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[Silence]

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Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to our weekly seminar.

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They’re having two new
coordinators coming in.

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Jesse and Grace are going to
be taking over for us next week

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for Noha Farghal’s
wonderful seminar that

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she’s going to be giving
at the same time next week.

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And, because it’s our last week,
we have someone a little bit

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different than what we normally
have in the seminars here.

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And this was my invitation to
A.J. Faas, who is an anthropologist.

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And I’ve known about A.J. for
quite some time in the field.

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I’ve read a number of his articles.
I think I cited him a couple of

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times in my work myself.
And he a phenomenal scholar.

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We are so lucky to have
him in the Bay Area here.

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He is an associate professor
at San Jose State University.

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He has his bachelor’s degree and
his master’s from Montclair State

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University in New Jersey.
And he got his Ph.D. in

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applied anthropology at
the University of South Florida.

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So please give A.J. a very
warm welcome to Menlo Park.

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[Applause]

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- Hello.

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[Applause]

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Good morning. I think that’s
the first time I’ve ever been

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introduced as sort of – this is
something a little bit different.

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[laughter]

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It’s not that strange,
in the end.

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But it will be – as you’ll
see in a moment, it will be

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a bit of a disorientation
as I’ve pitched this.

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Well, thank you for having me here.
It’s a real treat to come up here to

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Menlo Park. I gather you guys are
getting ready to move soon, so it’s nice

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to be able to visit the old campus here
before you guys move on to NASA.

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I want to thank Sara McBride
for inviting me here and

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organizing today’s event and the
larger series of which it’s a part.

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And I also want to thank Sara
for spending some time with me

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a month or so ago on the phone
sort of coaching me on how I might

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best address our audience today.
So any shortcomings I have

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in that regard are entirely my own,
but I’m appreciative of Sara’s support.

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And so, with that said,
I’d like to get started today.

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The topic of the talk is Varieties
of Vulnerability Thinking –

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a Disorientation to the
Anthropology of Disasters.

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And let me say that I tend to
joke a lot when I give my talks,

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sometimes to take the edge off
the seriousness of the material.

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Because, you know, in my work on
risk hazards and disaster in Mexico,

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Ecuador, and the United States,
and in other places, I’m forever

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mindful of the seriousness of the
issues at stake and of the fact that

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the matters we concern ourselves
with have serious consequences

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for people’s lives and
for their livelihoods.

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And I confess to being periodically
overwhelmed by the weight of this,

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especially considering that
disasters affect roughly

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one-quarter of the
world’s population each year.

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And I’m sure we all agree that the
complexity and immensity of disasters

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issues means that these are not 
the purview of any one discipline

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or institution or agency.
And so I sincerely appreciate the

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efforts of the U.S. Geological Survey
in organizing multidisciplinary forums

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like this one to share knowledge,
research, and best practices across

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disciplinary and
institutional boundaries.

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And I want to note that, you know,
the work of past USGS Director Marcia

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McNutt is this area is exemplary, both
in her time at the USGS and beyond.

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I was fortunate to play a role in bringing
the Society for Applied Anthropology

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into the Strategic Sciences Group –
the multidisciplinary entity

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co-organized by Dr. McNutt and
Gary Machlis at the direction of

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then-Secretary of the
Interior Ken Salazar.

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And this – the idea was to facilitate
the rapid deployment of

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multidisciplinary teams of scientists
to advise policymakers and

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practitioners in real time during
ongoing environmental crises.

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And happily, the report based on our
team’s work, Science During Crisis,

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was released by the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences

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in March of this year. Another person
from the – previously from the USGS

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who played an active role in that
was the great Kristin Ludwig.

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I’m a big fan of hers.
I should note also that the work

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of the AAAS – the other AAAS –
science and technology policy fellows

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at the USGS has also been remarkably
impactful in fostering the development

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of inter-disciplinary
communication and coordination.

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And so, in the spirit of inter-disciplinary
conversation and community-building,

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I would like to make some interventions
today into how we think about disaster

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by introducing anthropological insights
into the topic, which, as I’ve said, will at

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first entail more of a disorientation than
an orientation in the conventional sense.

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And it’s my hope that much of what
we discuss today in the context of

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my longitudinal study of post-disaster
resettlement and recovery in the

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Ecuadorian highlands can inform our
thinking and actions around current and

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future disasters, both here and abroad.
And so perhaps the first disorientation

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will come from the fact that,
though today’s talk is based on my

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work following the disasters associated
with the 1999 and 2006 eruptions of

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Mt. Tungurahua in the
Andean highlands of Ecuador,

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I will say very little about
the eruption events themselves.

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As an alternative, I want to take us
beyond thinking of events and hazards

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to consider the processes that cause
disastrous outcomes, how they are put

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in motion long before any geophysical
or hydrometeorological shock

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is registered, and focus on how things
truly become disastrous once big events

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pass and the camera crews move on.
And I think this has important

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consequences for disaster risk reduction,
relief, and recovery policies and

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practices. After all, how we think
disaster informs how we act in disaster.

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And so we’ll begin with a bit of
a conceptual disorientation and

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then proceed to discuss just a little
of how this disaster was made.

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Ultimately, I’d like to spend some time
discussing what came after and how

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multiple actors – campesino – that is,
peasant, villagers, local leaders,

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Ecuadorian government, and non-
governmental organizations, or NGOs,

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attempted to remake their lives and
livelihoods around Mt. Tungurahua.

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And so, first is just a straight-up
sort of geographic orientation.

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I’m sure we’re all familiar, but I always
like to point out to people, in Ecuador,

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we’re in the upper left side of
the lopsided ice cream cone

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that is South America.
And we’re right smack-dab in the

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middle of that in that red blotch,
which is the province of Chimborazo.

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And the areas we’ll be discussing
today are in the upper right corner

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of that province.
And Mt. Tungurahua, which we can

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see over here, sits astraddle the
border of Chimborazo province

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and the province of Tungurahua.
And some of the places I’ll be

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mentioning later today is one
village that’s right on the flanks

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of the volcano here, Manzano.
There are several more unnamed

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on the map here,
but we’ll talk about Manzano.

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We’ll talk about Penipe, or Penipe
Nuevo – New Penipe, which is a

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resettlement built for people displaced
from villages all along the volcano.

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And another resettlement on
a windy hilltop about 3 kilometers

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to the south named Pusuca.

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I’ll bring this map up again later
on when I introduce these places.

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Okay. So for roughly 40 years,
the concept of vulnerability has

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served as a sort of a conceptual
scaffolding for social science theories

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of risk hazards and disasters.
And generally speaking, social scientists

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regard vulnerability as a cumulative
indicator of unequal distributions

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of certain populations in proximity
to environmental and technological

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hazards and the ability of groups
or individuals to anticipate, prevent,

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cope with, and recover from disaster.
Since the 1990s, the term has become

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remarkably popular and been adopted
in policy and practice, but with

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important distinctions in different
disciplines and institutions.

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And so, on the way to introducing a
21st-century anthropological approach,

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I’d like to walk us through three models
of vulnerability thinking in the case of

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Mt. Tungurahua disasters,
displacement, and resettlements.

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And I’ll begin with two that are common
in policy and practice – what have come

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to be referred to as the hazard-centric
and the lack of resources models.

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And then transition to telling the
story from a contemporary

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anthropological approach built
largely from a line of thinking

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that is commonly referred to
as political ecology.

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And so a hazard-centric
view of vulnerability –

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I’m not sure where we
might encounter that.

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Maybe here at the
U.S. Geological Survey.

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Maybe in some of our
other federal agencies here.

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And so this is generally the
approach endorsed by the USGS,

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and it’s an incredibly
logical place to begin.

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People living on or near active
volcanoes, fault lines, flood plains,

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tornado allies – alleys, and coastlines,
to name but a few, are vulnerable

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principally because of their
proximity to these hazards.

