Considering culture in disaster practice

In: Annals of anthropological practice: a publication of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, Band 40, Heft 1, S. 52-60

Abstract

In disaster‐related policies and practices, culture is often treated as tangible, homogenous, static. The diversity of communities and places, on‐the‐ground actions and networks for how things are actually accomplished, intricacies of local politics and maneuvering and layers of socio‐historical inequalities, are often missing from expert calculations and official frameworks for action. The basic but most important first question goes unasked: "What would you do and how?" Disaster anthropology relentlessly arrives at the all‐too‐common problem of "policies and practices need to consider local culture." Here too culture is framed as static, passive, homogenous. Understanding the complexity and dynamics by which we experience and understand the world is much more challenging than at first glance. Culture is fluid, evolving, and intertwined with a host of economic, political, and social relations and tensions that are constantly altering seemingly stable processes. This leads to at least two related questions. First, how do we theorize beyond this point to better interpret and explain the persistent issue of cultural insensitivity in disaster‐related policy and practice? And second, how can we develop more useful and successful prescriptions for incorporating cultural sensitivity into policy and practice? Overall, this article puts forward the argument that disaster reconstruction is a complex, culturally sensitive dynamic, within which decisions are embedded in tensions of social, political, and economic priorities. While disasters can function as a mechanism to sustain and perpetuate power relations, disaster survivors have distinct agency through the disaster recovery process and are empowered citizens that should be treated as equal partners to guide the process in a way that makes sense on‐the‐ground in the given local contexts. In the unfolding plays of disaster, the interpretive, behavioral, and material repertoires we refer to as culture exhibit some of the characteristics of emergence, insomuch as they are not fully determined by arrangements that precede them; yet, neither are they without antecedents, relationships with the past and other ongoing processes.