| 1. |
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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- 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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| 6. |
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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Circumcision
- 2024
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Ingår i: The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 9780470657225 - 9781118924396
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Genital cutting is a well-researched bodily practice in anthropology, often associated with the formation of gender, personhood and self in different cosmologies. Early anthropology focused on male initiation rituals, blood sacrifices, and masculinity. As more women anthropologists conducted fieldwork on reproductive health, practices that were previously precluded to male anthropologists, the attention moved progressively to female genital cutting and modifications. Diverging ethical discussions on human rights and health, as well as a range of religious, political and medical stances invest the two practices, which should be considered together. They are also at the centre of opposite global health strategies and interventions by international health organizations, for example the WHO. Recent developments highlight the issue of bodily integrity also for male children. The topic becomes politicized in relation to migration health, gendered violence, and worldviews in the new country of residence. Circumcision calls into question our ability to claim cultural relativism.
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| 9. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent, et al.
(författare)
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Disaster as historical and community heritage : Memory, management and fluid landscapes of the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Survivors of the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster make of memory the foundational heritage of their communities. Individual and collective stories cut across people’s experiences and roots, making of memory a problematic legacy for the contemporary re-construction of identities. Memory of the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster is expressed in both intangible and material forms that require management in order to be transmitted to the following generations. Survivors preserve histories of the alpine tsunami triggered by the collapse of Mount Toc into the dam reservoir, and which erased villages along the Piave’s valley and torn away mountain hamlets along the Vajont reservoir, leaving behind approximately 2000 dead. But how do those who did not experience the disaster ‘remember’ it? The local landscapes are punctuated by remaining infrastructures and memorialisation of relevant sites, dominated by the menacing presence of the intact dam. Thousands of visitors every year travel to the region to attend commemorative events, walking the places of the disaster, entering museums and cemeteries, often accompanied by local guides (some of them provincial forest park guides, some of them survivors, others who attend specific training to inform the visitors). Contending histories about individual and collective plural memories cut across people’s experiences of the past and present Vajont, making of memory a problematic legacy for the historical and contemporary re-construction of local identities. Multidisciplinary research conducted in the area evidenced the transience and fluidity of intersecting territorial and experiential landscapes.
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| 10. |
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| 11. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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Gendered and Ungendered Bodies in the Tsunami : Experiences and Ontological Vulnerability in Southern Thailand
- 2019
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Ingår i: Climate Hazards, Disasters, and Gender Ramifications. - London : Routledge. - 9781138354364 - 9780429424861 ; , s. 165-183
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter focuses on the embodied experiences of women and men during and in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It explores ethnographic material collected in Thailand’s southernmost western province from December 2004 to March 2005 and on subsequent returns to the field to analyse how people lived the catastrophe through theirs and others’ bodies. The 2004 tsunami put the Global North into a shared vulnerability in a natural disaster rarely envisioned in a technocratic society. A different and more intimate relation between fish and human bodies turned out to impact the aftermath of the tsunami via a tangible fear of unintentional anthropophagy. The chapter considers perspectivistic analyses very significant for reflecting on the endangered definition of subjectivity, objectivity and personhood of the post-tsunami’s potential fish eaters. Gendered bodies as sexually active bodies were mentioned as a remote cause of the tsunami in religious interpretations that attributed the triggering of the disaster to unbridled sexuality and moral corruption.
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| 12. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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Panel "Disasters from above: when water and power kill"
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We are facing an increasing global threat from natural and man-made disasters in which water brings devastation to rural as well as urban communities, recurring seasonally or when extraordinary events hit, in developing and developed countries. While the hypothetical line separating natural and man-made disasters becomes increasingly thinner and disasters reveal to ultimately be complex social processes, there is a need for a broader dialogue between academics and disaster management experts. The title of this panel calls attention to several dimensions that constitute meanings of hydrological hazards/water disasters as coming from above. Physically: in the form of monsoon rains, storms leading to floods, inundations and mudslides, dams’ overtopping or collapses, towering tsunamis. Metaphorically: in the form of an agency that is perceived as pertaining to specific forms of power, such as the result of poor water management, corruption, or direct technical responsibility (as in several dam-related disasters). Teleologically: in the form of local tales or popular culture interpretations that propose a final cause (human, impersonal or superhuman) in relation to disaster events. The panel intends to foster a novel critical insight on practices, lived worlds, and underlying worldviews that govern the conceptualisation of disaster at the grassroots level, how the event and following recovery process are experienced, managed and narrated by members of the local communities and professionals, and how they are portrayed in popular culture. Disasters radicalise and problematize the opposition between nature and culture, the relation between the ideological and the material, calling into question the cosmological order. They also impact the identity of local communities, affected by rescue, evacuation, resettlement, material and personal loss, often intensifying pre-existing differences (for example socio-economic, ethnic, and religious) and highlighting individuals and groups’ marginal status in relation to external actors (aid agencies, governments, economic powers). The panel welcomes contributions from social and forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, development and social workers, geographers, geologists, historians, and disaster managers who carry out research and operate in disaster zones. Papers will address contemporary as well as past hydrological hazards to explore how lessons can be learnt engaging a historically deep approach, rather than privileging a focus on emergency.
