A.J. FAAS San Jose State University Is Vulnerability an Outdated Subjects and Spaces Theories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years.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 everywherevisible “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. [disaster, otherwise, postcolonial, vulnerability] Concept? After Introduction ulnerability thinking has enjoyed pride of place in theoretical frameworks guiding the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Since the late 1970s, “vulnerability” has served as a boundary concept unifying disparate disciplines’ engagements with disaster (despite disciplinary difference; O’Brien et al. 2004). It has been a galvanizing force in the rise of the subfield of disaster anthropology (Hoffman 2010) and a central feature in how we, the authors, have written and thought through the inequities of risk distribution across a wide variety of cultural and geographic contexts (Marino 2015; Faas 2016). Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of the word “vulnerable” and “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 flatten and simplify diverse communities, as well as discursively nullify the everywhere-visible “resilience,” toughness, and genius that exists in communities, and subsets of communities, that are habitually exposed to risk. This discomfort comes to the fore in surprising and personal ways. For example, Elizabeth, one of the authors, received a Christmas card in the mail from a friend in Anaktuvuk Pass. Anaktuvuk is a small Inupiat community in the Brooks Range of Alaska that would meet the criteria for “vulnerability” in any number of social scientifically produced vulnerability indices (e.g., hazard exposure, wealth, age, livelihood diversity, indigenous population, housing stock, infrastructure dependence; cf. Cutter et al. 2003). In the card, this friend invited Elizabeth’s family to her house—in the event of the apocalypse. This is funny, but (and this is true) it is also a generous and valuable invitation; because both Elizabeth and her friend believe that in the event of complete societal collapse, out of the two of them, the family in Anaktuvuk is the one more likely to survive. The joke here belies a joint and foundational recognition of the capabilities and persistence of people and local V ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 33–46, ISSN 0094-0496, online C 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All ISSN 1548-1425. rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/napa.12132 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License ELIZABETH K. MARINO Oregon State University—Cascades Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 institutions in Anaktuvuk Pass. So why is it that that community, and not the author’s, would be labeled “vulnerable” by most social scientific literature? Is vulnerability really what we are trying to capture? What this anecdote and the other thousands of stories about the strengths present in marginalized and politically oppressed communities point to is that there is a contradiction, on its face, in labeling these individuals and communities “vulnerable”— whether to climate change, technological failures, or other forms of hazard and disaster. Going further, we suggest in this article that identifying or labeling particular cultural groups, neighborhoods, or geographical locations as “vulnerable” can in itself constitute an act of marginalization and oppression; and mistakenly focus attention on the experiences and “cultures” of the communities exposed to risk, rather than on the significantly more vast assemblage of culture-bearing actors and institutions engaged in the (re)production, distribution, and contestation of risk, resources, and possible futures. Our argument here unfolds in five subsequent parts. Following this introduction, we acknowledge how vulnerability, as a boundary concept, is and has been useful in application, policy-enacting spaces, and cross-disciplinary engagement. This section is critical to a difficult discussion about how to apply anthropological insights broadly. It is also our paean to the usefulness and radicality that theories of vulnerability have been, considering the way disasters are typically conceived of in other disciplines and across non-academic institutions. But in the third section we move to critique standing definitions of vulnerability by arguing that identifying a community as vulnerable has tacit implications that can function to perpetuate marginalization and violence in subaltern communities and spaces. In contrast to this labeling of the “vulnerable,” we begin articulating a theory of vulnerability that calls ethnographic attention to both contemporary and historical contestations in the face of risk, instead of focusing on the outcomes of historical contingencies and oppressions as risk. To further this argument, in the fourth section we use case studies to highlight how disasters are sites of homogenization and the struggle against homogenization. Here, our point is that during disasters, assemblages of actors engage in constructions of meaning. We posit here that training our ethnographic gaze on that active and unfolding contestation and construction is 34 May 2020 a way to enlarge the scope of disaster anthropology to include a reckoning with the otherwise, or the multiple logics, utopias, and indeed alternative modernities (after Gaonkar 2001) that exist as potentialities within the context of risk. In the fifth section, we demonstrate how bureaucratic logics alternatively come into view or else become invisible in disaster scenarios. Our point here is to support our call for ethnographic focus on where, in disaster scenarios, contestations over meaning and logics are alternatively activated and silenced. We also want to demonstrate that focusing on the culture of “vulnerable communities” can effectively obscure culturally-steeped bureaucratic logic. Finally, we end with a concluding section on the implications of our argument. In this final section, we argue for a new theory of vulnerability in disaster anthropology, one that conceives of vulnerability not as a community, neighborhood, people, or bounded domain subject to risk or harm, but rather as assemblages of diverse subjects, institutions, materials, and meanings that are vulnerable to acts of oppression, suppression, theft, and erasure. Our objective is to encourage focused ethnographic work in this direction and to encourage the translation of this research across disciplines and into the fields of policy and practice. Vulnerability as Tr a n s l a t i o n a l Let us begin by pointing out that the concept of vulnerability has long been useful. As we have both argued elsewhere (Marino 2015; Faas 2016; Sun and Faas 2018), as an organizing concept in disaster studies, vulnerability is primarily meaningful because it orients critical attention to inequity and the sociohistorical production of disasters. What theories of vulnerability posit is that disasters are products of histories regularly mistaken for nature; a social calculus (Browne et al. 2020), rather than environmental chance. Anthony Oliver-Smith’s much cited review in the Annual Review of Anthropology defined the term disasters for a generation of disaster scholars, using vulnerability as its anchoring concept. He writes, “Recent perspectives in anthropological research define a disaster as a process/event involving a combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of environmental vulnerability” (1996:305 [our emphasis]). 