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- Convenors:
-
Anna Vainio
(University of Sheffield)
Benjamin Epstein (University College London)
Anna Martini (University of Groningen)
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- Stream:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 1, Sala 1.10
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel discusses involvement of various actors in post-disaster Tohoku and how they imagine the recovery process both in space and time. We will focus on: emotional responses of visitors, negotiation of conflicts and sustainability in communities, and mental health of affected populations.
Long Abstract:
The panel offers a range of different perspectives on recovery in Tohoku after the triple disaster of 2011. Five years into the recovery process, locals, visitors and media have created and negotiated imaginaries regarding the disaster, the future of the local communities, and their hopes and desires. The aim of the panel is to critically analyse to what degree the concept of 'imaginary' can be a tool for building sustainable futures in post-disaster communities, creating an educational tourism circuit, and being of help for post-disaster trauma mental health practitioners. We will focus on the clash between imaginary/imagined landscapes and actual, on-going processes of recovery. This includes the sometimes clashing, difficult, contested relationships among the actors involved in the recovery process, such as the government, national and local NGOs, locals, and foreigners. The panel connects interdisciplinary approaches that discuss the concept of imaginary, borrowing from geographies of tourism, psychology, and community studies.
A focus on the imaginary, the imagined landscapes, and imagined futures, can be a powerful tool in post-disaster recovery. The imaginary is defined as a set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole. Imaginary can be used as grounding concept to avoid falling into debates on definitions of recovery, a term that present ambiguities and have fuzzy definitions, as it is widely used but seldom critically defined. To move forward from such debates, this panel adopts, in all its presentations, the connecting concepts of 'imaginary'. This gives the opportunity to approach post-disaster development, sustainability, and communities hopes and desires, using discourses of representation, subjectivity, emotionality and perception.
By developing a connection between imaginaries and recovery, the panel's aim is to uncover gaps between the needs and desires of the actors considered, and in the expectations, negotiations and policies of the relations between the actors (victim-helper, community-authorities, and tourist-locals). By zooming in on how the recovery is imagined in different settings, by different actors, we uncover a potential in using the imaginary to address issues of agency, sustainability, and potential for the future.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Anna Martini (University of Groningen)
Paper short abstract:
After the 2011 triple disaster, tourism became a means to attract people and economic revenue back to Tohoku. I analyse how tourism workers and tourists make sense of disaster sites through tourism, focusing on their emotions and affects, and how these produce and manipulate imaginaries of place.
Paper long abstract:
Crises and disasters are considered times of intense difficulty or danger and are often deeply emotional experiences. In some instances, the ways crises are portrayed in the media can spark people's curiosity and imagination and drive tourists to visit places subject to present or past dangers. In the last decades, tourism stakeholders looking for 'alternative' tourism forms have capitalized on the potential of places connected to disasters, dangers and atrocities. In tourism studies these forms of tourism are known as 'dark tourism'.
My presentation analyses on one hand the narratives of tourism workers, who are now making an effort to imagine, model, create and negotiate the disaster-hit towns as tourism destinations. On the other hand, it investigates how foreign tourists who decide to visit Tohoku after the 2011 triple disaster perceive and experience place. Tourists, researchers, and volunteers didn't experience the disaster first hand. They make sense of it emotionally by superimposing their feelings and experiences to the landscape and narratives they see and hear. Tourists engage continuously with complex embodied, affective and deeply emotional nets that surface more vividly and poignantly in dark places. My contribution looks for a critical understanding of emotional and affective narratives of the experience: how do tourists and tourism workers negotiate, live and recount their trip to Tohoku? What are the strategies put forward by these stakeholders?
Anna Vainio (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on field work from communities in post-disaster Tohoku, the paper discusses the "good practice" of Community-Based Disaster Recovery and its effectiveness in the Japanese context
Paper long abstract:
The aim of the research is to contribute to a growing critical literature on dominant disaster recovery and risk management approaches that primarily focus on emergency management, thus separating the recovery process from the underlying drivers of risks and vulnerabilities that stem from the everyday social, political and economic context. Drawing on the data from Tohoku, the research concludes that the current "good practice" of Community-Based Disaster Recovery has done little to address issues of power and community agency and is having a 'pausing' effect on communities. The research hypothesises that this can have consequences for the long-term viability of recovery efforts, and instead argues that more sustainable forms of recovery and disaster risk management could be achieved by utilising community development practices that would embed these processes into the dwelled experience and everyday setting of affected communities. The research explores the use of disaster anthropology to open new avenues for both macro- and micro-level analyses to take place inside the social, economic and political context, and how to address them in a democratic way that enables agency, participation, and action on multiple levels.
Past research indicates that communities that are engaged and have clear plans for the future are resilient in the face of disasters, and quicker at bouncing back. Applying this idea to the recovery context, the research presents a methodology and preliminary results from an on-going ethnographic study on social construction of the post-disaster future conducted in Miyagi in 2015 and 2016. It explores the visions of individual grassroots actors for the future of their communities, roles of various actors within the process, and perceptions on whether current recovery is making these visions a reality. The paper finds that rather than making comparative analyses between pre- and post-disaster community conditions, by studying people's constructions of alternative and ideal hypothetical futures, we can gain a more accurate understanding of how transformed post-disaster social, political and economic structures and governance are affecting sustainability of recovery, and perceptions of personal and community agency.
Benjamin Epstein (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper, based on an institutional ethnography of Japan's disaster mental health system, addresses the development of professional identities and the interplay between standardized laboratory research and intervention as linked to broader questions about the management of suffering.
Paper long abstract:
The expansion of standardised mental health and psychosocial interventions in humanitarian response highlights how living with disasters and extreme events can be a catalyst for rapid social change. Providing a brief overview of a clinical ethnography based at a laboratory specializing in disaster mental health, the paper considers how catastrophe is treated as a metonymy of mental suffering, casting this in terms of the interplay between standardized clinical work and laboratory research: technê, and episteme. It then looks at how disaster mental health interventions connect to broader beliefs, values, and morality in the development of professional identities, before evaluating the instrumentality of rationalities turned towards local suffering. It is argued that practice, in the case of clinicians working in the disaster-struck areas of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, is a form of world-making; an ethical and moral commitment that both supplants and imaginatively recasts normative knowledge.
Moreover, whilst academic and clinical infrastructures must be understood as sites where social power is exerted both on and through its members, such spaces also offer novel and unexpected ways for individuals to act. In line with previous studies of healthcare, an anthropological view could offer critical analysis of the moral and cultural ideologies involved in disaster mental health intervention.
Focus in this research is placed on the clinical interlocutor as active in the very process of constructing and interpreting what needs to be done, what can be done, and what should be done to best support the families and survivors of the disasters. Looking beyond the epidemiological literature to explore the social influences and power dynamics at work within the psychosocial field, this research critically considers the role of disaster mental health as a force for social change through the proliferation of psychiatric discourse as a language of resistance and a form of social critique.