doi:10.1111/disa.12044

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience Roberto E. Barrios Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois, United States

A number of recent studies on disaster reconstruction have focused on the concept of community resilience and its importance in the recovery of communities from collective trauma. This article reviews the contributions the anthropological literature and the ethnographic case studies of two post-Hurricane Mitch housing reconstruction sites make to the theorising of community and resilience in post-disaster reconstruction. Specifically, the article demonstrates that communities are not static or neatly bounded entities that remain constant before, during and after a disaster; rather, communities take on shape and qualities depending on the relationships in which they engage with government agencies and aid organisations before and after disasters. Consequently, the article argues that definitions of community resilience and disaster mitigation programmes must take the emergent and relational nature of communities into account in order to address the long-term causes and impacts of disasters. Keywords: capacity, community, disasters, reconstruction, resilience

Introduction Community resilience is a concept that has much currency in the field of disaster research.1 In some instances, resilience is defined as ‘the qualities or characteristics that allow a community to survive following a collective trauma’ (Sherrieb, Norris and Galea, 2010, p .228); in others, it refers to the adaptive capacity of communities to evolve alongside social and environmental changes (Robards and Alessa, 2004). The qualities that make communities resilient, in turn, are seen as emanating from unique abilities—inherent or learned—a community embodies prior to experiencing a hazard (Norris et al., 2008).   It is also noteworthy that much of the literature on resilience prioritises concepts borrowed from economics as a means of representing the qualities that help communities survive catastrophes. In these cases, resilience is seen as contingent on the integration of physical, human and social forms of capital (Foster-Fishman, Pierce and Van Egern, 2009; Kusel, 1996), with social capital being the idea that social relations and the structure of social relations can have collective benefits on a community as a whole (Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1988; de la Peña, 2011; Putnam, 2000).   Definitions of resilience articulate several assumptions about the nature of people, communities and societies. In some cases, definitions of resilience build on the idea that communities are geographically circumscribed entities that have neatly delimited insides and outsides, and that remain somewhat constant over time; hence, Disasters, 2014, 38(2): 329−350. © 2014 The Author(s). Disasters © Overseas Development Institute, 2014 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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pre-disaster capacities are viewed as conducive to post-disaster recovery (Norris et al., 2008; Sherrieb, Norris and Galea, 2010).   This article demonstrates how two ethnographic case studies of post-Hurricane Mitch 2 housing reconstruction sites in southern Honduras—Limón de la Cerca and Marcelino Champagnat—help enhance definitions and theories of community and resilience in disaster reconstruction. Specifically, it shows that these cases echo the findings of anthropological studies that illustrate that ‘communities’ are never static nor bounded (either geographically or socially). Rather, they are collectivities that a) are in a constant state of emergence over time, and b) are shaped by dynamic, politically and epistemically charged relationships among assisting governments, aid agencies and disaster-affected populations.3   This study uses the expression ‘politically and epistemically charged relationships’ to mean that the relationships among governments, aid agencies and disaster-affected populations through which communities come into being do not take place in a social or political vacuum. These relationships have qualities that reflect the sociopolitical context in which they take place. The notion of relationships being politically and epistemically charged, then, conveys the idea that the relationships among disaster-affected populations, local and national government agencies and aid organisations that engender vulnerability or resilience are qualified by the political culture (the way political power is consolidated in a particular social context) of the locality in question and by the ways power is sometimes articulated through expert discourse of development and population management (Arce and Long, 2000; Ferguson, 1999; Tsing, 2005).   Social scientists must therefore take into account how practices of political power consolidation and institutional knowledge-making are intimately involved in the manifestation of resilience and vulnerability. Moreover, while the capacities that help communities adapt and recover from disaster may not be present before a catastrophic event, they may be the emergent product of the relationships that shape the reconstruction process. Governments and aid agencies concerned with disaster reconstruction must therefore recognise their role in shaping community resilience and should foster relationships that are conducive to recovery. By asking the questions ‘how does resilience emerge over time, through what relationships and in what locations?’, this article offers a more careful analysis of the concept of resilience by considering its spatial, temporal and relational dimensions.

Theoretical perspective: anthropological observations on community, resilience and social capital Anthropological perspectives on ‘community’ and resilience Resilience is a term borrowed by social scientists from the physical sciences to describe the qualities that help communities and individuals recover from collective trauma. In physics, the term was originally used to describe the characteristics that made a material or system return to a state of equilibrium following exposure to some kind

