Donna M. Goldstein

AIDS and women in Brazil : the emerging problem

This paper compares and problematizes the public discourse on AIDS and sexuality with the actual private discourse of low-income urban women in Brazil. Womens perspectives on sexuality are explored by examining what they say about anal sex, virginity, and fidelity and are seen as approximating culturally scripted ideals for sexual behavior. AIDS discourses that are being proposed by the Brazilian government, Brazilian AIDS activist groups and the womens movement are examined in light of these perspectives. Condom literacy, a central component to the Brazilian AIDS activist campaign, is problematized within the context of low-income womens lives.

The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle

Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven.

James V. Neel and Yuri E. Dubrova: Cold War Debates and the Genetic Effects of Low-Dose Radiation

This article traces disagreements about the genetic effects of low-dose radiation exposure as waged by James Neel (1915–2000), a central figure in radiation studies of Japanese populations after World War II, and Yuri Dubrova (1955–), who analyzed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In a 1996 article in Nature, Dubrova reported a statistically significant increase in the minisatellite (junk) DNA mutation rate in the children of parents who received a high dose of radiation from the Chernobyl accident, contradicting studies that found no significant inherited genetic effects among offspring of Japanese A-bomb survivors. Neel’s subsequent defense of his large-scale longitudinal studies of the genetic effects of ionizing radiation consolidated current scientific understandings of low-dose ionizing radiation. The article seeks to explain how the Hiroshima/Nagasaki data remain hegemonic in radiation studies, contextualizing the debate with attention to the perceived inferiority of Soviet genetic science during the Cold War.

Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump

This article builds on interlocutor comments to “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), a study published before the 2016 presidential election that analyzes Trump’s use of derisive humor in the Republican Party primaries. We move this earlier analysis forward by examining the ways that Trump’s semiotic displays on the campaign trail now inform the material policies of the Trump administration. Our response reflects upon two currents that characterize this postelection moment: first, the surreal mix of gendered and racialized nostalgia embedded in Trump’s iconography and message, and second, the intensification of white racism as Trump’s rhetoric of patriotic nationalism becomes government. Bringing the responses of our esteemed interlocutors into conversation with the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and Susan Sontag and the historical work of Carol Anderson, we suggest that Trump’s spectacle of governing embraces sexual transgression, civil lawlessness, and excessive opulence, all of which encourage a pro-white semiotics and a return to racisms past.

Commentary: Science, Politics, and Risk: Catastrophic Asia from the Perspective of a Brazilianist Anthropologist

THE FOUR ARTICLES IN this “Catastrophic Asia” collection, while showcasing distinct disciplinary approaches to the subject of what anthropologist George E. Marcus (1994) might identify as “technopolitical” catastrophes, are united in the attempt to uncover the sociopolitical resonances of “manmade” damage in what we take to be regional Asia. In his book Technoscientific Imaginaries, Marcus recognizes that science is deeply political and already embedded in events. In this special section of JAS, anthropologists join with scholars in the physical and natural sciences to apply this idea to catastrophic phenomena, continuing a transdisciplinary conversation that began in April 2014 at the Catastrophic Asia Symposium at the University of Colorado. Here, I contribute to this transdisciplinary enthusiasm by sharing with readers of an Asia-focused journal my own perspectives on catastrophe as a scholar of Brazil and a cultural anthropologist interested in medical anthropology and critical science studies. Specifically, I consider how experts working on issues related to the Angra dos Reis nuclear energy plant in Brazil—the site of my current research—viewed and discussed the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown of 2011. By reading the current articles through the lens of my own research, I seek to situate catastrophe within a broader anthropological literature on environmental toxicity. Human impact on the earth’s ecosystems has become a central discussion point in the framing of geologic epochs. Although the concept of Anthropocene is not harnessed directly by the authors in this special section, it hovers in the shadows of each of these accounts which, as Tim Oakes notes in his introduction, parallel and extend an earlier discussion that took place in this journal titled “Asian Studies in the Age of the Anthropocene” (JAS 73(4), November 2014). “Anthropocene” is the name given by some physical scientists to what appears to be a new geologic period (Crutzen and Steffen 2003; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). This interval, thought to characterize the present, has as its defining characteristic the environmental impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which have been accelerating exponentially since the industrial revolution. The concept has been debated across the social and physical sciences since first proposed at the turn of the millennium: Is there enough evidence to suggest the existence of a new geologic period? If so, what is responsible for it? When did it begin? Indeed, the proposed period is now gaining traction as a rallying point among humanities and social

