Paper short abstract:

Are there teaching and training practices to make anthropologists in the field resilient to challenging circumstances such as disasters and trauma, particularly when these are unexpected? This paper proposes a set of such skills, focused on the wellbeing of research participants and researchers.

Paper long abstract:

At the heart of anthropological research one can find the intention to be continuously attuned to the needs of the communities engaged with, and flexibility to navigate fieldwork accordingly. As the climate crisis deepens, anthropologists will find themselves more and more often working with communities facing extreme weather events and climate-induced disasters, as a result of which priorities and decision-making for those communities will have to be refined, potentially impacting ongoing or even recently completed anthropological research.

This paper poses the question of how well prepared, or not, anthropologists in the field are to handle such circumstances, particularly when a disaster has a traumatic effect on communities and research participants. To address this question, I discuss the concept of resilience, admittedly a controversial one for the discipline (Barrios, 2016, ‘Resilience: A commentary from the vantage point of anthropology’), though not from the perspective of communities but instead that of researchers themselves. What are the gaps in sending to the field anthropologists prepared to manage challenging circumstances such as disasters and emotional distress, particularly when those are unexpected? Are there teaching and training practices that can cover these gaps and make anthropologists resilient to the climate crisis? Taking a self-reflective approach on conducting disaster fieldwork and using examples from the bibliography, this paper proposes a set of skills anthropologists need to have for handling disasters in the field, particularly focusing on the wellbeing of their research participants as well as their own.