Disaster Subcultures & Resilience as Relationship
Touch moss & remember
What comes to mind & body when you hear the word disaster? Is it the hazard itself, like a hurricane or a train derailment? A felt sense of contraction, or withdrawal? Does it include the devastated infrastructure and communities? The rising up of mutual-aid and collective support through informal organizing and relationships, the moments when it feels like politicians have exploited the crisis for their own gain without offering real assistance? The evacuating, the hunkering down, the rebuilding, the relocation. Memories, projections? The break in the status quo and the resulting window into a different way of being? The crushing weight of momentum that pulls us back into an enforced normalcy when that window starts to close? And what gets deleted, forgotten, absenced in order to move forward in that way? What do we lose when we forget, and what opens back up when we insist on remembering?
Press your hand into a tuft of moss. Or, if you don’t have access to tufts of moss, try a memory foam pillow. Feel your hand make an impression, and then release the pressure and lift your hand back up. Watch the moss, or memory foam, spring back. The moss, or pillow, remembers its original shape. That’s resilience, from the latin root resilere, meaning to recoil or jump back. The moss naturally pops back into its original shape after pressure is applied, because it has this springy quality. Resilience as a field of study originally comes from natural systems science to describe ecosystems that can experience disruption and then quickly return to its previous state, or potentially an even healthier state. In the 1950’s, as the social sciences attempted to shed the stigma of being a “soft science” by adopting systems theory, researchers began looking into the qualities that help human beings able to “bounce back” after adverse childhood experiences. Some kids thrived after abuse, and some didn’t. Researchers wanted to know why, and developed a list of characters that the children who thrived didn’t. They weren’t concerned yet with how or why those children might have developed or acquired those traits, or how to change the conditions that allow for abuse. They focused on traits.
Over time, the idea of resilience being a checklist of qualities a person either does or doesn’t have has fallen away in favor of a more relational perspective. We all have the potential for resilience within us, and throughout our evolution it was our community’s responsibility to cultivate this seed in us so that we could withstand disruption and overwhelming experiences together. But because we are steeped in the ideology of Individualism in the West, we are often left to bootstrap ourselves through our challenges alone in our misconception of ourselves as separate from other beings. That’s how we end up with the concept of resilience being used to deny people needed resources, or to adapt people to abusive and oppressive conditions. You’ve probably seen some version of the meme where someone is offered the “compliment” that they are so resilient and have survived so much, and they respond “Thanks! It was that or die!” It’s not therapeutic or liberating to hear how capable you are of bouncing back from traumatic experiences when there is no questioning of why the traumatic experiences keep happening in the first place. When resilience is used as a way to shift the burden of survival onto the individual, it is really more of an agenda than an understanding of human thriving. In her writing about cultural resilience of Native American students, Crow/Blackfeet educator Dr. Iris Heavyrunner Prettypaint says resilience is the innate capacity for wellbeing. This innate capacity is meant to be nurtured by the community, involving not just mental health treatment and education but participation in cultural practices, and interventions that include facilitating change in the social environment. Social change & collective action bring out our inherent resilience. This brings us beyond the individual to the research into community resilience.
In disaster research and the practice of emergency management there is a hunger to understand what makes communities resilient or able to bounce back following disasters and other crises. Research points us to certain qualities: economic resources are important, but so is social cohesion. Communities that prioritize disaster preparedness and recovery planning fare better, but this requires an economic base that many rural and marginalized communities don’t have access to. In the research, these communities get called “vulnerable,” as in vulnerable to the more negative impacts of disasters. In her essay Black feminism & Radical Planning, environmental justice scholar Fayola Jacobs questions this: who made these communities vulnerable? What was the historical process by which they were vulnerablized? Of course a community will be more vulnerable to the negative impacts of disasters if they have been generationally blocked from accumulating economic resources, red lined and forced to live near natural and industrial hazards. A community’s capacity to recover from that disaster is not separate from the resources they had access to to plan for potential disasters. Human choices about development, zoning, and resource distribution influence how devastating a disaster will be, and these choices are often rooted in systems of oppression, meaning the impacts of a disaster are never equitable, and neither are the formal sources of recovery. So, like the ability of an individual to “bounce back” after a disaster, a community’s disaster resilience is actually a deeply relational process. And all of our relationships in the dominant culture of the West are filtered through hierarchy, domination and supremacy. This is how you disconnect people from land, from each other, and from themselves. This is why recovering those relationships is so powerful, and so threatening to those who benefit from domination in the current system.
