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Is Vulnerability an Outdated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
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ELIZABETH K. MARINO
Oregon State University—Cascades
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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
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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]).
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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