns.  In this sense, by documenting everyday occupational practices and cultural orientations of radiation protection professionals as they were reflexively structured (in other words, lived) through ‘national security’ concerns, the study provides a road map for other ethnographers to reflect upon as they trace back and forth between the past and present to document secret histories in the post-Cold War. 
      Second, the study reaches beyond the confines of the laboratory, that is the strictly technical pursuits of health physicists, and situates their practices with respect to the larger cultural and social milleu.  To use Sarah Franklin’s words, the research comprises a “crossing over between the culture of the lab and the culture of which this culture is a part” (1995: 174). 
      Third, the dominant narrative of the Nuclear Age is often told from the perspectives of politicians and their policies and the physicists who harness the atom for weapons of mass destruction (Traweek, 1988;  Gusterson, 1996).  The proposed research widens the discussion on the implications of the Nuclear Age by focusing on a nuts-and-bolts plutonium production facility that, while appearing to merely execute major decisions, actually exercised a considerable amount of flexibility in interpretations of policy.  Further, by examining the ways engineers ‘apply’ the theoretical information of physicists and the directives of policies, the study seeks to show that theory and practice exist at multiple levels of the nuclear sciences. 

          Fourth, this research project will provide much needed case-study material on knowledge practices in the field of risk assessment and management.  Few studies have explored connections pertaining to risk in the early work of anthropologist Mary Douglas as it relates to Ulrich Beck’s recent writing on risk society and Barbara Adam’s thoughts on the role of time in our thinking to illustrate how the problems of our new risk society are temporally grounded, so much so that we are, in Adams’ words “running out of time not resources” (1994: 106).

References Cited:

 Adam, Barbara
        1990 Time and Social Theory.  Cambridge: Polity.
        1994 "Running out of Time: Global Crisis and Human Engagement." 
In Michael Redclift and Ted Benton (eds.) Social Theory and the Global Environment.  New York: Routledge.
 
Beck, Ulrich
        1992 "From Industrial to Risk Society: Questions of Survival, Social Structure, and Ecological Enlightenment."  Theory, Culture, Society 9: 97-123.

Douglas, Mary and Aaron Wildavsky
        1982 Risk and Culture.  Berkeley: University of California.

Franklin, Sarah
        1995 ‘Science as Culture, Cultures of Science.’  Annual Review of Anthropology 24:163-84.
 
Gusterson, Hugh
        1996 Nuclear Rites: A Nuclear Weapons Laboratory at the end of the Cold War.  Berkeley: University of California.
 
Traweek, Sharon
        1988 Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.