Synopsis

Disrupting the normal, disasters force us to reconsider who we are and where and with whom to live to be who we are. Disaster survivors’ daily efforts to rebuild their lives are, in a sense, a process of working out their own answers to these anthropological questions. In order to understand their efforts, this workshop focuses on the infrastructural concepts of social life, namely house, home, and community. These are culturally rooted, historically shaped, and legally defined concepts that the survivors rely on when they envisage their lives to come. Still, their relationship on the ground is tricky, as they sometimes overlap and conflict at other times. Attending to them, based on long-term fieldwork, we critically examine the trajectories of post-disaster reconstruction in Nepal, Japan, and Sri Lanka. In the era of the planetary crises, we witness more and more people and societies suffering from disasters. Disasters are not isolated events but interrelated, building up damage. The presupposition that disasters undergo a linear process from mitigation to recovery needs to be reconsidered. We hope this workshop will be a step toward a more holistic approach to disasters we are staying with.

Presentation Titles and Abstracts:

Part I: 9:30 – 11:30

Sara Schneiderman (Department of Anthropology, The University of British Columbia)

“Anchoring Mobility, Embodying Risk: Houses as Intimate Infrastructure in Nepal’s Ongoing Transformation”

How do we ground ourselves in the face of uncertainty? Drawing upon 25 years of research in several districts of rural Nepal, this presentation explores the relationships between people, their houses, and the landscapes in which they live to consider how we comprehend risk and plan for the future amidst radical change. In this photographically illustrated talk, I track how houses have served as an anchor through the social transformations wrought by political conflict and expanded mobility, as well as the environmental upheaval of the 2015 earthquakes and the accelerated infrastructural development that followed in conjunction with reconstruction. At the same time, houses are a bellwether of future risk, as people consider where and how to invest their material, emotional, and labour resources in building shelter, that most fundamental form of infrastructure. Yet all too often, scholarly and political discussions of housing for marginalized communities foreground its functionality at the expense of understanding houses as a site of creativity that bring people into intimate relation with both the terrain and state in which they live. Here, I take a holistic approach that sees both houses and the people who build them as embodied subjects in ongoing processes of transformation, whose ability to thrive in complex sociopolitical and natural environments is dependent upon a balance between structural stability and the capacity to change.

Sanae Ito (Center for Innovative Research, National Museum of Ethnology)

“Boundaries of the Village Created by Reconstruction: The Case of the “Heritage Settlement” of Newar After the Nepal 2015 Earthquakes”

On April 25, 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake with its epicenter in central Nepal caused extensive damage across a wide area of the country. In Newar settlements in the Kathmandu Valley, which includes the presenter’s study site, houses over 50 years old were severely damaged were severely damaged.

After the earthquake, the government revised construction standards. One year later, the government also issued building guidelines for ‘heritage settlements,’ focusing mainly on the exterior of buildings, such as the use of bricks for exterior walls, wooden frames for windows, and tiled roofs for a specific proportion of the building’s roof area. Village P, the study site, was considered a “heritage settlement” and therefore subject to these regulations.

Before the earthquake, residents of Village P had started building houses in areas that had previously been considered outside the village perimeter. In addition, an increasing number of houses with concrete exterior walls and aluminum sash windows were being built in areas considered within the village boundaries. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the boundaries of “heritage settlements” were strictly defined and special regulations were imposed on houses being rebuilt within them. As a result, the boundaries of Village P, once obscured by modernization, were now clearly marked on maps as exclusive and also visually evident by the form of the houses as newly stipulated. Simultaneously, migration from the village accelerated, and residents who emigrated from the village attempted to ritually expand its boundaries by, for example, extending the route of the dance of the spirit that had once been dancing around within the village. In this presentation, I use the case of Village P to examine how the area of the “village” or community is negotiated and created between government regulations and the adaptation by the residents.

Part II: 11:45- 12:45

Shuhei Kimura (Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba)

“Who would replenish the emptied houses?: A reflection on house, community, and the repeated tsunamis in Tohoku, Japan”

As the 1896 civil code defined it as the base of modern Japanese society, house (ie) has been a basic but shifting concept that shapes disaster reconstruction policy in Japan. Reviewing the consequences of the devastating tsunamis in 1896, 1933, and 2011, that hit northeastern Japan, I examine the changes in the role that the house played in the reconstruction of the survivor’s lives, families, and communities. House was a critical passage point through which the survivors received governmental support in 1896, a means to “improve” the families and communities in the underdeveloped communities in 1933, and then a rather neoliberal scheme to help individual families, not communities in 2011. In a book based on his fieldwork on the communities affected by the 1933 tsunami, geographer Yamaguchi Yaichiro cites a local saying: “After tsunamis, [emptied communities] are refilled by strangers” (Yamaguchi 2011[1943]). He obviously wrote this as a caution; however, we now wonder who would replenish the emptied houses. Attending to the quotidian acts of the survivors of the 2011 tsunami, I argue that the house is now being rebuilt as a symbolic device and material place that helps local people to welcome others, find their relations with them, and imagine living together, if physically separated.

Masahiro Maeda (Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University)

“The relationships between houses, families, and communities that emerge through resettlement: Case studies from Sri Lanka and Tohoku”

Where do people who have lost their homes in disasters want to rebuild their houses? Most people probably want to return to their original place and home. However, there are cases where people are forced to resettle, that is, to leave their original place and seek dwelling stability in a new place. In this presentation, I would like to consider the relationships between houses, families and communities that emerge through resettlement from cases of resettlement in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and in Tohoku after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. These relationships are complex due to the gap between the ideal and the reality of the shape of families and communities in each region, and I have experienced many “misreadings” in my fieldwork. Resettlement is a process in which the physical and spatial elements of people’s relationships with houses and land are temporarily set aside, and the space for dwelling is reconstructed in a new place based on social elements such as family and community relationships. I would like to argue that resettlement is an opportunity to understand a local society through houses, the smallest units of society and that in planning and evaluating resettlement, including the rebuilding of houses, it is essential to combine knowledge of architectural space　with anthropological knowledge of family structure and social scientific knowledge of community care.