Living through the tsunami: Vulnerability and generosity on a volatile earth

Abstract

How might geographers respond 'generously' to a disaster on the scale if the Indian Ocean tsunami? Critical geographers and other left intellectuals have chosen to stress the way preexisting social forces conditioned human vulnerability, and have implied that ordinary people 'here' were implicated in the suffering of others 'there' through their positioning in chains of causality. Critics have also sought to expose the bias, unjustness and inappropriateness of post-tsunami patterns of donation and programs of aid and recovery. A supplement to this mode of critique is offered in the form of a view of disasters and human vulnerability that hinges on the idea of the self as 'radically passive': that is, as inherently receptive to both the stimuli that cause suffering, and to the demands of others who are suffering. All forms of thought -including geography and disaster studies should themselves be seen as 'vulnerable' and responsive to the impact to disasters. The idea that every 'self' bears the trace of past disasters -and past gifts of others -forms the basis of a vision of bodies and communities as always already 'fractured' by disaster -in ways which resist being 'brought to light'. This offers a way of integrating human and physical geographies through a shared acknowledgement of what is unknowable and absent. It is also suggestive that gratitude might be an appropriate response to a sense of indebtedness to others -for who we are, as much as for what we have done.

Disaster assistance: determinants of countries around the world contributing towards disaster donations

“…Geographies of generosity can refer to the study of different aspects of care where new modes of spatial relationships emerge and practices reveal the multiple and complex motivations for help following the occurrence of natural disasters and/or political emergencies (Barnett and Land, 2007;Carter, 2007;McEwan and Goodman, 2010). This new field already offers a range of studies that analyse the moral grounds of aid in relation to extreme and intense situations, such as the Asian tsunami (Korf, 2007;Clark, 2007).…”

Performative Vulnerability: Climate Change Adaptation Policies and Financing in Kiribati

“…In this sense, vulnerability is neither static nor comprehensible through more precise scientific understandings: rather, vulnerability is constantly made and remade within these encounters. In making this argument, I build on previous embodied, posthumanist, and social-theoretical contributions to understanding vulnerability (Braun and McCarthy, 2005;Clark, 2007;Findlay, 2005;Harrison, 2008;Mustafa, 2005;Yamane, 2009). Like Yamane's (2009) and Mustafa's (2005) research on hazardscapes, I want to link the material and discursive work of vulnerability and examine its effects.…”

The geographies of cultural geography III

“…Matter so often speaks through human sensibilities in accounts of nature, landscape and ecologies; through memory (Cloke and Powson, 2008), landscape and archaeology (Tolia-Kelly, 2010), through assemblages of stone (Edensor,2011 ), through island insularity ; the poetics of rubbish Hawkins (2011); gardens ( Hitchings, 2003), legislation (Hillman and Instone,2010), urban walking (Middleton, 2010), military airspace . As Stewart (2011) Overall what we encounter is a myriad of materialities with varying philosophical and theoretical roots, thus what we require in this field of research is a 'corporeal' generosity (Clark, 2007) to engage, empathise, process. Occasionally what is presented are surface collages, and graceful descriptions of things, places, surfaces and representations.…”