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And so – I wonder what a
tornado ally would be. [laughs]

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A hazard-centric approach to thinking
about the 1999 and 2006 eruptions of

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Mt. Tungurahua would point to the fact
that, at the time of the 1999 eruptions,

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there were roughly 21,000 residents
living within the zone that the

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Ecuadorian Geophysics Institute –
your counterpart there –

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determined to be high-risk.
This includes roughly 16,000 inhabitants

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of the town of Baños, the popular tourist
destination at the northern base of

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the volcano and approximately
5,000 residents of roughly

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a dozen villages along the western,
southwestern, and southern flanks

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of the volcano.
There on the flanks,

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multiple villages are in close
proximity to the several gorges

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that serve as conduits for lava,
lahars, and pyroclastic flows.

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However, as I’m sure many of you
are well aware, calculations of places

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and populations exposed can
prove rather elastic and elusive.

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When factoring in ashfall from
the columns of ash that frequently,

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since 1999, spew forth from the
crater and the lithic projectiles

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that are launched in larger eruptions,
the population at risk

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can grow up to 650,000.

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In the wake of the 1999 eruptions,
the devastation to homes and property

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was so great that 6,500 people were
unable or unwilling to return home.

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In the larger dual eruptions of 2006,
these factors resulted in six fatalities,

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more than 50 burns,
and the destruction of crops

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and the death of numerous
large and small livestock.

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At this time, an estimated 3,000 people
remained living in shelters from 1999.

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So seven years later, 3,000 people
are still in these improvised shelters.

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And that number swelled to 15,000 in
the wake of the August 2006 eruptions.

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So I’ll say that one problem with the
hazard-centric model is that it

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doesn’t explain the uneven distribution
of impacts and capacities to respond

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and recover that exist
within a given area of

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equal distributions of
exposure to hazard.

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The wealthier urbanites of Baños
suffered few direct impacts and

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bounced back much more readily
than the smallholding campesinos

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living in the villages along
the flanks of the volcano.

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In many cases, exposure is actually
a function of vulnerability.

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That is, people live in exposed
localities because they’re

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closed out of markets
for more secure places.

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Yet, this is the model principally
used by the state and multinational

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organizations, including the
World Bank, NOAA, the EPA,

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and, until recently,
the United Nations.

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One glaring and persistent problem
with this type of vulnerability is that

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social variables are commonly ignored.
And I like to think they’re important

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or else I wouldn’t be here today.
And so I think, surely, it wasn’t merely

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the nearness to a volcano
that made the processes around

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Mt. Tungurahua disastrous.
And so we might alternatively focus

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on the lack of resources or the political,
economic, and social relations that

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deprive some people of resources and
entitlements, such as food, housing,

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secure infrastructure, that they
need to secure a stable livelihood

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and to endure crisis.
This model helped explain famine,

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not as the result of drought,
floods, or pestilence,

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but rather socioeconomic and
political barriers to obtaining food.

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Using the lack of resources model
to analyze vulnerability among

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the populations in the high-risk zone
around Mt. Tungurahua, we could

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point to at least three key factors
for the sake of illustration.

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First, during the earliest indications
of a mounting eruption in 1999,

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local authorities and business owners
in that popular tourist town of Baños

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were reluctant to give evacuation
and pre-evacuation orders

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for fear of disrupting
the tourist business.

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Though the evacuation of all
16,000 occupants of the town

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was ultimately successful,
the tourism-centric priorities of

00:13:39.900 --> 00:13:43.940
local authorities almost certainly
elevated the risks faced by those local

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populations, and that evacuation was
a real nail-biter up to the last second.

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Meanwhile, our agropastoralist 
smallholders, again, living along

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the flanks of the volcano lacked
the basic infrastructure to prevent,

00:14:00.100 --> 00:14:03.769
mitigate, and respond to
these volcanic emergencies.

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Several villages on the western
and southwestern flanks are bound –

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let’s see if I can get the
cursor here to illustrate.

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Can you see it?
I can’t see it.

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- [inaudible]

00:14:15.580 --> 00:14:17.420
- Yeah, it doesn’t seem to want to
move to move with my finger.

00:14:17.430 --> 00:14:18.540
Oh, here we go.

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So they’re bound by the Chambo River
to the west – well, it’s sticking again.

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All right. So it’s bound by the
Chambo River to the west

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and the volcano to the east.
And they’ve got just this one

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north-south road to get in or out.
And, again, that’s where those

00:14:38.400 --> 00:14:43.040
pyroclastic flows in the image there
are going to be crossing that road.

00:14:44.360 --> 00:14:49.680
And so, these flows damaged or
destroyed several bridges and

00:14:49.680 --> 00:14:52.609
extensive road in 1999.
And, though there were repairs

00:14:52.609 --> 00:14:56.709
in the years following in the aftermath
of the 2006 eruptions, the Ecuadorian

00:14:56.709 --> 00:15:01.149
state simply refused to reinvest in
infrastructure in the high-risk area,

00:15:01.149 --> 00:15:04.079
leaving those who continued to
eke out their livelihoods in the region

00:15:04.079 --> 00:15:09.690
to fend for themselves, crossing
gorges on foot or with pack animals.

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And here’s an example.
Here’s my colleague and I standing

00:15:11.700 --> 00:15:18.000
in one of them that was broken up
by those flows – not easily crossed.

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Finally, a September 2006 survey
by the Ministry of Development –

00:15:25.369 --> 00:15:28.220
Urban Development and Housing –
MDUVI – we’ll hear more about

00:15:28.220 --> 00:15:33.389
them later – determined that a total
of 553 households were eligible

00:15:33.389 --> 00:15:38.019
for relocation outside the high-risk
area in the interest of both recovery

00:15:38.020 --> 00:15:43.400
and risk reduction.
Apart from one small

00:15:43.400 --> 00:15:48.100
42-household resettlement that
was realized by a small Ecuadorian

00:15:48.100 --> 00:15:52.060
non-governmental organization,
all four major resettlements built

00:15:52.060 --> 00:15:55.649
by the Ecuadorian state were
constructed on urban grids,

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absent land for agriculture,
and without any locally available

00:15:59.290 --> 00:16:03.419
productive resources or economic
opportunities in terms of employment

00:16:03.419 --> 00:16:07.649
or other industries. So here we see
Penipe Nuevo in those two images

00:16:07.649 --> 00:16:11.120
on the left. I’ll be introducing
this place shortly.

00:16:11.120 --> 00:16:15.460
Seems an odd way to resettle
subsistence agriculturists.

00:16:18.100 --> 00:16:23.060
Okay. So, while an inventory of hazard
exposure is no doubt an important

00:16:23.069 --> 00:16:27.970
component in vulnerability analysis,
and a decidedly logical place to begin,

00:16:27.970 --> 00:16:31.439
focusing on hazards alone runs the
risk of overlooking the relationships

00:16:31.439 --> 00:16:34.850
between populations with
varying degrees of exposure.

00:16:34.850 --> 00:16:37.470
Hazard exposure is not only a matter
of relationships between humans

00:16:37.470 --> 00:16:41.550
and the environment, but also,
and arguably largely, a result of

00:16:41.550 --> 00:16:44.819
relationships between
groups and a society.

00:16:44.819 --> 00:16:47.399
The resources approach
begins to address this issue.

00:16:47.399 --> 00:16:51.100
Looking away from hazards,
this framework is trained on the social

00:16:51.100 --> 00:16:56.119
production of unequal risks and impacts.
But one important limitation of this

00:16:56.119 --> 00:17:00.110
model that it shares with hazards –
the hazard-centric model is that

00:17:00.110 --> 00:17:03.769
they’re both trained on very limited
spatiotemporal spheres of exposure,

00:17:03.769 --> 00:17:07.189
resources, and preparedness
and response activities.

00:17:07.189 --> 00:17:10.870
In other words, these frameworks
principally highlight the proximate,

00:17:10.870 --> 00:17:14.360
rather than the distal or root causes
of disaster that I would like to

00:17:14.360 --> 00:17:18.680
turn to consider now.
I’d like to introduce a different

00:17:18.680 --> 00:17:22.430
version of vulnerability thinking
worth considering – one with deep roots

00:17:22.430 --> 00:17:26.300
in the past and which unites broad-scale
developments with the everyday lives

00:17:26.300 --> 00:17:29.760
of people living in the
shadow of Mt. Tungurahua.

