In December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions of Sri Lanka. Six months later, Michele Ruth Gamburd returned to the village where she had been conducting research for many years and began collecting residents' stories of the disaster and its aftermath: the chaos and loss of the flood itself; the sense of community and levelling of social distinctions as people worked together to recover and regroup; and the local and national politics of foreign aid as the country began to rebuild. In The Golden Wave, Gamburd describes how the catastrophe changed social identities, economic dynamics, and political structures.
Introduction: Political Ethnography of Disaster
Wijitha's Story
1. That day: Chaos and Solidarity
Dr. Priyanka's Story
2. Deaths: Fate and Vulnerability
Pradeep and Manoj's Story
3. Short-term Camps: Chaos and the Crafting of Order
Sumendra's Story
4. Housing: Temporary Shelters, Permanent Homes, and the Buffer
Zone
Lalitha's Story
5. Dangerous Liaisons: The Power, Peril, and Politics of Mediating
between Donors and Recipients
Jagath's Story
6. Business Recovery: Tourism and Construction
Dayawansa's Story
7. Reconstructing Class: Discourse on Theft, Loot, Cheating, and
Gifts
Fazmina's Story
8. The Politics of Corruption: Accusations and Rebuttals
Tharindu's Story
9. Citizenship and Ethnicity: The Tsunami and the Civil War
Conclusion
Michele Ruth Gamburd is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Portland State University. She is author of The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids and Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka and editor (with Dennis B. McGilvray) of Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions.
"Michele Ruth Gamburd's new book contributes rich views into the
micro-dynamics of local experiences of relief and reconstructions
projects.Vol. 73.1-2 2014"—Asian Ethnology
"The Golden Wave would be ideal for use in introductory-level
undergraduate anthropology or sociology courses on disasters and
humanitarian aid. It would also be well placed in introductory
courses on economic anthropology."—The Journal of Asian Studies
"Sensitively written, this an articulate social anthropologist's
examination of the immediate and ongoing much longer impact of
2004's devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. . . This is the best kind
of microstudy. It merits much praise for its thick description and
authenticity. . . Highly recommended."—Choice
"[G]amburd shows that all of the narratives demonstrate how 'Under
cover of disaster, capitalist interests can pursue neoliberal
agendas, humanitarian workers can implement culturally
inappropriate policies, and people pursuing international economic
and political agendas can ignore or refuse local input'—a story
that is repeated over and over from Nicaragua to New Orleans to
Pakistan and beyond, and to which Gamburd has added rich narrative
coupled with insightful analysis.71.2 2015"—Journal of
Anthropological Research
"Gamburd's political ethnography of this disaster is brilliant,
poignant, and will help anthropology in its nascent theorizing of
disaster, and will help all of those who want to understand how
people make sense and recover from disaster."—David L. Brunsma,
Virginia Tech
"[Provides] a rich human context to a catastrophic event too often
reduced by statistics and policy analysis to an exemplary
abstraction (or by sensationalism to a kind of voyeurism) . . . . I
can well imagine general readers picking it up to try to figure out
why the tsunami was 'golden' and getting hooked by the many
stories."—Mark Whitaker, University of Kentucky
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