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- Convenors:
-
Ignacio Farias
(Humboldt University of Berlin)
Susann Baez Ullberg (Uppsala University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E387
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
As disaster becomes our contemporary condition, settling, moving and staying are modes of re-construction. This panel explores ways of recomposing livelihoods, environments and modes of anthropological thinking in endemically broken worlds.
Long Abstract:
As the infinite conceptual variations around the Anthropocene and the ends of the world demonstrate, the catastrophic seems to have captured the political and the anthropological imagination. Disaster, an unfolding event marking and surpassing human times, seem to have become our contemporary condition. A fundamental practice of this condition is reconstruction of habits and habitats. If once reconstruction involved nostalgically restoring built environments and returning to normal, current practices and projects of reconstruction in the wake of crisis seem to involve an increasing number of actors and reflexive forms of problematizing and redesigning cities, ecologies and communities. Projects of reconstruction can be seen as processes of re-construction: assembling again and anew, but differently, as constant and always unfinished series of actions that involves both staying, moving, and (re-)settling. Re-construction challenges us also to recursively reflect upon the anthropological toolbox available and applied in and on such fields. Hence, this panel asks if the ethnography of re-construction necessitates a re-construction of anthropological concepts and methods, especially its modes of doing fieldwork and engaging with techno-scientific domains and multiscalar modes of social and political life. We invite papers that explore practices, discourses, projects and challenges of recomposing livelihoods, environments and modes of anthropological thinking in worlds of intrinsic crisis.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the gender differentiated impacts of storms in a masculinized fishing community in Vietnam. The paper engages with tendencies in disaster anthropology to understand a catastrophe as a parenthesis of daily life, which is to be dealt with so things can return to "normal".
Paper long abstract:
As the Anthropocene is pushing human life into planetary terra incognita (Galaz et.al. 2017), the need for studies of the gendering of climate hazards, disasters, and ramifications has become urgent. The Anthropocene is profoundly uneven with some habitats being particularly disposed to ruination and some groups being exceptionally precarious to the perils of climate change (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2012; Stoler 2013). The hazards of the Anthropocene, however, should not be conflated with the socio-economic and political antecedents already framing life prior to a climate disaster (Enarson and Chakrabarti 2009; Hewitt 2016). This paper explores the socially differentiated impacts of storms in a masculinized fishing community in coastal Vietnam. The paper engages with tendencies in disaster anthropology to understand a catastrophe as a parenthesis of daily life, which is to be dealt with so things can return to "normal" (Agamben 1998; Walby 2015). While the imperative for post-disaster healing is indisputable, translating a climate catastrophe into a bracketing of "normal" life calls for scrutiny. This paper argues that a crisis perspective offers a productive entry point to the study of the Anthropocene by directing our attention to the entanglements between a disastrous crisis of emergency and a spectrum of crises antecedents such as gendered livelihoods, hierarchies, and violences (Bradshaw 2009). When various crises modalities, intensities, and temporalities intersect, a crisis in context might metamorphose into crisis as context (Vigh 2008); into a crisis of chronicity which challenges the reconstruction of a broken world and a return to pre-disaster normalcy.
Paper short abstract:
Looking at current efforts to redesign public spaces affected by climate change in Munich, I would like to propose three keys for an anthropology of re-construction: moving between the lab and the field, favouring languages of recursion over exception, and welcoming re-articulations of its own role.
Paper long abstract:
The slow, but steady increase of temperature in cities, widely discussed as urban heat island effect, and its ambivalent, that is, not-only negative effects on the urban lives of humans, animals, insects and plants, offers an interesting contrast to dystopic imaginaries of disasters as cataclysmic events. Looking at current efforts towards the redesign of urban squares in the city of Munich with the aim of climate mitigation and climate adaptation, I would like to reflect on what an anthropology of re-construction might entail. Three vignettes from encounters with different types of actors (some of them fellow researchers) will ground the discussion.
Firstly, looking at the lab/field work of ecologists experimenting with the climatic performances and ecological affordances of different species of trees, native and exotic, reconstruction is figured as a process of laboratorization of the urban environments. Secondly, working with landscape architects and urban designers, climate-related reconstruction reveals itself as yet another recursive operation in a long history of revising previous designs for public space. Finally, conversing with activist collectives engaging in urban bee-keeping and urban farming, it becomes apparent that their reconstruction of urban ecologies of practices relies on mode of exploring the climatic catastrophe as a generative condition for re-articulations of interspecies entanglements.
