Download Joseph Masco

Joseph Masco
Department of Anthropology
The University of Chicago
Ethnografeast III: Ethnography and the Public Sphere
Lisbon, June 20-23, 2007
“The Nuclear Public Sphere”
Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research on nuclear politics in New
Mexico, this paper interrogates the possibility of a “nuclear public sphere” in the United
States. It argues that nuclear weapons are not only technologies embedded in expert
discourses of scientific production, military planning, and foreign policy, but also cultural
artifacts with a deep social history in the United States. Today, every U.S. citizen is
addressed by the official nuclear logics supporting the “war on terror”, even as
government secrecy works to limit the possibility of engaging those logics. Thus, the
terms of a “nuclear public sphere” are increasingly complex even as the political stakes
could not be higher.
To examine these issues, the paper explores the contemporary politics surrounding the
Trinity Test Site – where the first atomic bomb was detonated in July of 1945. The test
site offers a salient example of the problems surrounding the idea of a “nuclear public
sphere” in the United States. It is only open to the public two days a year and is located
in the midst of the White Sands Missile Range. Visitors who make the difficult journey
to the site are promised unmediated access to the bomb, but what they actually encounter
are photographs and each other. The bomb is inaccessible at its place of origin. An
ethnographic analysis of the site – as well as a review of its visual culture – provide a
means of interrogating the politics of recognition and misrecognition that support nuclear
discourse in the United States. In doing so, the paper explores the ethnographic challenge
of locating and engaging a nuclear public sphere in the United States.