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

of stress (Gordon, 1978; Norris et al., 2008). Since its adoption into the social sciences, the concept of resilience has seen a proliferation of new definitions devised to suit the particularities of human practice and experience. These definitions have varied significantly, ranging form the ability of communities to withstand external shocks to their social infrastructure (Adger, 2000) to the capacity for successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances (Masten, Best and Garmezy, 1990). Norris et al. (2008) and Sherrieb, Norris and Galea (2010) emphasise the conceptualisation of resilience as ‘a process linking a set of adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation after a disturbance’ (Norris et al., 2008, p. 130). In this latter definition, resilience manifests itself from pre-event community capacities, which include economic development, social capital, information and communication, and community competence. In this case, community is defined as an ‘entity that has geographic boundaries and shared fate’ (Norris et al., 2008, p. 128); it can vary in its manifestation and can include units of analysis as different as neighbourhoods, towns and cities.   These definitions of resilience are limited because they decontextualise communities from the broader socio-political contexts in which they come into being (and take on particular qualities) over the course of their existence. It is also important to note that the definition of community proposed by Norris et al. (2008) focuses too narrowly on spatial qualities (geographic boundaries) and shared fate, while social scientists have historically also emphasised the importance of studying communities bound by shared religious faith, identities and linguistic or cultural affinities.   A number of anthropological studies of the past three decades show that communities are never static in their capacities or membership; rather, they are in a constant state of emergence and transformation over time (Fabian, 1983; Mitchell, 2002; Pickering 2008). Moreover, these processes of emergence and transformation are driven by the dialectical relationships in which communities find themselves immersed with their surrounding environments, global networks of commodity production and circulation, and colonial and national governments.4 Consequently, even communities that are often heralded as icons of unchanging traditionality in the anthropological literature are quite contemporary, as they have usually taken form in relation to long histories of colonialism and post-colonial nation-building (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Mitchell, 2002). This means that the qualities social scientists call ‘community capacity’ in definitions of resilience are not shaped by processes that are strictly internal to geographically bounded communities; in fact, they are the product of relationships between people and institutions that extend beyond the perceived boundaries of communities in space and time (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Leeds, 1994; Tobin and Whiteford, 2002).   This insight into the nature of communities has also been expressed in the anthropological literature on disasters. Fortun (2001) and Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999) document how catastrophic events act as catalysts for the transformation of communities, especially in the case of highly vulnerable populations. Indeed, catastrophes lead to the formation of novel communities comprised of disaster-affected people,

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activists and academics, who come together to address the socio-political challenges posed by disasters and reconstruction processes. The anthropological literature, then, indicates that definitions of community resilience that rely on a conceptualisation of community as an entity that remains static over time and whose pre-trauma capacities help it navigate the challenges of catastrophes and reconstruction are not in tune with the realities of disaster-affected communities. Consequently, definitions of resilience must account for the ways communities take shape in a broader context of politically and epistemically charged relationships, and for the ways these relationships play a role in shaping their ‘adaptive capacities’. Anthropological views on resilience, social capital and social relations Current definitions of resilience consider social capital a key element of resilient communities. Like resilience, social capital is a concept whose definition varies—and is often the subject of heated debate—within the social sciences. Bourdieu, for example, defines the concept as: the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships in mutual acquaintance and recognition [. . .] which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivelyowned capital (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 248).   For Bourdieu, social capital is an investment by individuals in social relations for the purposes of obtaining a personal benefit (de la Peña, 2011). Bourdieu’s notion of the self-interested economic person at the centre of the social relations that comprise communities is echoed in more recent definitions of the concept. Lin (2001), for example, defines it as the idea that individuals invest, access and use resources embedded in social networks to gain returns. Alternative definitions of social capital, however, have veered away from Bourdieu and Lin’s emphasis on the self-interested economic person. Sherrieb, Norris and Galea, for example, define social capital as the ‘set of adaptive capacities that can support the process of community resilience’ (Sherrieb, Norris and Galea, 2010, p. 233). The broadness of such a definition limits the concept’s use, however.   The emphasis on social capital in definitions of resilience evinces an acknowledgement on the part of disaster researchers of the importance of social relations among people in the weathering and mitigation of disasters (Tobin et al., 2012). For anthropologists, this raises the question: What kinds of relationships among what kinds of persons? In the anthropological literature, there is a recognition that there are important qualitative differences in the ways people relate to one another from one social context to the next, and that variations in the qualities of relations among people also point to differences in the things people value (such as social relations vs. social mobility) (Povinelli, 2006). Similarly, such variations indicate differences in the ways people define well-being and recovery (Barrios, 2011).   Another anthropological dimension of social relations is that of personhood (Low, 2011; Mitchell, 2002). If the quality of social relations that are assumed to be at the

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

Figure 1. Department of Choluteca (shaded), Honduras

core of a community’s resilience varies from one context to the next, then what kind of person puts such relationships into practice? As Mitchell notes, for example, being a capitalist involves engaging people and things in profit-maximising relationships, but such a way of being in and relating to the world is far from being a human universal (Mitchell, 2002; Povinelli, 1995; 2006). Being a capitalSource: Keith Edkins at the English-language ist, then, requires embodying capitalist Wikipedia. logics of cost–benefit, that is, being a capitalist person.   In the sections that follow, this article focuses on the ethnography of post-disaster resettlement communities in Choluteca, Honduras (see Figure 1). It sheds light on the particular kinds of social relations practiced by disaster-displaced Cholutecans, the language they employed when speaking of their experience of these social relations, and the effects of relationships between local government, aid organisations and disaster-affected populations on the ways disaster survivors related to one another.   The discussion reveals that Cholutecans repeatedly invoked the sentiment of hallarse (a Honduran Spanish colloquialism that conveys the notion of being at ease) when speaking about their experience of life in the reconstruction sites. What is more, hallarse was contingent on the presence of social relations among spatially proximate neighbours and relatives; these relations had taken years to cultivate in neighbourhoods of Choluteca before the disaster. In addition, ethnographic evidence shows the impact of policies and practices of local government and international nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) on the social and spatial relations among disaster survivors in Limón de la Cerca; specifically, their effect was to limit the displaced people’s ability to experience hallarse. Consequently, just as the two resettlement communities of Marcelino and Limón came into being over the course of the reconstruction process (and the politically and epistemically charged relationships among local and national government agencies, aid organisations and disaster-affected populations that shaped this process), so too did the qualities of social relations among disaster survivors in the two resettlement sites.

