A “disaster” is often described by survivors as an incomprehensible disruption of their life trajectories, an upheaval of their horizon of meanings that accelerates some processes and creates an historical caesura at different levels. A pre- and a post- “state of being” is invoked in the narratives of the survivors that materialize a socio-cultural fault that runs crosswise to the buildings’ cracks. In the aftermath of 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, the same narratives and inhabitants’ daily practices follow the main shock and the humanitarian management of the Italian Government that after 5 months displaced 30.000 people (circa half of the city population) and built 19 “New Towns” and dozens of temporary wood housing units - assigned by a logarithm and located in new residential areas in derogation from the rules in force. At the same time, the historical centres of the city and of its 60 localities have been closed by visible and invisible barriers: these barriers encapsulate an excess production of memory in subjects’ experience that are living a non-overlapping here in a post- elsewhere, a history/memory dialect that subsumes the time of trauma in name of a neoliberal biopolitics of risk optimization for the urgent need to restore security after the emergency. Starting from a 6 months ethnography in one of those localities, this paper tries to explore - also from a methodological perspective - the implications of ethnography as a tool of understanding a post-disaster context; if it’s clearly complex for a researcher to reconstruct and define “the” field in an upset area, an analysis of places seen as spaces of relational practices can give us a way to understand the subject’s dealing with the “disaster”, focusing on daily micro-tactics acted and narrated in a complex time dimension. Post-disaster places becomes then “a cultural mean” that allows the anthropologist to analyze the consequences of “the fault” activated by the earthquake.
Carnelli, F. (2015). Ethnography of a (present) absence. Space-time practices and walking ethnography in post-seismic L’Aquila. Intervento presentato a: International anthropological workshop. Comparative study of disasters and upheavals: perceptions and responses, Chengdu, China.
Ethnography of a (present) absence. Space-time practices and walking ethnography in post-seismic L’Aquila
CARNELLI, FABIO
2015
Abstract
A “disaster” is often described by survivors as an incomprehensible disruption of their life trajectories, an upheaval of their horizon of meanings that accelerates some processes and creates an historical caesura at different levels. A pre- and a post- “state of being” is invoked in the narratives of the survivors that materialize a socio-cultural fault that runs crosswise to the buildings’ cracks. In the aftermath of 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, the same narratives and inhabitants’ daily practices follow the main shock and the humanitarian management of the Italian Government that after 5 months displaced 30.000 people (circa half of the city population) and built 19 “New Towns” and dozens of temporary wood housing units - assigned by a logarithm and located in new residential areas in derogation from the rules in force. At the same time, the historical centres of the city and of its 60 localities have been closed by visible and invisible barriers: these barriers encapsulate an excess production of memory in subjects’ experience that are living a non-overlapping here in a post- elsewhere, a history/memory dialect that subsumes the time of trauma in name of a neoliberal biopolitics of risk optimization for the urgent need to restore security after the emergency. Starting from a 6 months ethnography in one of those localities, this paper tries to explore - also from a methodological perspective - the implications of ethnography as a tool of understanding a post-disaster context; if it’s clearly complex for a researcher to reconstruct and define “the” field in an upset area, an analysis of places seen as spaces of relational practices can give us a way to understand the subject’s dealing with the “disaster”, focusing on daily micro-tactics acted and narrated in a complex time dimension. Post-disaster places becomes then “a cultural mean” that allows the anthropologist to analyze the consequences of “the fault” activated by the earthquake.
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