Pedro+de+la+Torre+III


 * MEMO: QUESTIONING A TEXT**

Hecht, Gabrielle. 2012. //Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade//. Cambridge: MIT press.




 * What is the text about – empirically?**


 * **//What phenomenon is drawn out in the text? A social process; a cultural and politicaleconomic shift; a cultural “infrastructure;” an emergent assemblage of science-culturetechnology-economics?//**

This book is about the history of uranium mining in Africa and its role in the global nuclear order(s) and uranium markets. This also makes it a colonial and postcolonial history of “nuclearity,” which is the term that she uses to “ signal how places, objects, or hazards get designated as ‘nuclear’… whether in technoscientific, political, or medical terms” (3-4). In the most general terms, I suppose it would be a book about an often-neglected element in the emergence of the global technoscientific/economic/cultural/political assemblage that is the contemporary nuclear order.


 * **//Where is this phenomenon located – in a neighborhood, in a country, in “Western Culture,” in a globalizing economy?//**

The author focuses primarily on Gabon, Madagascar, Namibia, and South Africa. However, the author is forced to shuffle between developments in the US, France, and many other nations and regions as she grapples with the framing of various uranium markets, nuclear relationships, anti-apartheid politics, etc. The analysis is located, then, in the sometimes relationships between these and other Uranium producing countries in Africa, and the global nuclear order(s) of (primarily) the west.


 * **//What historical trajectory is the phenomenon situated within? What, in the chronology provided or implied, is emphasized -- the role of political or economic forces, the role of certain individuals or social groups? What does the chronology leave out or discount?//**

This text is situated in the history of the development of nuclear technologies and politics, and their relationship to global uranium markets, “nuclear” (or not so nuclear) labor practices, and knowledge production around these issues (radiological monitoring, for example). While some individuals are discussed, the actors in the text are primarily particular institutions, especially governments, economic organizations, mining companies, and workers. As Hecht acknowledges, the history of environmental contamination is largely ignored, as are the experiences of most non-workers affected by the uranium mines that she examines.


 * **//What scale(s) are focused on -- nano (i.e. the level of language), micro, meso, macro? What empirical material is developed at each scale?//**

The book is focused primarily on the meso and macro scale. Although the author does explore some of the interviews she conducted with miners and others, as well as various public health and radiological detection practices, it is usually to shed light on meso or macro level questions.

At the macro scale, Hecht looks at, among other things, the construction of Uranium as a commodity, colonial and postcolonial relations among governments (and industries), the global anti-apartheid movement, government policies, scientific/public health debates about exposures and how to measure them. On the meso scale, we find relationships between specific organizations, companies, and state/international agencies. Finally, in terms of the nano scale, Hecht conducts interviews with former miners and others to learn about their experiences; relays particular stories found in the archives and reconstructed from interviews; and compares different labor regimes around African uranium mining (and other nuclear work).


 * **//Who are the players in the text and what are their relations? Does the text trace how these relations have changed across time – because of new technologies, for example?//**

There are many players in this text, and virtually all of their relations are charted across time. I suppose the central players are governments, mining companies, economic organizations (e.g., OECD) miners, social/labor movements, and experts. One example is, for example, that government/military strategy dictated the early global uranium “market,” with the U.S. attempting to monopolize global supplies. It could be argued that, during this period, there was no “market” for this resource, since it was intensely “nuclear” (exceptional), and shielded from market forces through, for example, contracts based upon a cost+ model. But, after uranium was found to be quite common and monopolization unfeasible, markets—often segmented according to post/colonial networks—emerged through the creation of certain “market devices” that constructed a price (or, more accurately, prices, since various markets and devices existed) for Uranium. Along with efforts to develop nuclear technology for energy production, this resulted the banalization (as opposed to nuclear exceptionalism) of uranium, particularly the closer one got to its site of extraction.


 * **//What is the temporal frame in which players play? In the wake of a particular policy, disaster or other significant “event?” In the general climate of the Reagan era, or of “after-the-Wall” globalization?//**

The temporal frame is the roughly the Manhattan project to the present, although there is some description of previous uranium mining and industrial uses (for “[|fiesta ware]” for example). This means that the action takes place against the background of decolonization, the entirety of the cold war, the entirety and end of apartheid, and the development and deployment of nuclear energy.


 * **//What cultures and social structures are in play in the text?//**

There is the culture of apartheid, the culture of the cold war, the cultures of various groups of miners in several countries, there are cultural preferences for various ways of making exposure visible (epidemiology vs. studies based on animal experimentation, for example), and many more.


 * **//What kinds of practices are described in the text? Are players shown to be embedded in structural contradictions or double-binds?//**

Practices of regulation, management, policy-making, claims making that looks a bit like biocitizenship, post-colonial efforts to gain more control over national resources, and economization, among other things, are examined in this text. One of the central double binds, examined below, is the tension between nuclear exceptionalism and banalization.