Methods: the ethnography of disaster reconstruction The ethnographic narrative that follows is pieced together from a number of sources. One of these sources is a community survey of 230 randomly selected households (110 in Limón, 50 in Marcelino, and 70 in 9 non-displaced but hurricane-flooded urban neighbourhoods of Choluteca), which the author completed with the help of two Honduran research assistants, Rosa Palencia and Carlos Giacoletti, between July and December 2000. This survey collected basic household demographic, nutritional

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and disaster resettlement history information from Cholutecan families displaced during the hurricane.   Another source of evidence is comprised of 40 structured ethnographic interviews that the author conducted with residents of Limón between January and August 2001. Respondents were selected randomly as a sub-sample of the larger community survey. These structured ethnographic interviews focused on the Limón residents’ assessment of their quality of life in the reconstruction site. The conversations were tape-recorded with the permission of Limón residents and later transcribed.   Another line of evidence is a collection of more than 100 informal conversations with Limón and Marcelino residents about their displacement and resettlement experiences, which the author documented as fieldnotes. These conversations were part of a broader 13-month ethnographic project (undertaken in 2000–01 in addition to month-long ethnographic visits in 1999 and 2006) and they took place in quotidian settings such as bus rides from the resettlement sites to Choluteca, at local community pulperías (local grocery stores) or in the homes of Limón and Marcelino residents. These ethnographic interviews were supplemented with conversations with community organisers, local government officials and national and international NGO programme managers charged with the task of assisting Limón and Marcelino residents through their reconstruction processes.

The setting and the people Limón de la Cerca and Marcelino Champagnat are located 4.3 miles (7 km) away from the city of Choluteca in southern Honduras (see Figure 2). The resettlement sites were constructed along the sides of a major international highway, the Carretera Panamericana (Panamerican Highway), which links North and South America. In 2000, the city of Choluteca proper was home to approximately 70,000 people, and the municipality of Choluteca (in which the city is located) was home to a grand total of 120,000 residents. At the time, the larger political unit of the Department of Choluteca5 was known for its predominantly agricultural economy, which was roughly divided in two sectors: medium- to large-scale shrimp, cattle and melon farms for export production, and smaller subsistence farms devoted to the cultivation of Mesoamerican crops such as maize, beans and more recently introduced grains such as sorghum (DeWalt, 1998). Historically, the region was also known as a mining area, with the origins of the city as a Spanish settlement dating to a 1522 mining concession, although an indigenous settlement had been present in the area since pre-Colonial times.   Before the hurricane, neighbourhood residents in the city of Choluteca proper devoted themselves primarily to occupations that supported the region’s large-scale farming, mining and transportation operations. Adult female survey respondents reported that they used to work primarily as maids, tortilla street vendors or laundry washers, while adult male respondents reported having been employed primarily as construction workers, taxi or truck drivers, watchmen or agricultural day labourers (see Table 1).

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

Figure 2. Map showing City of Choluteca, Limón de la Cerca and Marcelino Champagnat, Honduras, 2000

Source: courtesy of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional de Honduras.

  When Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras in late October 1998, the city of Choluteca suffered extensive flooding in neighbourhoods along the banks of the Choluteca River, which links the city to the highland capital of Tegucigalpa. As Table 2 shows, the majority of the surveyed disaster survivors in both Limón (57%) and Marcelino (60%) reported having lived in the central barrios de clase obrera (working-class neighbourhoods)

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Table 1. Top pre-Hurricane Mitch occupations reported by Limón and Marcelino adults* Occupation

Women

Men

Limón de la Cerca (N=110)

Marcelino Champagnat (N=50)

Number

%

Number

%

Maid

61

55.5

31

62.0

Housekeeper

20

18.2

1

2.0

Tortilla vendor

6

5.5

0

0

Food vendor

6

5.5

5

10.0

Laundry maid

4

3.6

3

6.0

Pulpería

4

3.6

2

4.0

Construction worker

30

27.3

14

28.0

Driver (taxi or truck)

9

8.2

5

10.0

Guard

7

6.4

2

4.0

Agricultural labourer

6

5.4

2

4.0

Food vendor

6

5.5

4

8.0

Mechanic

5

4.5

2

4.0

Note: * The table lists the top six occupations for Limón and the top five occupations for Marcelino. Source: Barrios, Palencia and Giacoletti (1999).

of Choluteca prior to the storm. A smaller percentage of respondents reported having lived in a colonia (suburban subdivision) of the city: 17% in Limón and 12% in Marcelino. Only a few reported having lived in a nearby rural village before the storm: 6% in Limón, 14% in Marcelino. These figures reveal that before the storm, Limón and Marcelino residents had had similar livelihoods and lived in roughly similar neighbourhoods, namely ones comprised of working-class residents and located on flood-prone land.

