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- Buck, Trudy J., et al.
(författare)
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Long term management of the dead and the ‘virtual’ dead following the Vajont dam disaster of 1963
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper employs an interdisciplinary anthropological approach to a historical hydrological mass disaster to highlight the long term and ongoing significance of water based mass disasters on the surrounding community. Hydrological disasters, both natural and the result of human agency, can lead to extensive fatalities within the local population. Accurate identification of the deceased following any mass disaster event is known to be vital to fulfil the legal and humanitarian requirements of the living. The physical properties of hydrological disaster scenarios, however, can result in large numbers of long term missing bodies that do not allow for identification and the proof of death. The inability to confirm the death of a loved one and to bury a body has a significant impact on the family of the deceased and the long term treatment of the missing, or ‘virtual’ bodies, can cause moral injury and distress to surviving family members.The Vajont disaster in northern Italy in 1963 killed almost 2,000 people when a landslide from Mont Toc collapsed into the Vajont dam triggering a 50,000,000 m3 inland tsunami. The resulting wave swept over the surrounding villages of Longarone, Erto and Casso with such destructive force that bodies were swept as far away as Venice and the remains of over 700 individuals were never located. This paper will discuss the processes used to retrieve and identify bodies after the disaster, prior to development of forensic anthropology as a discipline, and the process of the initial and secondary burials of victims, including the so called ‘virtual’ graves of the missing. The discussion highlights the need to further engage forensic anthropological theory and practice within a wider academic and humanitarian framework, engaging in interdisciplinary conversations with areas such as medical anthropology, disaster victim identification management and mortuary practices. The consideration of the long term consequences of the management of the dead and the employment of a historically deep approach to disaster victim identification will inform and develop the current practices of teaching forensic anthropology in universities and allow for a more holistic and comprehensive practice.
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- Covey, Judith, et al.
(författare)
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Community perceptions of protective practices to prevent ash exposures around Sakurajima volcano, Japan
- 2020
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Ingår i: International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. - : Elsevier BV. - 2212-4209. ; 46
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Whilst, globally, volcanic eruptions are unusual and cause anxiety in affected communities, people living near Sakurajima volcano, Japan are exposed to frequent ashfall with little-to-no official intervention. As part of a wider project, this study assessed how this apparently normalised experience affects residents’ perceptions of health impacts, and whether it is important to protect themselves from ash inhalation. A survey of 749 residents found little evidence of normalisation. Respondents identified a range of symptoms (including eye irritation, low mood, sore throat, cough) perceived to be associated with ash exposure, with 67% experiencing at least one symptom. Only 6% of respondents thought it was not important to protect themselves, and path analysis showed that protection was particularly important to older people and those with existing respiratory disease, who were more likely to rate ash as harmful or associate symptoms with exposures. Therefore, some of the most vulnerable sectors of this community are adversely impacted by ash. However, despite the local government recommending protective measures, most respondents said they had not received advice, but would like to. They took actions that they thought were effective (keeping windows/doors closed) or were easily available (wearing surgical masks). Other research has shown that industry-certified (e.g., N95) masks are more effective than surgical masks. Here, respondents recognised this, but high-efficiency masks were rarely used, probably due to unavailability. The results demonstrate a need to provide ash-affected communities with targeted, evidence-based information on options for effective protection, coupled with ensuring that communities have access to suggested interventions.
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- Lacbawan, Macario
(författare)
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The Burden of Responsibility : Predicaments of Environmental Life in the Caraballo Mountains, Northern Philippines
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Indigenous people are not obviously, or naturally, stewards of the environment. But when the idea that they are such custodians gains legal traction, and when indigenous land-use practices are codified to reflect environmental principles, they become a burden of responsibility that has significant consequences for the lives and the livelihoods of indigenous communities.This thesis is about Ikalahan people of the Caraballo Mountains in Northern Philippines and the vicissitudes of their obligation to the environment. Based on twelve months’ ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when the legal recognition of Ikalahan people as an indigenous group demands that they re-fashion their ancestral land from a place where they practice swidden agriculture into a space where they are supposed to ensure environmental conservation. It explores how the Philippine state utilizes scientific knowledge such as cartography and forestry to facilitate the expulsion and estrangement of Ikalahan people from their land even as it relies on those people to maintain their ancestral land as an exclusive ecological sanctuary.How do Ikalahan communities enact this environmental responsibility, and how do they contest it? The different chapters explore how villagers deploy the cultural power of shame to impose ecological obligations, how they also create tactics to evade and subvert such obligations, and how they use the rhetoric that the land should not be monetized to, precisely, monetize it. The chapters also discuss how traditional moral principles provide a means for Ikalahan people to both understand and facilitate the economic inequalities that have emerged since their land was transformed into an ecological zone. By addressing how Ikalahan communities negotiate the consequences of their legal recognition as indigenous people, the thesis contributes to the expanding literature that shows how indigeneity is not a neutral label, but is, rather, a potentially burdensome positionality whose attachment to the environment is anything but straightforward.
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- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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A chimeric being from Kyushu, Japan : Amabie's revival during Covid-19
- 2020
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Ingår i: Anthropology Today. - : Wiley. - 0268-540X .- 1467-8322. ; 36:5, s. 6-10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores how the resurgence of a forgotten chimeric figure from the Japanese history of disasters and epidemics intersects with some central ecological and political discourses in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic, especially those associated with culinary practices, human rights and relations with other historical epidemics. Presented as a mascot but viewed as an icon of protection, this uncanny little yōkai from southern Japan in the pre‐modern Edo period addresses our lives as they are caught in a suspension of our usual temporal and spatial dimensions. A monster, a hyperobject and an art effigy of our pandemic present.
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- Merli, Claudia
(författare)
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Bodily Practices and Medical Identities in Southern Thailand
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study explores contemporary practices concerning women’s and children’s bodies, with a special focus on postpartum practices, the treatment of the afterbirth and its cosmological dimensions, and male and female circumcision. At the intersection between traditional midwifery and modern medicine, Muslim women cross the boundaries between different cosmologies and medical systems. At the borders to Malaysia, the Muslim minority in Thailand upholds postpartum practices which have been abandoned by the Thai Buddhists in the region, making of the body a contested site of powers and identities. Traditional midwives are pressured to limit their practices to rituals and massage. The increasing use of medical technologies in the form of Caesarean section and modern contraceptives are perceived as leading to changes in the local ethnophysiology of female bodies. The fluidity once characterising pre- and postpartum bodily states, has turned into an infertile rigidity exemplified by metaphors of a hardened body. In official discourse a sharp line is drawn between outdated tradition and medical modernity, at the same time as ethnic-religious borders between Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists are erased with the disappearance of old practices and the emergence of new Muslim identities and rituals. Prodigious events and pregnancy losses led in the past to the formation of spirit cults managed by female mediums and represented a means of communication between Muslim and Buddhist lifeworlds. As these events vanish under medical scrutiny and intervention on the one hand, and a modernist reading of Islam on the other hand, local ethnophysiological conceptions are lost. Individual and social bodies are put under the medical dressage of biopolitics and a discourse on the Muslim minority is created to serve aims of internal colonialism.
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