Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Afterlives of Disasters

2017; Wiley; Volume: 119; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.12986

1548-1433

Deborah A. Thomas,

Disaster Management and Resilience

I am writing these remarks in the wake of one of the most damaging hurricane seasons ever in the Western Hemisphere. This fall, we witnessed the devastation wrought by Harvey, Irma, and Maria, and we may be host to additional unwanted visitors by the time the season wraps up around the time this issue comes out. These hurricanes, alongside the horrifying earthquake in Mexico and the rapidly spreading fires in California, have been true disasters—ecologically, socially, and politically. As so many anthropologists have demonstrated across the subfields, disasters are not merely “natural” but are created through human and nonhuman engagement. That is to say, natural disasters usually have social and political origins and effects. And since disasters are “characterized by external variability and internal complexity,” as Anthony Oliver-Smith wrote long ago (1999, 19), they pose a variety of challenges for anthropologists. These challenges are both conceptual (having to do with how we parse notions of temporality and scale, cause and effect) and political (having to do with the ways in which and venues through which we witness these events and their afterlives). What old and new realities might become visible through a focus on ancient and contemporary disasters? Take Barbuda, for example. After Hurricane Irma, which flattened 95 percent of the island and made it uninhabitable, the entire island was mandatorily evacuated. This means that all 1,700 souls had to leave home, either for Antigua, where many had family, or to Puerto Rico (where they would soon meet the wrath of Maria), or even farther afield. For the first time in three hundred years, Barbuda was unsettled, empty, without industry. At the time of writing, citizens of Barbuda have been invited to start returning in order to begin what will be a lengthy cleanup process, but they have also been told that electricity won't be fully restored for another week or two. I admit to having more than a cursory interest in what is going on there, not merely because I am a Caribbeanist with Jamaican roots but also because my mother-in-law is from Barbuda, and we were all stymied by the inability to communicate, to find family members, to know what was taking place. What will happen if people don't go back? How will families rebuild? What new industries will end up taking over? Very quickly after the hurricane, the Chinese government, which established diplomatic relations with Antigua and Barbuda in 1983 (two years after the twin-island nation became an independent state within the British Commonwealth), pledged US$2.5 million toward relief efforts in Barbuda. This promise went a long way toward the US$50 million targeted by the Antigua and Barbuda government for reconstruction, half of which has now been secured, and it was more than any other pledge by an individual state. Subsequently, a Chinese firm began a proposal for a new town on Barbuda, one that would include several high-rise apartment buildings (which would be hurricane resistant and would ostensibly provide mixed-income housing options) as well as a supermarket, cleaners, a drug store, a restaurant, a movie theater, clothing stores, a church, and other amenities. This would be the latest among a range of Chinese operations throughout the Caribbean region, and across Latin America and Africa. While in Latin America and Africa, Chinese engagement has often occurred within extractive industries, in the Caribbean it has mostly taken the forms of infrastructural development (such as highway construction, as is the case in Jamaica) and aid. In part, this is due to an attempt to gain votes within the United Nations for the “One China” policy within a context in which many Caribbean states still have ties to Taiwan. But it also marks a shift away from the normative realities of the Western Hemisphere—European and US imperialism, plantation-based agricultural development, the legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and various forms of postcolonial industrialization by invitation—toward a new and as yet largely unknown future. This future is untethered from European imperial histories and American alliances and, as such, marks one moment in the decline of so-called Western civilization. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria gives us insight into a different political reality, one we might call decolonization by default. While reporting during the hurricane always emphasized the fact that those in Maria's path were American citizens, the slow and scolding official response to the fact that millions of these citizens are still without water and electricity has led many to wonder what nonsovereign citizenship means today within the context of the United States. Many mainland Americans had, no doubt, “forgotten” Puerto Rico's long colonial relationship to the United States, one that now provides the conditions for posthurricane profiteering (Bonilla 2017). It is the moment of the exceptional, as Veena Das (2007) has taught us, that allows us to see more clearly the everyday processes that create its possibility. Das was discussing violence—in particular, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India—urging us to see the ways in which particular forms of violence enacted in and through everyday life create the conditions for disastrous eruptions. Anne Allison (2013) has similarly considered the relationship between disaster and the everyday. If the translation of disaster into response is central to the work of humanitarian relief, she wonders, how do we attend to this task analytically? Her answer is that the plodding “everydayness of survival—whether