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- Convenors:
-
Mitchell W Sedgwick
(London School of Economics)
Susanna Hoffman (Chair, Commission on Risk and Disaster IUAES)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Time
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 6
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses the contestations of former and presently-lived experience among disaster victims. It also engages with the institutional structuring, by governments, NGOs, etc., of those persons, i.e., the disjunctions between 'expert knowledge' and disasters' real experts.
Long Abstract:
This panel is concerned with unpacking the force of memory in our understanding of disaster. What does disaster mean to its participants and those engaging it indirectly? How do communities locate themselves after trauma? What, if anything, constitutes relief after 'disaster relief' is finished? Disaster is, of course, only selectively remembered. What is hidden and what continues to be made visible about the past, and by whom? What does the repression or molding of memory suggest about personal/psychological mechanisms of survival?
This panel cuts a broad swathe across the temporal, spatial and institutional conditions of disaster, inviting interventions from those researching and/or who have themselves directly experienced disaster or other dislodging crises or conflicts: those temporarily or permanently extracted unwillingly from their familiar milieu. Papers engaging directly with survivors may relate personal psychological states and various coping mechanisms regarding 'recovery' of individuals and communities, or the loss and (possible) rehabilitation of destroyed spaces - as places, as material objects and/or as symbolic representations - all in order to directly address the contestations of former and presently-lived experience. -- We also engage the dynamics of relations of communities that have experienced disaster and those offering assistance, thus subjectifying disaster. As such, we wish to explore intersections of institutional structures - government, NGOs, etc. - with spaces of and persons in disasters: the disjunctions between expert knowledge and those actually expert in disaster: the victimized and the victims of disaster themselves.
How are we, anthropologists, reading disaster?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Chronicled in this paper is the cascade of emotions that survivors of disaster undergo. Further brought up are the nuances of pain of past, home, and place that the dispossessed suffer when the fabric of life unravels.
Paper long abstract:
On October 20, 1991 a spark from an old fire reignited and swept down the hills behind Oakland and Berkeley, California. Within four days it destroyed 3,356 homes and 456 apartments. The Oakland Firestorm remains the largest urban fire that the United States has ever witnessed. Twenty-five people died. Six thousand people were left homeless. I am one of the survivors. In the fire I lost my home, clothing, furniture, heirlooms, car, pets, twenty-five years of anthropological research, library, and all my writings. To describe the devastation both physical and psychological of this kind of loss is like trying to define eternity or infinity. The experience and its upshot changed not only my life but also my anthropology. This paper explores the chronicle of the emotions and affect I, and other survivors, of disaster undergo and brings up the nuances of pain, nostalgia (pain of past), ecalgia (pain of home), and topalgia (pain of place) the dispossessed suffer when the fabric of life unravels. Covered will be loss of cultural and physical surroundings, quotidian habit and sphere, legacy and expectation, and perceptual ambience.
Paper short abstract:
What do professional responders and ordinary village folk really prepare for in disaster preparedness exercise? Looking at exercise practices of NDRF and women's group in a fishing village in South India, this paper looks at various forms of experience, expertise and their entanglements.
Paper long abstract:
The fishing village of Parangipettai in Tamil Nadu, South India, experiences cyclones regularly. In late 2004, it was swept over by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Subsequently numerous (I) NGOs have worked in the area with local community groups and while most have long gone, their legacy is palpable in the village landscape. In November 2013, that is "in the aftermath of the aftermath" of disaster, a local women's group meets for a disaster preparedness refresher exercise, involving first aid, role playing and lots of giggles.
A month later, in a car park of conference venue in Chennai, Tamil Nadu's capital, tens of men in NDRF uniforms climb up buildings that are "on fire", sending down mannequins in wheel chairs and bringing down baby dolls in their arms, while others use diamond chain saws to extricate "victims" from underneath the rubble. The NDRF disaster response demonstration exercise is observed by applauding audiences of conference participants and college students.
The two exercises eloquently show the different practices deployed by officially designated disaster response experts and ordinary village folk who happen to experience disasters. My paper, based on the "Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population" research project (2011-2015, Goldsmiths, University of London) explores the contrast between the designated expert and victim preparedness practices through analysing the content of their exercises and touching on concepts of certified and experiential expertise, and revealing their mutual entanglements.
Paper short abstract:
Exploring healing experience in post-genocide Rwanda, the research observed a mutual-saving group and reported that local healing experience was oriented toward a future, which took place as members recovered and integrated different social times through materialistic, bodily, linguistic activities.
Paper long abstract:
'Time' is an important notion in discussing human suffering and healing. In the field of war-related mental health, some medical anthropologists reported that healing experience is oriented toward a future in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is divergent from Western trauma psychotherapy that focuses on the past memory and its influence on the present. Why is their healing experience future oriented? How do material and linguistic activities relate to it? With these questions, this paper discusses findings from ethnographic observation of a mutual-saving group, ikibina, in post-genocide Rwanda. The findings noted that ikibina facilitated trust and reconciliation through mutually saving money and helping with everyday-life matters. Members created social time through counting saved money and days for the next meeting, which lead them to leave the wounded past and go forward toward a future. Their future-oriented healing then continued to the following generations in the cyclical views of life and death. One female Hutu ex-prisoner gave a material gift to a male Tutsi member, imagining that his offspring would remember her with it, which healed her profound isolation. Meanwhile, he also experienced healing since she invited him to her family's wedding ceremony, gusaba, through which he remembered when he had invited her to his own gusaba before the war and sealed his wounded war time. The paper highlights that their future-oriented healing took place by recovering and integrating different social times through materialistic, bodily and linguistic activities.
