The Politics of Catastrophe. Coping with 'Humanitarianism' in Post-tsunami Sri Lanka

The chapter draws on ethnographic research on the tsunami-affected coasts of Sri Lanka to explore how the catastrophe functions as a laboratory of “social drama” formation. By integrating the disaster into a long-term time frame and by dealing with the daily life of people, I examine the political use of the disaster situation. What resources do the locals use to “cope with” disaster, participating in a kind of ideal invention of the collective drama? What forms of appropriation do they develop against the “humanitarian” intervention, often presented as outside the political field, or analyzed by social sciences in terms of “biopolitics”? The use of identity resources and disaster politics by the victims, and the reconfiguration of collective memories through a renewed relationship with the past explain why the return to normal life may appear as the first fiction of disasters. The Sri Lankan case presented in this chapter is an example of the kind of highly politicized and projective undertaking that follows a catastrophe. Through the interactions with old and new, global and local, national and international actors, the populations affected by the tidal wave ended up engaging in a project far removed from the mere reconstruction of socio-material references that gave meaning to everyday life before the disaster. They found themselves participating in an ambitious and tricky political exercise shaped by values that required renegotiation and based on social agreements that themselves had been remade.