Inter-Asia Colloquium Series
Spring Semester Workshop
‘Natural’ Disaster: Inter-Asian Perspectives
April 12th, 2014 at Yale University Department of Anthropology (10 Sachem Street)
‘Natural’ disasters are the complex outcome of unfolding atmospheric, geologic, social, and historical processes - processes which cannot be understood as truly distinct in this moment of the anthropocene. The ontological status of ‘nature,’ and the threshold of ‘disaster,’ are increasingly uncertain for scholars and everyday people alike.
In the making of a ‘natural’ disaster, progressing geophysical events are channelled along fissures in social space: ‘disasters’ fall differently across the contour lines of poverty, ‘underdevelopment,’ age, gender, and ethnicity. In their wakes, ‘natural’ disasters prompt conversations about responsibility and repair that tie together problems of risk and justice, technology and governance. ‘Natural’ disasters pose a challenge of meaning: how can actors make moral sense of these occurrences? At the same time, disasters can serve to (re)activate or (re)configure particular imagined communities, from ‘the town’ to ‘the region’ to ‘the nation.’
Within the past decade, locations in Asia have experienced a series of devastating disasters, including the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China, the 3-11 earthquake in Japan, and Typhoon Haiyan in the Phillippines. These events resulted in serious loss of life, homelessness, and displacement. They altered ecosystems and landscapes and undermined human infrastructures. In their aftermaths, ‘recovery’ has been uneven and contested.
A translocal, transregional perspective is essential for understanding these charged events. ‘Natural’ disasters both trouble and reinforce national boundaries. Disasters occur across borders, simultaneously affecting multiple countries in a region - and, increasingly, particular events are linked to knotty transnational problems of global climate change. People and matter-out-of-place may move across borders, as well; and processes of aid and recovery are organized at regional and international scales. Further, reflections on the meaning of a disaster, attempts to assign blame and determine causation, may recruit intra-regional comparisons and references. At the same time, disasters may focalize patriotic or nationalistic sentiments, raise questions of national character and cultural identity, or highlight issues of national or regional security.
As part of the cross-institutional Inter-Asia Initiative, students and faculty members at Yale are working to develop an analytics of ‘Inter-Asia’ that challenges static, bounded categories of inquiry. We employ a concept of ‘region’ that treats locations at all scales, from ‘the local’ to ‘the global,’ as the products of particular historical connections and engagements. We hope to understand ‘Asia,’ then, as a set of interlinked formations - cultural, political, material, and discursive - that stretch from the Middle East to East Asia. By tracing the concrete connections between ‘Asian’ locations - be they flows of goods and people, flows of information and ideas, or shared watersheds and bioregions - we believe that new kinds of scholarly insights are possible.
In the spirit of this ‘Inter-Asian’ perspective, we turn to studies of ‘natural’ disasters in Asia as an important arena in which to investigate and discuss inter-Asian connections. This workshop is open to scholars who are researching ‘natural’ disasters, broadly defined, in locations across Asia. The event will emphasize new and emerging research; and we encourage applications from late-stage graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who would benefit from a wide-ranging exploration of transregional issues. Possible areas of discussion include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
This colloquium series is supported by Yale’s MacMillan Center and the Carnegie Corporation -funded Inter-Asia Initiative at Yale, a partnership effort between Yale University and other institutions including the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) at the University of Hong Kong, and Gottingen University. Additional support for the Inter-Asia Initiative at Yale comes from the Council for East Asian Studies, the Council for Southeast Asian Studies, and the South Asian Studies Council.