¹ “Soviet Thrust in the Mediterranean,” Time Magazine 97, 26 (28 June 1971): 27–28.

² “Choke points” are bottlenecks, points of access into a naval area for both surface and underwater navigation.

³ Located amidst the Tyrrenian Sea, the archipelago had been a strategic maritime fortress of the Italian Navy since the nineteenth century. Because of its geographic position and the local community's long experience living in the vicinity of military personnel, U.S. and Italian defense strategists decided that La Maddalena was the perfect location for the base. They did not expect local opposition.

⁴ Two months after the base was installed, at the request of the Italian Ministry of Defense, the Center for the Military Applications of Nuclear Energy (CAMEN) and the president of CNEN issued two reports reassuring people that radiological risks in the archipelago were slight. No special safety protocols were necessary, they said, given the reliability of the U.S. reactor technology. The personnel of CNEN's radioprotection division protested that the report was written at the personal initiative of CNEN's president, Ezio Clementel, and was not based on scientific evidence.

⁵ Webb Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language and Communication 23, 2–3 (2003): 409–25.

⁶ By “material signs” I indicate that signs have material embodiments and characteristics that allow their perceivers to interpret them in various ways.

⁷ For a discussion of the methodological approaches to analyzing semiotic regimentation, see Parmentier, Richard, “The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life,” Semiotica 95, 3–4 (1993): 357–95Google Scholar.

⁸ Wynne, Brian, “Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science,” Public Understandings of Science 1 (1992): 281–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Wynne, Brian, “Public Understanding of Science Research: New Horizons or Hall of Mirrors?” Public Understandings of Science 1 (1992): 37–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wynne, Brian, “May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of the Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide,” in Lash, Scott, Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and Wynne, Brian, eds., Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology (London: SAGE, 1996), 44–83Google Scholar. See also Jasanoff, Sheila, “The Political Science of Risk Perception,” Reliability Engineering & System Safety 59, 1 (1998): 91–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The Songlines of Risk,” Environmental Values 8, 2 (1999): 135–52.

¹⁰ Brian Wynne's alerts about the perils of overstretching his original argument are illuminating. See, for example, “May the Sheep Safely Graze”; and his reply to Darrin Durant: “Elephants in the Rooms where Publics Encounter ‘Science’: A Response to Durant, Darrin, ‘Accounting for Expertise: Wynne and the Autonomy of the Lay Public,’ Public Understanding of Science 17 (2008): 21–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Some examples of the most cited works are: Brown, Phil, “Popular Epidemiology and Toxic Waste Contamination: Lay and Professional Ways of Knowing,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33, 3 (1992): 267–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Irwin, Alan, Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development (Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; and Corburn, Jason, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice, (MIT Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² See, for example, Nelkin, Dorothy and Pollak, Michael, The Atom Besieged: Anti-Nuclear Movements in France and Germany (MIT Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Touraine, Alain et al. , Anti-Nuclear Protest: The Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France, Fawcett, P., trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For an example of more recent “object-oriented” approaches, see Barry, Andrew, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ For a recent critical review, see Kimura, Aya H. and Kinchy, Abby, “Citizen Science: Probing the Virtues and Contexts of Participatory Research,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016): 331–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Irwin, Alan, Simmons, P., and Walker, G., “Faulty Environments and Risk Reasoning: The Local Understanding of Industrial Hazards,” Environment and Planning A 31 (1999): 1311–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1312–13.

¹⁵ Ibid., 1312.

¹⁶ Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (SAGE, 1992). One of the most important theses in Beck's work is that modern society is characterized by a new fundamental cleavage, which he evocatively conceptualizes as “relations of definition”: the uneven distribution of expertise (normatively defined) that creates a status of subalternity of laypeople vis-à-vis technoscientific knowledge production. I cannot here illustrate all the critiques that STS scholars have addressed to Beck's argument, But for an overview of the most controversial points, see Boudia, Soraja and Jas, Nathalie, “Risk and ‘Risk Society’ in Historical Perspective,” History and Technology 23, 4 (2007): 317–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wynne, “May the Sheep Safely Graze?”