Two resettlement communities, two outcomes Despite the initial similarities between Limón and Marcelino residents, the two resettlement communities demonstrated significant differences three years after the catastrophe. Over the course of its short history, Limón became renowned as a violent place where transnational street gangs known as maras operated with impunity and victimised residents. Limón was also where international NGOs constructed 1,200 homes whose spatial characteristics and structural qualities were not suited to the social and environmental particularities of the site or the displaced Cholutecans who lived in it. The houses featured a single-room 25-m 2 floor plan that was inadequate

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

Table 2. Pre-hurricane residence of Limón and Marcelino residents Pre-hurricane residence

Limón residents

Marcelino residents

Number

%

Number

%

Brisas del Río

14

12.7

3

6.0

La Cruz

10

9.1

4

8.0

Las Arenas

6

5.5

2

4.0

Suyapa

6

5.5

2

4.0

Corbeta

5

4.5

0

0

La Providencia

0

0

5

10.0

Buenos Aires

4

3.6

4

8.0

Other

18

16.4

10

20.0

Subtotal

63

57.3

30

60.0

Las Colinas

0

0

1

2.0

Iztoca

1

0.9

0

0

Julio Midense

2

1.8

0

0

Nueva Esperanza

1

0.9

2

4.0

Pedro Díaz

13

11.8

0

0

Sagrado Corazón

1

0.9

2

4.0

Victor Manuel

1

0.9

0

0

Veinte de Mayo

0

0

1

2.0

Subtotal

19

17.3

6

12.0

Various locations

7

6.4

7

14.0

Other locations

21

19.1

7

14.0

Total

110

100

50

100

Working-class neighbourhoods of Choluteca

Colonias of Choluteca

Surrounding rural areas

Source: Barrios, Palencia and Giacoletti (1999).

for the multi-generational families living on the site. The survey shows that the median household in Limón consisted of seven people, with some families counting up to 16 members. The houses were constructed on 130-m 2 land parcels, which also limited the possibility of building home extensions to accommodate growing families. Consequently, residents refused to recognise the structures as homes, repeatedly referring to them as shoebox or matchbox houses.   The housing structures were built with cinder blocks without supporting corner columns and with haphazardly attached roofs, which were routinely blown off by strong winds and thunderstorms (see Figure 3). Residents reported witnessing the deaths of neighbours or family members whose hammocks, which were customarily

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attached to roof beams, were blown away by strong gusts. Limón was also plagued by unfinished infrastructure projects involving sewage and electricity, despite funding from foreign governments (see Figure 4). Consequently, 300 housing structures remained uninhabited over the course of the 13-month ethnographic study (Matus, Giacolleti and Portillo, 2000). Marcelino, in contrast, was characterFigure 3. Wind-damaged house, Limón ised by dramatically different conditions. de la Cerca, 2000 While street gang graffiti adorned NGO signs and abandoned housing structures in Limón, mara graffiti was completely absent from the walls of public buildings and homes in Marcelino (see Figure 5). Houses in Marcelino also featured larger 35-m 2 and 40-m 2 floor plans, with internal partitions separating living quarters and supporting concrete columns on their corners. The houses were located on larger, 3,200-square-foot (300-m 2 ) land parcels Source: author. that allowed for a separation between living spaces and latrines. In addition, Figure 4. Wind-damaged house and Marcelino benefited from a robust netposts without electric cables, Limón de work of grass-roots organisers who, with la Cerca, 2000 the help of religious brothers of the Marist order, successfully negotiated reconstruction projects with international NGOs and donor organisations. The strong community capacity was evidenced by the timely completion of the site’s electrification, which community leaders proudly boasted was ‘the best public lighting project in southern Honduras’ (author fieldnotes, 2001). Moreover, a brochure jointly produced by community organisers and volunteers of the NGO Caritas celebrated the renegade spirit of Marcelino’s residents with the title, ‘Praying to God and Fighting with the Crowbar’ (see Figure 6).   As the following ethnographic section shows, these two communities did not exist as geographically or socially delimited entities prior to the disaster, but emerged as such through the politically Source: author.

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

Figure 5. An abandoned housing structure in Limón de la Cerca bears the spray-painted logo of the Mara Salvatrucha, 2000

Source: author.

Figure 6. Brochure celebrating Marcelino’s fighting spirit, 2000

and epistemically charged relationships among disaster survivors, NGOs and local governments that moulded the reconstruction process. Indeed, the qualities and capacities of these communities took shape in the midst of these relationships.   The stark differences between the two reconstruction communities were not lost on Limón residents, who routinely spoke about them over the course of ethnographic interviews. In these conversations, residents used the Honduran Spanish colloquialism of hallarse—the sentiment of being at ease—as a means of assessing the socio-environmental relevance and success of reconstruction programmes. In an interview conducted in August 1999, for example, Doña Julia Maradiaga uses hallarse as the key criterion to assess her life in the reconstruction site two years after the hurricane. In her case, the unfinished infrastructure projects and her diminutive, structurally unsound house inhibited her capacity to hallarse in Limón. She said:

