Book Review
Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl. Petryna, Adriana.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2002.
Marte Tollefsen
University of Manchester
Throughout history mankind have witnessed
major events which have changed and
reshaped reality in ways which were previously
unimaginable. Chernobyl has served as a
chilling memory of how quickly and
devastatingly human error can impact millions.
In her book Life Exposed, published by
Princeton University Press in 2002, Adriana
Petryna retraces the steps leading up to the
Chernobyl disaster of April 1986, and tackles
the myriad of contested narratives concerning
the socio-political conditions of Ukraine to
explore the structural vulnerability of the
public. Life Exposed serves as a historical and
ethnographical account of the aftermath of the
Chernobyl disaster, and approaches this topic
in a unique and original fashion.Petryna
demonstrates that a new form of socio-political
practice emerged from the Chernobyl politics
which is based on a inclusion versus exclusion
framework. She terms this a ‘biological
citizenship’ and successfully argues that it
functions as a survival strategy in a difficult
political and medical climate.
Petryna writes in a simple and effective
manner, and by using complex ethnographic
trajectories, she details how the public are
perceived as sufferers, a legal category
enforced by the state as a means of assessing
the health status an individual. Postsocialist
Ukraine operates on a social system where
biomedicine has become interwoven with
politics, science became a political technique,
where only state approved sufferers are
entitled to social protection, that is financial
compensation for health risks and illnesses
caused by the radiation from the nuclear
disaster (Petryna, 2003:561). Consequently,
risk has become a resource for people to use
in the negotiation of their fight for government
aid and everyday survival. Ukraine, Petryna
argues, is unique in its response to this
disaster “in that it combines humanism with
strategies of governance and state building,
market strategies with forms of economic and
political corruption” (Petryna, 2002:5). It was
these conditions that allowed for a dramatic
shift in the imagined state boundaries and the
emergence of this biological citizenship with
restricted access to, but extremely high
demand for, social welfare. Petryna suggests
these lived dynamics are comparative
reflections on social organisation in new
postsocialist states, that is systems of
inclusion and exclusion.
Life Exposed is ordered chronologically
which helps support Petryna’s thesis as it
allows for a gradual and systematic unpacking
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of the complicated and interconnected multiple
narratives of actors in Ukraine. It is Petryna’s
honest yet sensitive approach to this study
which sets this book apart from other
ethnographic studies of postsocialist societies.
It offers raw and chilling accounts by the
people living in and with the aftermath of
Chernobyl: from the worries and fears faced by
young women like Anna who show signs of
having trouble conceiving (Petryna,
2002:71-72) to the medical and legal struggles
of people like Rita Dubova who is fighting to
upgrade her disability status to economically
secure her son and grandchildren’s future
before she dies (Petryna, 2002:121). Petryna
boldly exemplifies the fact that these social
realities are far more immediate and stark than
those described by politicians and scientists.
Reality is experienced in “the most
rudimentary life-and-death [way]” (Petryna,
2002:7). The institutionalisation of an ‘inclusion
versus exclusion’ society forces Ukrainians to
use their status as a sufferer and their ‘newly’
gained medical knowledge to navigate and
negotiate the treacherous politics of health
care and social protection. As Lev notes, it is
all about working the system (Petryna,
2002:135).
The ethnography is based on eighteen
months of original fieldwork conducted
between 1992 and 1997 in Ukraine, Russian,
and the United States, and a subsequent one-
month follow up visit to Ukraine in 2000.
Petryna’s multi sited focus strengthens her
thesis as it reflects the importance of
understanding connections between localities
when dealing with a disaster with international
consequences. Furthermore, it highlights the
questionable international involvement in the
Chernobyl aftermaths:
Much of the disagreement between UN-
related and local scientists centres on the
significance of proven versus expected
health outcomes… While UN agencies do
not recognise rises in leukaemia rates,
Prysyazhnyuk et al. indicate the
standardised incident ration (SIR) for
leukaemia to have increased significantly
among the most heavily exposed cleanup
workers in Ukraine (Petryna, 2002:9).
A clear strength of Petryna’s approach lies in
her motivation and understanding that to justly
tell the story off and analyse the turbulent
realities of post-Chernobyl Ukraine she had to
become scientific literate, which fundamentally
underpin her excellent study of these
postsocialist narratives of social, political,
economic and medical issues. Life Exposed
demonstrates in an elegant and coherent way
how reality subverts scientific claims to
certainty truth. It serves as a critique of the
postmodern ideal of science as an objective
and neutral approach to governmentality and
how this approach is flawed in the pursuit of
stability (Duke, 2011:412-413). As Beck
(1992:167) states “scientific reason can break
up into many sets of competing rationalities
with specific claims to errors, deceptions and
truths, [and] such uncertainties in scientific
spheres can produce a social and political
unraveling”.
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 Life Exposed is an expertly written
book with numerous admiring qualities,
however, some shortcomings are evident.
Petryna’s study and case histories focuses on
the lived experience of individuals and
households with little reference to wider
kinship networks. Some mention of and
attention to the various forms of communitas
that surely must exist in post-Chernobyl
Ukraine would have been beneficial for a
better understanding of the ways in which
people mobilise and come together to put
pressure on the state and medical
professionals.
Apart from this minor critique, Petryna’s
book is an ethnographic triumph that vividly
describes the complexities and difficulties
faces by a nation during its state formation,
and the struggles of the people adapting to this
new social structure, all while recovering from
a devastating nuclear disaster. Life Exposed is
meticulously researched and comprehensive.
Particularly impressive in its ability to move
from micro to macro level. Most importantly, it
Unpublished Book Review. 12 March 2015. Department of Anthropology, University of Manchester.
makes a lasting impression and leaves one
reflecting on everyday experiences one take
for granted.
References cited
Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New
Modernity. London: SAGE.
Duke, M. 2011. Ethnicity, Well-Being and the
Organization of Labor among Shade
Tobacco Workers. Medical
Anthropology Cross-Cultural Studies in
Health and Illness 30(4), 409-424.
Petryna, A. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological
Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Petryna, A. 2003. Science and Citizenship
under Postsocialism. Social Research
70(2), 551-578.
Sabo, S. 2014. Everyday Violence, Structural
Racism and Mistreatment at the US-
Mexico Border. Social Science and
Medicine 109, 66-74.

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