A Chronotope of Expansion: Resisting Spatio-temporal Limits in a Kazakh Nuclear Town

Catherine Alexander

doi:10.1080/00141844.2020.1796735

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article starts by anatomising the various strategies used by the Soviet regime to contain and ‘disappear’ the nuclear weapon test site in Kazakhstan before moving on to outline attempts by the independent Republic of Kazakshtan's National Nuclear Centre (NNC) to be more open—including making much of the site available for commercial and agricultural use, after 25 years of remediation and monitoring. Juxtaposing these strategies with accounts from residents living in the town that hosts the NNC provides far more ambivalent engagements with both town and site. Thus, in what I call a chronotope of expansion, what appears is a resistance to any kind of spatial or temporal containment, a denial of progress and the possibility of moving to a brighter nuclear future by leaving behind the Soviet period and its entailments. I end by discussing the consequences of assumptions that the site can be limited and bounded in terms of radioactive contamination.

Highlights

On my third visit to Kurchatov, a small township in northeast Kazakhstan, I took an unfamiliar turning and found myself in a dusty, tree-lined road, bordered by the Irtysh riverbank
In Kazakhstan’s case, as the section details, we find attempts to reframe one such national sacrifice zone as an area of potential national enterprise, but for a different geopolitical formation altogether
As Tony Crook (2007) and Graham Jones (2014) suggest, ethnography itself is often implicitly grounded on the idea of secret knowledge, that all is not as it first appears; the ethnographer’s task is to reveal what is ‘’ going on

Summary

A Chronotope of Expansion

To cite this article: Catherine Alexander (2020): A Chronotope of Expansion: Resisting Spatiotemporal Limits in a Kazakh Nuclear Town, Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1796735 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796735 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=retn20

Introduction

ALEXANDER

Findings

Conclusion