For Crouchback

[grinninfoole]

This is an excerpt from a nifty book I read for my comps, called Nuclear Rites, a weapons laboratory at the end of the cold war, by Hugh Gusterson. (1996, U Chicago)

"At the most obvious, functional level, the laboratory's colored badges, locked trash cans, exclusion areas, and conversational restrictions are part of a system that, however erratic, exists to ensure that foreign governments do not gain access to American military secrets. Looking at the laboratory's system of secrecy with a less literal eye, however, I argue that these regulations also have a role to play in the construction of a particular ... relationship between the laboratory scientists and the outsid eworld. ... Elaborating on this observation, my basic argument is here is that the laboratory is a high-tech version of the secret societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied all over the world and that the process of investigation for clearance is a bureaucratic variant of classic initiation rituals found throughout the ethnographic record. (p. 80)

"To know a secret is to be important, even though many secrets seem more interesting to those who do not know them than to those who do. The secretary of energy, Hazel O'Leary, exclaimed when she read her first classified briefings, "What's so classified about this? ... It was all the stuff I'd heard on CNN while I was getting dressed." (Mirabella 1994: 130) And many who have written about secret societies have observed that their forbidden secrets often turn out to be surprisingly mundane and unexciting once they are revealed." (p. 87)

Comments

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

Interesting.