Anthropology Of Disasters Research Articles

Tackling and Regulating Disasters. An Introduction

AbstractToday, disasters of different kinds are inseparable from the lives of individuals and of communities. They thrust themselves into people’s existence and bring chaos to organised society, as they challenge, disrupt and change the typical patterns of relations between people and their environment, both natural and social. This subject is positioned in the relatively newly established scientific field of disaster anthropology. Taken together, the articles included have made extensive use of research material to show that human communities and their cultures are formed under the influence of the natural environment, the physical and mental characteristics of the people in them and, accordingly, of the social and economic development they themselves create. The articles examine various questions and subjects and allow comparison of the existing danger of disaster and the vulnerability of the groups affected by disaster, and consider the construction of their behavioural responses in managing disaster, and their relations at official, institutional and personal levels. There is consideration too of changes in the social environment, and of the effects of disasters on the political and economic development of the countries and communities in which they occur.

Migration Strategies and Human-Made Disasters: Considering Tajik Migration Policy Initiatives in Tashkorgan from the Perspective of Disaster Anthropology

AbstractThis article examines the Pamiri Tajik population in China at the southwesternmost corner of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Prefecture and their struggles during numerous local natural and human-made disasters over the past decade. It explores, from the local point of view, the disaster recovery policies that function as a disguise for homogenization-oriented state-building initiatives. It examines how the local Tajik people have been reacting to and coping with natural disasters and the related relocation policy initiatives and how the disaster they are increasingly facing is the desecration of their homeland and the destruction of their traditional livelihood. The fieldwork findings reported are based on 12 years of fieldwork throughout Xinjiang, the Pamiri borderlands (both in the Pamiri region in Tajikistan and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang, China) as well as in the lowland relocation and sedentarization area in the Rabot resettlement township and the Tajik Abat resettlement township on the edge of the Taklimakan desert.

FAMILY WELL-BEING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN BULGARIA

The COVID-19 pandemic over the past three years has affected various aspects of life – political, economic, social and cultural. Their management and overcoming are crucial for the survival of our post-global society. The present study is complemented by disaster anthropology, and the goal is to track the pandemic and its impact on family well-being. The paper is based on the conducted field ethnographic research. Its aim is to describe and analyze three models of coping mechanisms for the crisis – in the capital, the small town and villages. The interlocutor's individual stories present changes in the economic situation, social relations, cultural transformations and the psychological consequences of the pandemic (insecurity, stress, negative emotions, etc.). The research is following the construction of various mechanisms to overcome the consequences of the pandemic, often adapting to the old ones, which are from the previous crisis periods, as a way to ensure family survival in the new disaster.

Shifting Safeties and Mobilities on the Land in Arctic North America: A Systematic Approach to Identifying the Root Causes of Disaster

Amid the surge in research on mobility and migration in the context of environmental change, little research has focused on the experiences of people for whom travel is cyclical and a part of daily, weekly, or seasonal life. For Inuit in Arctic North America, the land is the heart of cultural and community life. Disruption to time spent on the land is reported to impact the emotional health and well-being of individuals and communities. There is concern that environmental change is creating barriers to safe travel, constituting a creeping disaster. We systematically review and evaluate the literature for discussion of barriers to travel for Inuit in Arctic North America, using an approach from the field of disaster anthropology to identify root causes of constraints to mobility. We identify root causes of risk and barriers to time spent on the land. These emerge from historic and contemporary colonial policy and inequality, as opposed to environmental hazards per se, impacting people’s mobility in profound ways and enacting a form of slow violence. These results suggest a need to understand the underlying processes and institutions that put people at risk.

Strategy on Disaster Recovery Management based on Graph Theory Concepts

The COVID-19 pandemic has asserted major baseline facts from disaster anthropology during the last three decades. Resilience could be based on the solution to the question: "What is the maximum amount of destruction, if any, that the graph (a network) can sustain while ensuring that at least one of each technology type remains and that the remaining induced subgraph is properly colored?" The concept of a graph's Chromatic Core Subgraph is a solution to the stated problem. In this paper, the pandemic graphs and certain sequential graphs are developed. For these graphs, the Chromatic core subgraph is obtained. The results of the pandemic graphs' Chromatic core subgraph are used to develop a disaster recovery strategy for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pollution, Health, and Disaster

The materiality of pollution is increasingly embodied in humans, animals, and the living environment. Ethnographic research, especially from within the fields broadly construed as medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, disaster anthropology, and science and technology studies are all positioned to make important contributions to understanding present lived experiences in disastrous environmental contexts. This article examines points of articulation within recent research in these areas, which have much in common but are not always in conversation with one another. Research and writing collaborations, as well as shared knowledge bases between ethnographic researchers who center different aspects of the spectrum of toxics- based environmental health, are needed to better account for and address the material and lived realities of increasing pollution levels in the time of a warming climate.

