Tackling and Regulating Disasters. An Introduction

The idea for this thematic issue came from the International scholarly conference “Ethnography of Disasters” (Sofia, 11–12 May 2021) which was a continuation of the first steps taken by academic anthropologists in Bulgaria to study disasters and catastrophes from the point of view of their particular scientific disciplines. All the texts included in this issue were selected from the conference’s 44 presentations by participants from 12 countries of Europe and Asia,^[1] with the aim of stimulating the thematic development of anthropological disaster research, which seems extremely relevant in today’s alarming time of global crises. The contributors here have approached the topic of tackling and if possible controlling disasters from three social perspectives, first of which is protecting the ecological environment, in all its complexity, in regional contexts and achievements. The second perspective is that of protecting traditional cultures within their inherited traditional—but developing—norms and values. A third consideration is the need to promote and support the rights and interests of divergent groups of people, identified and organised in different ways, in their relationships with the natural and social environment. The authors of this issue are convinced that the ethnological observations and discussions based upon the case studies presented here could add a valuable perspective to the emergence and spread of their ideas, as well as help in the process of relief management, mitigation, and the overcoming of crises and critical situations.

In the past and still today, disasters constitute a significant factor in the construction of the objective framework of life on Earth, determining its context, content, and meaning, having accompanied and often shaped the dynamics of life continuously from ancient times until today. Most disasters strike unexpectedly and many cause serious material damage and human loss that affect physical and psychological health, politics and economy, education, spiritual activities, and the cultures of individuals and communities. Disasters remain long present in cultural memory and local tradition, creating ways of thinking in affected populations who then develop patterns and strategies of attitude and response which, if adequately studied and analysed, may be applied rationally today to prevent the worst consequences of disasters, and overcome them. Successful mitigating policies identified by such analysis would find places in official guidelines and instructions, most usefully of course if in conjunction with measures by local and central authorities to enhance their effectiveness.

Today, civilisation continues to face a range of threats related to global warming and climate change, military conflicts, famine and poverty, the voluntary or forced migrations and general mobility of vast numbers of people, pandemic disease and many more trials and tribulations. Officially, a future is predicted in which disasters “will regrettably be more frequent and more severe”, and “… more concurrent and consecutive hazard events” are expected (Australia Bushfire Inquiry 30 October 2020). Thus, with the development over recent decades of urbanisation and globalisation, people have gradually and almost imperceptibly found themselves increasingly vulnerable to natural, technological, or biological catastrophe.

Disasters leave long-lasting trails of destruction in their wakes; insecurity, disorder, and socio-cultural decline, disruptively infecting life’s rhythm and threatening established normality. The disruption disasters bring with them changes the typical patterns of relations between people and their natural and social environment. Records of various types of disasters have been preserved from earliest history recorded in many documents and monuments, and catastrophic events have served as calendar markers for various historical events, but despite the obvious significance of them, the study of disasters has not been an independent subject of anthropological research until a few decades ago.

Scholarly investigation of disasters, and particular anthropological discourse on them was stimulated because disastrous or catastrophic events challenge society to rework a specific methodology, based upon which a specific resource is activated to adapt to and cope with the social, ecological, and ideological effects. All three of those effects of disaster fit within the interpretive line of anthropology as a complex discipline combining a wide spectrum of research. However, this investigation includes a narrower ethnological direction that stresses the role of the cultural systems affected by a disaster situation and focuses on how people both draw upon and alter their belief systems and responses, and the institutional characteristics based upon them in their efforts to come to terms with disasters over longer periods.

In recent years anthropological priority has been more readily given to the sociocultural construction of risk, vulnerability, prevention, and survival, as well as to cultural models for overcoming the disaster-turned-cultural-experience at local level. Together with generally approved disciplinary research principles, a specialised anthropological focus is necessary because disasters put individuals, groups, and human lives at risk, in precisely the situations in which civically engaged anthropological and ethnological scholarship comes to investigate, analyse, and help formulate discussion. One proven successful approach is to set a specific research topic and develop it through the presentation and analysis of single relevant case studies—which this issue does.

The anthropologists have applied the basic positives of their methods: to view their subjects and objects completely (holistically) and comparatively, with emphasis on the broader context of human relationships, and exploration of the interlinkages between the cultural, social, political, economic spheres, and the environment. In the case of disasters and catastrophes, that means investigating and analysing what characteristic cultural belief systems, institutions, stereotypes, and behaviour lie at the centre of a group or society’s susceptibility or vulnerability, and that group’s preparation and mobilisation for preventing and overcoming them. The everyday culture contains, and the scholar respectively discovers, the original programmes or strategies, which could be called cultural mechanisms, that caused or assisted the disaster, or reacted against it (Henry 2007). There is, however, a more closely focused point within the anthropology of disasters centred on particular subjects. It is aimed at bringing understanding of local communities’ social experience as a significant part of the overall experience and survival of disaster, and of recovery. The relationships among different aspects of cultural, demographic, political, economic, and environmental domains contribute to examination of the social context of disaster which is the main goal of this issue. The idea is to view the subject from the main perspectives of anthropological research to which the issue hopes to respond: patterns of people’s actions during and reactions to a disaster; revealing resulting social changes, and subsequent modifications to political and economic discourse (Oliver-Smith 1996, 303–28).

