Description
Book SynopsisAddresses the ways in which natural disasters impact the strategies and priorities of neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance.
Trade ReviewAfter the 2004 tsunami in South India, reconstruction efforts leveraged the humanitarian gift of inland housing to relocate the artisanal fishing population and privatize the coastal commons. But the task of securing a spatial fix for capital accumulation failed. With keen ethnographic insight, Swamy shows how fishers sustained their claim to coastal life and livelihood while transforming humanitarian gifts into assets. Challenging assumptions about its depoliticizing and disciplining effects, he argues for humanitarianism as a contested process that can reset the contours of economy and politics." - Ajantha Subramanian, author of
The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India"This rich, multi-level ethnography brings together a rich ethnography of a fishing community in India, with the largely separate literatures of humanitarianism, disaster studies and development studies, and offers new ways to help poor communities to remain political agents in the face of the forces of neo-liberalism." - Arjun Appadurai, author of
India's World: The Politics of Creativity in a Globalized SocietyTable of Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: “Building Back Better”
- Part I. Nagapattinam
- Chapter 1. The Tsunami of 2004 and Its Aftermath
- Chapter 2. Artisanal Fishers, the State, and an NGO
- Part II. The Politics of Humanitarianism
- Chapter 3. NGO Antipolitics and Politics
- Chapter 4. The Humanitarian Gift Economy
- Part III. Economic Development and Humanitarian Aid
- Chapter 5. Unbridging the Future: Connectivity and Distance
- Chapter 6. Memory, Space, and Power
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