An anthropology of re-construction, I'd like to argue, could be reimagined along similar lines: moving between the lab and the field, favouring languages of recursion over exception, and welcoming re-articulations of its own role.
Paper short abstract:
Survivors of the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster make of memory the foundational heritage of their communities. Individual and collective stories cut across people’s experiences and roots, making of memory a problematic legacy for the contemporary re-construction of identities.
Paper long abstract:
Memory of the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster is expressed in both intangible and material forms that require management in order to be transmitted to the following generations. Survivors preserve histories of the alpine tsunami triggered by the collapse of Mount Toc into the dam reservoir, and which erased villages along the Piave’s valley and torn away mountain hamlets along the Vajont reservoir, leaving behind approximately 2000 dead. But how do those who did not experience the disaster ‘remember’ it? The local landscapes are punctuated by remaining infrastructures and memorialisation of relevant sites, dominated by the menacing presence of the intact dam. Thousands of visitors every year travel to the region to attend commemorative events, walking the places of the disaster, entering museums and cemeteries, often accompanied by local guides (some of them provincial forest park guides, some of them survivors, others who attend specific training to inform the visitors). Contending histories about individual and collective plural memories cut across people’s experiences of the past and present Vajont, making of memory a problematic legacy for the historical and contemporary re-construction of local identities. Multidisciplinary research conducted in the area evidenced the transience and fluidity of intersecting territorial and experiential landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a comparative study of cultural heritage in relation to disaster risk management in five countries in Asia. The paper also intends to re-construct anthropology through the collaborative ethnography of cultural heritage and tourism working with the devastated local communities.
Paper long abstract:
Disasters damage communities and environments, yet they create new cultural forms in the process of reconstruction. Since 2011 when the great earthquake struck the north-eastern region of Japan, Japanese anthropologists have sought to utilise their knowledge for the aftermath of the disaster, and new arenas like public anthropology have emerged. Anthropologists specialised in tourism have become aware of the fact that the large number of tourists visit the sites to reconstruct the communities. They have been conscious of the meanings of cultural heritage, because heritage represents not only a tourist attraction but also the significant local identity. These movements have led us to a research project on cultural heritage in relation to disaster risk management. Collaborating among anthropologists and architects, this paper elucidates the anthropological meanings of reconstruction of cultural heritage by examining the cases of Japan, China, Indonesia, Nepal and Turkey. The cases of Nepal (Kathmandu) and Turkey (Bergama) show that they reconstruct their communities as they were, while in China (Beichuan) the affected communities are abandoned and new ones are created under the direct control of the state. The case of Indonesia (Bali) illustrates 'environmental disaster' brought by mass tourism, which results in the formation of community ecotourism. Japan (Fujisan) faces 'tourism disaster' caused by the increasing overseas visitors, yet the fact has raised public awareness for sustainable heritage management. Through this comparative study on the reconstruction of cultural heritage, the paper also intends to re-construct anthropology through the collaborative ethnography working with the devastated local communities.
Paper short abstract:
The everyday crisis mode on Madagascar creates a lust for a rhetoric, and of practices, playing on the cords of respect, solidarity and national refoundation. The paper will trace such dynamic by regarding the recently created 'Council of Malagasy Reconciliation'.
Paper long abstract:
The interpretation of live as a never-ending disaster is one of the characteristics of the Malagasy discursive landscape. Long standing problems like the mounting problem of insecurity, a dysfunctional state or the bitterly commented pauperization of the population, and actualities like the recent outbreak of plague disease, the threatening arrival of another possibly devastating cyclone or the lamentable state of infrastructures are contributing together to create a consistent picture: to live a nightmare.
The paper will discuss one particularly visible Malagasy "project of reconstruction": a lust for a rhetoric, and of practices, playing on the cords of respect, solidarity and national refoundation, aiming for overcoming the crisis mode. While the emphasize on 'solidarity' (fihavanana) might entail a nostalgic revival of the values of precolonial times, it should be regarded as well as an attempt to strengthen the idea of nation and, simultaneously, to integrate new global currents of formalization, of institutionalization, and of the politics of peace, peace-building and universal rights - with many effects on the physical staying, moving and settling of the population. The recently created 'Council of Malagasy Reconciliation', today one main pillar of the constitutional body of the Malagasy Republic, will be at the center of the presentation.