The current thematic issue is consistent with the tendency outlined recently in the themes of most anthropological periodicals to focus on a selected aspect of the manifestation, response, and management of a crisis created by a disaster situation. It contains five contributions presenting different types of disasters with their consequences: a natural catastrophe (the Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008 analysed by Jiang 2023), a single or combined technological disaster (the gas explosion in the village of Hitrino, Bulgaria, in 2014 presented by Maeva 2023; the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine 1986 discussed anthropologically by Erolova and Tsyryapkina 2023; and an earlier similar explosion in the Southern Urals, Russia, in 1957 by Saveleva and Danilenko 2023). Also treated are the consequences of a human-made social disaster, that of the politically motivated relocation of the Tajiks in northwestern China in the 1960s–1970s researched by Nguyen (2023). The papers included here focus on aspects allowing a prominent anthropological interpretation—migration and dislocation of the affected population (Maeva 2023; Nguyen 2023); regulated change of everyday life (Jiang 2023); and traumatic memory response (Erolova and Tsyryapkina 2023; Saveleva and Danilenko 2023).

The articles cover a wide geographical area with described situations that are complex and diverse. The underlying idea is that every community has its own hazard profile, vulnerability fluctuation, and evolution or demise of emergency management systems, as well as unique cultural, economic, and political characteristics. Each such quality influences the particular community’s interaction with domestic central and international disaster management agencies and organizations. All five studies are filled with classic and subject-specific disaster research techniques, mainly interviews and surveys, archival research, official documents, and records of memories and folklore. The papers in this volume are highly diverse both geographically and in the types of disaster, making it difficult to construct comparable objective conditions and preconditions for stability, vulnerability, and reaction strategies. The contributors here understand of course that because of the complexity and diversity of their subjects there is no single nor unified set of indicators available. However, it is true that certain common connecting lines may still be drawn for the purposes of typology so the solution adopted was to trace those lines to derive typological conclusions on the studied subject. The expectation is that, both as a research model and as conclusions presented in more detail later in the text, whether predictive or definitive, those typological conclusions will fit within the historiographical lines of anthropological interest in this matter.

The first challenge for the authors was to make terminological choices on concepts of disaster, vulnerability, risk, and management, on which the academic community has yet to reach consensus (Shi et al. 2020, 426–40) although of the definitions postulated in this theme, two are accepted in the papers, and one definition has been chosen of the basic concept of disaster. According to the 2007 UN definition, disaster presents

a serious disruption in the functioning of a community or society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and resilience that result in human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts (UNISDR 2009, 9).

The other definition, commonly adopted by anthropologists and postulating that disaster is a “process/event involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced conditions of vulnerability” (Oliver-Smith 1996, 303–28), is accepted as a direction towards technological disaster response.

The authors agree that every disaster and crisis situation is complex: disasters are never simple nor single events but combine various of the factors inherent in the given territory and population, the precise natural environment, and climatic and social conditions (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002). Perception of disasters as social phenomena has attracted research attention, enabling the study of fundamental features of cultures and societies (Oliver-Smith 1996) or becoming a “window into the inner workings of society” and an understanding of the functioning mechanisms of society (Alexander 2005, 170).

The creators of and contributors to this volume consider that most reactions and attitudes are to a great extent summarised under the term “tackling/containing the disaster” and “managing/regulating the crisis”. In virtually every one of the disastrous situations described, human settlement patterns produce some kind of such reaction, and every culture that lives through a major disaster produces a particular social response and a representative memory of it. We have therefore tried here to assemble papers that stimulate thought about various aspects of containing and managing disaster and so to contribute to the overall social context of various reactions to it. Taken together the articles cover the two announced themes of the volume: tackling disaster, or the predisposed reactions of local groups’—mostly in the texts by Saveleva and Danilenko (2023) and Erolova and Tsyryapkina (2023)—and regulating the consequences, the accent there lying on the effect of post-disaster migration and elaboration of a specific economic approach—seen mostly in the papers by Jiang (2023), Maeva (2023), and Nguyen (2023).

