The Two-Faced Janus of Disaster Management: Still Vulnerable, YetAlready Resilient

Abstract

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’.

Pedagogies of the Unknown: Unpacking ‘Culture’ in Disaster Risk Reduction Education

“…Employing a language and concepts far removed from the experience of local populations and expecting an immediate harmonization of interests and coherent, consequential modes of action might indeed result in misunderstandings. Anthropologists have begun to analyse the dynamics triggered by this semantic‐linguistic gap, such as the way that locals often deploy technical DRR terminology politically or strategically as a means to an end (Benadusi, ; Olwig, ). This work addresses mainly extra‐European contexts, however, so there remains a great deal to address.…”

“…And yet, it is never well specified where or how it ought to be used. Likewise, DE policy fails to take into account the process of continuous knowledge updating made possible by social media and new‐generation technologies in even the most disadvantaged settings; or the strategic (and sometimes transformative) way that vulnerable groups come to use technical language and expertise as a result of their exposure to aid regimes (Benadusi, ; Revet, ). In this way, the emphasis on plural ‘cultures’ ends up being no more than the vague encouragement to include ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘local customs’ in formulating an effective DE strategy.…”

Ruptures

“…Yet, in order to justify intervention, the resilience concept was slowly reformulated in a twist which is shared with other post-disaster contexts (Benadusi 2013). Resilience became the conceptual aim of post-earthquake reconstruction, in line with an international rhetoric that had already been circulated for some years by institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID) and the UK Department for International Development.…”

Disaster response and recovery: Aid and social change

“…Studying the radical renegotiation of the survivor–state relationship postdisaster, scholars have observed the formation of the complex identities and citizenships under the usually intrusive, insensitive, and irresponsible relief state—some recent studies include “biological citizenship” (Petryna ), “scientific citizenship” (Sternsdorff‐Cisterna ), and the fluid identity of the survivors, (Benadusi ; Hastrup ). A pressing fact is that a majority of disaster survivors live and will continue to live in disaster‐prone, risk‐bound environments where all recovery efforts are extremely vulnerable to the disasters very likely to come.…”