Learning from disaster
Bloomington professor tailors course on anthropology of Chernobyl
By John R. Hughey, Published October 14, 2005
Shaping an entire semester around a single disaster was a challenge Phillips doubted at times as well. But after the first week, she knew the anthropology of disaster touches on so many key factors in the discipline, the course began to take on a momentum. The teaching experience—taking a broad course and giving it a narrowed focus—was so successful, Phillips decided to write an article based on her experience. The article is slated for publication in the Russian-language journal Forum for Anthropology and Culture.
Phillips received the Trustees Teaching Award from the Department of Anthropology (for academic year ’04-’05). IU Home Pages spoke to Phillips about the course and her research on Ukrainian culture.
Question: How did you first become interested in studying the disaster surrounding Chernobyl?
Phillips: It actually happened during my first visit to Ukraine. When I started graduate studies, I actually set out to study Russia. After my first year of graduate studies, which I began in 1994 at the University of Illinois, I got a fellowship to visit Kiev, for a language program. It was very serendipitous, actually. I didn’t have any plans to visit Ukraine. But when I went there to study Ukrainian, I just noticed people were talking about Chernobyl all the time, even though it had been almost 10 years since the nuclear accident, I found their conversations very fascinating and how they were connecting Chernobyl to issues of the Ukrainian national identity, which were conversations that were very prevalent because Ukraine gained its independence around that time, in 1991. So in 1995, they were still trying to figure out what it meant to be Ukrainian—well, they still are—but it was very much on people’s minds: “What does it mean to be Ukrainian? How will we define ourselves—as a people, as a nation?” And Chernobyl was wrapped up in those conversations. So, that’s really how the interest started, but it articulated to lots of research interests that I have had for a long time, especially the medical anthropology. Thinking about how people in different cultures think about what it means to be healthy, what it means to be ill and what therapies are developed to address certain health problems. Chernobyl was really at the center of a lot of those debates as well.
Question: During your field research, how did the Ukrainian people respond? Did you find community people were open to talking to a researcher?
Phillips: They were very open. I think there’s an assumption that people in post-Soviet society might have a problem talking about their experiences. In general, my experience has been very good.
Question: The official tally of people affected by the nuclear fallout surrounding the disaster is somewhat ambiguous, with many officials reporting the numbers as being much lower than originally predicted. Is there any way of truly calculating how many people have fallen ill from the disaster?
Phillips: An article came out in the New York Times (September 2005) talking about how the health effects—supposedly—of Chernobyl have been found to be much less than initially expected. Despite that, there is a sense in which lots and lots of people in Ukraine still feel that Chernobyl has affected their health to a certain degree. Even if it isn’t scientifically proven, if it’s not recorded in various tests and official government parameters, people have a sense it has affected their health anyway, so that’s what is interesting to an anthropologist. Whether or not it really is Chernobyl related, and what the actual epidemiologic effects of Chernobyl are, is a separate question—the fact that people find it relevant and significant in their own lives and how they deal with that.
Question: In the paper you wrote on your class, you suggest large, general anthropology classes can focus on a single case study for greater effectiveness. Tell us more.
Phillips: Chernobyl is so productive of many research questions. You can take Chernobyl as a case study to look at different aspects of anthropology and the different questions we try to answer in the discipline. I take the case study approach; most anthropologists use it in their teaching to a certain degree, but maybe not to the extent that I used it.
For example, I could have called the class the anthropology of disaster, or the environmental anthropology. Instead of limiting to a certain body of anthropological literature, it’s kind of paradoxical, because I narrowed the focus to broaden the focus. I was able to talk about medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of memory and even applied anthropology. I think it’s a productive approach in giving the students a broad sense of what the field is like.
Question: Some of the undergrads wouldn’t have a memory of this event. How did you begin to create a sense of 1986?
Phillips: It was very interesting. One of the things: I tried to make the course very interactive. I took them on a virtual tour of the Chernobyl museum that’s in Kiev—a place I had visited. It gave a lot of information on what happened at Chernobyl. I did a slide show that took them minute-by-minute through what happened at Chernobyl. I also brought in a lot of guest speakers, some that had done research on Chernobyl survivors…those sorts of interactive exercises were really helpful.
Question: Part of making the event more real was bringing your own fieldwork to the class. What type of fieldwork have you done?
Phillips: For the fieldwork that centered on Chernobyl, part of it was looking at people’s eating practices after Chernobyl. For example, I did a household health survey where I talked to people about how they had changed their diet after Chernobyl. How they were feeding their families today, at that point more than 10 years after, this was in 1998. I tried to look at practitioners of alternative medicines, because one of the things people said about their Chernobyl experience and subsequent decisions about health care, was they didn’t want to use invasive procedures; they didn’t want to use a lot of chemicals in their treatments because they felt Chernobyl had given them all the chemicals they would ever want.
They were looking for so-called all-natural forms of healing, different types of massage, different types of herbal remedies. A range of what we would call non-traditional therapy. I interviewed a lot of the practitioners and asked them theories of the body. I asked what type of patients and to what extent Chernobyl in their practices and their role in Ukrainian society.
Most of my Chernobyl research focused on these practitioners and what it tells us. I had an article in the journal Food and Foodways which talks about the phenomenon of radio protectors, a type of food supplement some people use in their diets to try to mitigate the effects of Chernobyl. I didn’t raise questions of efficacy. As an anthropologist, I was more interested in people’s perceptions of their health.