Paper short abstract:
Even if practically-meaningless in the face of trauma, this paper reflects on the collective psychological efficacy, however tenuous, of patterned, ritualized activity: an outstretched hand reaching towards safety and the stability: that is, a pretence of recovery.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the collective experience of trauma among members of a corporation, and their families, whose factory and office buildings, homes and communities were ripped apart in the tsunami following shortly after the 11 March 2011 'Great East Japan earthquake' 東日本大震災, referred to as '3.11'. In the ethnographer's co-experience of outrageous helplessness with Japanese colleagues in the immediate crisis, it was notable that even if, practically-speaking, mostly irrelevant, they took coordinated action where possible, placing an impressive emphasis on their work for the corporation itself as an emotional life raft. In the months and years to follow, 'recovery' was formally emphasized at this corporation, as elsewhere in this region of Japan. Machinery was repaired or replaced and assembly lines eventually re-opened, 'restart' ceremonies were held, with ribbons cut in comparatively sober, and sombre, celebration. The destruction of the earthquake and tsunami formally acknowledged, a page ostensibly turned, prospect of hope for a new beginning memorialized.
This paper argues, however, that whatever the physical proximity to disaster, it is timeless for those who share it. We can never again see each other but through the reminder of that deep distortion of normalcy. Rather, perhaps 3.11's memorialization is most significantly represented for these informants in its encounter with the re-emergence of day-to-day practice: ritualized formations of exhaustion, familiar in their regular patterns of work itself.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the connection between memory and storytelling after 3.11 disaster focusing on kataribe tours and other practices related to transmission of the memory of the disaster.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to explore the practice of kataribe and its cultural significance; particularly the reasons why this practice is important during the recovery process that is going on after 3.11 disaster. In the past, the word "kataribe" indicated a storytelling reporting traditional stories from the past. The current meaning, while retaining the previous one, includes the nuance of being a first-hand account from a more recent past, especially after a natural disaster or a traumatic experience. The concept of kataribe is connected with the action of katari-tsugi, literally "telling the future generation for the purpose of conveying a lesson from the past."
Kataribe has a distinctive role in shaping the memories around which new communities will rebuild their post-disaster identity. It is situated at the core between shared and individual narratives, at the interaction between official and public discourses managed by politics and tourists associations or NPOs, and narratives by common people. While in the beginning, only survivors were involved in storytelling activities, recently, the importance of being able to convey the memory of the disaster for a longer future, opened a space to non-survivors. While it appears necessary to codify the stories to fit into a homogenous narrative, this unavoidable process flattens the complexity and run the risk of letting some voices unheard.
Drawn on ethnographic fieldwork, I also analyze the connection between the memory of the disaster and the future of the local communities, focusing on how it will enhance resilience to future natural disaster.
Paper short abstract:
Locality construction, subalternity, and social change in post-disaster Japanese Northeast: an ethnographic study in placemaking, narration, and human mobility.
Paper long abstract:
After the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, life in the Japanese Northeastern coast (Sanriku) was deeply shaken. People and places appeared to misalign, as if the waves eroded more than buildings, cars, boats and streets. On top of that, the disaster hit a region already facing another slower, criptic disaster: depopulation, old age, lack of manpower, and the primary sector decline typical of all modern countrysides.
Subalternity, and the vulnerability it produces, dumbed down recovery, as well as wide scale reconstruction. At the same time, authoritarian, nonlocal discourses inflitrated the Sanriku place-making practices, enforcing the naturalising notion of a region 'materially poor, spiritually rich'. In a seemingly conflict-less manner, however, a heterogeneous segment of young locals and new-locals (former volunteers turned counterurban returnees) are producing a brand new array of narratives, coupling fishery (traditional and subaltern activity par excellence) with entrepreneurship, innovation, and optimism.
Drawing on a 12 months doctoral ethnographic fieldwork in Ishinomaki (Miyagi Prefecture), and focusing on four specific case studies, this presentation aims at exposing and analysing processes of narrating, enacting, and mapping the spaces of post-disaster Sanriku from the different perspectives and aims of locals, newlocals, and nonlocal actors, and from the different hierarchies of place-making authority such positions imply.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the gap between theory and practice in community-based approaches to recovery. It's main argument is that there is a lack of 'power' in empowerment in the process that is designed to promote community agency and control over recovery.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses empowerment through community participation in the framework of post-disaster recovery. It explores the gap between theory and practice within community-based approaches that today are widely recognised as the 'best practice' in recovery by inter-governmental organisations, governments and NGOs alike. Community-based approaches are broadly framed as bottom-up processes arguing to improve recovery outcomes by empowering local communities as the agents of their own recovery. Yet, the results of such initiatives are consistently inconsistent. Reports of wide-spread dissatisfaction toward recovery and reconstruction are a staple in almost any post-disaster story.
