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Friday, September 02, 2005
More on Katrina and Anthropology
I received an e-mail today from a fellow grad student about a professor at the University of Texas who is initiating an informal response from the academic community regarding Hurricane Katrina and what, if anything, different disciplines could contribute. He initially posed this invitation to his grad students at Texas but it made its way to USF anthropoplogy listserv so I was prompted to build on my previous post about Katrina and the possibility of an anthropological perspective. The following is what I submitted.
It is not immediately obvious what, if anything, the field of archaeology can offer to the understanding of and response to the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We are after all concerned with the material remains of past cultures and societies. In one disturbing sense any academic endeavor carried out in the immediate disaster area will ultimately be a study of a past society. Archaeologists several hundred years from now may excavate in New Orleans and be able to correlate data with historical accounts of a great flood that happened back in AD 2005. It is unknown what conclusions they may draw.
In a broader context, the field of anthropology has much to offer to the study and documentation of Katrina. One news reporter spoke of a “leveling effect” whereby every private citizen within the disaster area suddenly became equal: all had lost virtually everything. Money no longer held any value and one could no longer be judged by their material possessions. It is obvious however that an overwhelming majority of those “left behind” were of the lowest economic class in the country before the storm. They simply did not have the means to evacuate the city when the government demanded it. These people were herded into the Louisiana Superdome like cattle to ride out the storm only to emerge on the other side as headless chickens. Government officials initially did little to displace the survivors from the area after the hurricane had passed. Indeed there was little that could be done in such a devastating aftermath. Looters practiced their trade with callous indifference to law and order while others had no choice but to participate just to survive.
The dynamics of the entire situation beg for anthropological insight. Overnight the Superdome was transformed into a new society with new rules and new survival tactics. New Orleans was no longer and its former citizens found themselves facing the challenges of a lawless, third world nation. This was a unique situation in which people who had very little to begin with had even less. How did they react, adjust, and cope with this new social environment? What effect did cramming twenty thousand people into a concrete structure have on the mentality of these people? Surely exhaustion, devastation, frustration, and confusion were the most prevalent. However I feel there was something less obvious going on inside the walls of the Superdome. With little social order to speak of and even less infrastructure guiding the actions of the survivors, what knowledge and abilities did they put into use over the past several days? How did they deal with unrest? These are anthropological questions whose answers can serve a purpose. That purpose make become more obvious in the coming weeks and months but it is safe to conclude at this point that by studying how the people affected by the hurricane reacted and acted will be integral to planning for similar future situations.
Posted by Will at September 2, 2005 11:48 PM in Anthropology | In the News