Anthropological Approaches in Disaster Management

View with images and charts “Anthropological Approaches in Disaster Management” Introduction The disastrous event of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre September 11th 2001 boosted an already emerging tendency within geo-politics and disaster emergency relief; a tendency that combines emergency relief operations in so-called disaster areas with national security concerns and policy making (Bonnén and Søsted 2004). Hjalte Tin (2000) has examined this tendency and its origins within the Danish aid sector and defines it as "risk aid". Risk aid is often provided along with military intervention, and it is implemented in regions or countries not on the basis of how much suffering a given population is enduring, but rather on the basis of the perceived amount of threat it is believed to entail towards the West (Tin 2000). The threat can either take the form of massive refugee floods washing in over Western boarders, or the form of terrorists eager to blow themselves up along with thousands of innocent Western civilians. Whereas the link to the belief that disasters can produce refugees is rather obvious, it may not appear quite as logic and straight forward why such events should create terrorists? - But the risk aid discourse ties a broad spectrum of events that are often defined as disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, famines, the AIDSepidemic, widespread poverty, and war to the construction of fundamentalist ideologies as well as to the production of young people, who are willing to carry out atrocious acts in the West. The implementation of large-scale relief operations have to date primarily been based on political decision making, as Western governments are the primary institutions providing the funding for such interventions either via bilateral approaches or via the UN institutions. However, relief organizations are currently finding it increasingly hard to oppose the risk aid discourse or get a voice within it, in order to secure funding for the disasters they find to be the most entitled, and in the form the they wish for (Askov 2004). It thus appears that they lack an argument that can form a counter discourse beyond the risk aid discourse, or even better some convincing arguments grounded in scientific knowledge of the consequences of disasters. That is not to say that decision-making would not still be based on a political agenda. The argument would, however, stand stronger if it went beyond mere rhetoric’s and was based on scientific knowledge regarding empiric reality especially on the progression of disaster events, as the risk aid discourse projected by Western governments are largely concerned with the perceived risks such events pose to their own boarders. That leads to the overall question of what anthropology has to say. What does anthropology currently know about what disasters do to people and what people do with disasters? And how does anthropology know? Historically anthropology has generally neglected disasters as objects of study sui generis. Since the 1980s, however, a small group of disaster researchers have been emerging. Currently their work is mainly represented in two books edited by Anthony Oliver-Smith and

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