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice Mainstreaming the theoretical argument that disasters are socially produced, as Oliver-Smith has done in his decades-spanning career, has been monumentally challenging. Case studies from across disaster research demonstrate that the naturalization of disasters has proven difficult to shake in popular imagination and policy-making (Olson 2018; Sun and Faas 2018; Button 2016). Suggesting that disasters are not “natural,” that those who suffer were not primarily chosen by fate or chance, constituted a cataclysmic shift in the understanding of disaster events. This was true in 1983 when geographer Kenneth Hewitt (1983) argued against the prevailing wisdom of technocratic solutions to disasters, and in 2004 when Karen O’Brien and colleagues (2004) challenged the conception of vulnerability by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for foregrounding hazard exposure instead of social vulnerability, a condition of vulnerability linked to the political and environmental circumstances in which at-risk communities found themselves. In both cases, the default assumption by powerful state actors and physical scientists was that to protect people from harm was to limit people’s exposure to environmental or technological hazards themselves. Suggesting instead that solutions lay in, for example, reducing people’s exposure to extreme poverty or lack of political representation, and that then folks could handle the weather themselves, was (and in many, many cases remains) a radical notion. Disaster anthropologists and geographers have pushed forward the theory that disasters are primarily social phenomena, paying special attention to vulnerability as borne of root causes—the long arcs of colonialism, development, global capitalism, and modernity (Oliver-Smith 1999, 1996; Marino 2015; Faas 2016; Barrios 2017a). This work has demonstrated that the kinds of human ecologies, economies, and geospatial constructions encouraged in many (post)colonial contexts and in late liberalism more broadly are often poorly adapted, and poorly adaptable, to changing ecological conditions or emergent hazards. Colonial projects set up many, and many particular (read: subaltern), villages, urban spaces, and people to fail—especially in the face of environmental change. If crisis and disasters reveal underlying social structures (Barrios 2017b), then anthropologists have shown that social relationships bound up in (post)colonial and capitalist projects are falling to ruin. Annals of Anthropological Practice For several decades, disaster anthropologists have been producing a living record of the fragilities of colonial projects, global capitalism, and modernity by documenting disaster processes and making clear the historical production of these crises over time. We are witnesses to subjects suffering at the fissures and fault lines of these systems, and we critique popular narratives of disasters’ naturalization by pointing out the possibility that things could have been different, that the communities with whom and in which we work could have been spared, and that the prefabricated house, built in Iowa, with drip-oil heating, shipped up an Arctic river at great expense, which breaks down under the weight of the first storm, is the absurd foil of modernity, not of the wind (Marino 2015). Critically—and perhaps ironically—vulnerability is also a useful concept because it has proven legible in practical settings and policy-making or policy-enacting spaces. Relative to other social theories, vulnerability, though admittedly often a simplified and less pointedly historically critical version thereof, has proven exportable. It is a boundary concept that translates in applied spaces. The IPCC did, for example, take up social vulnerability as a leading construct in its fourth and fifth reports (IPCC 2007, 2014); and following this, they invited many more social scientists to join in articulating the state of knowledge on climate change. Risk maps gave way to vulnerability indices (especially the work of Susan Cutter; e.g., Cutter et al. 2003); and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States used the term economic vulnerability in the 2017 National Preparedness Report (FEMA 2017), even though the document mostly continues to equate vulnerability with hazard exposure. The translational aspect of “vulnerability” is important because disaster anthropologists have been especially committed to the application of their work in direct ways. Within our subdiscipline there is cultural currency, and not insubstantial pressure, to apply anthropological knowledge directly to the field. “Vulnerability” is well suited as a vehicle for bringing the radical critique at the heart of political ecology to diverse and powerful audiences. As an example, Elizabeth was a U.S. science delegate at the Arctic Science Ministerial in October 2018, a political meeting held to reaffirm commitments between nation-states to continue expensive research programs in the Arctic. At that meeting, there were a number of U.S. 35 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License I s Vu l n e r a b i l i t y a n O u t d a t e d C o n c e p t ? Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 political appointees, such as current and past appointed directors of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and NASA, and many of the most highly regarded Arctic natural scientists in the world. An important topic at the meeting was the nexus of science and disaster planning, though throughout the meeting “exposure” and “vulnerability” were used interchangeably—despite decades of social scientific research demonstrating otherwise. Throughout the meeting, the few social scientists present attempted to articulate how vulnerability is empirically, theoretically, and experientially different from exposure; and to a certain extent, it worked– there was widespread interest in our appeal. The critical point here is that, in cross-disciplinary or applied spaces, “vulnerability” becomes a starting point for “resocializing” harm (Farmer 2004) to introduce the longue durée into an often primarily material and naturalized discussion typically focusing on only the most proximal factors—and that it is possible to do so. Conversely, if anthropologists in these scenarios try to talk to an atmospheric chemist or a hydrologist about precarity (as used by Anna Tsing), discourse (as used by Michel Foucault), or structural violence (as used by Paul Farmer), those ideas can fall outside of a chemists’ or hydrologists scope of consideration, even if they are sympathetic to the ideas. Vulnerability, on the other hand, reaches across disciplines and, especially, across formal institutions. However it is being interpreted, vulnerability is appropriate to bring up at meetings like the Arctic Science Ministerial. The fact that it is legible (albeit defanged) in these settings gives anthropologists an opportunity to bring our theoretical orientations into spaces of application and decision-making. “Vulnerability” is palatable, and it is an entrée into discussing the much needed monetary and political investment in at risk and suffering communities. But there is an acute perversity— and an implicit whitewashing—to envisioning vulnerability as an attribute