00:17:29.760 --> 00:17:31.920
So let me begin by saying this.

00:17:31.920 --> 00:17:37.540
Disasters are the outcomes of histories
we routinely mistake for nature.

00:17:37.550 --> 00:17:42.290
A volcanic eruption, as I surely don’t
have to tell anybody in this room,

00:17:42.290 --> 00:17:45.810
by itself, is merely a movement of
magma, gases, and pyroclastic material.

00:17:45.810 --> 00:17:50.280
This only becomes a disaster when
it encounters human societies.

00:17:50.280 --> 00:17:53.620
We must therefore focus our attention
on the historical processes that bring

00:17:53.620 --> 00:17:57.740
people into contact with a given
hazard such as a volcano, and how

00:17:57.740 --> 00:18:02.380
their lives are structured, imagined,
and contested in these spaces.

00:18:03.960 --> 00:18:08.540
As has become more sort of common
knowledge these days, the poor and

00:18:08.540 --> 00:18:12.540
marginalized in a given society are
more likely to live in hazardous places

00:18:12.540 --> 00:18:16.110
and less likely to have the wherewithal
to cope with and adapt to the

00:18:16.110 --> 00:18:20.770
hazards they encounter.
This is predominantly the result

00:18:20.770 --> 00:18:25.160
of marginalization from political
protection and decision-making,

00:18:25.160 --> 00:18:28.510
inadequate infrastructure to cope with
hazardous conditions, and adequate

00:18:28.510 --> 00:18:33.490
resources to cope with disasters before,
during, and after the episodic hazard

00:18:33.490 --> 00:18:38.900
event occurs. Today, social scientists
generally understand disasters as being

00:18:38.900 --> 00:18:42.660
socially produced and emphasize how
political and economic forces operating

00:18:42.660 --> 00:18:47.550
at different levels – local, regional,
national, international, what have you –

00:18:47.550 --> 00:18:49.920
and how they contribute
to vulnerability.

00:18:50.740 --> 00:18:54.900
I join others in arguing that disasters
originate in social conditions that may

00:18:54.900 --> 00:18:59.480
be far removed from disaster triggers
such as earthquakes and hurricanes.

00:18:59.480 --> 00:19:01.930
In order to understand them,
we must not only know about the types

00:19:01.930 --> 00:19:05.430
of hazards that might affect people,
but also the broader vulnerabilities

00:19:05.430 --> 00:19:08.210
that – here in our societies
and how these are determined

00:19:08.210 --> 00:19:13.400
by social systems and power –
not natural forces.

00:19:13.400 --> 00:19:16.560
Disasters are therefore best
conceived of as episodic and

00:19:16.570 --> 00:19:21.050
foreseeable manifestations of the
broader forces that shape societies.

00:19:21.050 --> 00:19:24.830
And so this political ecology approach
entails examining the historical

00:19:24.830 --> 00:19:30.170
production of vulnerability, focusing
on both the distal and proximate causes.

00:19:30.170 --> 00:19:33.620
And this involves attention to human
environment, relations, culture,

00:19:33.620 --> 00:19:37.760
adaptation, and the interplay
of cooperation and competition

00:19:37.760 --> 00:19:41.120
for scarce resources.
So returning to the case of

00:19:41.120 --> 00:19:45.280
Mt. Tungurahua eruptions, we will
continue to alternate between visits to

00:19:45.280 --> 00:19:50.320
places in the present and various pasts.
We might begin with the histories of

00:19:50.320 --> 00:19:55.900
eruptions, colonialism, the post-colonial
hacienda economy, the legacy of land

00:19:55.900 --> 00:20:00.620
reform, and the clientelist politics of
Ecuador that articulate at those local,

00:20:00.620 --> 00:20:05.240
regional, national, and even
transnational levels of scale.

00:20:05.740 --> 00:20:09.380
Succinctly, from the sort of
way-back machine here,

00:20:09.380 --> 00:20:12.870
Spanish colonists imported
indigenous labor into the areas around

00:20:12.870 --> 00:20:17.130
the volcano in the late 16th century.
And this population took shape over

00:20:17.130 --> 00:20:22.060
the next three centuries into indigenous and
mestizo – mestizo meaning mixed

00:20:22.060 --> 00:20:25.881
European and indigenous heritage.
So indigenous and mestizo peasant

00:20:25.881 --> 00:20:32.240
communities tied to haciendas through
debt peonage and forced labor tribute.

00:20:33.540 --> 00:20:37.320
And, as these populations took shape,
massive eruptions of Mt. Tungurahua

00:20:37.320 --> 00:20:43.860
in 1773, 1886, and again from 1916 to
1918, caused tremendous damage and

00:20:43.870 --> 00:20:49.360
large-scale evacuations of the region.
Yet the 20th century saw an expansion

00:20:49.360 --> 00:20:53.440
of human settlements in the region,
largely because of these dual processes

00:20:53.440 --> 00:21:00.220
of land reform and the scarcity of land
available to poor agropastoralists,

00:21:00.220 --> 00:21:05.750
with little in the way of prevention.
In fact, the seismic monitoring of

00:21:05.750 --> 00:21:12.420
Mt. Tungurahua by the Geophysics
Institute didn’t begin until 1989, when,

00:21:12.420 --> 00:21:17.420
in the mid-20th century, land reform
legislation tried to break up the sort of

00:21:17.420 --> 00:21:21.870
oppressive hold of the hacienda
economy on the poor world populations.

00:21:21.870 --> 00:21:26.830
They created a pathway to land
ownership for campesinos.

00:21:26.830 --> 00:21:32.820
Most were left with land on the steepest
slopes of the volcanoes in the highlands,

00:21:32.820 --> 00:21:37.530
where they cultivated a mixture of crops
for household subsistence, generally

00:21:37.530 --> 00:21:43.430
only bringing, occasionally, small
portions to market as the need arose.

00:21:43.430 --> 00:21:48.350
Meanwhile, these new elites emerged
around this area and consolidated

00:21:48.350 --> 00:21:53.820
larger land holdings among the
majority smallholders in the region.

00:21:53.820 --> 00:21:58.060
These new elites often derived political
power by serving as brokers of political

00:21:58.060 --> 00:22:02.890
patronage and access to institutional
resources outside communities.

00:22:02.890 --> 00:22:05.940
And government investment in services
and infrastructure in the region has

00:22:05.940 --> 00:22:10.540
long been negligible and largely
dominated by these same elites.

00:22:11.780 --> 00:22:15.820
If that weren’t enough, at the time
of the 1999 eruptions, Ecuador

00:22:15.820 --> 00:22:22.060
was decidedly politically unstable.
From 1990 to 1999, the country

00:22:22.060 --> 00:22:26.470
had seven presidents.
And three more by 2006.

00:22:26.470 --> 00:22:32.820
None completed a term in office.
The massive 1997 to 1998 El Niño

00:22:32.820 --> 00:22:34.580
had devastated the country.

00:22:34.580 --> 00:22:38.900
Where, of course, the center
of the southern oscillation there.

00:22:38.900 --> 00:22:43.280
And they were still reeling from
an inflation crisis that resulted in

00:22:43.280 --> 00:22:45.840
the abandonment of their national
currency and the adoption of

00:22:45.840 --> 00:22:50.340
the U.S. dollar in 1999.
Though several – during this period,

00:22:50.340 --> 00:22:52.730
several volcanic tremors caught
the attention of volcanologists

00:22:52.730 --> 00:22:56.910
beginning in 1994, nothing
rose to the level of emergency.

00:22:56.910 --> 00:23:01.360
There was no official information
on risks posed by the volcano publicly

00:23:01.360 --> 00:23:05.730
disseminated before these eruptions.
The events of the 1999 and 2006

00:23:05.730 --> 00:23:09.250
eruptions were therefore the
consequences of colonialism,

00:23:09.250 --> 00:23:12.810
economic development, political
fragmentation, and settlement patterns

00:23:12.810 --> 00:23:17.660
accumulating into this highly precarious
situation around the volcano.

