The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused immense destruction and over 170,000 deaths in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The disaster spurred large-scale social and political changes in Aceh, including the intensified implementation of shari'a law and an end to the long separatist conflict. After the Tsunami explores Acehnese survivors' experiences of the deadly waves and the subsequent reconstruction process through the stories they tell about the disaster. Narratives, author Annemarie Samuels argues, are both a window onto the process of remaking everyday life and an essential component of it. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Samuels shows how the everyday work of recovery is indispensable for any large-scale reconstruction effort to succeed. Recovery is an ambiguous process in which grief remains as life goes on, where optimism and disappointment, remembering and forgetting, structural poverty and the rhetoric of success are often intertwined in individual and social worlds. Such paradoxes are key and form a thread through the five chapters of the book. Addressing post-disaster reconstruction from the survivors' perspectives opens up space for criticism of post-disaster governance without reducing the discussion of recovery to top-down interventions. Individual histories, emotions, creativity, and ways of being in the world, the author argues, inform the remaking of worlds as much as social, political, and cultural transformations do. After the Tsunami is a provocative and highly significant contribution to studies of humanitarian aid and disaster, psychological anthropology, narrative studies, and scholarly studies of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Its elegant style, pointed theorizing, and moving ethnographic descriptions will draw readers into Acehnese lifeworlds and politics. Its narratives attest to Acehnese ways of living with loss, within and across a history of colonial and postcolonial violence and suffering and a present of political uncertainty and hope.
Starting from zero: reconstruction, reciprocity, and recognition -- Ruptures, hauntings, and embodied narratives -- Islam, gender, and the ethics of grieving -- Memory in urban space: objects, places, and absences -- Improvement momentum: imaginations of the post-tsunami future.
The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories 'through' their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the 'narrated event' and the 'narrative event', both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its 'unmaking'.
AbstractResidential relocation can have profound effects on people's mobilities. This article explores changes in the mobilities of people who were relocated to Great Love village, a newly built neighborhood in Aceh, Indonesia, after the devastating 2004 tsunami. The relative isolation of this neighborhood limits mobilities and work opportunities of the low‐income population. However, women's mobilities became much more limited than men's. Building on the notion of mobility as a capability, the article discusses how access to this capability becomes gendered through everyday practices. It concludes that in this neighborhood limited physical mobility has led to social exclusion of women. Nevertheless, people also have reasons to stay, one of which is the prospect of future social mobility through homeownership.RésuméLe relogement peut avoir de profondes incidences sur les mobilités des populations. Cet article analyse l'évolution des mobilités des personnes qui ont été relogées gratuitement à Great Love Village, un quartier récent d'Aceh, construit après le tsunami dévastateur de 2004 en Indonésie. L'isolement relatif de ce quartier contraint les mobilités et les possibilités de travail pour la population à faible revenu, mais les mobilités des femmes sont devenues beaucoup plus limitées que celles des hommes. L'analyse considère la mobilité comme une capacité et étudie comment l'accès à cette capacité varie selon le genre dans les pratiques quotidiennes. Elle conclut que, dans ce quartier, la mobilité physique limitée a conduit à l'exclusion sociale des femmes. Néanmoins, la population a aussi des raisons de rester, l'une d'elles étant la perspective d'une mobilité sociale future grâce à un accès à la propriété.
AbstractIn their efforts to digitize public service delivery, countries increasingly use algorithms based on mathematical models, data and/or a combination of different administrative datasets to issue decisions, but recent studies point towards challenges around citizens' understanding, accessing, and filing objections to such automated decisions. This paper focuses on the social infrastructure supporting citizens that struggle with accessing such services. To address this, we ask: How does the social infrastructure affect administrative burdens associated with digital government services? This is studied in the Dutch context through expert interviews and observations of support programs in libraries. We find that although libraries as primary sites for these services may pose the disadvantage of being more difficult to reach for low‐literate citizens, advantages are their organizational structure at the local level as well as their currently changing role to include a growing range of services, including (digital) skills courses.
AbstractPolicy and data scientists have paid ample attention to the amount of data being collected and the challenge for policymakers to use and utilize it. However, far less attention has been paid towards the quality and coverage of this data specifically pertaining to minority groups. The paper makes the argument that while there is seemingly more data to draw on for policymakers, the quality of the data in combination with potential known or unknown data gaps limits government's ability to create inclusive policies. In this context, the paper defines primary, secondary, and unknown data gaps that cover scenarios of knowingly or unknowingly missing data and how that is potentially compensated through alternative measures. Based on the review of the literature from various fields and a variety of examples highlighted throughout the paper, we conclude that the big data movement combined with more sophisticated methods in recent years has opened up new opportunities for government to use existing data in different ways as well as fill data gaps through innovative techniques. Focusing specifically on the representativeness of such data, however, shows that data gaps affect the economic opportunities, social mobility, and democratic participation of marginalized groups. The big data movement in policy may thus create new forms of inequality that are harder to detect and whose impact is more difficult to predict.
This book examines the relationship between the state state implementation of Shari'a and diverse lived realities of everyday Islam in contemporary Aceh, Indonesia. With chapters covering topics ranging from NGOs and diaspora politics to female ulama and punk rockers, the volume opens new perspectives on the complexity of Muslim discourse and practice in a society that has experienced tremendous changes since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These detailed accounts of and critical reflections on how different groups in Acehnese society negotiate their experiences and understandings of Islam highlight the complexity of the ways in which the state is both a formative and a limited force with regard to religious and social transformation
