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From the November 2005 Anthropology News
Katrina and Rita
A Disaster Anthropologist’s Thoughts
Susanna M Hoffman
Although Anthony F C Wallace opened up the inquiry as early as the 1950s, disasters and their effects on culture and society have been largely disregarded by anthropologists. Most of us have approached the communities and concerns we research as if the fabric of the chosen site had never been rent by some calamity and doesn’t bear the patchwork that results from such events. In truth, many of the places where we have worked have been visited by devastating happenings, either from what Aristotle considered the four elements: wind, water, fire and trembling earth, or from the misconstructions or malfeasance of fellow humans. Many locations experience such events chronically, or if not chronically, since the occurrences are nonetheless embedded in their location or politics, intermittently and predictably.
It has taken several calamities in the last number of years within our own cultural and social abode to awaken more heightened anthropological interest. Two in just the last weeks, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have once again alerted our attention. These dual storms have all but erased the thriving perimeter of one of our major cultural zones and wiped out a city with a unique sub-culture that was cherished. Due to them, it has become blatantly clear how catastrophes modify the living patterns of the people dwelling in the impact zones, and indeed diffuse, whether largely or ever so slightly, into the entire cultural consciousness of a population. Perhaps it is time for us to take the consequences of catastrophes more into account in our endeavors.
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| Gregory Fobbs, a Plaquemines Parish police officer laid off from work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, walks out of his new trailer at a temporary trailer park for people made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, October 7, 2005, in Baker, Louisiana. Photo courtesy Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images |
Fracturing Social Structure
Various social and cultural changes almost inevitably ensue from a disaster, and Katrina and Rita are showing us them all. That the physical lay out of a community is altered, is clearly apparent, but with the physical layout, so, too, is the social structure fractured, never to be rebuilt in the same form again. The economy of a community dissolves, with no workplaces, no transport, no clients left, so that bayou farmer, vibrant jazz musician, Cajun cook, factory worker, shop owner, housemaid and gardener often drift away. New political leaders arise, and new political agendas are set in motion. Sometimes old leaders are sacrificed, both locally and as far away as Arabian horse shows. Survivors become marginalized from the communities in which they once participated. Virtually new separate cities of house trailers are being set up for victims in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, many of which may invidiously turn into survivor ghettos. The marginalization is not just physical. Survivors now find they share concerns only with other survivors, and so they segregate themselves. Animosity develops towards those unharmed. A specific enemy also always arises. In the case of Katrina and Rita, its name is FEMA, though the insurance companies are running a close second. Moreover, a phenomena called “convergence” is happening in numbers previously unheard of. The aftermath of disaster brings all sorts of outsiders to the scene: engineers, builders, agents and agencies, peddlers, experts and exploiters. Their ideas, rules and ways cannot help but wiggle into locals’ lives. In the wake of the wind and water, already a committee of architects is talking about how they will redesign a “new” New Orleans. Nary a one of them is a prior resident.
These are just some of the social and cultural alterations that disasters serve up that we should heed more as part of the cloth of the places we study. Others include broken unions and gender backlash, new religious rites, and often as well the return of previously moribund customs.
Disasters as Revealers
Yet another factor about calamities has been boldly writ by Katrina and Rita. Disasters are revealers. They show what has been silently going on in a society and culture, and especially who has been made most vulnerable. Disasters are not truly physical events, but are rather socially constructed, manufactured over long periods of time. With Katrina and Rita, as is often but not always the case, the most vulnerable were the poor, and among the poor, the racial segment of our nation that has long been disadvantaged. What lay behind what some have called the “cotton curtain” was exposed: a part of our own population so poor, so uneducated, and so under-employed that we should all be appalled. The two hurricanes also revealed what the degree of risk was undertaken by a part of our populous, and perhaps more so those who blithely “developed” the region. Hurricanes and flooding and beach decay have regularly swept the habitat, and the powerful river that was the heart of New Orleans has been artificially, cantankerously and dangerously held in place from miles north all the way to the sea for over one hundred years. These factors lay buried within the haze of disaster’s best friend, denial.
In the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, another aspect of anthropology, also often ignored, rises to the forefront, or should rise. That is, what we can do to help people who are ravaged. This is the area of our study usually called applied anthropology, but in such cases as Katrina and Rita, becomes, in fact, aid. We too are experts, but we are the sort to whom the words “culturally appropriate” are not triteness. We are the sort who participate directly with people in such a way that we might learn what survivors actually want and work to provide it. I not only suggest that we incorporate the effects of disaster into our studies, but I also implore that if anyone should converge after such a calamity, it should be us.
Susanna M Hoffman co-edited Catastrophe and Culture: the Anthropology of Disaster (2004) with Anthony Oliver-Smith.
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