Considering culture in disaster practice

Abstract

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.

Enduring Cooperation: Time, Discipline, and Minga Practice in Disaster-induced Displacement and Resettlement in the Ecuadorian Andes

“…Experts working for state agencies and NGOs (however well-meaning) can and often do exacerbate vulnerabilities and (re)produce inequalities in response and recovery efforts by marginalizing local knowledge and capacities in favor of their own expertise (e.g., Gamburd 2013; Marchezini 2015;Zhang 2016). At times, even sincere efforts of culturally sensitive humanitarian action fail because experts misread local culture as homogenous, scripted, and uncontested, and expect that local practices can be readily appropriated for organizational objectives (Faas and Barrios 2015;Maldonado 2016). The appropriation of local practices to realize organizational goals can facilitate the internalization of dominant ideologies; people may come to invoke local values in ways that nonetheless articulate with dominant interests and thereby police themselves based on expert rules of conduct.…”

Sinabung volcano: how culture shapes community resilience

“…Culture is an ever-changing process, as the adaptation practices, both visible and intangible, conducted for millennia by populations prone to disasters have proved (Maldonado, 2016). Culture is liquid and influences every aspect of human existence.…”

“…Nonetheless, the social and cultural determinants of the nature and extent of disasters, including those driven by volcanic hazards, often have still not been sufficiently acknowledged within research relating to volcanic hazards vulnerability (Maldonado, 2016;Usamah and Haynes, 2012;Krüger et al, 2015). Integrating different knowledge types and experiences to avoid a technical-reductionist framework helps to design projects, which will not be temporary impositions from outsiders but will permeate beneficiaries' everyday lives (Wisner et al, 1977;Mercer and Kelman, 2010;Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2015).…”

Extreme weather, complex spaces and diverse rural places: An intra-community scale analysis of responses to storm events in rural Scotland, UK

“…Furthermore, if rural settings are becoming more demographically and socio-culturally heterogeneous, the impacts of severe weather events are likely to be experienced less evenly amongst community members. This presents an important consideration for the scholarship, policy and practice of Disaster Risk Reduction, as the diversity of communities, the intricacies of local politics, and the influence of socio-historical inequalities often remain absent from official frameworks and scholarly accounts (Cox and Perry, 2011;Maldonado, 2016).…”