The research for this paper is based on a 13-month ethnography in Japan, exploring the lived experience of the recovery by local populations in tsunami affected coastal communities. Discussions of participation among the affected populations indicated a conceptual divide in what constituted 'participation' and 'empowerment' that led to a deep sense of dissatisfaction and 'pausing' among communities. This was analysed to illustrate a distinct depolitisation of recovery through the narrative of community-based approaches, where no power was transferred between the authorities and the communities to enable local agency to emerge. The implications of this to the affected communities, and the recovery process itself were severe, and led to dissatisfaction and untapped potential of local vigor, enthusiasm and human capital. The research concluded that the gap between theory and practice in the application of community-based approaches stem from the utilisation of language of empowerment in an environment of powerlessness.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores continuity and rupture after Japan's 2011 tsunami, asking how disaster has reshaped local identities by prompting the re-evaluation and resurrection of traditional materials and practices and the incorporation of objects and landscapes produced by the tsunami into local heritage.
Paper long abstract:
Disasters are often seen as historical ruptures: moments when "everything changed." Nowhere is this truer than in Northeast Japan, or Tōhoku, where on March 11, 2011 (3.11), a tsunami washed away everything from boats to houses to family photographs, leaving survivors bereft of both past and future. Many Japanese scholars have explored what the disaster means for Tōhoku's cultural heritage, already threatened by the demographics of an aging population. For some, the Tōhoku narrative is one of loss, with festivals and shrines abandoned and the historical character of villages eroded by uniform reconstruction policies. Others emphasize a greater degree of continuity, highlighting the role of shrines, monuments to past disasters, festivals, folklore, and traditional ecological knowledge in both mitigating and recovering from 3.11. This paper explores the interplay of continuity and rupture after the tsunami, asking how disaster and reconstruction have reshaped local identities not only through loss, but also by prompting the resurrection of traditional materials and practices and the incorporation of objects and landscapes produced by the tsunami into local heritage and "disaster culture" (saigai bunka). In the midst of Japan's ongoing heritage boom, catastrophes like 3.11 offer, I argue, a unique vantage point from which to view in real time the social and political processes through which some things become "heritage" and others merely the debris of history.
Paper short abstract:
In order to explore the learning process in the aftermath of a disaster causing multi-dimensional social shifts, this study will deploy Fukushima case study research with multiple disciplinary perspectives and paradigms from memory studies, crisis management and industrial safety fields.
Paper long abstract:
Disasters are complex events, and even when classified as natural and unique (assuming that it is most difficult to learn from such), in most cases they are associated with the vulnerability of society, so they become "human-caused" since we are not prepared to cope with critical events. The impact of disasters is multilevel, multi-scale, multi-directional and highly complex in which a number of social, ecological, organizational, and political factors interact, often in an unexpected way. While most disaster studies focus on the immediate disaster response, this research will take a complex systems approach in order to analyze how different social and organizational responses interact in the post-disaster recovery phase, with posing the main questions: how the recovery impacts the vulnerability and resilience of people, and what, if anything, can be learned from disasters? Our case study will be the triple earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster occurred in Japan on March 11, 2011. While the nuclear disaster is still ongoing and poses a threat with unforeseeable consequences, it has accelerated a number of conservative trends in Japanese politics and reopened debates about what the future of Japan may look like. More than seven decades after Japan's defeat, the triple disaster brings back the old memories and reveals that Japan's postwar history is anything but uniform understanding of the nation's past.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is part of recording the slow micro-fanonesque awakenings that span well beyond the historical fact of Croatia's entering the EU (1st July 2013) and surviving the consequences of it's disastrous communist heritage into the state of opposing the forced disaster consumerism.
Paper long abstract:
In the past three months there were four disasters (three floods and one water poisoning) throughout Croatia. To be precise, four confessed by the media sightings. In a number of reports the victims stated a deep distrust in the government and mentioned that their state is connected to the corporative rampancy of doing business with cover-ups done by the long-term politics of Croatian neoliberal profiteering. Locally, people tell horrific stories tied to the long lasting devastation of resourceful living (confessed or unconfessed by the media). Globally the business prosperity maxim of business as usual is hard to contest. The discrepancy of the two collides, while the collusion of many profiteering deceits has been struck long ago. Chronologies are much deeper and unsolvable through the leftist blaming of a few international institutions. The state can be described as talking culture, crying health and hoping for nothing (Špoljar Vržina, 2011) or its more pertinent version brainstorming for which brains are prohibited (Špoljar Vržina 2012) - both local outcries of the author of this summary given in the grasp towards establishing a chronology of on-ground happenings. In the words of the artist Weiwei we live in 'So sorry' cultures (Siemons and Weiwei, 2008). Croatians hear the 'So, sorry' mantra endlessly. This paper is part of recording the slow micro-fanonesque awakenings that span well beyond the historical fact of Croatia's entering the EU (1st July 2013) and surviving the consequences of its disastrous communist heritage into the state of opposing the forced disaster consumerism.