An Anthropologist in Chernobyl: Between Imaginary Catastrophe and the Real One
Chernobyl is a founding event, opening a new and long-lasting world, which has the characteristic of being, according to Günther Anders, both subthreshold, too low signal to be perceived, such as low-dose contamination, and supra-threshold, that is to say, too big to be tackled, such as the lifetime of radioactive elements (for hundreds of thousands years). One of the main lessons of the studying of such “objects” is that disasters, paradoxically, unify the mankind. This, undoubtedly, lead to renewing sociology and questioning the capabilities of the “sociological tradition” to link Chernobyl, Fukushima, GMOs, the bionic body, the “new farmers”, the “decreasing” and displaced populations, which must now be considered together. The reality of the disaster seems to have undermined our ability to represent it. The new object “nuclear disaster” lead the anthropological approach to re-examine the critical foundations of modernity.