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CASE STUDY” SURVIVING BHOPAL: DANCING BODIES, WRITTEN TEXTS,…
CASE STUDY”
SURVIVING BHOPAL: DANCING BODIES, WRITTEN TEXTS, AND ORAL TESTIMONIALS OF WOMEN IN THE WAKE OF AN INDUSTRIAL DISASTER. By Suroopa Mukherjee. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 224 pp. Hardbound, $84.00.In December of 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal was the site of an indus-trial catastrophe, a gas leak of enormous proportions resulting in the deaths of thousands of area residents and an untold number of related illnesses in sub-sequent years. Suroopa Mukherjee’s Surviving Bhopal examines this ongoing disaster from the perspective of affected individuals, especially women. As she states in her introduction, Mukherjee’s larger aims are “highlighting the ways in which the Bhopal disaster has been ‘constructed’ in the popular imagination by a process that simultaneously commemorates and erases the tragedy” (3), and “understand[ing] the development model from the perspective of those who do not stand to gain by it” in the context of globalized corporate growth (9). To these ends, she incorporates oral histories of survivors to counter official histor-ies produced in large part by the Indian and U.S. governments, often in collusion with, or at least in the best interests of, the offending corporations.The book is organized into seven chapters, all of which include varying quantities of direct quotations from survivors, contextualized by Mukherjee’s analysis of official documents and combined with extensive research into the relevant political, legal, and medical domains. The first chapter sets the scene, relating the events leading up to and immediately following the disaster itself, including previous incidents in the same facility and the first responses of Union Carbide and the Indian government, ultimately demonstrating that “[t]he Bhopal disaster was not an accident but the inevitable result of a series of corporate decisions” (38). The second chapter focuses intensively on oral testi-monials, from both archival sources and interviews by the author. These inter-view excerpts cover the same time period addressed in chapter 1 but provide a haunting illustration drawn from the memories of those who lived through the assault of toxic gas on their bodies and homes. They also anticipate the suc-ceeding chapters, which turn to the ongoing nature of the trauma, by explain-ing, in the words of one survivor, that the Bhopal gas disaster “is not about one night. It is never ending” (51).Chapter 3 examines the legal fallout wherein quick and ultimately ineffective settlements have been given preference over justice for victims and long-term systemic changes. Mukherjee describes Union Carbide’s transition to owner-ship by Dow Chemical Company as a “vanishing act,” which effectively removes them from the culpability equation (63), and reiterates the book’s stance that “development-as-growth is upheld without really going into the question of development for whom” (75). Chapters 4 and 5 combine oral histories with ana-lysis of economic aid provided to survivors by the government, in order to show how “rehabilitation programs were not gender sensitive” (11). Chapter 5 also begins the transition, continued throughout the remaining chapters, to focus-ing on women’s activism as it grew out of survivors’ groups. In chapter 6, the emphasis shifts from economic to medical rehabilitation, and here again the failure to attend to gender differences is foregrounded in the author’s selections from oral histories. Perhaps most chillingly, Mukherjee cites evidence from both medical professionals and female victims, indicating that “in a blatant display of sexism in medical science the reproductive effects of exposure was neglected” (134), and furthermore that medical research on gas victims “had been termi-nated not for purely administrative reasons,” as government sources insisted, but rather “when conclusive evidence of second-generation damage had begun to emerge” (152). Finally, chapter 7 picks up the growing thread of women’s protest and activism after the Bhopal disaster. Mukherjee examines how “the nature of demands that women themselves garnered from their experience became the rallying point of collective mobilization at the local level,” and how local needs-based movements have become “incorporated into wider issues of human rights and corporate liability in the context of globalization” (16).The author’s attention to what oral history is capable of sometimes out-weighs her explicit discussion of how she practiced it in her research; perhaps because she hopes this book will “have a wider appeal among campaigners and activists” (4), readers already familiar with oral history may find her argument on its behalf extraneous. Mukherjee discusses her methodology in her intro-duction and endnotes, explaining that her sources include archived testimoni-als immediately following the disaster and her own interviews conducted years later. Although she does not share many details about those interviews, such as how she sought out subjects or the questions she posed, she conveys the sense that she paid special attention to circumstances influenced by gender, including rights, employment, family relationships, traditional roles, and health. In many ways, Mukherjee answers the call of Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991) by