October 11, 2021 | Report-Backs
This past April we hosted four virtual panels focused on the relevance of the social science of disasters to the analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic. This mini-conference, as we chose to call it, was sponsored by the University of New Orleans Center for Latin American Studies and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) – Tlalpan, Mexico City, and focused on a number of questions that have a long history in the discipline of anthropology: Are crises, indeed, methodologically opportune moments that allow us to see social fault lines, structures, inequities, and contradictions that give shape and form to disasters (Oliver-Smith 1996, Sahlins 1972, Solway 1994)? How does epistemological variation among a pandemic’s diverse observers affect what they glean from beholding it (Barrios et al. 2020)? Put another way, what does crisis reveal for whom? And, what implications do such observations have for how people in a variety of social and institutional positions enact change (or not) during and after a global health crisis?
We chose to limit the geographical focus of this activity to Latin America, the Caribbean, and sites of Latin American transnational migration, although the questions we asked are applicable across the globe. Our regional framing was partly driven by the geographic focus of our institutional homes (Barrios is Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at UNO) and García-Acosta is former director of CIESAS, an internationally recognized research center with a long history of disaster research in Mexico. More importantly, we chose Latin America because it has historically played a key role in the development of disaster scholarship as both home to some of the field’s leading figures and as a producer of some of its key case studies.
The development of the anthropological study of disasters involved a long journey and featured the creation of different perspectives. The objective of these endeavors was to identify the factors that transformed “natural” hazards (e.g. earthquakes, hurricanes, landslides, droughts) into societally disruptive and destructive catastrophic events. The result was the understanding of disasters as temporally prolonged processes that are shaped through the accumulation of vulnerabilities, persistent social production of risk, and lack of preventive mitigation.
As we have learned over the past 20 months, the coronavirus’ agency has been enhanced by a number of socio-economic variables including hazardous working (especially for many front-line service sector workers) and living (e.g. assisted living facilities) conditions, inequities in health care access and health status, the politization of public health knowledge, and vaccine opposition. These are all topics rife for anthropological and sociological analysis, and especially so in the case of Latin America, where governmental safety nets are much less robust than in the United States and Europe and where social inequities are much more pronounced. At the same time, we were interested in branching out beyond the well-established lines of much disaster research and in overcoming the limitations of a strict area studies approach. Specifically, we were interested in promoting a dialogue between Disaster Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and the anthropology of securitization.
The insights that emerged from the event’s presentations included a reaffirmation vulnerability theory’s merit for examining disasters as diachronic processes that are given form and magnitude by the interaction of a hazard – in this case, a virus – and human practices of space, race, gender, and class-making that enhance risk inequities. Beyond this well-established observation of disaster anthropology, the papers also shed light on a number of issues surrounding COVID 19. Norbert Ross (Vanderbilt University), Gustavo Peña Flores (LA Times contributing author), Daniel Maldonado Jimenez (UNO), Sergio Visacovsky (CIT-CONICET/IDES) and Gabriel Noel (IDEAS/USNAM-CONICET) highlighted the need to overcome Eurocentric assumptions about the temporality of crisis, which represents moments of upheaval as rare events that are preceded by normalcy and are followed by a resolution of injustice or social contradiction (Kosselleck 2006, Roitman 2011). In many parts of Latin America, crisis is seen as the usual state of affairs where the expectation of its aftermath is not a return to stability but the emergence of future crises. These are places where the pandemic follows decades of hard hand dictatorships, Cold War violence, post-cold war insecurity, political corruption, and economic crises imposed by structural adjustment and foreign debt. What is more, Latin American historicities of crisis are not just the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic, they are the shapers of its very form as a public health disaster.
María Rodríguez (El Colegio de Michoacán) and Raymundo Padilla (Universidad de Colima) detailed how the pandemic manifests in post-disaster contexts. In Morelos, Mexico, the incomplete recovery from an earthquake that occurred two years ago has further complicated pandemic mitigation. Their papers also engaged the issue of risk communication and interactions between government agencies and the broader public, a topic that is of global concern but that nonetheless takes on location-specific complications related to political culture and state-society relations. Other papers by Ellen Moodie and Jessica Brinkworth (Labor Health Equity Action Project, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) reported on innovative collaborations between biological and cultural anthropologists tracing the ways histories of stress and trauma become marked on the bodies of Central American migrants and how these markings create inequities in morbidity that give the pandemic its distinctive epidemiological characteristics: Who becomes ill, who lives, who dies, who recovers, and who does not.
The dialogues stimulated by the panels has energized us to produce an edited volume. Those interested in the details of the panels’ participants and papers can access the program and presentation recordings here: https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/online-conference-april-2021-covid-19-revelatory-pandemic-latin-america/essay. Finally, we would like to thank. We thank Dr. Carlos Macías Richard (CIESAS Director General) Dr. Kim Martin Long (Dean of the UNO College of Liberal Arts, Education and Human Development), and Dr. Daniel Gonzalez (Associate Dean of the UNO COLAEHD) for their opening remarks and support of this academic activity, and our discusssants, Susanna Hoffman, Setha Low, Kim Fortun and Mark Schuller for their insightful commentaries.
References
Koselleck R. 2006. Crisis, transl. MW Richter. J. Hist. Ideas 67:357–400
Oliver-Smith A. 1996. Anthropological research on hazards and disasters. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 25:303–28
Roitman J. 2011. Crisis. Polit. Concepts Crit. Lex. Winter: http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/crisis/#fn-17–1
Sahlins M. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine and Atherton
Solway JS. 1994. Drought as revelatory crisis: an exploration of shifting entitlements and hierarchies in the Kalahari, Botswana. Dev. Change 25:471–98
Virginia García-Acosta is a social anthropologist and historian based at CIESAS, the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Mexico City. She has published over 100 articles and book chapters and 24 books. She has also been PI and CO-PI of several research projects funded by Mexican and international agencies. Her research focuses on food history, disaster, and risk from a historical-anthropological perspective with a specific interest in earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and droughts in Mexico and Latin America. She is the former director of CIESAS (2004-2014) and a founding member of the disaster researcher network “La Red.”
Roberto E. Barrios is Doris Zemurray Stone Chair of Latin American Studies and professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans. During the past two decades, he has conducted studies of disaster recovery and mitigation in Central America, Mexico, the United States, and the Caribbean. He is author of governing affect: neoliberalism and disaster reconstruction (2017, University of Nebraska Press) and co-editor with Susanna Hoffman of Disaster Upon Disaster (2019, Berghahn).
Published: 10/11/2021