¹⁷ Anthropologist Joshua Reno contends that by focusing on risk as the central analytical category, STS scholars tend to represent and conceptually reproduce the same lay-expert divides that they want to deconstruct: “Beyond Risk: Emplacement and the Production of Environmental Evidence,” American Ethnologist 38, 3 (2011): 516–30. I am not convinced, though, that there is any inherent problem making risk a focus of analysis. Several works in STS have focused on how collaborations between expert-activists and local communities shape hybrid forms of knowledge to leverage citizens’ resources for environmental justice. See, for example, Allen, Barbara, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes (MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Ottinger, Gwen, Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges (NYU Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Armiero, Marco, “Seeing Like a Protester: Nature, Power, and Environmental Struggles,” Left History 31, 1 (2008): 59–76Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Kinchy, Abby and Kleinman, Daniel Lee, “Organizing Credibility: Discursive and Organizational Orthodoxy on the Borders of Ecology and Politics,” Social Studies of Science 33, 6 (2003): 869–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hess, David, “To Tell the Truth: On Scientific Counterpublics,” Public Understanding of Science 20, 5 (2011): 627–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kinchy, Abby, Jalbert, Kirk, and Lyons, Jessica, “What Is Volunteer Water Monitoring Good For? Fracking and the Plural Logics of Participatory Science,” in the special issue “Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal Age,” Political Power and Social Theory 27 (2014): 259–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kimura, Aya H. and Kinchy, Abby, “Citizen Science”; Kinchy, Abby, Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops (MIT Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Kimura, Aya H., Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Duke University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Parthasarathy, Shobita, “Breaking the Expertise Barrier: Understanding Activist Strategies in Science and Technology Policy Domains,” Science and Public Policy 37, 5 (2010): 355–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Sherry Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, 1 (1995): 173–93. Barbara Allen's work on the Alabama chemical corridor is an exception to this point of view. Her analysis of the uneasy alliances between the heterogeneous and more inclusive social movements and movements based on identity politics fighting for environmental justice exemplifies the kind of “thickness” that Ortner argued for when discussing the “ethnographic refusal” to deal with the contradictions of subaltern groups. Furthermore, a now abundant literature on expert activists shows that controversies are not always between experts and lay people, the powerful and the subaltern. A case in point is the example of AIDS activists strategies to acquire authority and credibility, explored by Epstein, Steven in Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, (University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Likewise, see the recent collection of case studies edited by Ottinger, Gwen and Cohen, Benjamin, Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement (MIT Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² This point has been largely debated and problematized within the field of political ecology. For a review, see Horowitz, Leah, “Local Environmental Knowledge,” in Perreault, Tom, Bridge, Gavin, and McCarthy, James, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Routledge, 2015), 235–48Google Scholar. For a discussion of the misuses and misappropriations of the concept of “indigenous knowledge” in the context of developmental politics, see Agrawal, Arun, “Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge,” Development and Change 26 (1995): 413–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In STS, this problem is clearly laid out by Ottinger, Gwen, in “Changing Knowledge, Local Knowledge, and Knowledge Gaps: STS Insights into Procedural Justice,” Science Technology & Human Values 38, 2 (2013): 250–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Here I cannot do justice of the complexity of “semiotic relationality” as conceptualized by ANT, so I invite the readers to look at Law, John, “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in Turner, Bryan S., ed., The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Blackwell, 2008): 141–58Google Scholar; Callon, Michel, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” Sociological Review 32, 1 (1984): 196–233CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Akrich, Madeleine, “The Description of Technical Objects,” in Bijker, Wiebe E. and Law, John, eds., Shaping Technology/Shaping Society (MIT Press, 1992): 205–24Google Scholar. Bruno Latour has illustrated this point in many writings, but I think his clearest explanation can be found in “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Shaping Society (MIT Press, 1992), 151–80.

²⁴ Marres, Nortje, Material Participation: Technology, the Environment, and Everyday Publics (Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Ibid., 65; Newell, Sasha, “The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn,” Current Anthropology 59, 1 (2018): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I thank two anonymous CSSH reviewers who pointed Newell's insightful work out to me.

²⁶ Marres, Nortje, “Issues Spark a Public into Being: A Key but Often Forgotten Point of the Lippmann-Dewey Debate,” in Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT Press, 2005): 208–17Google Scholar.

²⁷ This point is clearly discussed in Sasha Newell's “The Affectiveness of Symbols,” and especially in Paul Manning's comments (pp. 14–16) about affect as a dyadic relation between two entities, which is not yet articulated and non-representational. As such it is not mediated by reflexive thought (thirdness).

