"Living with Uncertainty" : Public Anthropology and Radioactive Contamination(<Special Issues>Practicing a Public Anthropology of the East Japan Disaster)

Abstract

The experience of facing radioactive contamination caused by the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has touched the hearts and minds of the effected people. The nature of radiation, which is silent, invisible, and untouchable, has impeded people's clear understanding of its reality, dividing their opinions and attitudes about its impacts on their lives. The conventions holidng the people together around a shared sense of reality broke down, and consequently, they began to combine fragments of knowledge at hand in order to live in an uncertain world. This article is based on observations of a community farm in Saitama Prefecture where I have been volunteering. In this crisis, members of this community contingently modify their own ideas through heterogeneously networked connections including scientific knowledge, the farming method of organic farmers in Fukushima and their own local history. I explore how people construct counter-practices in the face of nuclear accidents and discuss what the public function of ethnographic description is in this case.