Challenges and Opportunities for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty during the Time of COVID-19

In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced university instructors across the United States to confront the daunting task of quickly changing their courses from face-to-face to remote instruction. Nationally, universities relied on virtual platforms as they adjusted educational spaces in response to the pandemic. While there have been many anecdotes of how individual faculty responded to this transition, social scientists have yet to study systematically how instructors handled this transition. This article presents and analyzes data from semi-structured interviews with non-tenure-track social science faculty to understand how they handled the change to remote teaching after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyzes these interviews by drawing on intersecting perspectives from the anthropology of disaster, anthropology of education, and digital anthropology. We argue the transition to online teaching presented new challenges and opportunities to instructors as people coping with novel health concerns, family obligations, and space-time changes. Simultaneously, this change created pedagogical issues related to continuity of instruction, classroom presence, and emotional labor. We conclude with recommendations and directions for future research. 

Virginia García-Acosta (éd.), The Anthropology of Disasters in Latin America. State of the Art

Publie chez Routledge dans la serie « Routledge Studies in Hazards, Disaster Risk and Climate Change », dirigee depuis 2015 par le chercheur britannique Ilan Kelman qui est un specialiste de la reduction des risques de catastrophe, ce volume est dedie a un etat de l’art de l’anthropologie des catastrophes en Amerique latine. Virginia Garcia-Acosta, anthropologue et historienne mexicaine qui fait partie des pionnieres dans l’etude anthropologique et historique des desastres dans la region et d...

Entangled Roots and Otherwise Possibilities: An Anthropology of Disasters COVID-19 Research Agenda

We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispecies networks, the politics of knowledge, gifts and mutual aid, and the work of recovery.

COVID-19 В СИЦИЛИИ: ЭКЗИСТЕНЦИАЛЬНЫЕ «МЕДИЦИНА» И ПРАКТИКИ – ОБРАЩЕНИЕ К ТРАДИЦИИ

Summary: This article analyzes the empirics of mental and behavioral models of Sicilians in existential conditions, namely in February – May 2020 during the coronavirus epidemic and quarantine measures in Italy. The study is based on the author’s field material. In the course of the paper, the author addresses such aspects of traditional culture as folk medicine, local cuisine and rituals. Analysis of the realities clearly demonstrates the devotion of a large part of Sicilian society to the ancient cultural strata that have a particular connotation: the ancient remedies, rational and magical, and prevention of diseases and demonic apparitions, as well as therapeutic practices aimed at healing various ailments, but mainly plague and dysentery, which repeatedly struck Sicily. The dietary changes of alimentary habits of the Sicilians, and appeal to certain "health" and cleansing rites have the same focus. The study of empirical material reveals the medieval roots of beliefs and recipes, which the Sicilians appeal to, the role of historical memory, which guarantees preservation of archaic culture, the predominantly folk nature of the cultural substrate addressed by representatives of local society, and the oral way of information transmission. The theory and concepts of anthropology of fear and anthropology of disasters allow to understand the mechanism of this behaviour and the reasons for the revitalization of such a specific culture in these existential for Sicilians conditions, and also to focus on other social issues (the assertion of the society’s identity and the problems of relationships with other communities).

On Seeing and Listening: How to Better Support Affected Communities before the Disaster Starts

This article draws on insights from disaster anthropology and medical anthropology, using examples from community-based research after Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy on Staten Island, and after Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico, illustrating how lack of cultural knowledge and contextual “not seeing” hampers both emergency response and longer term recovery efforts. Using these two distinct examples, it reveals underlying biases within the culture of emergency management that hamper agency effectiveness. It then makes recommendations as to how emergency management personnel can work to overcome these biases, and quickly obtain and incorporate previously unfamiliar information about local context. Building equitable partnerships with local organizations and networks will better support disaster preparedness, emergency response, and recovery efforts.

Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces

AbstractTheories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the “vulnerable” acts to discursively nullify the everywhere‐visible “resilience,” toughness, and genius that exist in communities that are habitually exposed to risk and hazards. We argue that constructing vulnerability as a characteristic of subaltern peoples and marginalized places is truncated at best and can perpetuate violence—epistemic, semiotic, and material—at worst. To identify the “vulnerable” is, we contend, necessarily a process of otherizing and essentializing. We see and are concerned to further encourage an emergent form of disaster anthropology that is particularly oriented toward understanding and theorizing the institutions, systems, and individuals that structure risk, and in the process to focus attention away from “the vulnerable.” To our surprise, this has emerged in recent anthropological writings in very particular ways. We find the orientation away from vulnerable populations among our colleagues who write at the intersections of disaster institutions and local communities. Here, we recognize vulnerability conceived not merely as historical inequity that produces negative outcomes, but as nested and contested sites of struggle for different visions of utopian futures, for contrasting articulations of what constitutes risk, and for diverse cultural logics of the good.

Disasta: Rethinking the Notion of Disaster in the Wake of Cyclone Pam

ABSTRACT Tongoa was one of the worst-hit islands in Vanuatu when it was struck on 13 March 2015 by Cyclone Pam, the most severe climatic event recorded in the South Pacific for several decades. Nearly all of the buildings on Tongoa were damaged by winds and flooding. However, exceptional this cyclone might have been, such disruptive events are frequent and widespread on Tongoa Island: landslides, volcanic eruptions, cyclones and droughts all contribute to shaping the universe of its inhabitants. This paper seeks to understand the category of disasta or ‘disaster’ and how it is constituted in the context of Tongoa Island, where there is no vernacular word to express the concept of catastrophe. Disasta is a subjective Bislama term, varying with circumstances, the impact of the phenomenon and the cultural and social identity of the group affected. Is there a threshold with which to measure and define disasters? Reflections from the perspective of an anthropology of nature and an anthropology of disaster reveal how considerations around the notion of catastrophe are closely intertwined with the relationships between people and their environment.

Nuclear disaster as chronic crisis: Accounts of radiation embodiment by survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster from Belarus born before, in and after 1986.

This article looks at chronic crisis on an empirical example of radiation embodiment by survivors of a nuclear disaster. Developing further the work of Henrik Vigh, this article argues that chronic crisis is conflictual in nature, where some individuals fully embrace it, while others reject it. A total of 16 in-depth interviews were conducted with survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster from Belarus who were below 18 years in 1986 and born in or after 1986. It is shown that survivors do not consider themselves affected, when they argue against social stigma imposed by others and when development discourse in relation to post-communist health care is used as a background against which nuclear victimhood can be argued. It is also demonstrated that survivors do consider themselves affected, when they embrace disaster temporality and victimhood and argue against narrow scientific definitions of victimhood which downplay a variety of health conditions attributed to the disaster. This article concludes that chronic crisis may not always be transformative, but reproduce the existing inequalities. It contributes to the anthropology of disaster and the anthropology of suffering by bringing together scholarship in feminist theory of disability and critical perspectives on development.

What Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom? The Anthropology of Crises and Disasters at the Onset of the Anthropocene

The modernist usage of the word crisis conveys the idea of an event that acts as a historical judgment, marks an epochal transition, and sometimes leads to a utopian era. Furthermore, current uses of crisis in the political sphere often figure catastrophic events as the result of errors and malfunctions, drawing attention away from the quotidian and normatively accepted practices and policies that produce them. Anthropological definitions of disaster, in contrast, understand catastrophes as the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Despite this fundamental difference between customary and scholarly definitions of crises and disasters, the former term is commonly used to refer to the latter by political elites and academics alike. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the crisis concept in the analysis of disasters on the basis of anthropological research on catastrophes during the last 40 years and provides an overview of the analytical diversification of disaster anthropology since the 1970s.