of a people or place in need. Vulnerability as Violence What we argue here is 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, much in the same way Lila 36 May 2020 Abu-Lughod (1991) critiques the notion of culture as an imaginary complicit in structuring hierarchy and power within anthropology. When communities are defined as “vulnerable,” they are necessarily, if often invisibly, defined in opposition to nonvulnerable communities, implicitly conceived as the corrupt, passive, powerless, deficient inverse of resilient communities (see Barrios 2016 for critique of “resilience”). Even as we are critiquing colonial structures, for example, we implicitly sketch out a chimera of the successful model of those same structures by who is left out of our analysis; who is conceived of as not “vulnerable.” We can see here how the sheer, blunt force of hierarchy and the historically shifting and contextually articulated powers of whiteness (Preston 2010, 2012), patriarchy (Ortner 2014), and class come to the fore and are at once reasserted and invisible in the notion and grammar of vulnerability (Bonilla-Silva 2012); how easily and problematically we inadvertently characterize vulnerability and “the vulnerable” as subject to merely a step or life-stage on the way to resilience or disaster. Speaking on disaster education through the lens of critical race theory, John Preston (2012:13) claims, “in practice, the ‘fittest’ in disaster education is often tacitly taken to be the white middle class heteronormative family.” If this is the case, are not “vulnerable communities” still conceived of as other than, in need of correction, while somehow simultaneously being bounded and essentialized? A similar argument pointing out the implications of “vulnerability” has been given before, namely in Greg Bankoff’s (2004, 2001) searing critique of vulnerability as a covert reproduction of concepts such as “tropicality” or “development” that underwrite the interventions of the Global North in the Global South. In alignment with our concerns here, Bankoff argues that vulnerability appears to offer a “radical critique to the prevailing technocratic paradigm by placing the emphasis, instead, on what [social factor] renders communities unsafe” (2004:25); however, he notes, it is also, “still a paradigm for framing the world in such a way that it effectively divides it into two, between a zone where disasters occur regularly and one where they do not” (2001:25-26). When vulnerability is applied to certain places and people, he argues, it can carry with it the tacit implication that what is needed is still a “cure” from the West. Locating vulnerability within geographies, neighborhoods, social identities, or even bodies can 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice render those geographies, neighborhoods, or bodies as “weak” or “risky.” Geographer Julien Rebotier (2012) argues that this is a discursive act of territorializing. Rebotier’s work is centered on the use, mapping, and discursive performance of the term “risk” in Latin America, but we see clear parallels in how labels of vulnerability affix to geographical spaces, communities, or people. As Rebotier argues, “By performativity, we understand that merely naming, identifying or managing risk is enough to establish its existence as a social fact” (Rebotier 2012:394). In other words, when we identify the “vulnerable,” conceptually among a particular demographic, or by drawing a circle on a map, we impart to it a social reality. Rebotier suggests that the ability to label “risk” is an act designed to assert power over those same places. To claim the power of labeling is to claim a kind of authorship over the social reality of a place. It is not inconsequential then, we think, that in disaster studies, the affixation of a label does not happen in the same way to actors or institutions that are active in creating and distributing risk. Theories of vulnerability, as they appear in the anthropological literature to date, can aid in both affixing labels to certain “vulnerable” communities and actors, while rendering invisible those communities and actors considered “non-vulnerable” (according to this logic). There are, for example, no theory-driven “labels” for the actors who explicitly or implicitly perpetuate the inequitable distribution of risk. While we talk about systems of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, the individuals and communities who perpetuate these structures are swept into a historical gloss of systems of oppression, while those who suffer under these systems get labeled “vulnerable,” “marginalized,” and in need of rescue. We ask here whether the very act of labeling communities that suffer the burdens of history as “vulnerable” in effect compounds these historical burdens. Sheldon Jackson’s biography is a useful tool when thinking through these ideas. Jackson was the secretary of education in Alaska in 1885 and was resolute in his conviction to eradicate indigenous languages and bring market economies to rural Alaska, which included building substantial expanses of infrastructure. This infrastructure development was perhaps the most critical piece to the production of high modernity and the marginalization of formal and informal indigenous institutions in the Arctic (Marino 2015). Until the 1970s, Jackson’s biogra- Annals of Anthropological Practice phies were glowing in their adoration of his fortitude and determination (Hinkley 1964), and he is still celebrated in many parts of the state. But of course, Jackson veritably embodied colonialism. In Alaska, high mobility among Inupiat communities, which was present before the colonial push into rural spaces, was particularly adaptive to the always dynamic coast; and Jackson was a singularly impactful proponent of building infrastructure and creating policies that coerced communities into places exposed to flooding. But Jackson, his descendants, and his home (he died in North Carolina) are what? Resilient? In the end, they have no label, no noun, tied to their decisions, which distributed risk. Our theories do not exert power over their culture, identity, or territory. Conversely the people and territory to whom that risk was distributed become “vulnerable.” This discrepancy in labeling highlights how theories of vulnerability render a welcome invisibility to parts of the system—even as those theories point to the sociohistorical production of risk. Further, we wish to suggest that using theories of vulnerability and the identifier “vulnerable” focuses attention on the actions and decisions of the West in history, and as a means to focus on, but also flatten, the cultures, habits, and experiences of the marginalized in the present. This is an asymmetrical analysis. Our critique resonates with Bruno Latour’s (1993:97) problematizing that Westerners cannot see the West as a culture and reiterates Laura Nader’s (1972) clarion call to “study up.” It articulates with Eric Wolf’s claim that there exists a tacit narrative of modernity, which reads, “If the West could only find ways of breaking that grip [of cultural tradition], it could perhaps save the victim” (Wolf 1982:49; emphasis ours). It is a theory that falls into the traps of metropolitan provincialism—“the ignorance that hegemonic centers usually have of the production of non-hegemonic centers” (Ribiero 2006:378)—and fails to adequately provincialize the West (Chakrabarty 1992). In what follows, we identify recent work that, we feel, focuses on a new kind of ethnographic insight. In these case studies, we see a glimpse of disasters not framed as a unidirectional analysis of a tacitly accepted colonial power that then renders a colonized form of powerlessness, but as a context in which there are active contestations to enact multiple futures. We feel these case studies pose new questions in disaster anthropology and set out new parameters for conceiving of vulnerability as not merely places and peoples destined for negative outcomes, but as 37 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License I s Vu l n e r a b i l i t y a n O u t d a t e d C o n c e p t ? Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 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. Throughout the following sections, we stretch and strain theories of vulnerability to help us articulate this contestation while eschewing bounded notions of “the vulnerable” that play into narratives of subordination that anthropologists are actively attempting to disrupt. Vulnerability and the Fight against Homogenization Disasters are dangerous—not merely materially and corporally, but also as signifying systems—sites of homogenization and reduction, which is particularly true for those individuals and communities identified by humanitarian aid organizations as “victims.” What can be, prior to a disaster, a complex differentiation of power, identities, and capabilities, can be, post disaster, glossed as the singular construct of “victim” or “aid recipient” by an outsider, or the powerful. And, in those instances where difference is recognized, it is often in acts of otherizing that obscure the cultural schema and practices of the state and nongovernmental bureaucracies ostensibly serving those affected by disaster, while reifying their subaltern status. Homogenization of Victims In post-earthquake Haiti, one of Mark Schuller’s (2016:171) colleagues and interviewees said about humanitarian aid workers’ assumptions, I had the impression that people thought that there are no more Haitians, that Haitians are not smart anymore. Since it was reported that houses had collapsed, that houses had been destroyed, and rubble had fallen on the population, it seems they thought that rubble fell on our intelligence too. Maybe they think rubble also fell on Haitians’ knowledge. Schuller goes on to explain the relegation of all Haitians to a subordinate social slot of “recipients of aid,” and the elevation of foreign humanitarian workers as “givers of aid.” This process rendered Haitians with expertise and knowledge invisible while justifying the elevation in prestige and economic incentives for non-Haitians. This malign neglect of Haitian expertise was not only applied to Haitians who had important local knowledge, but 38 May 2020 the act of demarcating “victim” from “giver” also obscured from view some Haitians with international and technical expertise. To be a recipient of aid, as Schuller and his colleagues from Haiti describe, is to be stripped of all other identities and capabilities. Schuller’s point here is critical because homogenization has a monetized objective: if nonHaitians need justification for making a large, nonHaitian salary, then it is necessary for there to be no intelligent Haitians. The histories of structural violence and isomorphic imaginaries of whiteness and expertise (especially in relationship to the Haitian revolution) loom large in this retelling, and they beg the question: if vulnerability is a social and relational construction, would vulnerability to disasters (as we typically conceive of it) be alleviated here even under the most successful of humanitarian efforts? Even if enough houses had been built (Sontag 2012) and cholera had not killed thousands of Haitians (Lantagne 2013), what risks would be averted, and which would be created if the idea remained salient that rubble had fallen on Haitian knowledge? Similarly, in Michele Gamburd’s (2013) ethnographic account of the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka, she calls attention to the subordination of aid recipients and the (re)production of class relations in the “golden wave” of humanitarian aid for disaster relief that flowed into Sri Lanka. Here, “givers” (local intermediaries or the agencies—state and NGO—themselves) become articulated through habit and discourse as the superior actors in exchange relations, while recipients become debtors. Gamburd, like Schuller, points out that the very act of giving may produce or reify unequal relationships through othering and negating “debtors’” claims to space and economic activity. The inequitable power delineation of “giver” and “debtor” facilitated a reconstruction process that had little regard for local culture in the design of houses and, as is common, new zoning regulations that benefitted corporate interests (tourism) at the expense of local small business (fishing). Here preexisting class relations are entrenched in remarkable ways post-disaster, actively subverting and oppressing alternative visions of what is a desirable (and legally binding, via zoning) future. Commodification and Co-optation of the “Other’s” Culture in Disasters In the most startling examples of the homogenization of culture and people in disaster contexts, 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice we have cultural commodification (Zhang 2016) and co-option (Faas 2017a, 2017b). Qiaoyun Zhang (2016) 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. In harrowing language, Zhang tells a story of the Qiang becoming “forever indebted” to the state for recovery. Most shockingly, however, the reconstruction of Qiang housing structures and communities has been turned, through reconstruction decision-making by outsiders, into a tourist hub that essentially eradicates Qiang control over their own cultural expression. As Zhang writes, Their heritage culture is represented through a series of market-oriented static, uniformed, and eroticized tourism items. The state has also interfered and alienated the Qiang’s access to and ownership of the heritage cultural practices, making the heritage as quintessential representation and property of the nationalist construct of state power, profit-generating tourism performances, and nostalgia-arousing activities for the leisure and entertainment of mainly middleclass Han tourists. In this case, disaster acts as a fecund opportunity for the state to step in and claim for itself the cultural heritage of the Qiang people, and to flatten out this heritage for the consumption of the ethnic majority. Disasters here provide an excuse for the state to further its own vision of who the Qiang people are and to monetize that vision for their own aims. Disaster reconstruction can also act as a moment of co-option, the appropriation of cultural memes and practices. Faas (2017a) writes about minga cooperative work parties—traditional Andean practices that have for centuries been instruments of both subaltern agency and colonial domination. Following devastating eruptions of Mt. Tungurahua in the Ecuadorian highlands, community and NGO strategies seemingly aligned to organize resettlement and infrastructure construction principally through mingas. However, the practice, while taking on the mantel of traditional cooperation and reciprocity, became, in some cases, articulated through a capitalist ethos of the work day, competi- Annals