emerging from a disaster with a capital ‘D’ or from the ordinariness of just getting by” eludes both representation and decisive action. While this perspective aligns with the critical literatures on humanitarianism in its insistence on the complexity of causality, we nevertheless also see people, past and present, finding ways to make life, and even to bring new realities into being, in the face of both exceptional and perduring disasters. We begin this issue with another approach to disaster, an analysis of postconflict peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts in Colombia. Angela J. Lederach's “‘The Campesino Was Born for the Campo’: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia” interrogates the relations between humans and nonhumans that have been forged both by violence and by peace processes. She is interested in the social and ecological dimensions of the Peaceful Movement of Reconciliation and Integration of the Alta Montaña's attempts to conceive of and practice peace in everyday life. Lederach's multispecies lens is trained on avocado trees, monkeys, and campesinos to more fully understand not only the relational disruptions caused by violence and displacement but also the limits of the Colombian state's measurements of harm and determinations of reparations. In the end, she argues that this lens also shows that campesinos’ own approach to peacebuilding—one that takes into account the relational, processual, and dynamic relations between humans and nonhumans—contrasts with the technical frameworks dominating state and private-sector efforts toward peacebuilding. “‘Tangled up in These Conceptualities’: Sanction, Protest, and Ideology in Berlin, Germany,” by Kenneth McGill, zeroes in on interactions with and the experiences of one interlocutor to parse the relationship between ideology, subjectivity, and politics. Drawing from the analytic exegesis of Christel T., an activist committed to overturning the sanctioning policy in Berlin that allows case managers within unemployment agencies to dock clients’ benefits, McGill isolates the ideological dimension of activism, revealing it to be a process of naming. In doing so, he also demonstrates the methodological merits of intense close reading within ethnographic research. Where Lederach's article explores ontologies in relation to a contemporary social movement, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen and Sanna Saunaluoma's article, “Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil,” brings together ethnographic and archaeological data from the Upper Purus, Brazil, to identify the ways history and cosmology are written on the landscape in the form of earthworks that materialize the engagements between nonhuman and human actors. Language, here, is explored in relation to writing, artwork, and corporeal practice in order to connect precolonial geometric iconography to contemporary design making. In this way, Virtanen and Saunaluoma reveal how personhood is both visualized and materialized through human–nonhuman relations and how the past lives in the present in Amazonian communities. In “Imperial Expansion and Local Agency: A Case Study of Labor Organization under Inca Rule,” Francisco Garrido and Diego Salazar ask us to rethink processes of imperial expansion from the bottom up, as it were. They explore the ways local communities in the northern Chilean Atacama Desert sought to engage the Inca Empire while maintaining particular economic activities beyond the state's control. By comparing the coexistence of attached and independent modes of production in two cases of mining production, they offer a complex picture of economic change. Nicola Sharratt's “Steering Clear of the Dead: Avoiding Ancestors in the Moquegua Valley, Peru” moves us to an investigation of mortuary practices in the pre-Hispanic Andes. She brings archaeological and ethnohistorical data to bear on how the dead were key actors not only in relation to land and resource claims but also vis-à-vis notions of heritage and assertions of status. By investigating the ways a Late Intermediate period community occupied a Middle Horizon village in southern Peru dating to AD 1250, Sharratt shows how this community avoided their predecessors’ dead by declining to reuse earlier domestic space while maintaining interactions with their own dead. She uses the frame of alterity to think through what avoiding the dead meant in relation to the community's construction of identity and social memory within a context of socioeconomic and political change. With “‘Milk Has Gone:’ Dietary Change and Human Adaptability in Karamoja, Uganda,” Sandra Gray and Mary B. Sundal offer a scathing critique of the effects of war and agricultural development and the consequent disruption of pastoralism in eastern Africa. By tracking the declining availability of milk and butterfat in seminomadic female-headed Karimojong households through dietary observation, analysis of food distribution and consumption, and interviews, they demonstrate how increasing vulnerability over a twenty-year period has led to shifts in the community's demographic structure, their experience of health and disease, patterns of child growth and development, and women's reproductive health. Their conclusion—that structural changes in this context have led to a state of permanent impoverishment, which has compromised human adaptability and population resilience—counters some of the more positive assessments of pastoralist adaptability in other contexts. Micah F. Morton's “Reframing the Boundaries of Indigeneity: State-Based Ontologies and Assertions of Distinction and Compatibility in Thailand” turns our attention to the ways Thai ethnic minorities have been asserting claims to Indigeneity and seeking recognition from the Thai state, in part by positioning themselves as loyal to the Thai king. Morton outlines the processes