Already innocent: radioactive bribes, white-collar corruption and nuclear expertise in Brazil

ABSTRACT The ‘father’ of Brazil’s nuclear energy programme since the 1970s, Vice-Admiral Othon, was released from prison in October of 2017 to await appeal of a 43-year sentence issued in 2016. Admiral Othon had been found guilty of organising fraudulent financial activities, engaging in political bribes and rigging and inflating construction contracts related to the construction of Brazil’s third nuclear reactor, Angra 3. Othon’s corruption sentencing coincided with impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT), also accused of financial manipulation and of having knowledge of political corruption in the Petrobras case known as Car Wash. Some on the political left have read Dilma’s impeachment as a successful strategy employed by the right wing to diminish centre-left political power. While political corruption in the fields of energy production is similarly the centrepiece of both cases, they are perceived differently. Comparing the two, the concept of nuclearity as developed by Gabrielle Hecht helps explain why Othon received considerable support from across the political spectrum. His supporters framed his case as one being managed by external foreign interests supposedly keen on preventing Brazil from harnessing its nuclear energy potential and, implicitly, of disregarding its national security risks and needs. Political corruption cases can either animate or neutralise public and moral sentiment. Perceptions of the Othon case challenge the notion that the anti-corruption campaign is merely a right-wing attempt to undermine the left. The case reveals how corruption thrives under the cover of nuclearity and in large-scale construction projects relevant to national security.

Invisible harm: science, subjectivity and the things we cannot see

This special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique recognises the growing centrality of the environment as a theme that cuts across and weaves through multiple disciplines. Scholars working within the fields of anthropology, history and literature have come together to present research on invisible harm, a term used here to capture the broad effects of increasing environmental toxicity and contamination in specific late capitalist contexts. Taken together, the articles suggest that it is the unseen nature of toxicity that enables the state to authorise its existence, whether the nuclear-era waste in a remote area of Kazakhstan that can be seen only with a Geiger counter (Stawkowski), the toxic oil pits hidden throughout Ecuador’s Amazonian jungle (Ofrias), the lead seeping into the soil from a metals smelter plant in Uruguay (Renfrew), or the radio waves that emanate from a secret US military facility (Jacobs). Secrecy, too, is a theme that emerges in these cases. Our authors each demonstrate the ways that the invisibility of toxicity is deceptive, outlining very real material effects that include not just damage to life and to the environment, but also the formation of new subjectivities organised around toxic harm. These effects, as enabled by invisibility, are the focus of this special issue. A temporal dimension permeates the things we cannot see. Toxicity may be invisible now but it will not be so tomorrow. For example, most scientists now agree that while exposure to chronic low-dose ionising radiation may not produce immediate health effects in a given population, this exposure will over time contribute to an increase in the number of cancers. But the temporal gap between emission and harm secures the tabling of environmental concerns at both the local and national levels. State actors clearly have interest in taking on at least the appearance of combatting future harm for their populations but they may choose to ignore long-term issues and instead embrace the benefits that neoliberalising and other present-oriented developmentalist approaches promise. These articles therefore ask how approaches based in immediacy may speak to the potential for environmental damage and bodily harm. Neoliberalism, whether characterised as ‘roll-back’ in terms of health care or ‘roll-out’ in terms of authorising particular directions for scientific research (Peck and Tickell 2002), carries particular valuations of health and illness and thus of life and death (cf. Agamben 1998; Lemke 2001; Foucault 2008). Even if states are invested in curtailing future harm, the science that might enable this direction (and necessarily shake the status quo) often remains ‘undone’ (Frickel et al. 2010; Hess 2016), making it extremely difficult to link health effects to toxicity. States affect the direction of scientific inquiry through political and economic means,