Let’s say that I, here, I am not at ease [Digamos que yo, aquí, yo no me hallo]. We don’t have water, we don’t have light. Sometimes I have to sit outside because these houses are so hot. Look at the houses of Marcelino, how pretty, because over there they have [internal] partitions. They feel fresh and there is more space, and here we have large families, you know, everything is reduced. I also see that my house is cracking and I sit here and think that it’s going to fall Source: courtesy of Marcelino Champagnat down. It’s cracked all the way from the Organising Residents. top [of the wall]. It’s cracked there by the window and one thinks, ‘How many strong winds will the house be able to withstand?’ Over there, two houses went down.   At this point, Doña Julia’s neighbour, who had been listening to the conversation, chimed in, asking, ‘Where was it that one of the rooftops caved in and killed two children?’ Doña Julia continued:

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Over there, by La Samaritana [a neighbouring subdivision of Limón]. Over there two children died because the wind lifted one of the rooftops and one of the walls collapsed, and it fell on top of them.   Just like Doña Julia, other residents made explicit linkages between their capacity to experience the sentiment of hallarse and the constraints the spatial design of houses and land parcels in Limón placed. In a January 2000 interview, Limón resident Don Julio Maradiaga reflects on his life after the storm, saying: Well, we lived better in Choluteca. We had our house, and that’s where we were born and raised, in Barrio La Cruz. But since we had to come to look for shelter here, without wanting to. . . . Look at that bandit hurricane, it took our houses and everything and it left us in the street. And well, it’s that, here, I’m not very at ease [yo aquí, poco me hallo]. But what is one to do? One has to stay.   In response to a follow-up question, he explained why he could not feel comfortable: The thing is that it’s not enough. We are between two vacant lots, and they don’t want to sell us another one. They say that no, that you can’t have two lots, and I say, what they want is the money. These lots, they’re really small. Look, from that post to that post, small. The ones in Marcelino, those are really big. In that colonia they have progressed a lot, look, over there they have electric power, and even potable water, everything.   Other residents attributed their inability to experience the sentiment of hallarse to the conditions of social insecurity that had come to plague Limón over the course of its construction. One resident, Doña Xiomara Carranza, had not benefited from home reconstruction programmes and continued to live in a micro, or temporary shelter, despite the presence of 300 vacant houses in the site. In the interview, Doña Xiomara explained her life in Limón in March 2000: We don’t feel at ease because we live in fear. We live in fear in the night, and sometimes you start to think, at what time will they come to harm you in the night? And at times, you don’t sleep, because these micros are not very safe, with one blow you can break it. And one thinks of the children, [hoping] that the delinquents won’t hurt them. Because now they don’t respect, they don’t even respect the children.   In the social science literature on disasters, the described characteristics of Limón and Marcelino are often interpreted as indicators of community resilience (Norris et al., 2008; Sherrieb, Norris and Galea, 2010; UNISDR, 2011). Marcelino, for example, was able to count on an effective network of grass-roots organisers who were able to make vertical and horizontal connections with international donors and community residents to limit the violent activities of street gangs and negotiate and implement infrastructure projects, a key indicator of community resilience (Sherrieb, Norris and Galea, 2010; Norris et al., 2008). Conversely, Limón was plagued by insecurity and housing that was structurally unsound; that is, the resettlement and reconstruction programmes made disaster survivors vulnerable—in both social and environmental terms—to the long-term impacts of Mitch.

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

  As noted above, disaster survivors assessed recovery in terms of sensory perception: the sentiment of hallarse. This article describe hallarse as a sentiment because it is a term used by Cholutecans to refer to the feeling of being at ease. The sentiment of hallarse was contingent on the presence of adequate space (lots and houses large enough to accommodate extended families), social relations (the proximity of family members and trusted neighbours) and functional infrastructure (potable water, electricity, structurally sound homes). Limón and Marcelino’s challenge to current definitions of resilience Based on current definitions of resilience, the key distinction between the two communities was a difference in capacity, inherent or learned, that Limón and Marcelino embodied prior to Mitch. On the one hand, Marcelino could be said to have had more robust social relations among its residents and grass-roots organisers, as evidenced by the community’s assertive leadership and limited street gang presence. Limón, on the other hand, seemed to be plagued by social fragmentation. Such an analysis would present Limón and Marcelino as communities that existed as geographically and socially discernible entities before the storm, and that followed dramatically different trajectories with respect to mitigation and vulnerability because of their inherent capacities. Furthermore, this type of analysis would consider these communities and their qualities outside of the broader socio-political context in which they (and the social relations that formed them) came into being.   In contrast, the evidence collected through the ethnographic interviews with local government officials, NGO programme managers, grass-roots organisers and disaster survivors calls for an analysis of the two communities’ differing power relations between disaster survivors, local government and international aid organisations. As discussed below, the ethnographic data demonstrates that Limón and Marcelino residents did not stem from two geographically distinct communities that predated, experienced and then recovered (or not) from Mitch’s flooding. Instead, the disaster survivors who established Limón and Marcelino as communities originally hailed from 22 different urban neighbourhoods; in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, they attempted to act as a single community but eventually split into two distinct communities in 1999. Most importantly, the fission that produced Limón and Marcelino as distinct communities occurred as a result of the power relations between local government and disaster survivors; these same relations played a critical role in shaping the social qualities and capacities of the two communities.