00:23:18.760 --> 00:23:23.300
Yet, in the midst of many systematic
vulnerabilities and failures,

00:23:23.300 --> 00:23:26.910
many Ecuadorians effectively
organized to care for one another in the

00:23:26.910 --> 00:23:31.640
immediate aftermaths of the eruptions.
There was no emergency

00:23:31.640 --> 00:23:36.440
operations plan in place in 1999.
In fact, by the time the Civil Defense –

00:23:36.440 --> 00:23:41.450
their National Guard – mobilized for
evacuation, most villagers had been

00:23:41.450 --> 00:23:45.800
spontaneously evacuated
by a local bus cooperative.

00:23:46.160 --> 00:23:50.540
After pyroclastic flows,
incandescent projectiles,

00:23:50.550 --> 00:23:55.550
and heavy ashfall devastated homes,
animals, crops, and possessions

00:23:55.550 --> 00:24:00.620
left hastily behind in the evacuation,
most evacuees were left to their

00:24:00.620 --> 00:24:04.150
own devices as the buses left them
on the streets in the central town

00:24:04.150 --> 00:24:08.760
of Penipe or in the city of
Riobamba a dozen miles away.

00:24:11.370 --> 00:24:15.700
In the coming days, churches and
public schools set up makeshift shelters

00:24:15.700 --> 00:24:19.890
to accommodate the displaced.
When Mt. Tungurahua erupted

00:24:19.890 --> 00:24:24.540
much more powerfully seven years later,
as I said earlier, in 2006, this 3,000

00:24:24.540 --> 00:24:27.920
that were still in shelters –
this number more than quadrupled.

00:24:29.810 --> 00:24:32.320
Though there were formal warnings
and evacuations this time, they were

00:24:32.330 --> 00:24:36.520
handled by the Civil Defense, whose
paramilitary extraction techniques

00:24:36.520 --> 00:24:40.480
added to people’s trauma and distrust.
Though there were shelters in place,

00:24:40.480 --> 00:24:43.290
there was no plan for what would
come next for the thousands

00:24:43.290 --> 00:24:45.810
of displaced villagers.
And I’ll say here, the folks we see

00:24:45.810 --> 00:24:50.090
in the picture here, this was a year
before I arrived in Penipe.

00:24:50.090 --> 00:24:53.710
And I came to know each of the
folks in this picture quite well.

00:24:53.710 --> 00:24:55.750
This was released in the
press at the time.

00:24:55.750 --> 00:24:59.760
So, in 2008, two years later,
we’re still looking at this

00:24:59.760 --> 00:25:06.570
overcrowded improvised shelters.
It took more than two years for plans

00:25:06.570 --> 00:25:11.640
to come together to build resettlement
communities for those displaced.

00:25:11.640 --> 00:25:15.710
The Ecuadorian Ministry of Urban
Development and Housing constructed

00:25:15.710 --> 00:25:20.990
three resettlements – very large ones
as these things go – 380 houses

00:25:20.990 --> 00:25:26.490
across two sites in Tungurahua
Province to the north and 185 houses

00:25:26.490 --> 00:25:32.060
in Penipe in Chimborazo Province.
The U.S.-based evangelical disaster

00:25:32.060 --> 00:25:34.890
relief organization,
Samaritan's Purse,

00:25:34.890 --> 00:25:39.060
constructed another 102 homes
in the Penipe resettlement,

00:25:39.060 --> 00:25:46.440
making for a – a total of 287.
These homes were built as an extension

00:25:46.440 --> 00:25:50.780
in the central town of Penipe.
So to distinguish the resettlement

00:25:50.780 --> 00:25:54.520
from the old town, I generally refer to
the resettlement as Penipe Nuevo,

00:25:54.520 --> 00:25:57.380
or New Penipe.
And so you can see, on the lower half

00:25:57.380 --> 00:26:00.420
of the image there, the old town –
the central town there.

00:26:00.420 --> 00:26:06.440
And, on the upper portion of the
image there, you see the resettlements.

00:26:06.440 --> 00:26:10.920
All of the plain yellow buildings
were the ones built by the state.

00:26:10.920 --> 00:26:13.250
And the multicolored ones
come from Samaritan’s Purse.

00:26:13.250 --> 00:26:18.020
Quite similar models mixed
together there – total of 287 of them.

00:26:19.270 --> 00:26:22.700
Like all of the state-funded
resettlements, Penipe Nuevo placed

00:26:22.700 --> 00:26:26.800
erstwhile smallholding agropastoralists
in landless urban grids.

00:26:26.800 --> 00:26:31.070
I can’t say that enough.
And without land or any

00:26:31.070 --> 00:26:36.200
alternative economic resources.
My focus – my research, at least

00:26:36.200 --> 00:26:39.651
for the purposes of today’s talk –
focused on Penipe Nuevo and another

00:26:39.651 --> 00:26:43.990
resettlement built on a windy hilltop
3 kilometers to the south.

00:26:43.990 --> 00:26:48.210
Pusuca is a community of
45 homes sponsored and constructed

00:26:48.210 --> 00:26:52.120
by the Esquel Foundation,
an Ecudorian NGO.

00:26:52.120 --> 00:26:54.760
Unlike Penipe Nuevo,
it actually includes plots of land

00:26:54.760 --> 00:26:58.340
for each household and common
plots for communal projects.

00:26:58.340 --> 00:27:04.500
However, highland agriculture is
highly dependent on irrigation.

00:27:04.500 --> 00:27:08.280
And this is a project that would take
another three years to complete –

00:27:08.280 --> 00:27:12.640
digging an irrigation trench roughly
8 kilometers across the highlands at

00:27:12.640 --> 00:27:19.190
about 2,600 to 2,800 meters’ altitude,
again, through rolling hills of the

00:27:19.190 --> 00:27:23.820
highland. So, for nearly three years,
Penipe and Pusuca resettlers were

00:27:23.820 --> 00:27:26.800
in similar conditions in that they
lacked productive resources and

00:27:26.800 --> 00:27:32.260
local economy. That is to say that,
while the hazard threat was neutralized,

00:27:32.260 --> 00:27:37.840
vulnerability persisted. One might
even argue that it was exacerbated.

00:27:38.840 --> 00:27:43.780
One reaction to this lack of resources
was that people began returning to

00:27:43.780 --> 00:27:47.980
their villages on the volcanoes to
grow crops and animals, even as

00:27:47.980 --> 00:27:53.320
Tungurahua continued regularly
erupting right through 2017.

00:27:53.320 --> 00:27:57.700
Let me repeat that again.
Imagine a world where the best

00:27:57.700 --> 00:28:04.070
thing you’ve got going for you,
the best chance you have at a livelihood,

00:28:04.070 --> 00:28:10.600
is to return to try and grow food and
raise animals on a still-erupting volcano.

00:28:10.600 --> 00:28:14.320
Okay? That’s to illustrate that
the hazard itself was not the

00:28:14.320 --> 00:28:19.550
core problem here, right?
Another was to commute daily

00:28:19.550 --> 00:28:24.560
or else migrate for weeks or months
at a time for wage labor in cities.

00:28:24.560 --> 00:28:28.460
Resettlers who were alternating between
their lands in the shadow of a volcano

00:28:28.463 --> 00:28:31.960
or wage work in the cities and their
homes in the resettlements were

00:28:31.960 --> 00:28:35.070
subjects to threats of eviction in the
resettlements if they didn’t return

00:28:35.070 --> 00:28:40.330
home each night. What is more,
the one road connecting the

00:28:40.330 --> 00:28:43.780
resettlements to the northernmost
villages was left in disrepair where

00:28:43.780 --> 00:28:48.220
bridges over the many gorges had been
washed away by pyroclastic material,

00:28:48.220 --> 00:28:51.520
increasing significantly the time
and effort spent commuting between

00:28:51.520 --> 00:28:54.330
the resettlements and
people’s agricultural fields.

