Cosmonaut in the Post Office: A Sociology of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

• In Event: 4160 - Social Theory for Our Grandchildren: Humanity’s Future in Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

My method for writing about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is to write by encircling: small paragraphs surrounding ideas, memories, historical facts, and feelings of place. These sections form zones through a practice I call sociological poetry, which is how C. Wright Mills categorized James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Mills was working toward something similar in his own writing. He was preoccupied with finding a methodology for sociology that would be a way of telling compelling stories with “full human meaning” that allowed for the inclusion of the author’s personal feelings and emotional connections toward the objects of study. He wanted to show the reverberations of those worlds as felt in the writer. Throughout his career, Mills tried to convey what he called the “tang and feel” of experience. Like Mills, I too am working toward a way of writing that takes emotions, senses, colors, and micro-climates seriously. Agee’s book was a beautiful failure; it was impossible to get close enough to the cotton tenant farmers in 1930s Hale county Alabama to fully represent their lives. This project will be a failure too, but in different ways, which remain to be seen. What it may offer is some ways to think zonally, to consider places both sacrificed and sanctified for their relationship to disaster. Part of thinking zonally, for me, is to chase the circling affects and memories of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and to trace how a certain 86ness can never leave the place. Half-lives swirl around this time into our time like the swirling eyes of cartoon characters under hypnosis or in extreme shock. To think zonally, for me, is also to think about attempts to contain the uncontainable. This paper is the very beginning of this project.

Author

• Lindsey A. Freeman, Simon Fraser University