From one community to two: the politically and epistemically charged relations of resettlement and reconstruction Cholutecans who were surveyed for this study said that when Hurricane Mitch struck, they relied on their kin and neighbours to respond to the catastrophe. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the future residents of Limón and Marcelino followed similar

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Table 3. Top three shelter types in Choluteca used by future Limón and Marcelino residents in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Mitch Type of shelter

Limón residents (N=110)

Marcelino residents (N=50)

Number

%

Number

%

School

38

34.2

13

27.1

Neighbourhood

21

18.9

11

22.9

Church

19

17.1

7

14.7

patterns in their search for shelter. Most sought refuge in Choluteca’s schools, but a substantial number also looked for shelter in the homes of relatives and friends. A smaller percentage went to neighbourhood churches (see Table 3).   Families that sought refuge in schools lived there for three months but eventually faced pressure from school administrators to vacate the premises for the coming school year. The Cholutecan municipality, like all other branches of local and national Honduran government (Fuentes, 2009), was overwhelmed by the logistical challenges created by the catastrophe and was incapable of addressing the immediate housing needs of disaster survivors. In view of the municipality’s sluggish response, a small group of disaster survivors who had a history of participation in neighbourhood civil society organisations called comités de desarrollo (development committees) decided to take matters into their own hands. With the assistance of a Spanish expatriate Marist religious brother who had previously managed the municipality warehouse,6 Manuel Fernandez, these grass-roots organisers began an independent search for a place to resettle.   The group identified a property approximately 4.3 miles (7 km) to the east of the city along the Panamerican Highway. Efforts had been made to develop the land for agricultural purposes, from cattle ranching to rice farming, but none of these initiatives had proven successful. At the time, Banco de Occidente, a major national bank, was in possession of the land’s title. The 840-acre (340-hectare) property was attractive to grass-roots leaders because of its low price; residents were able to purchase 3,200-square-foot (300-m 2 ) land parcels, which disaster survivor organisers felt was a necessary size to accommodate Cholutecan working-class families. Land parcels had to be large enough to allow for future expansions, as it was customary for families to add rooms to houses as they grew. Small animal husbandry, vegetable gardening and the planting of fruit trees had also been common activities in the nowflooded neighbourhoods of Choluteca, and the continuation of these practices required additional space surrounding homes. Disaster survivor leaders were also concerned that the installation of sewage connections in the resettlement site would take several years, and they felt the larger land parcels would allow for sufficient separation between houses and latrines.   Despite their initiative, the grass-roots leaders were limited in their capacity to act as legal representatives of displaced Cholutecans and found themselves, once again, on the municipality’s timetable. Faced with continued procrastination on the part of

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

local government, they urged other displaced Cholutecans to follow them on a partial invasion of the identified property in February 1999. Not wanting to create unnecessary frictions with the bank that owned the land, displaced Cholutecans built a small shantytown along the sides of the Panamerican Highway, hoping their precarious condition would call attention to the municipality’s continued delays. In 2000, Carlos Carrales, one of the grass-roots leaders and a member of Limón’s comité de desarrollo—the resettlement site’s resident-staffed development committee—recollected this moment, saying: Each shelter had people from different neighbourhoods, and each neighbourhood had its own leaders from the time before the disaster. These leaders were some of the first people to survey the area where Nueva Choluteca [another name given to Limón] was constructed, and they began the land invasion. Each leader brought his own people from the shelters [located in Choluteca’s schools and churches]. They came little by little, and then, when the people in the shelters saw what was going on, they started to come. Some of the leaders that are in charge now were neighbourhood leaders before the hurricane, some weren’t. Some became leaders out of necessity, others became leaders to see what they could gain.   Living on the shoulder of the Panamerican Highway posed a new risk for Choluteca’s displaced. The road’s high-speed traffic was a hazard and, within a month of the limited land invasion, a car killed a young disaster survivor. This death acted as a catalyst for the increasingly frustrated displaced Cholutecans, who placed responsibility for their undesirable living conditions on the municipality’s slow response. After the child’s death, disaster survivor leaders organised a protest with the intention of shaming local government into action. The protest took place in the city centre, with protesters blocking the entrance to Choluteca’s most prominent landmark, the Choluteca River Bridge. On 10 January 2001, Carlos Carrales explained the motives behind the protest, saying: We were housed in various shelters and we didn’t know where we were going to end up living, so a group of people decided to take those lands. The Catholic Church contributed tents so people could live there. In the end, we took the bridge so the mayor would finally tell us where we could go resettle. Because of the mayor, we lost a lot of aid. The German Red Cross went to Marcovia [another town about 5 miles/8 km west of Choluteca] because the mayor had not resettled us. At last, a land commission was formed, but, to this date, we don’t know how much was actually paid for the land. The mayor handled everything behind closed doors. There is a document, a bill of sale, but we have not seen it. Maybe you can talk to the lawyer who handled the sale so you can see it. These lots, they were supposed to be affordable.   The protest triggered a reactionary response on the part of the mayor, who summoned local police to put an end to it. The attempt to disperse the demonstrators turned violent. Police officers beat several disaster survivors and arrested protest organisers. Ironically, following the protest, the mayor decided to take an active role in the acquisition of the resettlement site. He appointed a land committee composed of

