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Contribution short abstract

This roundtable contribution asks how ethnographic narration can reckon with the embodied and social impacts of natural disaster and the slow violence of state abandonment. Showing how chronic malnutrition in cyclones' aftermath is not a "red" form of violence, it asks, what color is hunger?

Contribution long abstract

Four back-to-back cyclones in central Madagascar from January to March 2022 brutally remade the fabric of everyday life and the capacity for ethnographic knowledge. The storms were "mafy be," merciless and intense, as they stripped fruit trees limb from limb, cracked houses open, and forced tons of sandy soil downhill to flood young rice fields. "Mijaly ny vary," farmers said, even the rice suffers. In the storms’ aftermath, we suffered too. Up to 80% of young crops had broken. But we were inland from the hardest-hit coast, so no relief came, whether from a “lean” neoliberal state or from overstretched NGOs. In this landscape of abandonment, what little there had been to eat became even less. Hunger settled in. It distorted how we could act, how we could talk to each other. Thoughts became hazy. Experience dulled against the edge of aching need. Our bodies shrank. Our infections and injuries grew. We were so hungry.

This roundtable contribution asks how ethnographic narration can reckon with the embodied and social impacts of natural disaster amid the slow violence of forced, yet impossible, self-sufficiency. Redness in Malagasy color theory symbolizes the protection of the ancestors, the possibilities of political mobilization, the vibrant liveliness of blood -- all constrained in conditions where ancestors could not be propritiated for the lack of offerings, where there was no one to turn to in protest, and where energy faded into the torpor of chronic malnutrition. What color, then, is hunger? This paper seeks an answer.