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| 13. |
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| 14. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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Sunat for girls in southern Thailand : its relation to traditional midwifery, male circumcision and other obstetrical practices
- 2008
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Ingår i: Finnish Journal of Ethnicity and Migration. - 1796-6582. ; 3:2, s. 32-41
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Among the Thai- and Malay-speaking Muslims living in southern Thailand, the traditional midwife (alternatively called mootamjae in Thai or bidan in Malay) performs a mild form of female genital cutting (FGC) on baby girls. This article is based on material collected in the Satun province, located on the Andaman coast, bordering on the Malaysian state of Perlis (once part of Kedah). People have different views of the practice: men question the cutting, considering it both un-Islamic and un-modern, whereas women generally support it. In evident contrast to this debate and to the privacy surrounding FGC ritual, a large public male circumcision ritual takes place once a year. Both practices are called sunat by the local people, distinguishing sunat perempuan for girls and sunat lelaki for boys. Both forms should be analysed with regard to the increasing medicalisation of birth, which while depriving bidan and women of their agency and authority, performs other forms of genital cutting in the delivery room, in the form of routine episiotomies, strongly opposed by local women.
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| 15. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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The Amabie : A Japanese Prophetic Chimera and Chronotope Amid Political Monstrosities
- 2022
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Ingår i: Shima. - : Shima Publishing. - 1834-6049 .- 1834-6057. ; 16:2, s. 7-34
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The years 2020–2022 engraved our existence with epidemiological and political monstrosities that will not be forgotten for quite some time. The COVID-19 pandemic dragged us to contemplating the possibilities of a plague that, rather than being confined to the global south’s ‘invisible’ territories of diseases, heavily affected the global north and with the prospect of wiping out a large number of the world’s population in a similar manner to that of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Governments were caught between choices to either privilege lives or economies and eugenics reared its head as a spectre from the historical past. A benign marine monster, the Amabie, a prophetic yōkai from Japanese folklore, became popular, initially in Japan and, rather rapidly on a global scale, assumed a prominent position, becoming an icon for the COVID-19 pandemic. I interrogate how people resorted to this chimeric creature from marine and historical depths to deal with existential uncertainty and abnormal lives, rendering it a chronotope that connects times and spaces. Such aquapelagic creatures frame the ambiguity of a world where political, environmental and health disasters merge.
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| 16. |
- Merli, Claudia, Docent
(författare)
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Virtual burials of the 1963 Vajont dam disaster: Past and present
- 2019
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- On the night of 9 October 1963 the deadliest landslide recorded in European history brought Mount Toc's flank to collapse into the Vajont hydroelectric reservoir, triggering a monstrous 250m high tsunami wave that plunged into the Piave valley below at an impressive speed, wiping out five villages in a matter of minutes. Another tsunami wave traveled into the reservoir's lake and canceled small hamlets on the lake's shores. Of 1910 victims, only 1464 bodies (or parts) were recovered, only 700 were identified. This presentation will illustrate the historical process of establishing the first main site for burials, and how it underwent structural modifications to account for all victims, how the dead are commemorated in other minor cemeteries in the area. The monumental cemetery at Fortogna as well as the memory of the disaster were and remain a terrain of contention for multiple identities.
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| 17. |
- Palm, Camilla, 1988-
(författare)
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Navigating Conflicting Norms on Body and Sexuality : Exploring Swedish-Somali Women's and Swedish Welfare Workers' Perceptions of Female Genital Cutting
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Female genital cutting (FGC), sometimes referred to as female genital mutilation, is the subject of intense debate, exposing tensions between varying cultural values about bodies and sexuality. In Sweden, FGC is framed as a social problem designed to control female sexuality, and national efforts have long aimed to prevent it from being perpetuated. Welfare workers have a key role in interpreting and implementing FGC politics, making the welfare encounter a site where sometimes divergent cultural understandings about FGC, bodies, and sexuality converge.In this thesis, I explore how sexuality and sexual health are constructed in relation to FGC through welfare work and from the perspectives of different generations of Somali women in the Swedish setting of immigration. Based on individual interviews (16) and focus groups (3) with welfare workers (24) in social care, healthcare, and education, I investigate how FGC, sexuality, and sexual health, is approached in counseling and information targeting young women potentially affected by FGC. Through individual interviews (12) and focus groups (9) with Swedish-Somali women of different generations (53), I examine how women relate to and make sense of their own FGC experiences in light of changing social norms and discourse of FGC post-migration to Sweden. I discuss how concepts of FGC, body, sexuality, and sexual health are navigated and negotiated by investigating meanings ascribed to FGC by the various actors. I also consider the ways in which the understandings of these notions are changing depending on a complex interchange between individual experience, social interaction, and global discourse on FGC.The thesis consists of four papers. The first two papers explore the complexity of how to counsel and