whereby Indigenous Peoples have thus simultaneously adhered to nationalist expectations of ethnicity and belonging while also challenging them. This gives us a new lens through which to interrogate the “problem” of Indigeneity in postcolonial Africa and Asia, spaces in which processes of settler-colonial histories are not as clearly articulated as in the Americas. “Transposing Brazilian Carnival: Religion, Cultural Heritage, and Secularism in Rio de Janeiro” offers a semiotic analysis of how the hegemonic constructions of samba music and Afro-Brazilian religion (candomblé) as intrinsic to the Brazilian public cultural form of carnival are being challenged by evangelical groups seeking participation in this quintessential representation of nationhood. Martijn Oosterbaan focuses on the rise of evangelical carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro in order to guide readers through the imbrications of religion, cultural heritage, and public performances of identity. Analytically, he is interested in how the historical formation of secularism upholds distinctions between “culture” and “religion,” and he mobilizes this distinction to demonstrate how evangelical carnival groups strategically engage this formation in order to position themselves as legitimate carnival participants. Oosterbaan argues that while Brazilian multiculturalism has created the space for these kinds of openings, other groups have sought to strengthen the connection between public cultural practices and Afro-Brazilian religious traditions in order to maintain a semiotic ideology that positions popular cultural forms as embodying spiritual power. Finally, “Signaling Safety: Characterizing Fieldwork Experiences and Their Implications for Career Trajectories,” by Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford, Katie Hinde, and Kathryn B. H. Clancy, reports on a Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE) among female archaeologists and biological anthropologists. They argue that incidences of sexual harassment are more common in fieldwork settings where there is a lack of clarity regarding the repercussions for violating appropriate behavioral expectations about work conditions in the field, and that hostile fieldwork environments and negative experiences can have a lasting detrimental impact on the career trajectories of individual researchers. These findings are, unfortunately, not surprising, but documenting them here should serve as a call to action for changing the culture of fieldwork in our discipline. The authors argue that site directors and others in positions of power must embrace clear codes of conduct, enforce consequences for those who violate these codes, and protect those who come forward with concerns or complaints. Our World Anthropologies section this issue features a roundtable discussion on the anthropologies of tourism. Prefaced with an introduction by Noel Salazar, these essays and commentaries ask what an anthropology of tourism might look like if we moved outside the hegemony of the US-based canon and English-language scholarship. They also invite us to question how the study of tourism has been affected by processes of nation-building and the trajectory of anthropology's development as a discipline in a variety of locations, including Spain, Mexico, and China. In addition to three film reviews, the Multimodal Anthropologies section for this issue spans the “print” journal and our website. Rachel Hurdley, Mike Biddulph, Vincent Backhaus, Tara Hipwood, and Rumana Hossain have coauthored an essay about drawing as a research methodology, called “Drawing as Radical Multimodality: Salvaging Patrick Geddes's Material Methodology.” They are interested in the ways this material technology—“slower” than the more commonly used film and podcast—transforms our ideas about temporality and practice at multiple scales. Working with collaborator Mike Biddulph, an urban designer, and research student Tara Hipwood, Hurdley hosted a cross-disciplinary drawing workshop during which participants were asked to reflect on the ways treating drawing as a research tool transformed their usual drawing practices. Drawing, here, becomes not merely a method but also a way to stimulate “active looking” and to engage research participants, as well as new audiences, in questions about the role of visual evidence in social relationships, among many other issues. An online essay features reflections by participants in these workshops, as well as many of the drawings themselves. As usual, we have also published fourteen book reviews as well as a review essay in our Book Reviews section. And, finally, we offer three obituaries in this issue: Roy Goodwin D'Andrade (1931–2016), Sandra Lynn Morgen (1950–2016), and Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015). Don't forget to look for new additions to our Public Anthropologies discussions on our website (www.americananthropologist.org), where we feature a conversation between Gina M. Pérez and Zoë H. Wool on “Ethnography and the Militarization of the American Dream.” We have also posted two new installments in the De-Provincializing Development series interrogating the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals—one by Garrett M. Broad, titled “Fixing Hunger at Its Roots,” and another by Zoe Todd, titled “Protecting Life Below Water.” Also on the website are two new episodes of our podcast, Anthropological Airwaves. One features interviews with Jason De León and Hilary Parsons Dick about immigration policy and immigration discourse, as well as the roles and responsibilities of anthropologists in the public sphere. The second features interviews with Carolyn Rouse and Brent Luvaas about their multimodal research into various projects of self-making and becoming. You will also find supplementary material for several of the articles in this issue on the website.