00:28:54.330 --> 00:28:57.260
And in here, in the lower left of
my slide, you’ll see a meme-ification

00:28:57.260 --> 00:29:01.280
of that. For those of you who don’t
speak Spanish, so here we have

00:29:01.280 --> 00:29:05.220
these really precarious cable systems
that people improvised to cross some

00:29:05.220 --> 00:29:11.670
of these breaks in the road there.
And the caption there says,

00:29:11.670 --> 00:29:17.460
avanzamos patria, which is, like,
forward goes the nation,

00:29:17.460 --> 00:29:23.080
which was a key slogan of
the ruling party at the time.

00:29:23.080 --> 00:29:25.690
So they’re having a joke that this is
sort of, yes, we’re moving forward.

00:29:25.690 --> 00:29:28.430
This is the condition we’re in, right?
And that is that road –

00:29:28.430 --> 00:29:30.690
the Via Baños-Penipe –
that north-south road

00:29:30.690 --> 00:29:35.720
that I indicated earlier.
Meanwhile, local elites organized –

00:29:35.720 --> 00:29:39.210
occasionally – their communities
to report members of other communities

00:29:39.210 --> 00:29:43.960
for violations as they engaged in the
sort of politics of deservingness in

00:29:43.960 --> 00:29:47.000
the resettlement environment,
where productive resources

00:29:47.000 --> 00:29:51.550
were replaced by flows of aid
as the principal objects of

00:29:51.550 --> 00:29:56.240
political competition. And I’ll
come back to that theme in a while.

00:29:56.240 --> 00:30:00.260
Now, my sincere hope is that you’re
following my argument and thinking,

00:30:00.260 --> 00:30:04.420
sure, that makes sense. We can
hang with this anthropology guy.

00:30:04.540 --> 00:30:06.780
[laughter]

00:30:06.780 --> 00:30:10.200
But [laughs] – we’re not going to
invite him back again, but,

00:30:10.200 --> 00:30:13.430
you know, for today,
we’ll tolerate him.

00:30:13.430 --> 00:30:19.650
But I also hope that you’re beginning
to suspect, like me, that the choice of

00:30:19.650 --> 00:30:23.770
the word “vulnerability” in this line
of thinking is somewhat unfortunate.

00:30:23.770 --> 00:30:26.830
One problem is that the very term
“vulnerability” implies weakness

00:30:26.830 --> 00:30:31.260
and passivity. Taken together
with hazard-centrism, and especially

00:30:31.260 --> 00:30:35.820
when applied to the global south and 
impoverished areas of the global north,

00:30:35.820 --> 00:30:38.860
there’s a tendency to imagine
and portray places and populations

00:30:38.860 --> 00:30:42.960
themselves as vulnerable.
That is, pathological, enfeebled,

00:30:42.960 --> 00:30:47.660
and, importantly, in need of outside
intervention to get things right.

00:30:48.500 --> 00:30:51.780
So, while I reject the notion that
disasters are natural, and I take very

00:30:51.790 --> 00:30:55.570
seriously the historical production
of disaster and the unequal distribution

00:30:55.570 --> 00:31:00.460
of the associated risks, I am concerned,
in my work, to, in effect,

00:31:00.460 --> 00:31:04.870
write against vulnerability.
To critically examine local agency

00:31:04.870 --> 00:31:08.610
and how people make their lives
around the volcano and build new lives

00:31:08.610 --> 00:31:11.690
in the wake of calamity.
And to understand vulnerability

00:31:11.690 --> 00:31:14.690
more as a concept metaphor
for how risk and disaster are

00:31:14.690 --> 00:31:17.760
historically produced in society.
These are not attributes of people

00:31:17.760 --> 00:31:20.920
or places. [bump sounds]
Oh, I knew I was going to do that.

00:31:21.920 --> 00:31:23.960
Smacking my
microphone up here.

00:31:23.970 --> 00:31:29.720
So this is how I came to study minga.
Cooperative labor parties practiced

00:31:29.720 --> 00:31:34.520
throughout the Andes for centuries.
Mingas are, at once, exemplars of

00:31:34.520 --> 00:31:39.040
the distinctly Andean cultural strategies
and the creative agency of rural

00:31:39.040 --> 00:31:44.690
campesino and indigenous communities.
I first learned of minga when I was

00:31:44.690 --> 00:31:48.860
reading an Ecuadorean newspaper –
this very one – reporting on locals

00:31:48.860 --> 00:31:54.250
in Penipe organizing mingas to
distribute scarce food resources and

00:31:54.250 --> 00:31:59.610
to clear debris from people’s homes.
When I moved to Penipe in 2009,

00:31:59.610 --> 00:32:03.430
I learned that Samaritan’s Purse
had organized their portion of the

00:32:03.430 --> 00:32:07.510
construction of Penipe Nuevo as
a minga, with one member of each

00:32:07.510 --> 00:32:13.050
beneficiary household required to work
alongside hired contractors each day.

00:32:13.050 --> 00:32:17.170
Likewise, up on that windy hilltop,
the Esquel Foundation organized

00:32:17.170 --> 00:32:21.770
construction of the Pusuca
resettlement as a minga.

00:32:21.770 --> 00:32:24.730
The first minga I participated
in involved rebuilding a school

00:32:24.730 --> 00:32:27.750
in the center of Puela parish,
which is the parish that Manzano

00:32:27.750 --> 00:32:32.420
is in at the foot of the volcano.
This minga was interesting

00:32:32.420 --> 00:32:34.770
for several reasons. First,
I could see how it worked

00:32:34.770 --> 00:32:38.040
in practice and not just
read about it from afar.

00:32:38.040 --> 00:32:41.340
Village leaders called villagers
to work and meticulously

00:32:41.340 --> 00:32:45.020
recorded attendance lists.
I’ll talk about that in a moment.

00:32:45.800 --> 00:32:51.460
But there was no central task
manager nor regulated work output.

00:32:51.460 --> 00:32:54.370
People rather spontaneously took
to a variety of tasks, such as

00:32:54.370 --> 00:32:58.300
clearing debris from inside
and repairing the roofs.

00:32:58.300 --> 00:33:02.790
Second, this minga was done in
defiance of government plans

00:33:02.790 --> 00:33:06.890
to permanently shutter the school and
to build much larger schools in the

00:33:06.890 --> 00:33:12.700
Penipe township to house the extant
and newly resettled student populations.

00:33:14.120 --> 00:33:17.900
But for the resettlers, for reasons
I’ve already mentioned, there was

00:33:17.900 --> 00:33:22.940
no living in the resettlement.
There was life – a bare life at that.

00:33:22.940 --> 00:33:24.380
But there was no living.
There were no livelihoods.

00:33:24.380 --> 00:33:26.980
There was nothing
there for them.

00:33:26.980 --> 00:33:31.290
And finally, what was interesting about
this was that this minga in rebuilding

00:33:31.290 --> 00:33:37.020
the school, and others that I participated
in at the time, it didn’t appear to

00:33:37.020 --> 00:33:41.360
conform to any of the varieties
of minga practice that I had

00:33:41.360 --> 00:33:45.630
thus far encountered in the
anthropological literature.

00:33:45.630 --> 00:33:49.380
And so, with apologies in advance,
I want to explain those varieties of

00:33:49.380 --> 00:33:55.380
minga, which will help us interpret
what I found in the following years here.

00:33:55.380 --> 00:34:00.440
The most commonly recorded varieties
of minga practice can be roughly

00:34:00.440 --> 00:34:03.040
grouped into five categories.
Though they’re not always

00:34:03.040 --> 00:34:07.670
mutually exclusive, as we’ll see.
First, the earliest form of minga

00:34:07.670 --> 00:34:11.720
is what’s known as reciprocal
exchange labor, or mutual aid.

00:34:11.720 --> 00:34:15.940
The term has its roots in the Quichua
word “mit’a,” meaning “turn.”

00:34:15.940 --> 00:34:20.109
And the practice predates the Inca
empire that rose in the 15th century.

00:34:20.109 --> 00:34:24.740
Basically, for every day that someone
worked on their neighbor’s land, that

00:34:24.740 --> 00:34:30.440
neighbor would owe them a day of
equal labor to be called upon as needed.