The key research tasks of “tackling and regulating the disaster” are action-based and draw on certain main characteristics of the people immediately affected by a disaster—their vulnerability and their cultural persistence. Vulnerability, in turn, or a group’s predisposition to allow, harbour, and nurture a disaster situation, provides evidence to bolster the claim often found in the literature that groups are “disaster-prone”, which closely reflects their cultures. The first idea of the articles in this issue is to verify that claim and its related details. The extensive comparative material presents ample grounds for that, and allows identification of exactly where any latent chinks of vulnerability might be found in cultural characteristics. From an editorial point of view, those could be centred in testable questions and theses of the following topics, questions frequently asked in the disaster literature. Plausible answers are offered in the texts of this issue:

1. Is it possible to talk of chinks of vulnerability related to place, way, and quality of life in disaster-affected individuals and groups? Is there a culturally based predisposition to respond?

   According to Erolova and Tsyryapkina (2023), the juxtaposition of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, and Bulgarian memories of the Chernobyl accident reveals strong personal empathy among the communities immediately affected by the disaster, with the highest value placed on survival, life, and health. The main characteristic of vulnerability comes from the location of those people so close to the nuclear plant, and the potential dangers posed a priori by their proximity. According to the materials, the subjective evaluations of those directly affected by the accident amounted to imputation of blame, mainly after the accident, for the absence of adequate public information. Living under Soviet totalitarian one-party rule was not judged as a risk factor, in fact people even saw it as a good thing. The political factor prompted feelings of guilt and vulnerability among Bulgarians some distance from the accident site. The matter of “Chernobyl’s Children” is raised and the thought is expressed that the danger and vulnerability actually stems from insufficient knowledge of the long-term consequences. Based on the material presented, any idea of such a predisposition in Bulgarian culture as a whole seems exaggerated, although particular elements and specifics of it carry greater possibilities for the vulnerability of certain population groups, and we find them in those very structures and parts of physical survival first of all, then of domestic culture, that together bear the brunt of the damage caused by disasters.

In the article by Nguyen (2023), the predispositions of population groups to react to disasters in a particular way, which derives from their culture, is represented by the Tajiks’ deeply negative attitude to their relocation to Xinjiang into conditions alien to the lives they had led in western China. The deportation was conceived and presented by the Chinese authorities as an eco-immigration strategy to overcome an unfavourable natural environment and poverty of the Tajiks. But the forced abandonment and destruction of homes, the destruction of traditional ways of life and holistic living through relocation from the high plateau of the Pamirs to the low-lying desert of Tashlamakan, have threatened traditional community cohesion and contented lifestyle. The Tajiks’ reaction is the result of the overall construction of personality in the conditions of stereotyped and traditional life, just as we see too in the text about the Chernobyl disaster (Erolova and Tsyryapkina 2023), when collective survival is expected and faith is placed in the efforts of the state and its structures, while among the peripherally affected Bulgarian population’s efforts to overcome the crisis, there arises distrust of the management units, and they are reproached. Deep emotional memories are linked to the main home territory, and a local martyrology is created when leaving it, as described concerning the disaster in the Southern Urals (Saveleva and Danilenko 2023). Here, Maeva (2023)’s conclusion regarding the technological explosion in Northeast Bulgaria seems to be generally applicable and relevant to the rest of the materials, about the need to deal with the disaster not so much at the institutional level, but at the individual level, to avoid deterioration of the social environment after the event, as the articles mentioned point out.

1. What behavioural adaptation strategies are activated in the affected groups?

   This question relates to the mechanisms of change in the worldview and behaviour of the affected population. Included in these mechanisms are modifications to social institutions such as religious and similar units, adapted social organizations, values and morals. The local community, represented especially by close neighbourly and kinship ties, can demonstrate its integrative role and potential, as well as show the stability of the relationship with the homeland. That is strongly evident in the texts recorded by local observers and researchers and reflected in the field information, such as the emergence of “heroic stories”; the drive to transform lifestyles and homes following the relocation of 25 villages in the Southern Urals, and the birth of new folklore of disaster, recorded in the text by Saveleva and Danilenko (2023). In most cases, disaster evokes the need for communication and directs affected individuals to seek group solidarity. In another of the cases described (Maeva 2023), in Bulgaria, initially weak networks of integrity between people prevented social mobilisation after the disaster and that took a long time to overcome. Disaster mediates between people connected by both closer and more distant ties, and serves to strengthen existing social relationships and to create new ones. But that is true only if the preconditions for it already exist, otherwise disaster is a destroyer of such ties as do exist, becoming therefore a kind of secondarily created disaster.

