The Two-Faced Janus of Disaster Management: Still Vulnerable,Yet Already Resilient

Abstract

Adopting an ethnographic approach, this paper traces the various forms that resilience and vulnerability took in a post-tsunami Sri Lankan village, as well as the interpretations of these two ‘action devices' by both humanitarian operators and the survivors themselves. The author shows that the practices of community-based disaster management involved approaches, visions and modus operandi that were highly ambiguous and divergent. Indeed, these practices revealed intense contestation around the concepts of resilience and vulnerability and wide variation in the ways the concepts were embodied by reconstruction actors. Still vulnerable yet already resilient, the survivors were encouraged to employ strategically one or the other of disaster management's Janus faces, calibrating the features that rendered them desirable for gifting: a moving need for help and an untiring ability to cope with uncertainty. To attract additional aid packages, the survivors had carefully to weigh up the level of resilience achieved through training; they had to appear ‘just resilient enough’ to be eligible for gifting, but not so resilient as to tarnish the image of vulnerability still required to intercept aid. In an attempt to promote resilience at the community level, the humanitarian actors thus ended up creating a ‘social drama’ with ambiguous and controversial implications. Paradoxically, the most important lesson the villagers learned during the reconstruction was how to retain their position as a ‘good product of the tsunami’.