Strategies of re-construction, it will be proposed eventually, might be seen as an endless spiral of dialogues between the actors and a multi-level structured environment, urging the anthropologist to conceptualize the dialectical interpenetration of global/local roles, concepts and practices.
Paper short abstract:
The paper asks how ethnography, as a collaborative research method, can reveal and potentially disrupt the logic of chronic breakdown and repair of infrastructure in Semarang, a Javanese port city.
Paper long abstract:
My paper argues that recurrent floods in a coastal neighborhood of the Indonesian city Semarang produce a field of interactive relations that shapes the local perception of time. Floods produce a meantime - a form of temporal belonging in which breakdown has to be constantly managed. This meantime is also determined by material processes, as the city's drainage system is mired in ruination (Stoler 2013). Residents must deal with this ruination or "chronic disaster" (Cazdyn 2012; Fortun 2014) which puts a significant strain on social reproduction. The state, which promises to "fix" the problem and bring progress, offers limited funds for repair. Fragmentary reconstruction and repair, however, exacerbate uneven distribution of resources and ability to endure. In this meantime, where development remains a promise, time is differentially experienced at the intersections of inequity (Sharma 2014). As people strategize to deal with the dead-ends of infrastructural projects that respond to and foster an uncertain future, the meantime offers various forms of temporal belonging. Social and cultural formations are synchronized around breakdown in this meantime. The paper asks how ethnography, as a collaborative research method, can reveal and potentially disrupt the forces of the meantime.
Paper short abstract:
The 2014 wildfire in Sweden had devastating effects. To preserve and study the ecological consequences of the disaster, 8000 hectares were declared protected area. This making of a different forest is taken to discuss how disaster re-construction can be understood as a temporal process.
Paper long abstract:
In the summer of 2014 occurred the worst wildfire in modern times in Sweden. The fire raged for weeks and weeks in the province of Västmanland before it could be brought under control. Hundreds of people were evacuated during the height of the emergency. One man died, scores of houses were destroyed, and close to 13,000 hectares of forest burned down. Hundreds of small scale family producers and large-scale companies lost forest for a value of millions of Swedish kronor. Left was a black landscape that some people in the area compared to the apocalyptic landscapes of the saga Lord of the Rings. While much of this forest was cut down and replaced with new tree plants, more than half of the scorched forest has been declared a protected area due to its uniqueness in ecological terms. The natural reserve Hälleskogsbrännan and the eco-park Öjesjöbrännan were created to preserve and observe specific ecological processes set in motion by the wild fire to prepare for an uncertain climate future. Ambitious visitor sites and programmes have been arranged by involved public and private actors, as a means to generate a process of ecological, social and economic re-construction from the disaster. This paper draws on ethnography to analyse how re-construction of the scorched forest was planned and made by experts, political decision makers and local inhabitants to constitute a mnemonic object of the present and for the future.
Paper short abstract:
Starting from L'Aquila earthquake, a paraethnography of urban governance and a street ethnography reveal a descending path from the cranes of the current greatest European building site to the context-sensitive good life "improvisation" of alley's teenagers.
Paper long abstract:
In the last decades, some authors consider the performing role of neoliberal capitalist system in creating and trying to impose times of crisis. This "capitalism of disaster" finds a very fertile ground in catastrophe-affected environment where destructive events are considered the crisis-generating factors, mainly regarding urban space and dwelling.
Starting from the case of L'Aquila earthquake, I will show how both emergency and reconstruction management assume bio-political forms addressed to a process of urban space neoliberalization. The combined effects of disaster management on outskirts and centre produce a new urban layout, where multitopic living practices replace a stubborn centripetism. It is around this paradox, undermining the downtown role and its regeneration, that reconstruction urban planning takes place.
A paraethnography of urban governance, following actors and agencies of technical expertise, traces the pathways that localize global development models in "ideas of city". In addition, a street ethnography fieldwork reveals how, in everyday practices, the "negative capacity" allows people to face the created suspension of urban landscape. There, I could participate to an alternative form of appropriation of downtown space that a teenagers group enacted, reworking destruction and emptiness into hip hop culture elements of rapping and writing.
Engaging with them meant a progressive change from a "dark anthropology" to an "anthropology of the good". Analyzing the intrinsic power of the "how one should live" reconstruction formula led to a descending path, from the cranes of the current greatest European building site to the context-sensitive good life "improvisation" of alley's teenagers.