Paper short abstract:

Resilience became a catch-all term for describing indigenous experiences of and responses to Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, March 2015. Here, I consider the logic that resilience enabled, coalescing ni-Vanuatu misfortune and good fortune into a favourable moral characteristic worthy of assistance.

Paper long abstract:

On Friday 13th March, Cyclone Pam moved across the islands of Vanuatu at Category 5 strength. As little as one day later, the contours of debates that would run - often at high levels of emotion - over the next few weeks were taking shape on social media: who was best suited to carry out relief operations?; was - or should - the government take a lead role in these?; and who and where was being ignored in the distribution of aid? As criticisms of the government and relief efforts increased, a counter-discourse arose, tying together ideas about indigenous knowledge in the frequently-asserted quality of "resilience".

Here, I consider how resilience was used to encapsulate the specifics of indigenous preparations and responses to the cyclone, and was then deployed as an ideal that united the nation and precluded criticism of the government approach to relief. I consider the logic that resilience enabled, becoming the explanation for how people got through, the intangible that was helping recovery and furthermore, what it was that "we", overseas, should be supporting. Thus, ni-Vanuatu misfortune and good fortune both coalesced into this favourable moral characteristic worthy of assistance. I link this logic to other terms of relevance to the ethnography of Vanuatu (e.g.: kastom, independence, self-reliance, sustainability) and note similarities in the scalar properties of these terms. Finally, with reference to the broader literature on resilience, I consider how it simultaneously valorises and diminishes indigenous accounts of the cyclone, its impact and the ideal shape of recovery.