 * **//How are science and technology implicated in the phenomenon described?//**

The invisibility of radiation, and the long timeframe between exposure and consequence, is a central topic. Hecht argues that more than radiation is required for something to become “nuclear:” It presupposes technopolitical systems to make that radiation visible. This means that things like technological limitations—such as radiological equipment that could not pick up certain forms of radiation, are an important part of this story. Also important are mutually exclusive claims from sciences employing various methodologies, “hot spots” made invisible by certain ways of measuring average doses, and the ways that infrastructures (like the ventilation systems in mining shafts) participated with apartheid to (unwittingly) make exposures for black miners much higher than for white miners, and to (more wittingly) make the exposures of the former invisible by basing averages on the exposures of the latter.

The treatment of market devices, here, may also be relevant to STS, as it employs ANT derived methods (Callon—performativity of markets) for understanding the construction of markets, economic rationalities, etc.


 * **//What structural conditions– technological, legal and legislative, political, cultural – are highlighted, and how are they shown to have shaped the phenomenon described in this text?//**

One particularly important structural element of this text is political economy, which the author argues is absent in most social science scholarship on nuclear technology because of “nuclear exceptionalism.”


 * **//How – at different scales, in different ways – is power shown to operate? Is there evidence of power operating through language, “discipline,” social hierarchies, bureaucratic function, economics, etc.?//**

As uranium markets were constructed, for example, power was baked in, but also contested. Western countries, for example, often pushed against including considerations of national sovereignty and apartheid raised by post-colonial states (among others) into the uranium market. The racial hierarchies enforced by the apartheid system and South African colonialism in Namibia were also on display, for example in the repression of strikes by the very well armed security forces of one of the major mines in Namibia.


 * **//Does the text provide comparative or systems level perspectives? In other words, is the particular phenomenon described in this text situated in relation to similar phenomenon in other settings? Is this particular phenomena situated within global structures and processes?//**

This text is comparative: Hecht compares, for example, the visibility of radiation exposures and the capacity for labor unions and others to mobilize around these issues in the various countries examined.


 * What is the text about – conceptually?**


 * **//Is the goal to verify, challenge or extend prior theoretical claims?//**

Hecht’s main conceptual goals, as I seem them, are to:
 * Put forward the concept of nuclearity
 * Decolonize nuclear history and scholarship
 * Challenge the paucity of political economy in this field of study


 * **//What is the main conceptual argument or theoretical claim of the text? Is it performed, rendered explicit or both?//**

Hecht both states her theoretical claims explicitly, and performs them through the diverse histories she recounts. Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways from this book is that the ability to define a given activity or material as “nuclear” (exceptional) or banal is power, and has and continues to be a field for a variety of struggles. This challenges the notion that “an immutable ontology distinguished the nuclear from the non-nuclear” (6), and raises the issue of inequality: Nuclearity—with the additional precaution that it often implies—is often constructed as a “‘first world’ luxury” (338).


 * **//What ancillary concepts are developed to articulate the conceptual argument?//**

Hecht makes use of invisibility/visibility as a lens through which to examine the “work” that nuclearity requires. She also makes use of several concepts from Callon like “market devices” to trace the inclusions and exclusions that went into creating uranium markets.


 * **//How is empirical material used to support or build the conceptual argument?//**

Hecht uses both archival work, interviews, and oral histories to support her arguments. She uses these sources—sometimes together and sometimes separately—to build both numerous mini-case studies (or histories) where her argument is performed. She also, however, focuses on large scale changes that cut across and into these mini-cases.


 * **//How robust is the main conceptual argument of the text? On what grounds could it be challenged?//**

I think the main conceptual argument is robust. Nuclearity can provide a useful framing device and/or “orienting concept” for any number of empirical investigations in the still unfolding “nuclear era.” It could, I suppose, be challenged via competition (see next question). In terms of injecting political economy and post colonialism into nuclear studies, some might argue that it is already present. Certainly, some have written about the Marshallese islanders and American Indians affected by the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, and I believe that the term “nuclear orientalism”—the view that countries like Iran are fundamentally irrational with nuclear technologies—was already coined by Gusterson. Furthermore, political economy, including labor, is a theme (if sometimes a underemphasized) in much of the nuclear scholarship that I have encountered.


 * **//How could the empirical material provided support conceptual arguments other than those built in the text?//**

Perhaps one issue with the concept of nuclearity is that it, somewhat ironically, performs the exceptionalism that it calls into question by creating a concept specific to nuclear things that combines more general and established concepts, in STS and beyond. This could include, for example, the coproduction of exceptionalism in particular situations by elements of political economy, scientific and medical knowledge, etc.


