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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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- 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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| 5. |
- Merli, Claudia, et al.
(författare)
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Forensic identification and identity politics in 2004 Post-Tsunami Thailand : Negotiating dissolving boundaries
- 2015
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Ingår i: Human Remains and Violence. - 2054-2240. ; 1:1, s. 3-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and 'thanatocracy'. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between 'us' and 'them'.
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| 6. |
- 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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| 7. |
- Merli, Claudia, et al.
(författare)
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Identifying a common field : On experiencing collaborative research between forensic and social anthropology
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this paper we explore the possibilities offered by interdisciplinary collaborations between forensic anthropologists and social anthropologists, and present our experience of researching DVI following natural disasters, specifically the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Thailand. While a strong focus on interdisciplinarity punctuates contemporary academic rhetoric on fostering research grant applications and outputs, the practice of teaming up forensics and social anthropologists is still seldom witnessed, partially due to respective theoretical frameworks and specialist languages that create a challenge to reciprocal enrichment and communication. DVI is a field of study that offers a unique possibility to foster and explore more collaborations of this kind. Basing our reflection on our study of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami DVI processes, we conceive our collaborative endeavour as inscribed in the field of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM), one of the most promising subfields in Medical Anthropology. By investigating the technical and organizational difficulties encountered by multi-national DVI teams, we come to an appreciation not only of the diversity pertaining to the scientific techniques available but also of how these differences translate more complex dynamics related to diverse forms of politics.
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| 8. |
- 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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