²⁸ Shapiro, Nicholas, “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime,” Cultural Anthropology 30, 3 (2015): 368–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Reno, “Beyond Risk.”

³⁰ Masco, Joseph, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ See, for example, Parr, Joy, “A Working Knowledge of the Insensible? Radiation Protection in Nuclear Generating Stations, 1962–1992,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, 4 (2006): 820–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuchinskaya, Olga, “Articulating the Signs of Danger: Lay Experiences of Post-Chernobyl Radiation Risks and Effects,” Public Understanding of Science 20, 3 (2011): 405–21CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Morita, Atsuro, Blok, Anders, and Kimura, Shuhei, “Environmental Infrastructures of Emergency: The Formation of a Civic Radiation Monitoring Map during the Fukushima Disaster,” in Hindmarsh, Richard, ed., Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi (Routledge, 2013), 78–96Google Scholar.

³² Parr, “A Working Knowledge of the Insensible?”

³³ Joy Parr borrowed the concept of “somatic mode of attention” from anthropologist Csordas, Thomas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8, 2 (1993): 135–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Kuchinskaya, Olga, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (MIT Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ Wirtz, Kristina, “Spiritual Agency, Materiality, and Knowledge in Cuba,” in Johnson, Paul C., ed., Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 99–129Google Scholar.

³⁶ Keane, “Semiotics and Social Analysis.”

³⁷ Ibid., 418.

³⁸ Keane, Webb, “On Semiotic Ideology,” Signs and Society 6, 1 (2018): 64–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Ibid., 66–67.

⁴⁰ On the importance of metasemiotic reflexivity in social life, see ibid., especially pages 74–80.

⁴¹ Peirce, Charles Sanders, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Buchler, Justus, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover Publications, 1955), 99–119Google Scholar.

⁴² Ibid., 100.

⁴³ Cited in Fann, K. T., Peirce's Theory of Abduction (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Eco, Umberto, “Peirce's Analysis of Meaning,” in Ketner, Kenneth et al. , eds., Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress (Texas Tech Press, 1993), 179–93Google Scholar, 193.

⁴⁵ Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 104.

⁴⁶ Keane, “Semiotics and Social Analysis,” 414.

⁴⁷ Keane, Webb, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” in Miller, Daniel, ed., Materiality (Duke University Press, 2005), 182–205Google Scholar, 190.

⁴⁸ Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 109.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 108.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 104.

⁵¹ Ibid., 112.

⁵² Ibid., 114.

⁵³ Eco, “Peirce's Analysis,” 188–89.

⁵⁴ On the problem of potentially infinite semiotic regressions and the possibility of knowing the world, Parmentier offers an interpretation of Peirce's position based on passages where the philosopher asserts that knowledge and truth are not individual achievements but collective endeavors, based on the evidence that scientifically logical minds will eventually provide to arrive at settled beliefs. See Parmentier, Richard J., “Peirce Divested for Non-Intimates,” RSSI: Recherches semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 7, 1 (1987): 19–39Google Scholar, esp. 33–35.

⁵⁵ Buchler, Justus, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover Publications, 1955), 91Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Giulio and Roberta are pseudonyms. From author's interview with them, La Maddalena, Sept. 2012.

⁵⁷ Here, Giulio refers to the area known as Sasso Rosso, which the local administration used until the early 1990s as a landfill for the entire archipelago.

⁵⁸ In Italy orata (pl. orate) is the common name for Sparus aurata (Gilt-head Bream).

⁵⁹ Interviewed by the author, La Maddalena, Oct. 2012.

⁶⁰ Reno uses Harri Englund's concept of emplacement: “a phenomenological fact [that] is molded by histories of boundary making and constraint” (in “Beyond Risk.”)

⁶¹ Irwin, Simmons, and Walker, “Faulty Environments,” 1319.

⁶² In their work, Kate Brown, Joseph Masco, and Olga Kuchinskaya observe that around Chernobyl, Los Alamos, and in radiocontaminated areas of Belarus, fauna and flora are thriving. They use these examples to underscore the perceptive distortions that radiation introduces into the world and the sensorial and cognitive disorientation it provokes in communities living in contaminated areas where the healthy appearance of natural life masks the invisible hazards of radiocontamination. Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Masco, Nuclear Borderlands; Kuchinskaya, Politics of Invisibility.