00:34:30.440 --> 00:34:34.259
The second variety is
patron-clientelism, which resembles

00:34:34.259 --> 00:34:38.159
the first, but instead, it’s markedly
unequal. In this case, a member of

00:34:38.159 --> 00:34:42.190
a wealthier land-holding elite would
recruit many laborers to come work

00:34:42.190 --> 00:34:45.690
on their large estates and then
reciprocate, not with labor,

00:34:45.690 --> 00:34:48.839
but with material gifts –
very conspicuous too –

00:34:48.839 --> 00:34:52.009
making sure that people see.
This kind of gifting is public.

00:34:52.009 --> 00:34:55.099
This includes feasting,
portions of harvest, tools,

00:34:55.099 --> 00:34:57.480
and more recently,
even cash.

00:34:57.480 --> 00:35:01.960
Third, minga has historically
been a form of labor tax.

00:35:01.960 --> 00:35:06.160
It was systemized by Incan rulers
who mobilized conquered populations

00:35:06.160 --> 00:35:10.829
to build and sustain the infrastructure of
empire – those famous roads, right?

00:35:10.829 --> 00:35:16.609
Well, Inca rulers reciprocated with
the support and protection of the state.

00:35:16.609 --> 00:35:20.619
This system was appropriated and
made decidedly more severe by

00:35:20.619 --> 00:35:25.420
the Spanish conquerors as a
means of extracting labor tribute

00:35:25.420 --> 00:35:28.660
throughout the several periods
of colonial administration.

00:35:28.660 --> 00:35:34.040
After independence, highland hacienda
bosses and coastal plantation capitalists

00:35:34.040 --> 00:35:38.750
continued to extract labor via mingas.
And while indigenous peoples and

00:35:38.750 --> 00:35:43.839
campesinos were popularly derided
as backward and idle, their minga labor

00:35:43.839 --> 00:35:48.049
plainly underwrote the modernization
of the Ecuadorian state infrastructure

00:35:48.049 --> 00:35:50.989
and economy, as they
built the road, rail,

00:35:50.989 --> 00:35:55.250
and telegraph systems
that united national territories.

00:35:55.250 --> 00:35:59.609
Fourth, minga can be a form of local
governance that establishes and

00:35:59.609 --> 00:36:03.519
standardizes community boundaries –
physical boundaries, such as roads

00:36:03.520 --> 00:36:07.440
and the irrigation canal
you see us digging here.

00:36:08.940 --> 00:36:15.619
And it can be also a form of governance
in terms of belonging to community

00:36:15.619 --> 00:36:18.900
and full membership, as participation
is a condition of full community

00:36:18.900 --> 00:36:21.680
membership and access
to common resources.

00:36:21.680 --> 00:36:25.109
Finally, minga practice
can be a political strategy.

00:36:25.109 --> 00:36:28.819
The massive indigenous and
campesino uprisings of the 1990s

00:36:28.819 --> 00:36:32.279
and early 2000s were the
coordinated result of many

00:36:32.279 --> 00:36:35.700
locally organized mingas.
And today, political leaders

00:36:35.700 --> 00:36:40.220
across the Andes invoke the
concept of minga to signal

00:36:40.220 --> 00:36:43.860
their solidarity with
indigenous and peasant causes.

00:36:43.860 --> 00:36:49.100
In fact, despite this colonial legacy
that I’ve talked about, and the

00:36:49.109 --> 00:36:52.349
still-common patron-clientelism
of minga, the practice is today

00:36:52.349 --> 00:36:57.529
a powerful symbol of indigenous
and campesino and afro-Ecuadorian

00:36:57.529 --> 00:37:00.920
cultures and identities.
And minga has played a vital role

00:37:00.920 --> 00:37:06.910
in local mutual aid, disaster recovery,
governance, and resource management.

00:37:07.680 --> 00:37:14.040
So, since 2009, I’ve been studying
how resettlers practiced minga

00:37:14.049 --> 00:37:18.460
since the initial acts of mutual aid I
read about in the wake of the eruptions.

00:37:18.460 --> 00:37:23.210
I’ve done so by participating in
dozens of mingas, observing

00:37:23.210 --> 00:37:26.589
recruitment and organizing,
and interviewing roughly 100 people,

00:37:26.589 --> 00:37:29.779
many of them many times over,
about the practice.

00:37:29.779 --> 00:37:33.519
And since minga factored in the
work of these outside agencies

00:37:33.519 --> 00:37:37.829
promoting recovery, reconstruction,
and risk reduction, I was also interested

00:37:37.829 --> 00:37:41.980
in how these interventions affected
the practice and the ways in which

00:37:41.980 --> 00:37:45.900
culture was imagined and
operationalized in the process.

00:37:47.400 --> 00:37:50.540
Put succinctly, when well-meaning
outside agencies come in to work

00:37:50.550 --> 00:37:54.809
towards recovery and risk reduction,
the assumption is that the people and the

00:37:54.809 --> 00:37:59.480
place are vulnerable, while the outside
organization is robust and capable.

00:38:01.040 --> 00:38:03.560
What this often means in practice
is that, even the most culturally

00:38:03.569 --> 00:38:06.980
sensitive organizations will often
be blind to their own cultural

00:38:06.980 --> 00:38:10.540
assumptions and the
impacts that these have.

00:38:13.820 --> 00:38:18.660
I’ve already noted that there was
something wrong with Penipe Nuevo –

00:38:18.660 --> 00:38:21.400
from this resettlement
from the very start.

00:38:21.400 --> 00:38:25.569
They built 287 homes for rural
agriculturalists with no land

00:38:25.569 --> 00:38:30.560
and no economic opportunity.
And I’m not sorry for repeating it.

00:38:31.380 --> 00:38:36.579
Moreoever, local leadership itself was
largely based on minga organization.

00:38:36.980 --> 00:38:41.240
But, absent farmland, and with
potable water handled on an urban grid,

00:38:41.249 --> 00:38:44.609
once Penipe Nuevo construction
was completed, minga was

00:38:44.609 --> 00:38:49.640
no longer practiced there.
The entire – I call it spatial ecology

00:38:49.640 --> 00:38:54.360
upon which the practice was predicated
had been eradicated in the resettlement.

00:38:54.360 --> 00:38:58.279
From 2009 through 2012,
some resettlers occasionally attempted

00:38:58.279 --> 00:39:03.109
to organize mingas for community
development and to establish

00:39:03.109 --> 00:39:06.650
community leadership,
but these efforts all came to naught.

00:39:06.650 --> 00:39:09.790
Some nearby townspeople and
other outsiders even went so far as

00:39:09.790 --> 00:39:13.589
to claim that resettlers had
lost their minga culture

00:39:13.589 --> 00:39:17.060
and grown accustomed
to receiving handouts.

00:39:17.060 --> 00:39:23.680
However, these claims were belied
by the fact that the resettlers,

00:39:23.690 --> 00:39:28.700
like villagers from Manzano – that small
village at the base of Mt. Tungurahua,

00:39:28.700 --> 00:39:31.690
who returned to cultivate and recover
their livelihoods in the shadow of that

00:39:31.690 --> 00:39:36.960
still-erupting volcano, practiced minga
in earnest, rebuilding schools,

00:39:36.960 --> 00:39:41.410
roads, and water systems.
And, having observed the NGO

00:39:41.410 --> 00:39:44.559
fascination with local community
organization and the perceived

00:39:44.559 --> 00:39:48.170
solidarity of minga practice in
the resettlement construction,

00:39:48.170 --> 00:39:51.779
local leaders learned to organize
mingas just to attract NGO attention –

00:39:51.779 --> 00:39:57.089
to show off their social capital.
Moreover, resettlers in Pusuca,

00:39:57.089 --> 00:40:02.050
where households were allotted those
plots of land for farming and common

00:40:02.050 --> 00:40:06.190
land for water – and common land
and water – they practiced minga

00:40:06.190 --> 00:40:08.750
more frequently than anywhere in
recent history, and they received

00:40:08.750 --> 00:40:13.089
more development aid than anyone
in Penipe Nuevo ever did.

00:40:13.089 --> 00:40:17.720
So much for the dependency
theory about these moochers.

