Suchergebnisse

Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground is an ethnographic account of the impacts of climate change in Shishmaref, Alaska. In this small Iupiaq community, flooding and erosion are forcing community members to consider relocation as the only possible solution for long-term safety. However, a tangled web of policy obstacles, lack of funding, and organizational challenges leaves the community without a clear way forward, creating serious questions of how to maintain cultural identity under the new climate regime. Elizabeth Marino analyzes this unique and grounded example of a warming world as a confluence of political injustice, histories of colonialism, global climate change, and contemporary development decisions. The book merges theoretical insights from disaster studies, political analysis, and passages from field notes into an eminently readable text for a wide audience. This is an ethnography of climate change; a glimpse into the lived experiences of a global phenomenon

PurposeThe authors engage a set of critical discussions on key concepts in disaster studies with attention to recent critiques of the concept "community," which decry the term's imprecision and problematic insinuation of consensus. The authors' objective is to explore for enduring and redeeming merit in the use of the term in disaster prevention, response and recovery and in collaborative social science research more broadly.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on case studies drawn from the authors' ongoing, longitudinal studies of community-based work with Spanish-speaking community leaders in San José, California and rural Indigenous communities in Alaska.FindingsThe authors synthesize unromantic critiques of the community concept that surface important matters of inequality that complicate efforts for decolonizing disaster work with a view of community as an often utopian project servicing redistributions and relocations of the loci of power. It is a term not only invoked in scholarship and the work of governmental and nongovernmental agencies but also one with deeply symbolic and contextualized meaning.Originality/valueThe authors' interpretation is that we must at once be critical and unromantic in studying and working with "community" while also recognizing its utopian fecundity. Abandoning the concept altogether would not only create a massive lacuna in everyday speech but also we fear too strong a language in opposition to the community concept metaphor telegraphs a hostility toward those who use it to mobilize scarce social, political and material resources to confront power and contest structural violence.

AbstractTheories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the "vulnerable" acts to discursively nullify the everywhere‐visible "resilience," toughness, and genius that exist in communities that are habitually exposed to risk and hazards. We argue that constructing vulnerability as a characteristic of subaltern peoples and marginalized places is truncated at best and can perpetuate violence—epistemic, semiotic, and material—at worst. To identify the "vulnerable" is, we contend, necessarily a process of otherizing and essentializing. We see and are concerned to further encourage an emergent form of disaster anthropology that is particularly oriented toward understanding and theorizing the institutions, systems, and individuals that structure risk, and in the process to focus attention away from "the vulnerable." To our surprise, this has emerged in recent anthropological writings in very particular ways. We find the orientation away from vulnerable populations among our colleagues who write at the intersections of disaster institutions and local communities. Here, we recognize vulnerability conceived not merely as historical inequity that produces negative outcomes, but as nested and contested sites of struggle for different visions of utopian futures, for contrasting articulations of what constitutes risk, and for diverse cultural logics of the good.