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municipality workers and three disaster survivor organisers who resided in Limón, and who were co-opted with the offer of free land and houses in the reconstruction site.   The municipality-appointed land committee made a number of policy decisions that had profound implications for the reconstruction of Limón de la Cerca. Rather than proceeding with the 3,200-square-foot (300-m 2 ) land parcels preferred by grassroots leaders, the land committee opted to reduce the size of land parcels to 1,400 square feet (130 m 2 ), with the rationale of assisting a greater number of families. The land committee also decided to randomise the distribution of land parcels through a raffle, arguing that the practice would insure equity in the distribution of reconstruction resources. Both these measures are examples of ‘epistemically ideologically charged relationships’ between local government and disaster survivors.   Over the course of this ethnographic research, government officials defended these practices on the basis of cost–benefit logic (that is, reducing the size of land parcels and therefore housing more families) and increased transparency (as through randomised parcel distribution); they argued that such measures were unquestionable as they were rational practices of modern governance. In this context, ‘epistemically charged’ refers to the way local government agencies related to disaster survivors in the practice of land allocation; specifically, these agencies used ideas of modern governance and knowledge-making to answer questions such as, ‘How do we know we have maximised the benefit of land parcels?’ and ‘How do we know land parcels were distributed evenly?’ Moreover, the land committee excluded the assertive grass-roots leaders who were perceived as a political threat by the municipality. This exclusion is an example of ‘politically charged relationships’ between disaster survivors and local government; put differently, relations between the mayor and disaster survivor leaders were fraught with tensions emerging from the political culture of southern Honduras.   In January 2001, Manuel Fernandez, the Marist religious brother who assisted the grass-roots organisers, recalled this process, saying: The mayor raffled the lots at El Chilo [one of Choluteca’s schools]. That was a lie and a farce! The leaders were marginalised and did not receive any lands. The mayor bought off a couple of the community leaders by guaranteeing them homes and continued with the raffle.   In view of the literature on the political culture of Honduras, the Cholutecan mayor’s actions may be seen as an example of a broader practice of governance called clientelism—in this case, the use of reconstruction aid as gifts in patron–client relationships to secure political support (Allison, 2006; Euraque, 1996; Rosenberg, 1988; Sieder, 1995). In Honduras, clientelist practices date back to the early post-independence period, when regional patriarchal and charismatic leaders called caudillos used gifts as a means of consolidating political power. This practice re-emerged in the 20th century, when US capitalist interests—especially fruit companies—relied on clientelism to steer Honduran national economic policy, making clientelism a hallmark institution of governance in this Central American nation (Euraque, 1996; Sieder, 1995). Through the cold war, cycles of clientelist gift circulation became further entrenched in Honduran political and community life (Sieder, 1995); these practices

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

became one of the primary mechanisms through which local government and some assisting NGOs related to disaster survivors in Limón.   Like disaster-affected communities, national communities themselves come into being in the midst of the global power relations that characterise colonialism, cold war and New World Order politics (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992). The US-based evangelical NGO Samaritan’s Purse, for example, was directed by Deborah De Moss, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member who had served under Jesse Helms; De Moss was married to a prominent Honduran military officer who had presidential political aspirations (NYT, 1994). Samaritan’s Purse was originally founded by Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham. As the previous congressional experience of the NGO’s Honduran national director indicates, the organisation is known for its right-wing political tendencies. In view of the broader political context of Choluteca’s reconstruction, the assertive actions of Choluteca’s displaced can be interpreted as a challenge to a transnational system of political culture, prompting the reactionary actions of local government.   The practices on the part of the municipality’s land committee had profound implications for the reconstruction of Limón. The random distribution of land parcels fractured important social relations between neighbours and relatives who had lived in proximity to each other before the storm. These relationships were of critical importance for experiencing the sentiment of hallarse among disaster survivors. Ethnographic observations in hurricane-affected working-class neighbourhoods in Choluteca reveal that long-time neighbours had relied on each other for assistance with childcare and household security. In Limón, in contrast, residents reported not having enough confianza (trust) in current neighbours; the conditions of relative anonymity made it difficult for working mothers to secure childcare and led residents to be less willing to assist neighbours who had been victimised by gang members.   The municipality’s intervention not only divided neighbours and relatives spatially, but it also divided disaster survivor leaders into two political camps: those who sided with the ousted organisers, and those who acquiesced to the policies of the municipal land committee. With the assistance of Manuel Fernandez, the ousted leaders and 620 displaced families founded a second resettlement site just 200 m west on the Panamerican Highway; they named their nascent community after the founder of the Marist religious order, Marcelino Champagnat.   The actions of the municipality had a polarising effect on Limón and Marcelino, making a docile social body of the former and contributing to the formation of a robust and assertive network of grass-roots organisers in the latter. This difference in community organisation had significant implications for the execution of housing reconstruction and infrastructural projects at both sites. In Marcelino, assertive grassroots leaders became renowned for their acts of resistance to aid projects they found socially and environmentally unsuitable to the socio-ecological particularities of southern Honduras. Marcelino’s residents proudly retold the story of how community leaders rejected a proposal by the NGO CARE, which had recommended the construction of housing structures similar to those of Limón at the site. This assertive act of resistance forced CARE project managers to reconfigure their project budget

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to allow for the construction of houses with larger floor plans, internal partitions and reinforcing columns.   In Limón, in contrast, architects working for Samaritan’s Purse routinely employed cost–benefit analysis to reject disaster survivor requests for alternative home designs and construction techniques. This is yet another example of the epistemically charged relationships between disaster survivors and aid agencies within the reconstruction process. In Limón’s case, aid programme managers used project budgets as mechanisms of expert knowledge-making. Projects were deemed successful if budgets were spent on time on their designated purposes, without much consideration of the socioenvironmental relevance of the aid itself.

