Nuclear Summer

The Lost Summer i 2. The Anthropology of Fallout 3-Coming Home 4-Introductions 5-Circle for Survival 6.Who Goes There 72-7-The Plot 8. Oh Say Can You See 9-Independence Day IO.What Did You Bring?i i .Innocents Abroad 12. Ease on down the Road 13-The Bridge: A Drama 14. Good Americans 15-The Difference Within 16.The Postnuclear Conclusion References Cited Index amine a wide range of narratives and actions that made up social, psychological, and political dramas.In the tradition of Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman's Small Town in Mass Society (a study conducted in the 1950s in a community near Seneca County), this book is concerned with the often uneasy relationship between local communities and the larger society in which they exist.But unlike the earlier study, which took place before the globalization of mass communication and the massive presence of multimedia forms in the home, this book does not assume that mass culture is an "external agent," somehow separable from the local community into which it "transmits" policies and information (1958:82).Instead, all the aspects of mass societies intricately intertwine, generating much confusion and tension in their members, who then try to separate these interwoven aspects of their lives into identifiable communities and influences.Their attempts are what interest me here.I want to understand how people defined and juggled what came to be seen as separate personal, community-based, and mass-culture narratives as they were trying to make sense of the world around them.The question that arises for an anthropologist studying these events is not who was right and who was wrong but how the participating communities defined all that was happening around them that summer.This book analyzes constructed texts, identities, and narrative representations in order to show their rhetorical composition and the discursive constraints that affected their production and utilization.I conclude that constructing representations is a powerful political act that controls not only the crucial definition of self and other but also the differential access to power, resources, influence, and status.The results of my work are presented here in the form of an experimental ethnography that employs, at the same time that it is exploring, a variety of textual forms and voices.Such textual experiments are becoming more common in anthropological texts.Myra Bluebond-Langner (1978), for example, uses the same technique of organizing narrative information into the form of a dramatic play that I have employed in Chapter 13.The fictionalized narrative in Chapter 12, though not common in standard ethnography, is being seen more often as anthropologists turn their field experiences into novels (Barbara Tedlock, Billy Jean Isbell, Dan Rose, and others are actively exploring this genre).Even the inclusion of substantial transcripts of conversations and written textual productions of the community under study is still relatively uncommon in ethnography.Peter Davis's portrait of an American community, which com-Preface / xi bines "social research with techniques of storytelling" (Davis 1982:10), covering events from a wedding to a murder in a small town, perhaps comes closest to the project attempted here.These experiments in textuality, wedged into more traditional analysis, are designed to demonstrate the complexity of textual production not just in ethnographies but also in the everyday lives of the people anthropologists study.The events described and analyzed here took place in 1983, at a time when there was much concern and discussion about the nuclear threat to the world.When events in Europe in 1989 and 1990 signaled the "end" of the cold war, concerns about nuclear weapons and policies came to seem almost unnecessary.Suddenly it seemed as if we could put behind us the powerful cold-war narratives of self and other that had been sustaining and driving us.The attempts to replace these old stories with new narratives of a neutral, unthreatening world were short-lived, and the war in the Persian Gulf brought back in full force the types of narratives described here.I hope this analysis helps the reader to make sense not only of the events of 1983 but of the similar processes of narrative construction and textual self-defense that continue to rule our understanding of the world situation.My research was conducted in two communities in conflict with each other; yet both encouraged and supported my project.I thank all the women of the Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice who were willing to share their experiences, ideas, and written accounts.Some I only know by first name and others are identified this way for anonymity.I particularly thank Jody, Shad, Andrea Doremus, and Pam Flanigan for their comments and interest, and Nancy Zucchino, my video partner.