Mara Benadusi

Pedagogies of the Unknown: Unpacking 'Culture' in Disaster Risk Reduction Education

Disaster risk reduction policies make heavy use of education for spreading a ‘culture’ of resilience at community level. This paper reflects on the uncritical way the concept of culture is used in current pedagogies of resilience. It describes how a deterministic/normative vision of culture is gradually giving way to a generative/emergentist approach. Indeed, the notion of resilience has brought with it an idea of culture that emphasizes the flexible and dynamic character of learning. The paper also illuminates the unrecognized potential for disaster education, for it can be used as a tool to absolve public institutions from failure by shifting responsibility for safety to the population. Resilience, in other words, can become a shock absorber that compensates for institutional inefficiency.

Cultivating Communities after Disaster: A Whirlwind of Generosity on the Coasts of Sri Lanka

A common idea in many studies of catastrophe is that the experience of disaster ruptures the worldly order, causing the obliteration of every means of making sense of human existence. According to this approach, the traumatic fracture of catastrophe cannot be easily repaired, because it threatens to leave people unanchored from their prospects for planning, sharing values, acting, and making history as agents present in the world. The well-known Italian folklorist Ernesto De Martino uses the concept of “crisis of presence” to describe this condition of displacement and alarming uncertainty that human beings experience under certain circumstances (disease, death, conflict, and calamity in general) when facing the potential loss of the familiar reference points that give meaning to daily life.

3.3 Learning to Survive in Sri Lanka: Education and Training in Times of Catastrophe

In the context of pre- and post-catastrophe education, ethnography can be an important tool to interpret the numerous pedagogical viewpoints that permeate these learning settings. The papers shows how, in times of catastrophe, the tensions that emerge between different forms of situated knowledge and practices are at the root of many of the failures of disaster education. In order to reduce the impact of disasters through capacity building, both local and global experts are involved in a common effort to interpret, shape and represent “the” disaster. In this way the catastrophe becomes a cognitive artifact that activates hypertrophic efforts of interpretation, generating multiple contradictory versions of the event itself. A single disaster fragments into conflicting sets of interpretations according to the experiences of those affected and those who intervened. Meanwhile, disasters force both researchers and practitioners alike to confront the many and shifting faces of these social imagined realities. The ethnographer is no exception. By repositioning the disaster into its diachronic dimensions, retracing the play of refractions between the different sources of knowledge on the catastrophe, and participating actively in the learning laboratories that shape the emergency arena, the ethnographer contributes towards making the disaster “real”.

Con-donare. Ipertrofia del dono nello Sri Lanka post-tsunami

The paper traces a biography of the gift in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. It shows that the process of “commodification” of international aid was not produced by a monolithic humanitarian apparatus, considered as the perverse expression of the interference of the North on the South of the world. Various ethnographic studies prove that the “competitive humanitarianism” that emerged in Sri Lanka resulted by an interrelate network of individuals and organizations which overcomes the rigid distinction between beneficiaries and donors, expatriates and locals, experts and non-experts.