Fukushima in Brazil: undone science, technophilia, epistemic murk

ABSTRACT After the Fukushima catastrophe, people in many different countries turned their attention to the nuclear power stations located closest to them. What were the risks of a nuclear meltdown? Were there lessons to be learned from Fukushima? It was in this context that I approached nuclear discourse in Brazil. In 2012 and 2015, I interviewed scientists, engineers, security experts, anti-nuclear activists and public health officials connected to the Centro Nuclear Almirante Álvaro Alberto (CNAAA), Brazil’s nuclear complex located in Angra dos Reis. Did Brazilians care about Fukushima? This essay focuses on nuclear discourses of anti-nuclear activists and pro-nuclear professionals working in the Brazilian nuclear sector. Advancing the concepts of technophilia, undone science and epistemic murk, the essay explores why Brazil has pursued construction of a third nuclear power plant in spite of the Fukushima disaster, even while its citizens share apocalyptic visions of what a catastrophic nuclear event would look like at Angra.

Investigating anthropology’s Cold War histories

Comment on Price, David. 2016. Cold War anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the growth of dual use anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Drugs & Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, & Public Security

Drugs and Democracy is a bold and informative study about the forms and functionings of illegal social networks in three distinct communities in Rio de Janeiro: Vigário, Tubarão, and Santa Ana (also referred to by the author as favelas or urban shantytowns). More broadly, it is a book that makes an argument about how governments might begin to address the persistent problem of urban violence in the context of democracy-building. The focus of the book is on the ways in which drug traffickers mobilize their power and activities through their local connections, not only with other residents in their communities, but also with actors in civil society and the state. The approach used throughout the book is one known as social networking analysis, which is a paradigm that is at once powerful and limiting. The author, Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York, asks two questions relevant to Latin American cities that are considered central by scholars of the region. “Why is there so much violence in Rio?” and “What can be done to improve the situation?” Given that the author spent substantial time in each of these communities, the book is ethnographic in many ways. For instance, it is particularly innovative in identifying the Residents’ Associations (AMs) as central to the organization of criminal networks. One of the many benefits of the social networking model is that it enables the author to compare across cases and to locate similar processes in diverse contexts. Another benefit is that it provides a close-up examination of the role of AMs as critical nodes of interaction between drug traffickers, residents, and the broader political spectrum of actors. One of the model’s many drawbacks is that it precludes attention to the ethnographic voices of the actors, instead focusing on the structure of the network itself, rather than its raison d’etre. To be fair, an anthropologist is writing this review, and the drawbacks to this approach are more of a comment on the methodological distance between anthropology and political science than a flaw of the book. Arias explains that criminal drug traffickers, by establishing and using a series of social networks, can effectively take on long-term illegal activities with minimal external opposition. By taking advantage of both governmental resources and existing social capital, drug traffickers undermine and co-opt states and social efforts to control drug trafficking. What is especially appealing about Arias’s approach is that he provides a clear picture of the process of building networks as well as a direction for solutions in thinking through this dilemma. He suggests that Rio’s favelas be understood by governments not as peripheral but rather as at the center of political life and democracy-building. This shift would require considerable resources to enable “competing networks [to] bring residents, civic leaders, and state actors together to collectively resolve drug trafficking and local violence” (p. 206). The book is self-consciously comparative, first addressing the cases of three communities within Rio de Janeiro, and then in the final two chapters, applying the analysis to other countries and contexts that are also suffering from deeply entrenched criminal networks. One of the crucial arguments of Drugs and Democracy has to do with the ways in which drug traffickers gain power in places where it appears that the state is absent. For many years, scholars of democratic transition and of crime and violence in Brazil have argued that in these impoverished communities—which are existentially distant from a functioning day-to-day rule of law—the state is absent. This scholarly trend has also argued that drug traffickers function in these locations as a kind of parallel state, a separate power base that competes in the local arena by providing local residents with protection, employment, and even some social services. The details of this networking process, as outlined by Arias, turn the drug traffickers into highly active agents of local transformation. Arias’s comparative