We Are All Survivors

A collection of essays written by folklorists, We Are All Survivors: Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery contemplates and challenges the role of folklorists in supporting disaster survivors on their road to recovery. Contributors include folklorists who have survived disasters firsthand, those who have worked with disaster-stricken communities, and those who analyze the role of empathy when engaging with disaster survivors. This collection encompasses a wide range of disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; the Chūetsu-Niigata Earthquake in Japan; the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster; and the COVID-19 pandemic. The book questions what it means to be a survivor, how to effectively navigate empathy, and what folkloristics may contribute to disaster recovery.In the introduction, Carl Lindahl shares his experiences launching a project called “Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston,” which recruited, trained, and paid displaced evacuees to record fellow survivor's stories. As the project progressed, Lindahl quickly realized that the notion of “fellow survivor” is nebulous. Interviews conducted by students who did not experience the hurricane created powerful and coherent stories that may have produced healing effects as effective as those recorded by hurricane survivors, further emphasizing that anyone may effectively engage with disaster survivors if they have an empathetic approach and respectfully allow the survivors to take the lead.Lindahl proposes three ways in which folklorists may help use their professional skills to deal with humanitarian crises: (1) Work with law enforcement agencies, news organizations, and the public to prepare them for false reports of victim-blaming stories; (2) document the experiences of survivors in ways that present them as sympathetic characters deserving of aid; and (3) be responders by ensuring that survivor testimonies are shared broadly beyond the survivor community. All the essays in this collection advocate for survivor agency and bring forth compelling examples of survivors passionately supporting each other and folklorists effectively and respectfully engaging with impacted communities and documenting these interactions.Chapters 2 through 4 present contrasting yet parallel reflections by Japanese folklorists on their engagements with disaster survivor communities. Yutaka Suga had been “objectively” (p. 29) conducting fieldwork on bullfighting in Ojiya since 1998. It was not until after the 2004 Chūetsu-Niigata Earthquake that he developed an empathetic relationship with his informants. Just 10 days after the disaster, while still in a gymnasium, evacuees were already discussing how to continue the bullfighting tradition, which Suga was determined to support. He became a member of a bullfighting organization and supported their recovery efforts by preparing official documents for funding opportunities and communicating with the mass media about the importance of traditional culture. He advocates for the need to encourage impacted communities to actualize recovery projects on their own instead of relying on potentially exploitative projects initiated by outside professionals with selfish motives.Yoko Taniguchi interviewed elderly current and former residents of a rural mountain village also impacted by the Chūetsu-Niigata Earthquake. After continuing her interviews for over 10 years, Taniguchi found that older adults emphasize a strong attachment to their hometown and actively seek tangible reasons to return, such as caring for farms and cleaning ancestral graves.Kōji Katō’s chapter is about the materiality of objects based on his involvement with a collections-rescue operation following the March 11, 2011, triple disaster. The team was responsible for rehousing and restoring 4,000 documents and other materials. University students who supported the cleaning process returned to the affected sites and eventually held 25 exhibitions over 10 years displaying disaster-affected materials, which evoked fond pre-disaster memories for survivors. Kōji aptly summarizes that “the process of rescue is one of giving meaning to objects, of identifying their place in a wider narrative” (p. 72). All three of these case studies emphasize the value of long-term support to build trust and develop a well-informed understanding of survivors’ priorities and visions for recovery.Kate Parker Horigan writes as a survivor-folklorist and offers a convincing argument about the power of critical empathy. Through her personal experiences with Hurricane Katrina, Horigan interrogates the potential issues and addresses the merits of being a survivor-ethnographer. She argues that survivor-scholars have the privilege and positionality to draw attention to less-visible local expertise and that this support “will ultimately increase survivors’ command over their stories and the recovery of their communities” (p. 93). Amy Shuman's chapter complements Horigan's through a suggestion that tellability is a companion to empathetic listening. She advocates for ethnographers and folklorists to actively create conditions that empower survivors to have control of their own stories by remaining cognizant of the imbalances between survivors and witnesses.Michael Dylan Foster is neither a survivor nor an ethnographer of disaster, but he presents an intriguing example of a Japanese ritual where practitioners demonstrated the need to hold their tradition lightly, meaning they had to be flexible and willing to adjust to unforeseen circumstances. This notion is valuable for post-disaster communities where a “willingness to modify or reinvert tradition to accommodate the needs of a community in crisis” (p. 124) may help them maintain a sense of continuity; for example, they might hold a performance of traditional dance in a new, unconventional location such as an evacuation center. On the other hand, living traditions within a community establish pre-existing infrastructures of trust and teamwork that may support disaster relief activities such as preparing meals.Gloria M. Colom Braña offers a very personal firsthand experience of living in Puerto Rico as Hurricane Maria made landfall. Her chapter is especially impactful when read after the preceding chapters, by demonstrating the power of storytelling from the perspective of a survivor.We Are All Survivors concludes with a description of the “Folklife's First Responders” project, a series of interviews with public folklorists from 2020–2021 to learn how they have adapted their work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book could have benefitted from a stronger conclusion or even a tool kit providing guidance and resources on ethnographic methods to balance a researcher's expertise with survivor empathy and to support survivor initiatives and their vision for the recovery of cultural activities. However, an overall emphasis on the value of applied work particularly in a post-disaster context is extremely valuable, and this book is a must-read not only for ethnographers and researchers working with disaster survivors, but also for academics who seek to become more empathetic and more community-oriented researchers

Aesthetics · Art · Sociology · Disaster Management and Resilience · History · Psychology