address FGC in welfare encounters while having a difficult dual role – working to protect future generations from the practice, while simultaneously encouraging and empowering those for whom it has already been done, without undermining body image or sense of sexual capacity. The first paper found that a key problem is the over-reliance on medical models of sexuality that tend to result in a reductionist focus on the genitals for sexual function, perhaps under-emphasizing the role of the mind, emotions, and sociocultural factors. This approach often led welfare workers to conclude that FGC inevitably negatively interferes with sexuality and sexual health. It was also primarily within a biomedical discourse that solutions and strategies to promote young women’s sexual wellbeing were sought.The second paper investigate how welfare workers understand and respond to health discourse about FGC, using counseling on menstrual pain as an empirical example. The study found that welfare workers navigate their various sources of knowledge, where acquired FGC-knowledge worked as a lens through which young women’s situations were understood. Medical discourse, and menstrual pain in particular, was also used as a starting point for discussing drawbacks of FGC, in order to deter young women from forwarding the practices to future generations.The third paper highlights how women navigate dominating discourse of FGC in their efforts to make sense of their experiences. The study found that imageries and dominant framings of FGC affect how women are perceived by others, or how they expect others to perceive them, also affecting women’s selfunderstanding. Women “talked back” to and talked through expected categorizations and elements of dominant discourse that put women with FGC in a stigmatized position. Doing this, they reinforced categorizations of the most extensive form of FGC (type III, pharaonic cutting) as stigmatized and harmful, while less extensive forms of FGC (type I-II, IV, sunna cutting) were disconnected from some of the stigma attached to FGC.The fourth paper examines subjective experiences and perceptions of sexuality in relation to FGC. The study found that while FGC has been seen as a means to mold a tempered female sexuality in line with cultural standards for proper gendered behavior, both gender standards and means to achieve them have changed under influence of migration and global FGC politics. The findings suggest that while premarital virginity remains as an important value, the external regulation of sexuality through FGC to protect female chastity has been replaced by increased emphasis on inner control and self-discipline. Women disqualified previous rationales for the practice by unsettling the connection of FGC to reduced sexual responsiveness. Many described sexual responsiveness as inherent and not necessarily adversely affected by FGC, although experiences varied. While most expressed positive expectations on sexual desire and pleasure, emerging was also more mixed understandings among some older and younger women. These were associated with notions of the clitoris as significant for sexual responsiveness, causing women to question their bodily and sexual adequacy. Such understandings shall be seen in light of previous cultural ideas about FGC as contributing to reduced sexual responsiveness, which is reinforced in the Swedish context which emphasizes the negative impact of FGC on sexuality.In conclusion, this thesis sheds light on the complex nature of FGC in a context of immigration, particularly highlighting FGC in relation to individual care and counseling in welfare encounters. In Sweden, FGC is framed as a social problem, shaping how women with FGC are perceived and understand themselves. Welfare workers predominantly address FGC from a health perspective, often adopting a genital reductionist approach. Medical discourse plays a dual role: empowering women through knowledge while also exerting control over their bodies, drawing boundaries of some bodies as normal, and others as pathological. Interviews with Somali women shed light on their interactions with FGCconstructs in the Swedish context, illustrating a complex interplay of sociocultural, individual, and global influences.
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| 18. |
- Schwartz-Marin, Ernesto, et al.
(författare)
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Merapi multiple : Protection around Yogyakarta's celebrity volcano through masks, dreams, and seismographs
- 2022
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Ingår i: History and Anthropology. - : Routledge. - 0275-7206 .- 1477-2612. ; 33:5, s. 588-610
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Gunung Merapi (Mountain of Fire) is the guardian of a cosmogonic-sacred landscape, and one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Its eruptions are well studied, however, the relationships among ritual, science, protection and grassroots disaster management arising after the 2006 and 2010 eruptions are mostly overlooked. This paper fills this gap in the literature, through qualitative research that explores local perceptions and places respiratory protection in a larger ecology of protective practices during, and after, volcanic crises. In a previous study, 99% of respondents in Yogyakarta used masks to protect from inhaling volcanic ash. In order to understand the respiratory protective practices developed, in the last decade, to cope with Merapi’s eruptions, we need to engage with the emergence of the local volunteer-led grassroots monitoring systems. Although these networks were formalised by agencies, they were originally set-up in a bottom-up fashion to respond to pyroclastic flows and other life-threatening volcanic hazards. Our research found that they play a key role in the distribution of masks and respiratory health narratives, thus influencing the wide adoption of certain types of respiratory protection. Disaster management agencies, village heads, ritual experts and volunteers participating in these monitoring networks share spiritual signals (dreams) and scientific ones (seismic data, health narratives) and masks as part of their response to volcanic crises. Our findings about these Merapi networks challenge dominant assumptions in the Disaster Risk Reduction literature that tend to equate building resilience with the substitution of problematic ‘cultural beliefs’ for ‘scientific facts’.
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| 19. |
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