00:40:18.700 --> 00:40:22.720
But, along with returning to cultivate
on the volcano, the other most popular

00:40:22.729 --> 00:40:26.749
household economic strategy in Penipe
Nuevo and Pusuca was for one or more

00:40:26.749 --> 00:40:30.130
household members to migrate for
wage employment in the cities

00:40:30.130 --> 00:40:34.040
that could be 45 minutes,
or several hours’, distance away.

00:40:34.040 --> 00:40:38.160
Penipe Nuevo resettlers both returned
to cultivate in places like Manzano

00:40:38.160 --> 00:40:41.760
and migrated for labor, and many
households in Pusuca did the

00:40:41.760 --> 00:40:45.549
same because, as I mentioned,
that subsistence-level cultivation

00:40:45.549 --> 00:40:48.010
would take a couple years to
get going while they built that

00:40:48.010 --> 00:40:51.580
extensive irrigation canal.
And so, in light of this diversification

00:40:51.580 --> 00:40:55.240
of household economic strategies
and these outside interventions of

00:40:55.240 --> 00:40:59.480
these agencies, I was interested
in examining old and new approaches

00:40:59.480 --> 00:41:03.539
to organizing and administering
mingas in Manzano and Pusuca

00:41:03.539 --> 00:41:05.720
and how they would affect
how people adapted their

00:41:05.720 --> 00:41:09.460
new livelihoods and what
this would tell us about disaster.

00:41:10.260 --> 00:41:13.299
In the village of Manzano,
people returned to work the lands,

00:41:13.299 --> 00:41:15.980
and though most had homes in
the Penipe Nuevo resettlement,

00:41:15.980 --> 00:41:18.640
they soon realized that, if they were
to make a go at restoring their

00:41:18.640 --> 00:41:22.069
livelihoods in the shadow of the
volcano, they would need to rebuild

00:41:22.069 --> 00:41:25.700
the collective infrastructure of
their community, as they had

00:41:25.700 --> 00:41:29.869
begun with that school in 2009.
This included working on an irrigation

00:41:29.869 --> 00:41:34.599
canal, local roads, potable water
systems, and community buildings,

00:41:34.600 --> 00:41:39.420
all damaged by the eruptions and
years of disrepair since displacement.

00:41:39.420 --> 00:41:46.670
I documented minga participation
and countless reciprocal exchanges

00:41:46.670 --> 00:41:51.460
in Manzano from 2010 to 2012,
and several times since.

00:41:51.460 --> 00:41:55.380
I found that, the more a household
engaged in giving and receiving food,

00:41:55.380 --> 00:42:00.539
harvests, gifts, favors, and tools
with other households in Manzano,

00:42:00.539 --> 00:42:04.690
the more likely they were to participate
in mingas. So there was clearly some

00:42:04.690 --> 00:42:10.589
element of that reciprocity
underwriting minga participation.

00:42:10.589 --> 00:42:13.150
But there was also a degree of that
other variety that I mentioned earlier –

00:42:13.150 --> 00:42:17.440
the patron-clientelism at work in
organizing mingas in Manzano.

00:42:17.440 --> 00:42:22.210
Bernardo – Manzano’s village council
president, engaged in perpetual

00:42:22.210 --> 00:42:25.549
recruitment that helped mark the
ever-emergent boundaries of the

00:42:25.549 --> 00:42:28.440
community, routinely making
the rounds in Manzano and

00:42:28.440 --> 00:42:32.170
Penipe Nuevo in his white
pickup truck to invite participants.

00:42:32.170 --> 00:42:35.140
His invitations were almost always
accompanied by the promise of

00:42:35.140 --> 00:42:38.289
tangible benefits, such as
new service or micro development

00:42:38.289 --> 00:42:40.540
projects for the community.

00:42:40.540 --> 00:42:42.900
On one of several occasions in
which I joined Bernardo,

00:42:42.900 --> 00:42:46.259
whom I consider a close friend,
as he drove around Penipe to

00:42:46.259 --> 00:42:49.410
recruit Manzano participants,
he was organizing a minga to

00:42:49.410 --> 00:42:53.520
perform maintenance and weeding
around the potable water system.

00:42:53.520 --> 00:42:58.200
I mentioned that he was driving past
Manzano homes in the resettlement,

00:42:58.200 --> 00:43:01.509
and I asked why he didn’t inform them.
Ah, he responded that some people were

00:43:01.509 --> 00:43:05.460
simply too difficult and uncooperative.
And when I mentioned one woman,

00:43:05.460 --> 00:43:08.660
he complained that she and her
sisters never supported village council

00:43:08.660 --> 00:43:12.240
initiatives and were a constant
source of dissension.

00:43:12.240 --> 00:43:16.640
Over time, I noticed that Bernardo
routinely recruited roughly the same

00:43:16.640 --> 00:43:20.529
30 households – those most
tightly bound to the village

00:43:20.529 --> 00:43:25.390
through reciprocal exchange relations –
for each minga and each meeting,

00:43:25.390 --> 00:43:28.589
while regularly
ignoring certain others.

00:43:28.589 --> 00:43:31.890
There was also a reason to see
some elements of the local governance

00:43:31.890 --> 00:43:35.369
model at work in Manzano.
As elsewhere in the Andes,

00:43:35.369 --> 00:43:39.069
minga leaders kept lists of
minga attendance, assigning

00:43:39.069 --> 00:43:44.190
what they call rayas, which just means
checkmarks, to indicate credit for

00:43:44.190 --> 00:43:49.040
roughly – working roughly six hours
according to each laborer’s ability.

00:43:49.040 --> 00:43:51.309
That is, everyone worked according
to their ability and were given

00:43:51.309 --> 00:43:54.230
equal credit for working the
same number of hours as others.

00:43:54.230 --> 00:43:57.680
This’ll be important in a moment.
There was no favoritism,

00:43:57.680 --> 00:44:00.990
nor special consideration given
based on status or, you know,

00:44:00.990 --> 00:44:05.440
your relationships in the community.
It’s interesting to note that this

00:44:05.440 --> 00:44:08.260
combination of minga modalities,
which is why I bored you with the

00:44:08.260 --> 00:44:12.289
sort of background on it a moment ago,
this combination of minga modalities

00:44:12.289 --> 00:44:15.160
makes for an especially
adaptive approach to

00:44:15.160 --> 00:44:19.660
collective action and disaster
recovery and risk reduction.

00:44:19.660 --> 00:44:23.480
It is, of course, rooted in the
flexible task-oriented approach

00:44:23.499 --> 00:44:27.480
to time management common
to subsistence agriculturalists.

00:44:27.480 --> 00:44:30.369
The frequency of reciprocal
exchanges is made possible

00:44:30.369 --> 00:44:34.369
because subsistence agriculture
does not entail time-sensitive labor.

00:44:34.369 --> 00:44:39.599
Virtually everyone has occasion to call
on their neighbors from time to time,

00:44:39.600 --> 00:44:43.400
and people are their own task masters.
If I’m a subsistence farmer,

00:44:43.400 --> 00:44:45.120
and you come and ask me
if I can help you out

00:44:45.120 --> 00:44:47.700
at 2:00 in the afternoon
on Tuesday, there’s almost never

00:44:47.700 --> 00:44:51.540
a reason why I have to say no.
Nothing has to be done right now.

00:44:52.780 --> 00:44:55.999
This is quite different for wage laborers,
right, who are beholden to clocks

00:44:55.999 --> 00:44:59.499
and employers, and they don’t enjoy
that same kind of flexibility

00:44:59.499 --> 00:45:03.529
their subsistence agriculturalists
neighbors do that allows them

00:45:03.529 --> 00:45:07.819
to participate in these
collective action routines.

00:45:07.819 --> 00:45:10.099
So I wondered if those households
who had turned to wage labor

00:45:10.100 --> 00:45:13.700
would be increasingly left
out of this whole system.

00:45:13.700 --> 00:45:17.890
However, while some people expressed 
some challenges in making it back from

00:45:17.890 --> 00:45:20.820
the city to work mingas,
Manzano leaders in the community

00:45:20.820 --> 00:45:24.460
were generally able to accommodate
this. How? By principally organizing

00:45:24.460 --> 00:45:29.880
mingas on weekends.
Fair enough. On to Pusuca.