of Anthropological Practice tiveness, and new translations of traditional practices. In one post-disaster resettlement, displaced smallholding campesinos had adapted to the prolonged period of activating agricultural production in the new community (roughly four years total) by alternating between migrating to nearby cities for wage labor or working their lands back on the still-erupting volcano. But when, after three years, the long-awaited irrigation project began with funding from the Provincial Council of Chimborazo and the World Bank, resettlement NGO Esquel hired engineers and paid laborers to design and manage construction, which shifted mingas to weekdays, as the engineers were not expected to work weekends. This was an even greater obstacle for wage laborers to fulfill their minga duties. Weekday mingas were impossible for almost all of them and many fell increasingly behind in their obligations and were facing exclusion from irrigation rights, seriously limiting their possibilities for returning to cultivate in the new site. Faas demonstrates that disasters can act as moments of cultural domination by outsiders— coopting traditional solidarity movements to promote neoliberal, state-supported work habits—and agendas (in this case both the state and NGOs) using the very language and form of traditional cultural practices, and by promising social mobility to those who comply (see Faas 2018). These work habits— particular cultural relationships with time (as opposed to the task orientation that was more common among agriculturalists)—were not questioned or contested; though several complained loudly and often of their hardship, the temporal regime of the nine-to-five work week was never cited. They existed as facts of the world to which resettlers were compelled to adapt. This is particularly interesting because the otherwise was in plain view—neighboring villages accommodated the diversity of household economic strategies by generally organizing mingas on weekends—yet the exclusion carried the weight of fact. The problem here was that the relations producing exclusion were unrecognized—the anthropologist, it should be noted, only came to appreciate the problem with the benefit of distance after leaving the field and poring over field notes—while the relationality and procedurality of such vulnerability that we aim to bring into view here could render visible greater parameters of possibility. These above case studies accomplish two things. The first is they point to a growing interest, and vital need, for disaster anthropology to study 39 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License I s Vu l n e r a b i l i t y a n O u t d a t e d C o n c e p t ? Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 the practices, habits, assumptions, and cultural orientations of the bureaucracies and institutions that create disaster policies, something we discuss in some detail below. Vulnerability theories for years have pointed out the misdeeds of the powerful, but we call here for more nuance, cultural analysis, and detailed descriptions of the acts and desires of people in power—a refusal to give in to the gloss of “acts of the state,” and the suggestion that we must simultaneously hold up and provincialize the actions and actors that distribute risk. The works above also do something else: they withstand the convenience of overgeneralization of the harmed, and the trope that outsiders should know more about “local culture.” Schuller does not write about how non-Haitian humanitarian agents should know more about Haitians, or even about Haitian history (though we certainly would not argue against reading more Haitian history). He argues instead that humanitarian agents should know that there is no such facile entity as a “Haitian,” which outsiders can semiotically construct, decipher, know, and then “help.” Similarly provocative, Zhang suggests that reification of Qiang culture is the exact opposite of knowing—that “cultural awareness” as enacted after a disaster by the state is the ultimate violation of human rights. And Faas is clear that minga practice, capitalism, and bureaucracy are not mutually exclusive, although there are important tensions; rather, he points to the fact that only one of the three was subjected to being read as “culture” and modified to suit outsider agendas, the latter of which were never questioned. These case studies resist the easiest labels and instead attend to the desires and actions of the actors present. Vulnerability as the Invisible Logic of Bureaucracies in Disasters Cultural collisions and contestations with bureaucracy often begin before the biophysical phenomena of disaster subside and endure long after they do. Disasters thrust affected communities into novel and amplified contact with large bureaucratic institutions—an encounter that has been characterized as a “collision of worlds” (Anderson 2006). The act of declaring a state of emergency, all on its own, enables actions that would be inconceivable under other conditions (Agamben 2005). This includes the rapid deployment of military and paramilitary agen- 40 May 2020 cies and operations, which often attend only to the “bare life” of human bodies (after Agamben 1998) and can often be neglectful of, or openly hostile to, the fuller lives of language, practice, relationality (material and semiotic), meaning, and cultural sensibilities (see especially Marchezini 2015 and Barrios 2017a). These national, international, regional, and (para)military systems cannot and do not become competent in local meanings and perspectives prior to action, and so they demand the reverse, that, in order to access aid or resources, local responders and other actors must instead learn the cultural memes and protocols of the bureaucratic systems that enter local contexts. For example, the U.S. National Incident Management System employs an organizational strategy for emergency response operations known as the Incident Command System, which is intended to facilitate the seamless integration of federal, state, and local response agencies and operations. However, it is the local responders who require and are given training to become fluent in the esoteric language, procedures, and regulations in the system (see Faas et al. 2017). The problems of cultural imposition masked as rational and disinterested bureaucratic navigation are also acute in Kate Browne’s (2015) ethnography of an extended black kin group’s prolonged and fraught struggles for recovery from Hurricane Katrina in St. Bernard’s Parish, Louisiana. Displaced survivors found their stresses compounded as they navigated unfamiliar bureaucratic channels with agents who not only used unfamiliar language but also were impatient with local black dialects. Though FEMA was mandated to contract “local, minority owned” businesses in the recovery process, such businesses were sidelined and unable to compete in the complex, high-stakes bidding processes. The next major disjuncture came in the form of treating victims as individuals and not recognizing large extended family networks as fundamental units of social organization. Ostensibly “culturally competent” mental health services focused on individuals, furthering their sense of isolation and discomfort, while importing mental health counselors not familiar with local people and life. For the bureaucratic institution, as with liberalism more broadly, only individuals are recognizable. This is a double movement that renders invisible both the historical and collective claims of the subaltern and reveals the unspoken whiteness constructed through the hyper-individualism that is endemic to so much bureaucratic practice. 