During my time at Tulane I learned a lot about the formal processes by which communities declare emergencies and receive federal funding, the ways states and municipalities decide how much money to dedicate to disaster planning, and the role infrastructure plays in resilience. But coming from a social work, climate justice and cultural anthropology background, I was interested in the social forms of community disaster resilience. If human beings had lived alongside potentially destructive hazards for tens of thousands of years, surely we would have evolved cultural methods of living with risk of annihilation? I felt like if I could research and learn about those practices, I could be a part of recovering and supporting an older and more deeply rooted form of disaster resilience, something much needed as we witness the formal systems of disaster response and recovery fail in the face of increased climate-driven disasters and the deterioration of the social safety net.
One of the theories I discovered during this process is called Disaster Subculture theory. This theory emerged from disaster research by Wenger & Weller that looked at how communities that experience repeated disasters develop cultural practices and ingrained values that help them adapt to living with that hazard. In this example from the 2010 Chile earthquake, interviewees stated that due to the frequency of earthquakes in the Greater Concepción region, they had a relationship to earthquakes that included an understanding that if it was bad enough for a person to fall, then they knew to go outside and head up onto the mountains. This ended up protecting them from resulting tsunamis. Most importantly, this knowledge was the result of pre-colonial Indigenous wisdom from the Mapuche people, who did not experience themselves as being at the mercy of nature but had developed, over generations, practices for living with risk. This points to the way that colonization, which included banning Indigenous peoples from participating in their own cultural practices, is a major contributing factor to increasing disaster vulnerability, though this tends to be ignored in disaster scholarship.
I see movements like Mutual-Aid Disaster Relief as networks of Disaster Subcultures. Mutual-aid, that often self-organizing decentralized way of supporting each other in meeting needs after a crisis or disaster, draws on our innate capacities as cooperative beings but it also draws on lineages like the Black Panthers Survival Programs, Indigenous lifeways, anarchist praxis and the labor movement. During the pandemic, efforts have been made to de-politicize mutual-aid from its radical roots, but Disaster Subcultures challenge this tendency in the mainstream. One of my driving research and practice questions is: How do we cultivate the wisdom and efficacy of Disaster Subcultures in a reciprocal, and not extractive, way? Is this even possible within institutions like academia and formal disaster relief agencies as they currently exist?
And one of my driving personal questions is: how do I remember my original, more relational, shape?
I’d like to shout out one organization that is doing amazing work answering these questions and organizing around them. I’ve collaborated with Climate Mobilization on research and webinars, and you can sign up to hear more about how they are networking mutual-aid and climate survival groups to build power. They have an event in a few weeks, Tuesday August 27 or Thursday August 29 from 3-5pm PT / 6-8pm ET. You can sign up here to learn more about their climate survival programs and vision for movement-building. Their members and collaborators are building tangible networks to actualize our capacity to collectively thrive through climate justice, and if you are interested in what I’ve written about here you’re going to be stoked about what they’re working on.
Next week I’m going to approach Disaster Subcultures from a more personal perspective. I’m exploring the 1980 Irpinia Earthquake in Southern Italy & my own relationship to my lineage and how people in Southern Italy & the Italian diaspora in the US work with traumatic amnesia and remembering in our own relationship to disaster. This whole writing project is an attempt to integrate my personal writing and my academic writing, the scholar in me with the mystic. I’m still figuring it out, and am grateful you’re with me in this. & HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has subscribed! I’ve been bowled over by the response & feedback.
More to come <3 CC