adjusting her collection and interpretation of women’s words to account for the unique systems of oppression they endure and forms of resistance they employ.Surviving Bhopal also evokes comparison with Kai Erikson’s A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994), an ethnography of communities devastated by toxic events. Although Mukherjee does not cite this book, it is a similar study of “people pitched against monolithic institutions” (10) in the context of industrial dis-aster. Perhaps to readers of books such as Erikson’s, Mukherjee’s insistence on using oral history to rewrite the history of people in conflict with industrial development is not entirely new; however, that does not lessen its importance, its unmatched focus on the particular case of Bhopal, or the unique aspect of its attention to women’s experiences. Furthermore, the publication of this study is undeniably timely in the current environment of increasing protest against globalized corporations with minimal accountability and maximum impact on the lives of people who live in their shadows.Kate Parker HoriganThe Ohio State Universitydoi:10.1093/ohr/ohs072Advance Access publication 16 August 2012ROCHDALE VILLAGE: ROBERT MOSES, 6,000 FAMILIES, AND NEW YORK CITY’S GREATEST EXPERIMENT IN INTEGRATED HOUSING. By Peter Eisenstadt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. 328 pp. Hardbound, $35.00.In this detailed account of the integrationist past of New York’s Rochdale Village housing cooperative, historian Peter Eisenstadt provides a unique lens into the complicated experience of interracial living in post-World War II northern cities. Eisenstadt, himself once a resident of Rochdale, collected some fifty interviews of his former neighbors and classmates in order to document, as he says, “the initial promise of integration, and its subsequent failure” (x).Eisenstadt’s work offers an important addition to the growing body of schol-arship on these complicated integrationist impulses in neighborhoods around the country, from Washington DC’s Takoma and Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy to the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights and Chicago’s Oak Park. While the story is not a new one, in linking these middle-class liberal efforts with the more progressively aligned cooperative movement, the author draws useful connec-tions about class and race in postwar urban America.As Eisenstadt writes, Rochdale sprang from the somewhat unlikely part-nership between Abraham Kazan, president of the United Housing Foundation whose work grew out of the Jewish Labor Movement of the early twentieth century, and Robert Moses, perhaps the most influential urban planner in New York’s history. This pairing of social idealism and political and business pragma-tismwhat the author terms the “Utopian” and the “Anti-Utopian”created the space for a moderate-income housing cooperative contextualized in the postwar loosening of racial constraints and the anti-interventionist inclination to “create a racially egalitarian society . . . freely entered into by all parties, unco-erced, unmonitored, and unregulated, just people of different races choosing to live together” (80-81). Out of this improbable collaboration grew Rochdale Village, an integrated housing cooperative that was, at its inception in 1963, roughly 80% white.From here, Eisenstadt crafts a familiar tale of social relationships and eco-nomic interests, of educational tensions and political pressures, and of rising crime rates and urban instability. By the early 1970s, like many integrating 368ORAL HISTORY REVIEW
Highlight the stakeholders–Who was impacted positively and negatively?
Apply the ethical principles of each theory–Ethical Egoism, Utilitarianism, Duty Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Social Contract TheoryEvaluate the issue according to each ethical theory.
Choose the most ethical option from your application of Ethical Egoism, Utilitarianism, Duty Ethics, Virtue Ethics, & Social Contract TheoryActing according to which ethical theory would have led to the most ethical action?
State your justificationGive reasons why acting according to one of these ethical theories would have been more ethical than the others.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Essay Format
INSTRUCTIONS:
Essay Format
= introduction
= explain the ethical issue
= Who impacted
= What should have been done or not done? What are the possibilities?
Section II
Argumentative portion of your essay:
Your Argument = Thesis & Supporting Points, as well as the rational justification for your Supporting Points
State your Thesis:
Then give justification for your thesis:
Write 1 paragraph for your thesis and supporting points.
Section III
Supporting Points & Rational Justification
Argumentative portion of your essay:
Your Argument = Thesis & Supporting Points, as well as the rational justification for your Supporting Points
State your Thesis:
Then give justification for your thesis:
Write 1 paragraph for your thesis and supporting points.
Similar write three more for supportive and argumentative
Section IV
Conclusion
Briefly discuss the importance of at least one significant ethical point from the application of one of the four ethical theories that you did not defendPart iii.
Briefly consider how Socrates OR Plato OR Gilligan might offer a more or less ethically relevant approach to the issue.
