Disasters and Risks

Abstract: 

Twenty years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, I find myself confronted by a question that did not exist when I began my research: in what sense was I still studying the tsunami? Over two decades, the catastrophe became entangled with humanitarian interventions, reconstruction projects, post-war transformations, political struggles, security concerns, and competing memories of violence. The longer I followed the tsunami, the less obvious it became whether the disaster remained the same object, occupied the same place, or even belonged to the same historical moment.

This experience raises a broader question about the temporal life of disasters. Disaster scholars have long challenged the idea that catastrophes are bounded events, showing instead how they emerge before the moment of rupture and continue long after it. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to what happens once a disaster survives long enough to be absorbed into other crises, political projects, and historical trajectories. At what point does a disaster cease to organize the present? When does it lose its explanatory force? And under what conditions does it return?

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Sri Lanka, this talk explores the shifting status of catastrophe across time. Rather than treating the tsunami as a bounded event or as an endlessly unfolding aftermath, I follow its changing trajectory through successive regimes of relevance. At different moments, the tsunami functioned as a humanitarian emergency, a development opportunity, a political resource, a security concern, a commemorative object, and a fading public memory. Its significance did not simply persist or disappear. It was continuously displaced, eclipsed, reactivated, and reconfigured.

The question, therefore, is not only when a disaster begins or ends. It is how the significance of disasters is displaced, eclipsed, reactivated, and reconfigured over time. Revisiting the Sri Lankan tsunami twenty years later, I argue that the temporality of catastrophe cannot be understood solely through analyses of root causes and long-term aftermaths. It must also be approached through the shifting conditions that allow disasters to remain, cease to be, or become once again objects of public and political significance.

Abstract:

Focusing on infrastructure as both a material system and an analytical lens, the paper shows how disasters emerge through the breakdown, transformation, or deliberate reconfiguration of socio-technical networks. In moments of crisis, infrastructures become visible as sites where power, responsibility, and competing visions of the common good are negotiated. Such disruptions reveal the social relations and moral economies that sustain everyday life, while also generating new forms of connection, exclusion, and conflict. By combining insights from pandemic-related infrastructural disconnection based on multimodal fieldwork in Argentina with broader debates on cascading and prolonged crises, the talk highlights how people reinterpret norms, mobilise moral claims, and create alternative pathways when formal systems fail. In doing so, it contributes to rethinking disasters as ongoing, multi-scalar processes and positions infrastructure at the centre of anthropological debates on risk, governance, and social transformation.

Résumé

Se fondant sur deux vignettes ethnographiques au Vanuatu, la première centrée sur le cyclone Pam (2015) et la seconde sur l’éruption du volcan Manaro Vui (2017-2018), cette communication analyse les processus de réparations dans la temporalité de l’après-catastrophe et leurs effets sur les dynamiques de recomposition des territoires, comme des relations sociales.