 * Modes of inquiry?**


 * **//What theoretical edifice provides the (perhaps haunting – i.e. non-explicit) backdrop to the text?//**

While I would not say that this is ANT work, it does seem to be influenced by this school of thought. This is, perhaps, explicit when it comes to the treatment of market making, but it is also implicit in its analysis of “scientific” debates as involving networks enrolling heterogeneous elements.


 * **//What assumptions appear to have shaped the inquiry? Does the author assume that individuals are rational actors, for example, or assume that the unconscious is a force to be dealt with? Does the author assume that the “goal” of society is (functional) stability?//**

I’m having a difficult time figuring out what the author assumes, or at least I can only think of these assumptions as a negative. For example, she does not assumes that official archives present a complete, authoritative description of events, which is one reason that she complimented this archival work with a large volume of interviews with experts, miners, and other relevant actors. She does not assume that homo economics walks among us. Her take (based on Callon’s take) of economics assumes that markets and economic rationality (among other sorts) is constructed (in an ANTy sense), rather than either natural or simply an imposition of a particular class.


 * **//Does the author assume that what is most interesting occurs with regularity, or is she interested in the incidental and deviant?//**

The author focuses on both regularities and particular events.


 * **//What kinds of data (ethnographic, experimental, statistical, etc.) are used in the text, and how were they obtained?//**

The author uses extensive archival research, as well as interviews with current and former miners, doctors, and other relevant experts.

One of the central reasons for the interviews was a critical understanding of the limitations of official archives (as well as, in the South African case at least, the destruction of much of those archives). The interviews allowed the author not only to track down additional documents, but also to collect oral histories and other kinds of information (such as, in some cases, whether miners working in gold mines that also extracted uranium had even heard of the latter).
 * **//If interviews were conducted, what kinds of questions were asked? What does the author seem to have learned from the interviews?//**


 * **//How was the data analyzed? If this is not explicit, what can be inferred?//**

Hecht does a fairly good job in trying to make what she calls the “backstage” of history visible, especially in the appendix (“Primary Sources and the (In)visibilities of History”). Since both the “data” and, in some ways, the histories she is trying to tell are quite heterogeneous, however, this is somewhat of a difficult question to answer. She is, at times, working to reconstruct the various framings and reframings of uranium as a commodity, and relating it to larger geopolitical developments, negotiations between postcolonial states and western governments. At other times she is tracing the invisibilities that surrounded African uranium miners, particularly in terms of exposures, as well as attempts by various parties to make these exposures visible in various ways. She also tries to analyze these invisibilities by relating them to various histories, technoscientific debates and limitations, particular regimes of power (such as apartheid), etc.


 * **//How are people, objects or ideas aggregated into groups or categories?//**

Nationality plays an important role in categorizing people, objects, and ideas in this text. Nations are, in fact, often referred to as actors (“Gabon tried to….”).


 * **//What additional data would strengthen the text?//**

More information about the local social geography of the mines, as well as how they have dealt with any radioactive contamination of their soil and water, would have been valuable, although Hecht’s empirical research was extensive.


 * Structure and performance?**


 * **//What is in the introduction? Does the introduction turn around unanswered questions --in other words, are we told how this text embodies a research project?//**

The introduction focuses less on questions than on gaps in the existing literature and problematic discourses and policies more broadly.

As I mentioned above, the author does seem to draw on ANT, without taking it on as her overall methodological/theoretical framework.
 * **//Where is theory in the text? Is the theoretical backdrop to the text explained, or assumed to be understood?//**


 * **//What is the structure of the discourse in the text? What binaries recur in the text, or are conspicuously avoided?//**

One of the main binaries structuring the text is banality/exceptionalism.


 * **//How is the historical trajectory delineated? Is there explicit chronological development? How is the temporal context provided or evoked in the text?//**

This is a historical study, but various trajectories are pointed to in terms of both geography and topic. This allows her to build up a comparative approach, although it is not quite as schematic as versions of comparative history.


 * **//How does the text specify the cultures and social structures in play in the text?//**

The author points to how different national and international bodies responded to scientific controversies, economic frames, labor and other (e.g., national security) policies, etc.


 * **//How are informant perspectives dealt with and integrated?//**

Interviews with informants were often used to both supplement archival work by including perspectives, facts, and histories not found in the official archives.


 * **//How does the text draw out the implications of science and technology? At what level of detail are scientific and technological practices described?//**

Scientific and technological practices are dealt with on both a nano and meso level view, but often leaning toward the later. While she discusses the epidemiology vs. experimentation debate in detail, for example, it is not a lab study, and she does not describe the actual process of experimentation in much detail.


 * **//How does the text provide in-depth detail – hopefully without losing readers?//**

At times, the detailed discussion of uranium market making probably does lose readers, although its represents a valuable contribution and is on the whole well written. For the most part, Hecht does a good job of keeping the details within engaging narratives about interesting issues. She also provides overviews in several parts of the book to help readers make sense of the detail.


