`Chernobyl' reaches Norway: the accident, science, and the threat to cultural knowledge

• Published in: Public Understanding of Science
• Main Author: Paine, Robert
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 1992
• Subjects: Norway; saami
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/1/3/003; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1088/0963-6625/1/3/003

This report is interested in the transitions that `Chernobyl' underwent in Norway. It `arrived' as a ghastly accident: important cultural routines were disturbed, apprehension ran high, and the country waited for scientists to `repair' the accident. By the following year, `Chernobyl' was but a memory for most of the population. The scourge of radiation, however, still covered much of the countryside of central Norway. Reindeer pastures were heavily polluted, and among Saami (Lapp) groups there arose a cognitive sense of disruption to a way of life. Ambivalent relations—at times cooperative, more often adversarial—developed among the Saami in respect to the outside experts who strove to bring the radiation problem under control. The report (with anthropological fieldwork) strives to show how much of the problem of `Chernobyl', in this later phase, had to do with the different nature of the claims of two kinds of knowledge: the outside scientists' and the Saami pastoralists'.