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice Bureaucracies and institutions also imagine and invent their own cult objects that exercise tremendous power over those subjected to the bureaucratic cultural gaze. Chief among these objects are budgets and agendas. In his book, Governing Affect, Roberto Barrios (2017a) argues that for people who experience disasters, their own sense of ease, or emotional registers are routinely and purposefully neglected by bureaucracies tasked to aid in disaster recovery. The invisibility of affect here is contrasted with the budget, which is held up as the most valuable cultural object and organizing principle in bureaucratic practice, and never far from view (Barrios 2017a:64–76). Barrios demonstrates that, in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, so long as budgets were spent on time, reconstruction was considered successful. He quotes a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development who recognized this as neglecting local cultural needs: “We wanted to take cultural considerations into account but spending the budget on time became our top priority” (Barrios 2017a:66). The nonchalance with which literally all social, cultural, and environmental life outside of budget spreadsheets is bracketed out of consideration is chilling and bespeaks the absolute invisibility of conceiving of the budget itself as a “cultural consideration” of outsiders. Agendas are also powerful cultural objects in bureaucracy. They preclude flexibility while privileging particular cultural relationships with time. Elizabeth Marino and Heather Lazrus (2016) are critical of the ways in which the agendas of outside organizations severely limit locals’ ability to participate in determining their own futures in developing resettlement programs to respond to rising sea levels associated with climate change. Agendas can create path dependencies whereby certain embedded decisions preclude the consideration of alternatives and impose a rigidity that erases local conditions and preferences. These case studies do not divide the world into those who carry out history and those who receive it. Rather, they lay bare the cultural logics of the individuals and institutions that help create disasters and show them in contrast to the other cultural logics that might be present. But we would like to press this further. Our concern articulates with recent anthropological attention to bureaucratic institutions as sites of the (re)production of relations based on race, class, ethnicity (Schuller 2012); structural violence (Gupta 2012); and disci- Annals of Anthropological Practice plines and regulations that constrain human agency (Graeber 2015), amplify risk (Eldridge 2018; Eldridge and Reinke 2018), and reify the social and political economic structures of settler (post)colonialism (Clark 2015). But we are concerned also to recognize bureaucratic institutions as heterogeneous assemblages through, within, and against which well-intentioned actors make good faith attempts to realize pro-social objectives, as well as the processes by which these agendas and maneuvers are constrained or distorted in bureaucratic practice and interpersonal relations that are never quite institutionally neutralized (e.g., Faas 2018; James 2012). Approaches informed by these recent trends in ethnographic investigations not only bring into view the embeddedness and violence (material, political, semiotic, epistemic) of institutional practice, but also the multiple visions of the good produced, contested, or silenced both within and without bureaucratic institutions; in sum, it finds us minding the otherwise (McTighe and Raschig 2019). Moving from Community Vulnerability to a Suspension in Vulnerable Systems What we ultimately want to argue is for anthropologists to begin to articulate vulnerability in terms of the relationships and assemblages, which produce inequitable risk themselves (Marino 2013) and which are therefore the proper loci of investigating vulnerability. We contend that anthropologists should view disasters as contexts in which the systems of relations, the webs of social lives—which move risk and safety, materials and meaning, across space and time—become increasingly visible. Within these relations of relations, during and following times of acute risk and hazard, there will be contestations over which utopian future to follow, which version of the good to pursue, which category of risk is the scariest. When we bring ethnographic attention to “vulnerability” in these scenarios, we argue, this should be a call to describe the multiple visions being articulated, and the systems of relations and assemblages, which are the most vulnerable to subverting subaltern visions and voices as acts of violence, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. We argue that these sites of disagreement, and the relationality activated during these disagreements, are vulnerable to masking bureaucratic logics 41 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License I s Vu l n e r a b i l i t y a n O u t d a t e d C o n c e p t ? Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 as normative, and market-based economics as naturalized. And so, we must attend to the particular assemblages of actors, ideas, and materials that are susceptible to rendering military deployment as a “rational” and therefore invisible cultural logic; vulnerable to taking particular temporal regimes as normative, the “agenda” as sacrosanct, and the budget as an icon. We ask, when different visions of how to imagine the future collide—as they do in disaster scenarios, and in the histories which lead to them— which systems of relations are most vulnerable to using, or to have used, the blunt force of power to eliminate alternative ways of proceeding? Which systems of relations, which assemblages of actors, ideas, and materials are vulnerable to outcomes borne of oppression? To point to these sites of contestation, to bring ethnographic focus to relations of relations, which lock horns in these scenarios, is to orient the anthropology of disaster to the specific points in time, and trajectories across time, where contestations over what constitutes a meaningful future become subject to ugly brute force, to racism, homophobia, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and colonial impulses that end up disastrous. Like most good ideas in anthropology, this one emerged from our field sites themselves. It is obvious to those of us who have been in disaster contexts that, for example, colonized geographies or neighborhoods that flood are not vulnerable; that they are instead often incredibly resilient places and people who both reside in and contest systems of oppression. To point out that communities that flood are always struggling against the systems that (re)produce risk is to reclaim the sociality of theories of vulnerability. If a system of relations is abetted by colonial and racist institutions, practices, and discourses, for example, we can predict the likely inequitable distribution of risk born of these vulnerabilities. If a system of relations is not vulnerable to racism, for example, risk should be both lower