NSF Award
1547377
The immediate research response to a natural disaster frequently focuses on loss of life, injuries, structural damage, and aid response. Research on the demographic shifts associated with response efforts and the social, linguistic, and economic effects of 'outsiders' engaging with affected communities is often overlooked. Without immediate action to capture and document these details, the individual experiences of people who survived these events risks being merged into more generalized narratives, influenced and homogenized by media reports. The possibility of this disconnect was brought to the fore during events such as Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Katrina in 2005, where initial media coverage under-represented individual and local experiences, but where subsequent ethnographic studies found practical and pedagogical value in capturing such details (for example, the lived effects of the privatization of health and housing services, and the construction of culturally sensitive science curriculum materials about hurricanes). <br/><br/>This project focuses on Nepal, which was recently devastated by major earthquakes in April and May 2015, to capture individual-level and local experiences in a timely manner. The researchers will collect, annotate, and make publicly available interviews and narratives conducted with earthquake survivors. The geo-linguistic focus will be communities of Tibeto-Burman language-speaking peoples from three districts of Nepal's Western Zone: Mustang, Manang and Gorkha, including local residents and former residents (rural-urban migrants) who are now moving back to their home villages to participate in relief and rebuilding efforts. All are speakers of endangered languages. Linguists Kristine Hildebrandt of the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and Mark Donahue of Australian National University along with Medical Anthropologist Sienna Craig of Dartmouth College and Cultural Anthropologist Geoff Childs will work with Nepali researchers to elicit narratives and interview speakers to build a database of survivor narratives, one that takes the perspective of the survivors and responders. The narratives will reveal grammatical and discourse features of emotive language. These materials will also reveal nuances about the relationship between humans and their social and physical environment while the collective memory of the event is still fresh, providing valuable insider perspectives on why and how people create and maintain their livelihoods in places and in ways where extreme environmental conditions are a constant and powerful presence.
