How narratives of disaster impact survivors’ emotionality: The case of Typhoon Morakot

Abstract

Through a case study of Typhoon Morakot, which landed in Taiwan in 2008 and caused massive destruction to many aboriginal communities, this paper explores how narratives of disaster impact individual survivors’ emotionality and reflexivity. We draw on 45 in-depth interviews and engage the literatures on cultural trauma, emotion work, and reflexivity. We find that in framing their experiences, most survivors drew upon narratives of government incompetence or ethnic-environmental injustice, which circulated respectively in Taiwan's mainstream media and a counter-hegemonic public. To a lesser extent, some survivors hybridized these two frames while a few others followed the government's official narrative that the government did nothing wrong. Our analysis highlights a sharp contrast: the injustice frame prompted survivors to express ethnic pride, assert righteous anger, and display an eloquent reflexivity, whereas the other three frames prompted survivors to express their frustrations as grief rather than anger, and oftentimes engage in the emotion work of gratitude-display and self-censorship and ultimately develop a silenced or split reflexivity. This study advances the cultural sociology of disasters by conceptualizing how disaster narratives shape the emotional aspects of post-disaster recovery. Furthermore, we highlight how covert silences in ahistorical disaster narratives can be detrimental to all in an age of environmental crises.