and distributed equitably across society. However, the most exciting part of this theoretical framework, from our perspective, is what it includes. We happily anticipate disaster research dedicated to what the world might otherwise have been, and what it may yet otherwise become—the descriptions of utopian futures that neither have the backing of global colonial systems nor are underwritten by capitalist interests, the risk reduction strategies that go overlooked and under-described. We look forward to seeing the cultural logics that are not supported by current World Bank policy but may 42 May 2020 offer strategies for fewer deaths by wind. We look forward to an emergent disaster anthropology that contributes to World Anthroplogies (Restrepo and Escobar 2005), which offers critical insights into alternative modernities (Gaonkar 2001); and one that offers a vision of the habitus and desires of a FEMA accountant in Washington, D.C. Vulnerability as a Place of Hope: A Final Thought The psychological and philosophical literature on vulnerability arrives at the conclusion that vulnerability is a position of great promise, that it is here, and only here, that new habits can be formed, and that vulnerability is a position that does not necessarily suggest violence will occur (Petherbridge 2016). When the authors began this conversation about vulnerability nearly two years ago, arriving at a conclusion that in any way corroborated this idea seemed farfetched—indeed, vulnerability was conceived of as the cumulative outcome of the histories of violence and oppression that become articulated in crises and caused suffering. Vulnerability was not a site of promise—it was instead often a site of horror. Our conclusion today is the same in some regards, and different in others—but the two intellectual ideas we think are more in alignment. If the theory of vulnerability we advocate is that the organization of social relations that structure risk are vulnerable to racism (for example), does it not also suggest that these social relations may be sites of emancipatory action? If disaster reconstruction is vulnerable to disaster capitalism and the subordination of the poor, could it not also be a site of contestation where grass roots organization is victorious? Vulnerable systems of relations, delivery agents for the inequitable distribution of risk, are relations of relations that do not, perhaps, necessarily trigger the brute force of power and oppression. Indeed, articulating vulnerability as a process of contestation among alternative ways of being—where acts of violence are likely, but not necessary—not only holds promise, but it may indeed be the only place where radical social change, and ultimately justice, can occur. Resilience building can never accomplish this. Infusions of money or sea wall construction cannot accomplish this. If the diverse contestations among individuals and formal and informal institutions are exposed in disaster anthropology research, if our ethnographic endeavors map the systems of engagement around which both risk and safety emerge, then whiteness 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice becomes visible, patriarchy becomes visible, history becomes visible, and happily, alternative paths likewise come into view, including local concepts of time, pacifist responses to threat, and alternative responses to risk. Applying theories of vulnerability as they have previously been constructed, to the case of Sheldon Jackson, the Alaska secretary of education in the late 19th century, what is visible is how decisions from far away actors created communities in Alaska which are “vulnerable” to climate change today. What becomes visible is that colonial power, throughout history, causes risk. This is the radical critique of political ecology—and one that has been extremely useful. But under the theory of vulnerability that we construct here, what would also become visible, curious, and seductive are the visions of the future that Jackson ignored. What construct of the good was elided, what possible future left out, and what Inupiat technology rendered invisible? Most importantly, and with warm hearts, we ask, what utopian future could we follow, enact, and hold up, if the system of relations between state actors and Inupiat communities planning risk mitigation today— at the point of action where these systems are most vulnerable to racism and colonial impulse—were to resist racist and oppressive tendencies and embody cultural pluralism, historical awareness, and grace? Vulnerability, as we redefine it here, is a theoretical orientation that encompasses infinite possibility. We hold out hope of the unknown infinities that might bring about justice. Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank Roberto Barrios and Julie Maldonado for feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also grateful for the helpful comments of several anonymous reviewers who helped us clarify our argument. Finally, we especially thank our colleagues and friends in Alaska and Penipe for many of the insights and perspectives we discuss here. Quyana. Dios les pague. References Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Fox, 137–62. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Annals of Anthropological Practice 2005 State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, M. K. 2006. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bankoff, Gregory 2004. “Time is of the Essence: Disasters, Vulnerability and History.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 22(3):23– 42. ———. 2001 “Rendering the World Unsafe: “Vulnerability” as Western Discourse.” Disasters 25(1):19–35. Barrios, Roberto. 2016. “Resilience: A Commentary from the Vantage Point of Anthropology.” Annals of Anthropological Practice 40(1):28– 38. ———. 2017a Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2017b “What Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom? The Anthropology of Crises and Disasters at the Onset of the Anthropocene.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46:151–66. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2012. “The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America.” Ethnic and racial studies 35(2):173–94. Browne, Katherine E. 2015. Standing in the Need: Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home after Katrina. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Browne, Katherine, Elizabeth Marino, Heather Lazrus, and Keely Maxwell. 2020. “Engaged: Applying the Anthropology of Disaster to Practitioner Settings and Policy Creation.” In Disasters Upon Disasters: Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice, edited by Susanna Hoffman and Roberto Barrios. New York: Berghahn. Button, Gregory. 2016. Disaster Culture: Knowledge and Uncertainty in the Wake of Human and Environmental Catastrophe. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. ———. 43 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License I s Vu l n e r a b i l i t y a n O u t d a t e d C o n c e p t ? Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History.” Cultural Studies 6(3):337–57. Clark, A. Kim. 2015. “New Areas of State Action in Ecuador: Public Health and State Formation, c. 1925– 1950.” In State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule, edited by Christopher Krupa and David Nugent, 126–41. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cutter, Susan L., Bryan J. Boruff, and W. Lynn Shirley. 