Bidding ^Tarewell to Bikini^
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special. But there is no death on this Sunday morning in Kili.
Rather, someone is striking the empty steel oxygen cylinder
that hangs from the old breadfruit tree in front of the church,
striking it with a length of pipe to produce a sweet but
muscled sound, like a requiem for a tsar. It is the call to church
and soon the Bikinians are sending up their voices to Zion,
filling that small hall with a devotion in song. It is then that
the outsider comes to know a certain truth about these people,
a people at peace with their lives. .. So on this Sunday
morning they are not only singing and worshiping. They are
once again sailing their outrigger canoes, and they are fishing
and clawing in the sand for turtle eggs. They are fathers
smiling as their sons make their first climb to the top of a
coconut tree. It is not the sea that they hear outside pounding
Kili’s unprotected shores. It is the ghost of a lost culture
calling out to them.‘^
Bikini and National Geographic—At the Crossroads
In the first few decades of the Atomic Age, many Americans believed
that the fissioned atom was as a key signifier of the technological advancement
and beneficence of American society. The Operation Crossroads atomic tests in
Bikini Atoll in 1946 established a narrative binary opposition in which,
supposedly, the most highly developed civilization with its most advanced
technology encountered one of the most primitive cultures with its rudimentary
technologies. National Geographic seized on this narrative opposition. Indeed, it
was a natural outgrowth of the magazine's traditional focus.
The combination of atom and anthropology fit National Geographic's
longstanding interests and ideology quite well, for it combined American
superiority, man’s conquest of nature, and the primitive all in one dramatic
episode. Returning to the Pacific crossroads forty years after “Farewell to
Bikini,” the magazine was certainly more sympathetic to the plight of the
Binkinians. Yet the narrative constructed four decades earlier still held tight:
“Civilization and the Atomic Age had come to Bikini, and they had been in the
way.”
But the official narrative is only one aspect of the magazine’s
reportage. In this essay, I have attempted to read the magazine’s text and
photographs to uncover the unintentional and concealed aspects of the story.
What becomes clear is that the magazine coverage of the United States’ atomic
testing in the Pacific reflects key developments of the Atomic Age: the human
toll of nuclear testing, the expansion of America’s atomic empire, and the
ontological foregrounding of our postmodern atomic age, of worlds darkened by
mushroom clouds and shattered by atoms.
New Mexico Tech
Scott C. Zeman