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- Convenors:
-
Susanna Hoffman
(International Commission on Risk and Disaster)
A.J. Faas (San Jose State University)
- Stream:
- Living landscapes: Anthropocene/Paysages vivants: Anthropocène
- Location:
- LMX 342
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Anthropology and its core concept culture have become identified the essential the understanding of disaster and risk. Covered here are various risk and disaster scenarios, ways and topics in which the anthropological perspective has become crucial.
Long Abstract:
Over the past thirty years, disasters of both geophysical and technological origin had become ever more frequent and severe across our planet. The alarming situation is due in large part to the increasing conditions of vulnerability among the human community, affecting ever larger numbers of people, as the previous set of driving factors of disaster is now combined with grave new components, global warming, coastward migration, and urban densification. Coincident with the increase in number and severity of disasters and the growing vulnerability of the human populations, the level of interest concerning the issues that surround both calamities and hazard has markedly expanded in the field of anthropology. Indeed, anthropology has become a major contributor to the understanding of risk, hazard, human vulnerability, and disaster. Along with anthropology's holistic approach, the key concept of the discipline, culture, has risen to the forefront in almost every arena dealing with risk, disaster, sustainability, and development. This panel explores the increased need and applicability of anthropology to the growing problematic of disaster. Covered can be: various disasters and places, risk reduction efforts, the various ways and topics in which anthropology has become critically pertinent to understanding both hazard perception and calamity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Irena Leisbet Ceridwen Connon (University of Stirling and University of Dundee)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this paper looks at how changing dominant political discourses over the previous 20 years have contributed the formation and shaping of a new local politics of suffering in the UK environmental hazard context.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between changing dominant political discourses and local perceptions of environmental hazards within the UK over a 20 year period. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I outline a major shift in local conceptualisations of environmental risks, hazards and responses, from one of rights and inclusion to one of exclusion, deservedness, localism and populist transformation. Exploring how changing local ideas of living with risk, of tolerance to weather and industrial hazard events and the provision of disaster relief and mitigation are now framed both positively and negative within a language of 'acceptability', I suggest that local conceptualisations of disaster result from a combination of changing dominant political discourses, long-standing culturally embedded ideals of egalitarianism originating in Protestantism and an increasing sense of awareness of global change. From this, I argue that this has led to the formation of an identity-based local politics of suffering that influences ideas about who should be 'allowed' to experience and/or display fear during extreme weather events and who should be given priority to receive emergency assistance during the actual hazard events themselves. The paper concludes that this has also led to the creation of new vulnerabilities amongst groups previously identified as being at less risk and suggests that the long-term neglect of the emotional aspects of disaster within hazard mitigation and response development contributed significantly to a recent acceleration within this shift.
Emmanuelle Bouchard-Bastien (Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ)) Genevieve Brisson
Paper short abstract:
In July 2013, a train of petroleum products derailed in Lac-Mégantic, causing deaths and destruction of the city center. This paper presents a part of the results of an anthropological study about social consequences, and applies anthropology to examine the paradigm of new energetic development.
Paper long abstract:
In July 2013, a train of petroleum products derailed in Lac-Mégantic, causing deaths and destruction of the city center. This paper presents a part of the results of an anthropological study about social consequences, based upon participatory observations and 57 semi-directed interviews with citizens and socio-economic actors.
This qualitative study contributes to the field of anthropological catastrophe studies in order to think in social and symbolic ways about the paradigm of new energetic development. The analysis reveals that Lac-Megantic was in economic decline when the accident occurred. The railway is perceived as useful to industrial activities. For this reason, some informants want to maintain the railway as before, crossing the middle of the small city. For some others, trains must be banished from Lac-Megantic city and an alternative rail trajectory must be built, but this is largely based on a symbolic desire for healing. Those two opposite visions create larger conflicts in the community, amid calls for peace and solidarity. Municipal and central authorities seem to contribute to the tension by their lack of clear orientations about the railway's future, and about the economic development of this impacted place.
This work adds a contemporary example of the possible consequences of the increasing development of hydrocarbons in North America. This ethnographic case study helps to draw lessons for authorities about risk management and the difficulties in a context of post-trauma community.
A.J. Faas (San Jose State University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I discuss responders and experts working for nongovernmental organizations attempting to work with disaster-affected communities in the Ecuadorian highlands by adopting local practices in resettlement construction and administration, while imposing their own standards of practice.
Paper long abstract:
All too often, policy makers and practitioners imagine local culture as static, unchanging, or holistic, and overlook the variegated, shifting, and contingent compositions of culture(s), increasing the likelihood of problems in disaster policy practice. In this paper, I discuss how well-meaning responders and experts working for nongovernmental organizations attempted to work with disaster-affected communities in the Ecuadorian highlands by adopting local practices as core elements in resettlement construction and administration. These practices were disembedded from local contexts and re-embedded in expert imagination, resulting in critical local adaptations and the cooptation of local relations and discourses of power and social obligation.
Nakeyah Giroux-Works (Université Laval)
Paper short abstract:
In the wake of anthropological studies investigating climate change as a discursive construction, this presentation explores how fishermen and farmers in the Magdalen Islands are experiencing knowledge and environmental phenomena associated with this contemporary issue.
Paper long abstract:
Climatic changes have significant consequences in coastal areas, as is the case of Magdalen Islands, particularly with erosion. The landscape of the archipelago is perceived by inhabitants as an entity in constant transformation, shaped as much by human hands as by natural elements. For fishermen and farmers, individuals who daily contend with climate-related factors, the problematic of climate changes is strongly dependent on the political will of governments. Individual actions of environmental protection and energy transition are mostly considered ineffective to remedy to it. Fishermen and farmers avoid using only the scientific and environmentalist discourse of climate changes to explain the unpleasant natural transformations they experience in their activities (fish migrations, loss of ice cover, drought, torrential rain, etc.), focusing instead on multifactorial causes and thus moving away from globalizing formulas that do not reflect the complexity of their reality. Using local knowledge and scientific facts, the concept of climate change is still very much used in the speeches of these Madelinots to support perceptions of environmental transformations in their daily activities. From the perspective of political ecology and environmental history, this paper explores Madelinots' social strategies aimed at making sustainable activities of nature exploitation, regarding local energy consumption and ecological issues they associate to climatic deterioration stories.