 * **//What is the layout of the text? How does it move, from first page to last? Does it ask for other ways of reading? Does the layout perform an argument?//**

Hecht includes something like an introduction to each chapter, or group of chapters, which is helpful for readers attempting to synthesize the complicated histories that she is trying to relate. I’m not sure exactly what it says, but part I of the book focuses on markets, resources, sovereignty, and other more macro level issues, while part II deals more closely with the experience of workers. While there are many points of contact, these parts probably could have been published as separate books. In effect, there are two histories—one of making Uranium markets in a (post)colonial world, one of African uranium miners—that are linked through the theme of nuclearity and visibility.


 * **//What kinds of visuals are used, and to what effect?//**

Hecht uses many pictures of miners—working, posing in front of equipment, being examined (one rather disturbing), and hanging around cramped living quarters. There are also several maps, posters, photos of relevant industrial facilities and mines, pictures of politicians and other officials at events like mine openings and U.N. meetings, and one diagram of the uranium fuel chain. In the introduction, there is also a picture or two illustrating “nuclearity,” like [|this famous picture]—perhaps the most romantic image spurred by the threat of nuclear war—from Bonn, Germany. Hecht doesn’t write, as far as I can remember, very much if at all about these images. In many cases, they are used to orient readers or illustrate visually some of the places and kinds of people she is discussing. There is something to the contrast between the image from Bonn and the image on the cover of the book, however. One brings to the fore all of the uncanniness of the nuclear age, while the other—a man looking through rocks in Niger, also with a gas mask, shows a much more banal (or banalized) reality that receives much less attention and care. Also relevant, while the two people in the picture from Bonn are completely covered in a protective suit, which they are helping each other put on, the man on the cover has part of his face exposed, as well as his hands, and seems (if we ignore the obvious fact of the photographer) completely alone.


 * **//What kind of material and analysis are in the footnotes?//**

There is little analysis in the footnotes. They mostly refer the readers to the particular archival texts she is drawing upon, point readers to additional material, or note what I guess can be called “writing conventions,” like sticking with one name when a company changed names several times. Sometimes, the clarify the text with details or technicalities that would otherwise be bothersome. She does, occasionally, point out debates between, for example, South African historians about the origins of apartheid, or provide a little bit of additional context.


 * **//How is the criticism of the text performed? If through overt argumentation, who is the “opposition”?//**

Hecht is critiquing both the nuclear complex (not a very precise term, I know) by bringing to light the history of African uranium mining, the complicities with neocolonial and racist regimes that it has included, and the double standards that have always existed when it comes to nuclear labor. She is also criticizing the focus of most work on nuclear history on Europe and the US, and its tendency to downplay postcolonial concerns as well as political economy.


 * **//How does the text situate itself? In other words, how is reflexivity addressed, or not?//**

She discusses research challenges and, to a lesser extent fieldwork experiences. She does not, however, situate herself very extensively in the text.


 * Circulation?**


 * **//Who is the text written for? How are arguments and evidence in the text shaped to address particular audiences?//**

The text is written both for academics in the realm of history, STS, and related disciplines. However, Hecht is also trying to reach a larger audience. She does this both by providing succinct summaries, but also by letting theory shape her approach, rather than discussing it in fine detail. When she does discuss theory, it is really only to define and elucidate some of her central concepts. There is nothing that resembles a literature review, for example. She also begins with a memorable example: President Bush talking about yellowcake from Niger.


 * **//What all audiences can you imagine for the text, given its empirical and conceptual// scope?**

The text is generally very well written and accessible to the sophisticated general reader. Anyone generally interested in nuclear history, postcolonial STS, African history (particularly, I think, the South African apartheid state), and perhaps the history of the cold war would find this book rewarding.


 * **//What new knowledge does this text put into circulation? What does this text have to say that otherwise is not obvious?//**

Much of the history that Hecht has put forward would be very difficult to find elsewhere. There is not a great deal of work on the history of uranium mining in Africa, and many of the archives she consulted were in bad shape—some may even have been discarded by now. Additionally, she conducted hundreds of interviews, some of which led to additional documents not in circulation.


 * **//How generalizable is the main argument? How does this text lay the groundwork for further research?//**

Nuclearity is a concept that could help guide future studies into nuclear history and culture, and is highly generalizable. She also points to some gaps in nuclear social scholarship, which could help to spark work on the political economy of some aspects of the nuclear order as well postcolonial nuclear histories.


 * **//What kind of “action” is suggested by the main argument of the text?//**

Apart from different ways of thinking and studying related issues, Hecht suggests that policies setting exposure standards based in part on living standards (one way that “as low as reasonably achievable” is interpreted) need to go. It also suggests that while standards are important, focus also needs to be paid on the infrastructures that allow exposures to become visible and relevant.