Disaster response and recovery: Aid and social change

Abstract

This article offers a discussion of the complex and far‐reaching impacts that disaster aid has on the socio‐ecological and cultural‐political transformation of affected communities through three different and interrelated theoretical and ethnographic angles presented in the “Response and Recovery” section of the plenary session on the anthropology of risk, hazards, and disasters. It introduces the research on “disaster narratives,” the framing of “bad victims,” and state‐led recovery of ethnic cultures by Mark Schuller, Roberto Barrios, and Qiaoyun Zhang respectively. Responding to the special issue's uniting theme of “continuity and change,” this article analyzes the historical, discursive, political, and social relationships embedded in relief efforts and recovery projects that can induce long‐term change in social lives and relations. It argues that the restoration and endurance of the pre‐disaster ecologically and culturally shaped practices and relationships largely depend on how disaster, damage, and survivors are perceived and manipulated. It observes the oftentimes contested social changes with disaster aid (or lack thereof), reconstruction policies, and recovery projects. Revealing the indigenous adaptation and struggles under imposed reconstruction and resettlement plans, this article hopes to bridge the epistemological and practical gaps between the work of the humanitarian agencies and the needs of the affected populations.

Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces

“…In the most startling examples of the homogenization of culture and people in disaster contexts, we have cultural commodification (Zhang ) and co‐option (Faas , ). Qiaoyun Zhang () discusses the 8.0 magnitude earthquake in the southwestern Sichuan province of China that, in 2008, resulted in the deaths of upwards of 70,000 people, including nearly 20,000 from the Qiang ethnic minority. Following the earthquake, the Chinese government made special efforts to rebuild Qiang communities and invest significant resources into this area, especially as a mechanism to build state identity.…”

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. Thus, on another level, politically charged "metafunctions of humanitarian action" serve as puissant conduits of dominant ideologies and practices (Donini 2008); experts impose the rationalities of organizational priorities, manage populations, and distinguish the deserving from the undeserving (Faas n.d.;Gamburd 2013;Marchezini 2015;Zhang 2016).…”

Representing Recovery: How the Construction and Contestation of Needs and Priorities Can Shape Long-term Outcomes for Disaster-affected People

“…Disaster intervention and disaster aid confers power on the giver to decide and shape forms of post-disaster development. Portrayals of affected communities and the inherent biases within them (e.g., deserving versus undeserving aid recipients) may reinforce hegemonic/economic relations and discursively create certain channels for intervention prioritized by the donor (Zhang, 2016). Similarly, Drake (2016) finds that governmental bodies set up to manage the impacts of disaster may represent poorer disaster-affected populations in a blanket way as uninformed and manipulated by activists, despite an evident diversity of viewpoints on the ground.…”

“…In the discussion that follows, we synthesize insights from the relatively limited body of research that exists on representational aspects of disaster recovery to explore further how dominant ways of thinking, and challenges to these, influence the support disasteraffected people receive, their capacities to recover, and their rights and agency in these processes. We also examine disaster-affected sustained period (anderson and Woodrow, 2019;Zhang, 2016). Several decades of critical research on disaster risk have amply demonstrated that vulnerability to disaster impacts is conditioned as much by social factors as it is by the nature of the physical hazards that trigger the destructive events (e.g., Cutter, 1996;Hewitt, 1983;Wisner et al, 2004).…”