ABSTRACT
This chapter explores everyday sensemaking in communities living near a uranium mining site in Tadzhikistan. At this site, extracting uranium had already begun during the early phase of the Soviet nuclear program. Based on an ethnographic study of accounts and narratives of the communities, the author contextualizes how the legacies of uranium mining are dealt with and integrated into everyday life today. Despite or because of its hidden character and secrecy, it has left its impact on people's livelihoods. As this chapter shows, experiences with the natural environment (and its pollution) translate into social relations and may take considerable time until they are integrated into discourses of health and claims for compensation and a public issue involving the need to be addressed in terms of political responsibility.