The Great Forest Wall: A plan to protect Japan from future mega-tsunami

Disaster Anthropology is often prefaced on a phrase such as, ‘First there was the eruption/earthquake etc., then came the disaster’ meaning that much of what was experienced as a disaster must be blamed on the lack of human preparedness and failures in the human response. The three-fold disaster that hit Japan in 2011 (mega-earthquake + mega-tsunami + plus nuclear disaster almost compatible with Chernobyl) was indeed such a mixture of natural disasters compounded by human failure. This paper focuses especially on the important role of religion and ritual in successfully responding to the disaster and the difficulties that have arisen because the government is constitutionally obliged to be tone-deaf to both. The government and many local people found they had seriously different assumptions and priorities. The welcome to foreign aid volunteers is used to highlight such differences. Enormous concern about the survivors and victims was coupled with the anxiety of survivors themselves and growing criticism of government, for not doing enough either before or after the disaster. Against the backdrop of so many complicated and conflicting sentiments and obligations, the paper introduces The Great Forest Wall project as not only a green solution that would protect against future tsunami for hundreds of years or more, but also as so far the only enterprise that hopes to enable the whole country to come together in a single testimony of all their powerful feelings about the victims, and collective concern for future generations. It seeks to enable a concept of Japan and being Japanese that avoids the awkward politics of nationalism. It links past, present, and future by promoting traditional wisdom that ‘It is the trees that protect us.’ It offers a mixture of the latest science with traditional religion and an understanding of how ritual and ‘religious-like’ concepts can bridge social divisions and express a great variety of contradictory sentiments at the same time.

Public Anthropology of Disaster and Recovery : "Archive of Hope"(希望ア-カイブ)( Practicing a Public Anthropology of the East Japan Disaster)

Public Anthropology of Disaster and Recovery : "Archive of Hope"(希望ア-カイブ)( Practicing a Public Anthropology of the East Japan Disaster)

Considering culture in disaster practice

In disaster‐related policies and practices, culture is often treated as tangible, homogenous, static. The diversity of communities and places, on‐the‐ground actions and networks for how things are actually accomplished, intricacies of local politics and maneuvering and layers of socio‐historical inequalities, are often missing from expert calculations and official frameworks for action. The basic but most important first question goes unasked: “What would you do and how?” Disaster anthropology relentlessly arrives at the all‐too‐common problem of “policies and practices need to consider local culture.” Here too culture is framed as static, passive, homogenous. Understanding the complexity and dynamics by which we experience and understand the world is much more challenging than at first glance. Culture is fluid, evolving, and intertwined with a host of economic, political, and social relations and tensions that are constantly altering seemingly stable processes. This leads to at least two related questions. First, how do we theorize beyond this point to better interpret and explain the persistent issue of cultural insensitivity in disaster‐related policy and practice? And second, how can we develop more useful and successful prescriptions for incorporating cultural sensitivity into policy and practice? Overall, this article puts forward the argument that disaster reconstruction is a complex, culturally sensitive dynamic, within which decisions are embedded in tensions of social, political, and economic priorities. While disasters can function as a mechanism to sustain and perpetuate power relations, disaster survivors have distinct agency through the disaster recovery process and are empowered citizens that should be treated as equal partners to guide the process in a way that makes sense on‐the‐ground in the given local contexts. In the unfolding plays of disaster, the interpretive, behavioral, and material repertoires we refer to as culture exhibit some of the characteristics of emergence, insomuch as they are not fully determined by arrangements that precede them; yet, neither are they without antecedents, relationships with the past and other ongoing processes.

Applied Anthropology of Risk, Hazards, and Disasters

This article provides a brief introduction to advancements in the anthropology of disasters as well as the historical antecedents and the intellectual collaborations that contributed to contemporary work in the field. It reviews the multiple directions, methodological approaches, and theoretical leanings that comprise today's diversified field of disaster anthropology and discusses how the monographs included in the special edition of Human Organization (74[4]) on the applied anthropology of risks, hazards, and disasters showcase the variety of topics and themes engaged by applied anthropologists who work on disaster-related issues.

The Biopolitics of Disaster: Power, Discourses, and Practices

With the increase in frequency and visibility of disasters in contemporary state societies, national governments have developed a collection of agencies to manage catastrophic events. These institutions invariably deal with human populations as a political, scientific, and biological problem, an approach Michel Foucault described as biopolitical. In this article, I discuss some aspects of disaster governance, focusing on the long-term recovery process. Specifically, I analyze the fundamental biopolitical assumptions of the discourses and practices on the part of governmental disaster response agencies in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil. In this case of biopolitical response to disaster, the discourses and practices implemented by governmental agencies created the illusion that state agencies successfully responded to the disaster by saving biological lives. This article shows how these biopolitcal discourses and practices also had the unintended and unacknowledged effects of devaluing social lives and abandoning disaster-affected populations. By calling attention to the unintended and unacknowledged effects of biopolitical governance, this article demonstrates how disaster anthropology can document and address the shortcomings of governmental disaster recovery policy and practice.