Discussion The micro-history of disaster displacement, resettlement, and reconstruction in Choluteca shows that Limón and Marcelino were not geographically delimited communities prior to Hurricane Mitch; rather, these two resettlement sites emerged as communities through their politically and epistemically charged relationships with the local government and assisting NGOs. The qualities of these two resettlement communities were equally emergent and relational in nature. Limón, for example, became a politically docile and socially fragmented population because of the relationships between Choluteca’s mayor and assertive grass-roots leaders, but not because of an absence of ‘capacity’ among disaster survivors before, during or after the disaster. While Limón became an icon of vulnerability over the course of reconstruction, Marcelino Champagnat became home to a dense network of grass-roots organisers; this process was driven, in part, by the exclusionary actions of the municipalityappointed land committee.   Significantly, these two communities took on the qualities social scientists identify as resilience or vulnerability through the politically and epistemically charged relationships among disaster survivors, local government officials and NGO programme managers that shaped the reconstruction process. To ignore the key role of these relationships in the forging of resilience, vulnerability and the social relations that shape ‘communities’ amounts to a partial analysis that verges on victim-blaming when communities ‘fail’ to demonstrate resilience.   It is also important to note the local vernacular used by Cholutecans to speak about social relations, which, for social scientists, are at the heart of community resilience. As discussed above, Choluteca’s disaster survivors speak about such relations and their recovery in terms of the sensory experience of hallarse. They indicate that what matters most in disaster recovery is the creation of spatial, social and infrastructural conditions that allow them to experience the sentiment of recovery. In order to successfully recreate sentiments of recovery, community reconstruction programmes must approach survivors as feeling subjects and must understand the co-constitutive relationships among the culturally variable experience of the senses, socially produced space and the social relations that form in such space (Low, 2011).

‘Here, I’m not at ease’: anthropological perspectives on community resilience

Conclusions and recommendations for practice Current definitions of disaster resilience that implicitly theorise ‘community’ as static, unchanging and geographically bounded miss the relational and emergent nature of social groups. This article demonstrates how such implicit conceptualisations of community overlook the politically and epistemically charged relationships through which communities and their characteristics come into being. This anthropological insight suggests that social scientists, NGO programme managers and government officials interested in disaster mitigation should focus on the documentation, theorisation and cultivation of their relationships with disaster-affected populations, as these relationships can produce resilience or vulnerability.   The ethnographic case studies reviewed above document what resilience-cultivating relationships look like in practice. They show the multiple ways in which the agency of disaster-affected Cholutecans manifested itself over the course of their displacement and resettlement process. From the search for resettlement lands, to the protest on the Choluteca River Bridge, to the rejection of unsuitable housing reconstruction projects in Marcelino, disaster survivors constantly used acts of assertion, subversion and resistance to communicate their needs to assisting government officials and NGO programme managers. Certain government officials and aid programme managers did not embrace these acts as an integral element in the dialectical adaptation of recovery assistance to the socio-environmental particularities of southern Honduras; instead, they used reconstruction resources to punish or reward grass-roots leaders for their political behaviour and cited project budgets and cost–benefit analysis to reject disaster survivor requests for alternative home construction practices. Their stances and attitudes precipitated conditions of social polarisation between the two reconstruction sites. Consequently, Limón and Marcelino became iconic examples of vulnerability and resilience. These case studies, then, exemplify the importance of institutional and ideological or epistemic flexibility in the process of disaster mitigation (Bankoff and Hilhorst, 2004).

Acknowledgements Funding for this research was provided by the Fulbright-IIE Program and the National Science Foundation of the United States.

Correspondence Roberto E. Barrios, Department of Anthropology, Faner Hall, Room 3536, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901, United States. Telephone: +1 618 453 5037. Fax: +1 618 453 5037. E-mail: [email protected].

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Endnotes 1

See Amaratunga and Haig (2011); Norris et al. (2008); Robards and Alessa (2004); Sherrieb, Norris and Galea (2010); Tobin and Whiteford (2002); and UNISDR (2011). 2 Hurrican Mitch struck Honduras in late October 1998, claiming at least 6,600 lives, displacing 2.1 million people and causing $1.34 billion in damages to infrastructure and industry (PAHO, 1998). 3 See Bankoff and Hilhorst (2004); Fortun (2001); Gupta and Ferguson (1992); Mitchell (2002); and Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999). 4 See Gupta and Ferguson (1992); Leeds (1994); Mitchell (2002); Pickering (2008); Tobin and Whiteford (2002); and Tsing (2005). 5 Honduras is divided into 18 administrative units called departamentos or departments, whose governors are appointed by the Honduran president. 6 The municipality warehouse housed materials for Choluteca’s infrastructural development, including electricity transformers, wiring and sewage system construction materials.

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