A number of recent studies on disaster reconstruction have focused on the concept of community resilience and its importance in the recovery of communities from collective trauma. This article reviews the contributions the anthropological literature and the ethnographic case studies of two post-Hurricane Mitch housing reconstruction sites make to the theorising of community and resilience in post-disaster reconstruction. Specifically, the article demonstrates that communities are not static or neatly bounded entities that remain constant before, during and after a disaster; rather, communities take on shape and qualities depending on the relationships in which they engage with government agencies and aid organisations before and after disasters. Consequently, the article argues that definitions of community resilience and disaster mitigation programmes must take the emergent and relational nature of communities into account in order to address the long-term causes and impacts of disasters.

In recent years, the concept of resilience has gained popularity as a means to describe the qualities and capacities that enable a community to recovery from a catastrophic event. Definitions of resilience make a number of assumptions about the nature of communities and the practices that enable their ability to cope or weather a disaster's impact. In this article, I provide a brief history of the ways disaster researchers have defined resilience and provide an analysis of the fundamental assumptions upon which such definitions are based. Furthermore, I provide a critical analysis of such assumptions in light of anthropological knowledge about the relationships and processes that put communities on the map, shape the ways they are exposed to hazards, and their possibilities for recovery. In conclude by providing four recommendations for practice which stress 1) the recognition of disaster has a historically shaped process involving development practice and human‐environment relations, 2) the recognition of the broader political ecological relationships that shape resilience, 3) an emphasis on systemic transformation rather than locality specific interventions as a means of resilience‐building, and 4) a prioritization of subaltern voices in operationalizations of “rebuilding better” as a mechanism for addressing the practices of environmental injustice that routinely give form to disaster vulnerability and those conditions that are branded “low resilience.”

The modernist usage of the word crisis conveys the idea of an event that acts as a historical judgment, marks an epochal transition, and sometimes leads to a utopian era. Furthermore, current uses of crisis in the political sphere often figure catastrophic events as the result of errors and malfunctions, drawing attention away from the quotidian and normatively accepted practices and policies that produce them. Anthropological definitions of disaster, in contrast, understand catastrophes as the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Despite this fundamental difference between customary and scholarly definitions of crises and disasters, the former term is commonly used to refer to the latter by political elites and academics alike. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the crisis concept in the analysis of disasters on the basis of anthropological research on catastrophes during the last 40 years and provides an overview of the analytical diversification of disaster anthropology since the 1970s.

This article provides a brief introduction to advancements in the anthropology of disasters as well as the historical antecedents and the intellectual collaborations that contributed to contemporary work in the field. It reviews the multiple directions, methodological approaches, and theoretical leanings that comprise today's diversified field of disaster anthropology and discusses how the monographs included in the special edition of Human Organization (74[4]) on the applied anthropology of risks, hazards, and disasters showcase the variety of topics and themes engaged by applied anthropologists who work on disaster-related issues.

No abstract