⁶³ Eco, Umberto, “Guessing: from Aristotle to Sherlock Holmes,” VERSUS Quaderni di Studi Semiotici Milano 30 (1981): 3–19Google Scholar, 18.

⁶⁴ Funtowicz, Silvio O. and Ravetz, Jerome R., “Science for the Post-Normal Age,” Futures 25, 7 (1993): 739–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ According to CNEN and ISS experts interviewed by national and local newspapers, four years were not enough for subjects exposed to low-level radiation to experience genetic effects. See notes 72–75.

⁶⁶ Parmentier, “Semiotic Regimentation,” 360.

⁶⁷ “Nascite anormali a La Maddalena,” L'Unione Sarda, 28 May 1976: 3.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ “Occorre un'indagine seria sulle nascite alla Maddalena,” L'Unione Sarda, 30 May 1976: 3.

⁷² “Una smentita che non smentisce,” L'Avanti, 2 June 1976; “La Maddalena: smentite le morti da radioattività,” Corriere della Sera, 2 June 1976; “Si studierà la radio-attività a La Maddalena,” Il Giorno, 4 June 1976.

⁷³ “I tre bimbi anormali: analizzate alghe, mitili della base Maddalena,” La Stampa, 3 June 1976.

⁷⁴ Il Messaggero, 31 May 1976.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ “Il ministro della Sanità rischia l'incriminazione,” L'Avanti, 10 June 1976. Tamponi's arguments echoed and sometimes explicitly referred to statements about the status of the radiosurveillance system in La Maddalena that ISS and CNEN experts made in public debates and scientific conferences. Moreover he used legal arguments offered by environmental activist judge Gianfranco Amendola, leader of the environmental organization “Gruppo Ambiente.” He intervened frequently in the public debates concerning the lack of radioprotection protocols in La Maddalena through op-eds in national newspapers: Gianfranco Amendola, “Basi infette,” Il Messaggero, 22 Mar. 1974.

⁷⁷ I say especially leftist political leaders because they were a minority in La Maddalena and were generally denied the resources that the dominant elites monopolized through their affiliation with the central government, the local church, and the Italian Navy. The anti-base front had to elaborate a strategy to break through widespread reticence and undermine official narratives about the economic benefits of the U.S. Navy's “innocuous” presence.

⁷⁸ For the period 1972–1976, I relied on newspaper articles from La Nuova Sardegna and L'Unione Sarda available at the archive of the municipal library of Sassari, Sardinia. For 1976–2008, I drew from a rich collection of articles about the base assembled daily by the Information Office of the Italian Navy command of La Maddalena. I had access to the collection thanks to the precious collaboration of Mr. Francesco Nardini, director of the library at the Navy Officer Club of La Maddalena, where it was deposited after the base closed.

⁷⁹ The base in La Maddalena was the station of the squadron.

⁸⁰ During informal conversations, former U.S. Navy servicemen mentioned the name of Gian Carlo Tusceri as the clearest example of anti-base attitudes in La Maddalena. A retired U.S. Navy officer, who requested anonymity, told me: “That shit that G.C.T. [how Tusceri signed his articles] wrote on La Nuova was just political propaganda.”

⁸¹ During our conversation, Tusceri mentioned several times that he had been intimidated and threatened, but he would provide no specifics.

⁸² Author's interview, La Maddalena, Apr. 2012.

⁸³ Author's interview, La Maddalena, Oct. 2012.

⁸⁴ The Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) remains the largest leftist union of the country. CGIL was considered the closest union to the Italian Communist Party and other parties of the socialist constellation. The CGIL-Ricerca was the union branch that represented the sector of public employees inside national research institutions like CNEN and ISS.

⁸⁵ I thank Carlo Papucci for granting me access to his private archive.

⁸⁶ Salvatore Sanna to Carlo Papucci, private correspondence, 11 Mar. 1977, Carlo Papucci private archive (my italics).

⁸⁷ In 1972 the Italian government admitted that the news of the imminent arrival of the U.S. Navy in La Maddalena reported by some newspapers was true. This led several scientific organizations, including the Italian Physics Society, to express concerns about the risks involved in installing a nuclear submarine base at the hearth of the Mediterranean Sea. During the plenary assembly of the Society in Cagliari, on 2 November 1972, some members emphasized the importance of maintaining a “technical profile” in order to gain credibility in the eyes of political authorities and the members of the public who were ready to dismiss their advice as the “opinion of a bunch of communists.”