Disaster risk reduction policies make heavy use of education for spreading a 'culture' of resilience at community level. This paper reflects on the uncritical way the concept of culture is used in current pedagogies of resilience. It describes how a deterministic/ normative vision of culture is gradually giving way to a generative/emergentist approach. Indeed, the notion of resilience has brought with it an idea of culture that emphasizes the flexible and dynamic character of learning.The paper also illuminates the unrecognized potential for disaster education, for it can be used as a tool to absolve public institutions from failure by shifting responsibility for safety to the population. Resilience, in other words, can become a shock absorber that compensates for institutional inefficiency.
How can we ethically research “the social” in times of social distancing? This paper considers the effects of a global pandemic on anthropological practice and scholarship. We suggest that, while much can be learned about the human experience during times of strife, we must first reflect on whether our research is beneficial, collaborative, or necessary. These considerations must constitute an ongoing conversation with research collaborators, and we should work with them in assessing the sociopolitical and biophysical risks our work entails, given that many anthropologists collaborate with members of disenfranchised and politically-marginalized groups. Acknowledging the highly social and oftentimes mobile nature of anthropological research, we call for a dialogue on research’s “new normal.” Due to anthropology’s understanding of the interconnectedness of sociopolitical, historical, and cultural factors in crisis contexts, we encourage our colleagues to commit to the design of ethically-relevant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adopting an ethnographic approach, this paper traces the various forms that resilience and vulnerability took in a post-tsunami Sri Lankan village, as well as the interpretations of these two ‘action devices' by both humanitarian operators and the survivors themselves. The author shows that the practices of community-based disaster management involved approaches, visions and modus operandi that were highly ambiguous and divergent. Indeed, these practices revealed intense contestation around the concepts of resilience and vulnerability and wide variation in the ways the concepts were embodied by reconstruction actors. Still vulnerable yet already resilient, the survivors were encouraged to employ strategically one or the other of disaster management's Janus faces, calibrating the features that rendered them desirable for gifting: a moving need for help and an untiring ability to cope with uncertainty. To attract additional aid packages, the survivors had carefully to weigh up the level of resilience achieved through training; they had to appear ‘just resilient enough’ to be eligible for gifting, but not so resilient as to tarnish the image of vulnerability still required to intercept aid. In an attempt to promote resilience at the community level, the humanitarian actors thus ended up creating a ‘social drama’ with ambiguous and controversial implications. Paradoxically, the most important lesson the villagers learned during the reconstruction was how to retain their position as a ‘good product of the tsunami’.
By describing the long trajectory of petrochemical industrialization in a Mediterranean area in southeastern Sicily locally known as the triangle of death, this article discusses how the widespread, long-term, and nearly invisible nature of everyday forms of catastrophe generate effects that at times are even more insidious than a major disaster. Indeed, like the fumes rising from an industrial smokestack, oil culture seeps into the imaginaries and epidermises of the people for whom petroleum represents both a blessing and a curse.
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