The materials referred to can be read as a search and discovery of initial mechanisms for people to adapt to formats of collective response and in search of community response. Particularly strong in this regard and despite the present-day major globalization drive, is the attitude to native land as the cradle of life and a subject of eternal attachment. That feeling is present in all narratives concerning migration strategies as a mode of reaction and response. In texts describing post-disaster relocation, the important anthropological question is addressed of what exactly the lost land means for communities. In that sense the material in this issue—all of it in fact but most particularly in the texts dealing with the forced migration of Tajiks to an environment different from their usual one (Nguyen 2023), the relocation after the Chinese earthquake (Jiang 2023), and the train explosion in Bulgaria (Maeva 2023)—all the material contributes to the vivid scholarly debate of the last decade of the previous century, which was born of a dramatic disaster event of a technological nature and which created the concept of one’s own land as cultural property (Tzaneva 2015, 99–111). That case created a discussion on a subject that is crucial to all subsequent studies of migration—whether a forcibly, unwillingly abandoned homeland is a “cultural property” the deprivation of which changes the way and quality of life and should be legally sanctioned. The pieces in this issue, and especially the articles on the reaction of the population in southwest Xinjiang (Nguyen 2023) and the Urals (Saveleva and Danilenko 2023), are inclined to answer that question in the affirmative. They show separation from home and birthplace as causing “loss of cultural memory”, a cause of “local internal trauma” for the people. There is even a suggestion of a post-disaster reaction itself leading to a new disaster.

1. Post-disaster shifts in the perception and reputation of political figures and organizations are found.

   The papers on the two nuclear accidents do not verbalize these shifts, nor do they directly criticize figures in political life, but assess the decisions for traumatic effects and consequences, especially those decisions related to relocation and change of living. New groups of activists and informal leaders are emerging in the villages of the disaster area and might grow into leaders. The assessments of all of them are usually according to their involvement in the distribution of aid, for their roles are often to mediate between individuals, the state and the international organisations offering aid, as illustrated in the article on the Wenchuan earthquake (Jiang 2023). The severe effects of what was judged to be inadequate official policy in Tashkorgan after the disaster is described by the author (Nguyen 2023) as causing a loss of ethnic dignity and giving rise to ethnic conflict at local level. In certain cases, there are those among the available political figures in positions of power who are marginalized, as are others; for example the post-disaster picture in the village of Hitrino (Maeva 2023) shows a significant change in social relations because the damage of the train explosion was cleared away primarily with the support of institutions rather than by local individuals. If the bulk of the work had been directed and done by local people, mobilization and concentration of the personal resources of individuals and families would have been required; but that did not happen, and so the expected expressions of solidarity never came. If the leaders are endorsed by those in power, they are surrounded by individuals from among those who are affected, who support the leaders and are then judged as favoured. In rural communities, small and larger groups of persons are formed who are judged to be favoured in terms of post-disaster benefits, as well as those who, although still heavily affected, remain in the background. The importance of the relationship between central and local government is theorised and explained in Jiang (2023) with the theory of two-levelled disaster management as a concomitant economic approach to recovery. Maeva’s text on Hitrino (2023), and Nguyen’s article on Tashkorgan (2023) describe a post-disaster community facing a crisis which affects its ability to design and implement a successful local coping strategy. The conclusion is that there is a need to work within local communities before disasters occur, for that can play a key role in coping with the aftermath when disasters do come.

2. According to the specificity of post-disaster regulation, changes are emerging in economic relations also among those affected.

   The texts included here leave us with an impression that the picture of wage labour is changing, especially that related to the provision of services to cope with the destruction, new reinforcement and construction work, and so forth, the structure of services and the nature of mutual aid in the affected regions. That is highlighted in the texts on China (Jiang 2023; Nguyen 2023), the Urals (Saveleva and Danilenko 2023) and the village of Hitrino (Maeva 2023). In economic terms, only the article by Jiang (2023) executed within the framework of environmental economics shows how, among all the possible approaches, combating pollution—the “low-carbon approach”—has been chosen as a response and as a coping strategy in cases of disaster. Jiang is professionally versed in her subject and tells a story of an innovative and unfamiliar post-disaster strategy. The article on the choice of the low-carbon strategy after the earthquake is interesting for its highlighting of the link between local people and communities with the pollution factors and harmful emissions. It shows what motivated people’s choice to use implementation of low-emissions to fight the post-disaster effects of a severe natural disaster—in that case a deadly earthquake. The author expands and complements her presentation of crisis management by revealing the interplay between the two levels of government and decision-making. Another aspect of recovery management is that introduction of a new post-disaster economic policy means changes to the local political picture. Concerning the reconstruction policy in Tashkorgan (Nguyen 2023), the inadequacy of the social construction strategy there is also presented due to insufficient consideration of the historical and cultural anthropological characteristics of the affected communities.

The overall conclusion is that post-disaster coping and crisis management strategies should include a comprehensive assessment of at least the four directions of possible intervention outlined above, and should always be conducted in the context of robust debate and active outreach. The focus of disaster policy should be the building and maintaining of a cohesive local community. Strategies, and efforts to do so need to precede the disaster, for only then will they meet the tenets of the distinct research credo with which the contributors to this issue set out to explore the significant anthropological theme of our time—that of disasters and catastrophes and their management for the benefit of life and people.