Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how participation in the aftermath of a disaster produces ethnographically-informed insights that can assist the wider policy worlds of development and aid intervention that include livelihood protection, conservation, natural resource management, and disaster mitigation.

Paper long abstract:

In 1992, J. Davis undertook the task of uniting the "the comfortable anthropology of social organization, and the painful anthropology of disruption and despair" (1992: 149). With the seemingly increasing frequency and severity of climate related disaster, drug-resistant pathogens, and instances of violent armed conflict, it seems all anthropology has the potential to be painful, particularly if the ethnographer is present at the time disaster strikes. And as disaster anthropology already recognises, painful anthropology and unpredictable events are moments when the vulnerability, resilience or sustainability of the affected society become acutely exposed.

I was in the fieldwork phase of my doctoral research, examining the encounter between externally-driven development intervention and local Buddhist practice in Ladakh, North-West India, when the region was exposed to a series of cloudbursts and flash floods on a scale previously unrecalled by local memory. What this disaster taught me about development was how non-human beings can participate as political actors, how ceremonial and ritual governance combine with the mundane in attempts to manipulate the successes of development, and to be observant of smaller instances of misfortune or technological rejection and their interpretation. The paper thus highlights how the experience of "being there" (Roncoli et al 2009), in this case participating in aftermath of a disaster, stimulates ethnographically-informed knowledge production that can support decisions taken in the wider policy worlds of development and aid intervention, conservation strategies and climate adaptation, livelihood risk and protection, and disaster mitigation.