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From the November 2005 Anthropology News Doing Anthropology in New Orleans, Before and After Katrina SherriLynn Colby-Bottel I was in New Orleans for a late-summer stint of fieldwork exploring social and musical relationships among New Orleans’ music communities. Oddly, my first night in town a local friend lightheartedly told me about an old New Orleanian precaution: she said to make sure that I had a hatchet in my attic—hurricanes move in fast. What follows is a series of reflections on how Hurricane Katrina reshapes my emerging field project. When my husband and I went to sleep in our rented shotgun-style house that Saturday night, Katrina was a category three hurricane. We had decided—like most people in Orleans Parish—that we would wait until Sunday morning, watch Mayor Ray Nagin’s press conference, and then see if an evacuation was ordered. We spent Saturday buying items recommended by locals: candles, water, a flashlight and batteries, non-perishable food and a few jugs of wine. We attended a White Buffalo Day celebration memorializing Chief Tootie Montana and honoring the relationship of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indians with Native Americans. As our small gathering dispersed from Congo Square, I heard two stories buzzing through the streets about the approaching storm: either it will turn to the east, or if it doesn’t turn, those houses had been here for 150 years and they weren’t going anywhere now. One of the chiefs in attendance at the memorial told us, “Ah, don’t leave. Trust me, it’s gonna scoot to the east.” We had pizza for dinner and went to bed. At 6:40 the next morning a friend called and said, “We’re outta here, and you need to go too. Now.” We turned on the TV and overnight Katrina had become a category five. Unlike so many local residents, we had the means to flee; in 45 minutes we were on the road headed for a friend’s house in Alabama. And then we waited and watched, first with tentative relief, and then with horror as this naturalized social disaster unfolded. Before the Storm These music communities and their largely region-bound styles have now been dispersed across the nation accompanied by narratives that will now surely be staged in pre- and post-Katrina frameworks. No doubt the strong sense of neighborhood, family histories and communality which many have noted as central to New Orleanian music will play a role in post-Katrina life. Just how that role will be remobilized and memorialized remains to be seen. Back home now in Charlottesville, Virginia, I face the challenge of deciding what role I will take in New Orleans’ reconstitution, or reconstruction, of the roots-music communities that represent a unique social groove long self-conscious about maintaining traditions which defy academic musical and social categorizations.
Crisis But beyond these rather general moral obligations, what are my responsibilities to specific people and institutions in my fieldsite? Some things are obvious. Personally, I am compelled to find friends affected by the storm to share aid and comfort. But what of those with whom I had talked once, twice, three times, those with whom my conversation would have to start: “Hi, this is Sherri-Lynn, the graduate student you talked with the week before the storm … remember?” When I ask myself “What do they need that I can offer?” it becomes a question not just of resources, but skills. There are people and organizations in place trained to handle crises; I must turn to what I am trained for. This presses my focus forward: as the urgency of crisis is replaced by the realities of recovery, a more complicated picture of people and their needs comes into view. The question then becomes: “What do they need that I, specifically as an anthropologist, can offer?” How can my anthropological skills be put to use by, and on behalf of, the music communities I had begun studying? Recovery Beyond such local dialogues, New Orleans’ rebuilding is being nationally debated: How much will reconstruction cost, who will profit? These questions do—and should—draw significant attention. Moreover, this is seen by many as an opportunity to “make New Orleans better.” A disaster of this magnitude, and in this place, makes it much less possible to ignore the deepest issues of race and class plaguing US society today. But just what this will mean for the US, and New Orleans in particular, is not at all clear. Katrina forces our gaze upon that which dominant society works so hard to forget. As John Hope Franklin said in the New York Times Magazine last September, “The tragedy is that Katrina changed our view at all. We should have known the things that Katrina brought out.” This disaster brings with it new opportunities for anthropologists long engaged in studying culture, race and class to participate meaningfully in national debate, as well as contribute to local, on-the-ground changes. In Between Now and Then SherriLynn Colby-Bottel (slcolby@virginia.edu) is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia. She will continue research on the social and musical relationships among New Orleans’ roots music communities. Post-Katrina, this research will explore how these music communities reconnect, change, reestablish and reinvent their traditions. |
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