Volume 58, Issue 1-2 - Special Issue: We are all Survivors: Verbal, Ritual and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery

Abstract: This essay introduces a collection of articles by ethnographers concerned with the questions of how survivors narrate disaster, how survivors use traditional techniques to recover from disaster, and how ethnographers can best respond to disaster. The introduction describes a survivor-to-survivor interviewing project created in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and focuses on ways in which ethnographers can help survivors simply by ceding control to them, by working with them to enhance their sense of community and access to agency. Our ethnographic knowledge of the communities we research derives from our power to be outnumbered ; the greater extent to which we use our knowledge to entrust survivor communities with the tools of recovery, the more quickly and fully they are likely to recover.

Abstract: In 2004, one of my long-term field sites was struck by a major earthquake. Following this event numerous researchers and experts arrived at the region and began executing various recovery projects centered around traditional culture. However, their activities were not purely intended to help the survivors but, rather, cleverly designed for their own benefit. I began to feel very uncomfortable about such efforts and worked to conduct my own activities from a folkloristic perspective based on “empathy,” an approach qualitatively distinct from those of many other researchers. Generally speaking, researchers and experts have sought to be as “objective” as possible and have undervalued empathy, which they have perceived as belonging to the realm of emotion. However, in order to support survivors' strategies for independently regaining livelihoods in the disaster recovery process, it is essential that researchers have empathy for the survivors and sufficiently understand their experiences and values. In this paper, based on my experiences in the disaster-affected area, I discuss both the utility of empathy as a means of understanding survivors as well as the subtle risks associated with such an approach.

Abstract: This essay is based on interviews and participant-observation work with older residents forced to evacuate their homes after the 2004 Chūetsu-Niigata Earthquake, exploring how people tell stories about reconnecting with their hometowns after disaster and about long-term displacement. Specifically, the essay: 1) describes how a relationship developed between the residents and an outside ethnographer; 2) presents a regional outline of the village, describing its geography, population, history, and the aftermath of the 2004 earthquake;3) details the processes involved in the residents' displacement into temporary housing; and 4) explores the primary factors that influenced survivors in their decision to return to their hometown and restart their daily lives.

Abstract: This essay explores what happens to objects, and the stories they tell, after a disaster. The focus is a project called the “Cultural Assets Rescue Operation” that was undertaken in the Ishinomaki area of Miyagi Prefecture by a coalition of experts, students, and volunteers to rescue objects after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March, 2011. The objectives of the essay are 1) to provide a first-hand account of rescue activities; 2) to show how the idea of cultural assets emerges from a longer history of preservation, rescue and museums; and 3) to explore the way cultural assets are part of a complex narrative that is always bound to people, and always changing.

Abstract: In October 2012, I joined a two-part panel with survivors and scholars of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami (2011). Together, our presentations raised numerous questions, including these: how can official responses to disaster better meet the needs of survivors, and how can they draw on the local knowledge and resources survivors themselves provide? Although our methods differ, all the contributors to this issue emphasize locally generated ways of understanding disaster. In the case of Katrina, I have conducted research over the last decade on the circulation of hurricane survivors' narratives, showing how publications transform personal stories, consequently skewing public perceptions and diminishing recovery efforts. I advocate for different means of sharing personal narratives that foreground survivors' control over their stories and their communities. I share, with other survivor-ethnographers represented here, the belief that survivors are the experts on their own experiences, and as such, ought to have leading roles in rebuilding their lives.

Abstract: As folklorists, we are accustomed to viewing culture as the obstacle to understanding across difference. Culture as a lived, embodied experience of daily, symbolic, and political life is specific and contextual; it cannot be generalized; nor do people necessarily articulate the fundamental, taken-for-granted understandings that govern their interpretations. As the folklorists in this issue have observed, trauma disturbs those patterns of cultural life, sometimes permanently. If ordinary life was ever intelligible, even if unarticulated, trauma can make it unintelligible, unrecognizable, unfathomable. Is that what we try to empathize with, with the loss of ordinary life? Even survivors, having shared a collective trauma, more often say that they cannot speak for each other, or they cannot speak for a collective whole. To some extent, the representation of trauma is always about the unrepresentable, the untellable, the unspeakable. And yet, at the same time, the obligation to remember, to tell, and the desire to be heard supersedes this limitation.

Abstract: Although my own fieldwork site in Japan is far from Tohoku, where the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011, my research in a small rural community helped me to place the narratives of survivors into a context I could better understand. Against this backdrop, I consider the role of certain forms of “heritage,” such as local festivals and rituals, in the aftermath of disaster, suggesting that the infrastructure created for the practice of traditional activities during normal times can, in times of trauma, become a template for more urgent forms of organization – such as setting up shelters. Moreover, the fact that many communities persist in performing festivals and rituals soon after disaster suggests that the very practice of such traditions, even when the context has changed, has symbolic and practical value. Ultimately, however, for heritage to work under these circumstances communities must maintain flexibility and a “light” approach.