Book Review: Samuels, A. (2019). After the Tsunami: Disaster Narratives and the Remaking of Everyday Life in Aceh.

Abstract

After the Tsunami represents an in-depth study of survivors of the 2004 tsunami in the badly-hit Indonesian province of Aceh. Annemarie Samuels interrogates disaster narratives and the efforts of survivors to remake everyday life in the midst of destruction, loss, humanitarian aid, and political change after decades of an armed conflict that was finally settled in August 2005. The book focuses on how people speak, or remain silent, about the tsunami and its aftermath, and adds important insights to the anthropological study of disasters by exploring how subjectivities are constructed through disaster narratives. Samuels presents her rich ethnographic material and interview excerpts, which were gathered in a period of more than ten years, in a clear and accessible language. This clarity is also reflected in the structure of the book. Its five chapters are organized in a rather linear time fashion, starting with before the tsunami, and finishing with Acehnese speculations about a future. The Introduction makes mention of social science framings of disasters, and sets Annemarie Samuels’ work as a continuation of subjectivities studies within psychological anthropology. The author argues that, although scholars call for processual and historically informed analysis of disasters, pointing at asymmetries of power and the social construction of vulnerabilities, for tsunami survivors the framing of the disaster is first and foremost that of an event. She asserts that “post-disaster recovery is not only a social and cultural process, but also a fundamentally subjective one” (p. 7). The author proposes narratives as a methodological device to examine how subjectivities and everyday life are made through them. Narratives, she writes, are also an epistemological device. For example, storytelling itself is an essential component of remaking. The first chapter looks at the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and centers survivors’ agency vis-à-vis Indonesian government representatives and foreign humanitarian aid. Especially with regard to the reconstruction phase, the author skillfully presents how the figure of the local broker and the proposal, that is local efforts to approach authorities in a bureaucratically acceptable form, mediate negotiations among citizens and authorities. Taking the issues of housing, citizen complaints of corruption, and time lags or inaction of government institutions, the author teases out the threads of patronage relations from the Rezensionen  Book reviews