2003. “Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards.” Social Science Quarterly 84(2):242–61. Eldridge, Erin R. 2018. “Administrating Violence Through Coal Ash Policies and Practices.” Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 4(1):99–115. Eldridge, Erin R., and Amanda J. Reinke. 2018. “Introduction Ethnographic Engagement with Bureaucratic Violence.” Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 4(1):94–98. Faas, A. J. 2016. “Disaster Vulnerability in Anthropological Perspective,” Annals of Anthropological Practice 40(1):9–22. ———. 2017a “Enduring Cooperation: Space, Time, and Minga Practice in DisasterInduced Displacement and Resettlement in the Ecuadorian Andes.” Human Organization 76(2):99–108. ———. 2017b “Reciprocity and Vernacular Statecraft: Changing Practices of Andean Cooperation in Post-Disaster Highland Ecuador.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 22(3):495– 513. ———. 2018 “Petit Capitalisms in Disaster, or the Limits of Neoliberal Imagination: Displacement, Recovery, and Opportunism in Highland Ecuador.” Economic Anthropology 5(1):32–44. Faas, A. J., Anne-Lise Velez, Clare FitzGerald, Branda Nowell, and Toddi Steelman. 2017. “Patterns of Preference and Practice: Bridging Actors in Wildfire Response Networks in the American Northwest.” Disasters 41(3):527–48. 44 May 2020 Farmer, Paul. 2004. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology 45(3):305–25. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 2017. 2017 National Preparedness Report. Washington, DC: United States Department of Homeland Security. Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2013. The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. 2001. Alternative Modernities. edited by Dilip Parameshwar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Graeber, David. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hewitt, Kenneth. 1983. “The Idea of Calamity in a Technocratic Age.” In Interpretations of Calamity: From the Viewpoint of Human Ecology, edited by Kenneth Hewitt, 3–32. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin. Hinckley, T. C. 1964. “Sheldon Jackson as Preserver of Alaska’s Native Culture.” Pacific Historical Review 33(4):411–24. Hoffman, Susanna M. 2010. “Of Increasing Concern: Disaster and the Field of Anthropology.” Anthropology News 51(7):3–4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2007. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team], R. K. Pachauri and A. Reisinger, eds. Geneva: IPCC. ———. 2014 Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. R. K. Pachauri and L. A. Meyer, eds. Geneva: IPCC. 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice James, Erica Caple. 2012. “Witchcraft, Bureaucraft, and the Social Life of (US)AID in Haiti.” Cultural Anthropology 27(1):50–75. Lantagne, Daniele, G. Balakrish Nair, Claudio F. Lanata, and Alejandro Cravioto. 2013. “The Cholera Outbreak in Haiti: Where and How Did it Begin?” In Cholera Outbreaks, edited by G. Balakrish Nair and Yoshifumi Takeda, 145–64. Berlin: Springer. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marchezini, Victor. 2015. “The Biopolitics of Disaster: Power, Discourses, and Practices.” Human Organization 74(4):362–71. Marino, Elizabeth. 2015. Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground: An Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, Alaska. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press. ———. 2013 “Environmental Migration: The Future of Anthropology in Social Vulnerability, Disaster and Discourse.” In Environmental Anthropology: Future Directions, edited by Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, 188–203. New York: Routledge. Marino, Elizabeth, and Heather Lazrus. 2016. “‘We Are Always Getting Ready’: How Diverse Notions of Time and Flexibility Build Adaptive Capacity in Alaska and Tuvalu.” In Contextualizing Disaster, edited by Gregory V. Button and Mark Schuller, 153–70. New York: Berghan. McTighe, Laura, and Megan Raschig. 2019. “Introduction: An Otherwise Anthropology.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, July 31. Accessed September 9, 2019. https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/introduction-an-otherwiseanthropology. Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell H. Hynes, 284–311. New York: Pantheon Books. O’Brien, Karen, Siri Eriksen, Ane Schjolden, and Lynn P. Nygaard. Annals of Anthropological Practice 2004. “What’s in a Word? Conflicting Interpretations of Vulnerability in Climate Change Research.” CICERO Working Paper. Oliver-Smith, Anthony. 1996. “Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25:303–28. ———. 1999 “Peru’s Five-Hundred-Year Earthquake: Vulnerability in Historical Context.” In The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, 74–88. New York: Routledge. Olson, Richard. 2018. “Speaking Truth to Power: Please Don’t Call Them Natural Disasters.” Research Counts, Natural Hazards Center. Accessed September 2, 2019. https:// hazards.colorado.edu/news/researchcounts/speaking-truth-to-power-pleasedon-t-call-them-natural-disasters. Ortner, Sherry B. 2014. “Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America.” History and Anthropology 25(4):530–49. Petherbridge, D. 2016. “What’s Critical about Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition, and Power.” Hypatia 31(3):589–604. Preston, John. 2010. “Prosthetic White Hyper-Masculinities and ‘Disaster Education’.” Ethnicities 10(3):331– 43. ———. 2012 Disaster Education: ‘Race’, Equity and Pedagogy. Boston, MA: Sense Publishers. Rebotier, Julien. 2012. “Vulnerability Conditions and Risk Representations in Latin-America: Framing the Territorializing Urban Risk.” Global Environmental Change 22(2):391–98. Restrepo, Eduardo, and Arturo Escobar. 2005. “‘Other Anthropologies and Anthropology Otherwise’ Steps to a World Anthropologies Framework.” Critique of Anthropology 25(2):99–129. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2006. “World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 26(4):363– 86. 45 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License I s Vu l n e r a b i l i t y a n O u t d a t e d C o n c e p t ? Vo l u m e 4 4 Number 1 Schuller, Mark. 2012. Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2016 “The Tremors Felt Round the World”: Haiti’s Earthquake as Global Imagined Community.” In Contextualizing Disaster, edited by Gregory V. Button and Mark Schuller, 66–88. New York: Berghan. Sontag, Deborah. 2012. “Rebuilding in Haiti Lags after Billions in Post-Quake Aid.” New York Times, December 23, 2012. 46 May 2020 Sun, Lei, and A. J. Faas. 2018. “Social Production of Disasters and Disaster Social Constructs: An Exercise in Disambiguation and Reconciliation.” Disaster Prevention and Management 27(5):623–35. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zhang, Qiaoyun. 2016. “Disaster Response and Recovery: Aid and Social Change.” Annals of Anthropological Practice 40(1):86–97. 21539588, 2020, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/napa.12132 by James Waldram - Cochrane Canada Provision , Wiley Online Library on [17/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Annals of Anthropological Practice
0
You can add this document to your study collection(s)
Sign in Available only to authorized usersYou can add this document to your saved list
Sign in Available only to authorized users(For complaints, use another form )