00:45:30.280 --> 00:45:33.039
My initial impressions of Pusuca
were that minga resembled

00:45:33.039 --> 00:45:37.859
much more the local governance
variety of minga practice.

00:45:37.859 --> 00:45:40.990
For one, there was no correlation,
as I had found in Manzano,

00:45:40.990 --> 00:45:44.750
between reciprocal exchanges between
neighbors and minga participation.

00:45:44.750 --> 00:45:47.579
And there was no evidence of
this perpetual recruitment led

00:45:47.579 --> 00:45:51.349
by community leaders. Participation
was standardized and independent

00:45:51.349 --> 00:45:54.550
of status and relationships.
Mingas were organized by

00:45:54.550 --> 00:45:57.740
an elected village council
whose bylaws were drafted

00:45:57.740 --> 00:46:00.690
under the guidance of
the Esquel Foundation.

00:46:00.690 --> 00:46:02.670
Mingas were announced at
village council meetings,

00:46:02.670 --> 00:46:06.029
and attendance was mandatory
and meticulously recorded

00:46:06.029 --> 00:46:08.529
by designated secretaries
in Excel spreadsheets

00:46:08.529 --> 00:46:11.800
on a computer donated
by the Esquel Foundation.

00:46:12.340 --> 00:46:15.760
Yeah, that always gets a laugh.
[laughs] Yet, the intervention

00:46:15.769 --> 00:46:20.309
of the Esquel Foundation in Pusuca
resulted in radical changes in minga

00:46:20.309 --> 00:46:23.569
schedules and the imposition
of standardized labor outputs

00:46:23.569 --> 00:46:28.180
that resembled much more the
labor taxes of the colonial and

00:46:28.180 --> 00:46:32.920
hacienda eras than the local governance
strategies of the highland villages.

00:46:32.920 --> 00:46:37.430
In some respects, Esquel replaced
the village president as the regulator

00:46:37.430 --> 00:46:42.269
of labor and the closely related role
of broker of outside resources.

00:46:42.269 --> 00:46:47.421
Importantly, Esquel was focused
on issues of empowerment and

00:46:47.421 --> 00:46:50.069
cultural sensitivity – a very
well-meaning organization

00:46:50.069 --> 00:46:53.460
that did great things.
Community participation and

00:46:53.460 --> 00:46:58.289
minga practice formed cornerstones
of their implementation strategy,

00:46:58.289 --> 00:47:02.650
and the plan emphasized community
participation in all phases, quote,

00:47:02.650 --> 00:47:07.019
in order to ensure an effective
contribution and subsequent

00:47:07.020 --> 00:47:12.780
empowerment of resettlers, end quote.
Noble goals, every one.

00:47:12.780 --> 00:47:17.480
However, time came to be managed
quite differently in Pusuca as a

00:47:17.490 --> 00:47:24.009
direct result of Esquel’s intervention.
In 2009, mingas were primarily held on

00:47:24.009 --> 00:47:28.910
weekends in Pusuca, as in Manzano,
and minga attendance was established

00:47:28.910 --> 00:47:32.640
as a prerequisite for
project inclusion and access to

00:47:32.640 --> 00:47:36.359
common resources,
such as irrigation water.

00:47:36.359 --> 00:47:40.359
When mingas were held on weekends,
they were challenging to attend

00:47:40.359 --> 00:47:43.979
for those working and living,
at least part-time, outside of Pusuca,

00:47:43.979 --> 00:47:47.089
but not impossible.
Many periodically returned for

00:47:47.089 --> 00:47:53.710
a day or weekends for minga duty.
But when the long-awaited irrigation

00:47:53.710 --> 00:47:57.940
project began in 2011, with funding
from the Provincial Council of

00:47:57.940 --> 00:48:03.529
Chimborazo and the World Bank,
Esquel hired engineers and paid laborers

00:48:03.529 --> 00:48:09.329
to design and manage construction,
which shifted mingas to weekdays,

00:48:09.329 --> 00:48:13.120
as engineers are certainly
not expected to work on weekends.

00:48:14.860 --> 00:48:17.640
Perhaps we might find some
exceptions here. I don’t know.

00:48:19.260 --> 00:48:22.819
This was an ever-greater obstacle
for wage laborers to fulfill

00:48:22.819 --> 00:48:26.269
their minga duties.
Weekday mingas were impossible

00:48:26.269 --> 00:48:29.859
for almost all of them, and many fell
increasingly behind in their obligations

00:48:29.859 --> 00:48:33.619
and were facing exclusion from
irrigation rights and other benefits.

00:48:33.619 --> 00:48:37.480
In addition to the rayas, if this
weren’t enough – in addition to the

00:48:37.480 --> 00:48:41.109
rayas, those checkmarks, for attendance,
that were recorded in paper notebooks

00:48:41.109 --> 00:48:44.790
in Manzano and elsewhere but in –
but on those Excel spreadsheets

00:48:44.790 --> 00:48:52.289
in Pusuca, in Pusuca, they also practiced
a tarea, or task, system for minga duties.

00:48:52.289 --> 00:48:56.509
Not presently practiced in the region,
but typical of the regulation of minga

00:48:56.509 --> 00:49:02.319
labor on the haciendas in the past.
A tarea, such as digging a ditch of

00:49:02.319 --> 00:49:06.440
1 meter width, 1 meter depth,
and 10 meter length –

00:49:06.440 --> 00:49:10.549
these were uniformly assigned to
every household for each minga.

00:49:10.549 --> 00:49:16.059
And a raya – checkmark – only awarded
once those tareas were complete.

00:49:16.059 --> 00:49:21.279
The sanction for non-participation
was elimination from the project.

00:49:21.279 --> 00:49:23.380
Some wage laborers returned
periodically and attempted to

00:49:23.380 --> 00:49:27.220
catch up by working several days
on minga responsibilities.

00:49:27.220 --> 00:49:30.599
There were, at times, opportunities
for those in arrears to make up rayas

00:49:30.599 --> 00:49:33.529
by bringing additional laborers
to complete multiple tasks or

00:49:33.529 --> 00:49:37.640
paying fines or by completing
additional tasks on non-minga days.

00:49:37.640 --> 00:49:41.869
Yet participation was nearly
impossible for those who had taken jobs.

00:49:41.869 --> 00:49:45.140
And elderly- and female-headed
households struggled mightily

00:49:45.140 --> 00:49:48.230
to complete tareas that were
challenging for young able-bodied

00:49:48.230 --> 00:49:53.009
males, including yours truly.
That 10-meter ditch was a killer.

00:49:53.009 --> 00:49:58.390
In the end, this meant that they would
likely give up claims to irrigation,

00:49:58.390 --> 00:50:02.580
and therefore, the hopes of returning
to cultivate, as they had all intended.

00:50:04.200 --> 00:50:08.900
Sociologist Kathleen Tierney refers
to the excessive disciplining of the

00:50:08.900 --> 00:50:14.560
population by authorities during
disaster as an example of elite panic.

00:50:15.380 --> 00:50:18.460
Or what happens when those in
power fear that crises will result in

00:50:18.469 --> 00:50:24.440
the breakdown of society and set
loose mobs of looters and rioters.

00:50:24.440 --> 00:50:28.119
This is despite ample evidence that
the poor, working, and middle-class

00:50:28.120 --> 00:50:31.989
are frequently documented engaging
in mutual aid during disaster.

00:50:33.240 --> 00:50:38.340
I tend to refer this as a – I refer to this,
instead, as a variety of politics

00:50:38.349 --> 00:50:42.299
of deservingness.
Or the contending distinctions

00:50:42.300 --> 00:50:48.060
between those deemed deserving and
undeserving of state or NGO assistance.

00:50:48.060 --> 00:50:53.280
Markers of the politics of deservingness
include things like productivity –

00:50:53.280 --> 00:50:55.800
are you a productive
member of society?

00:50:55.800 --> 00:50:59.500
Community organization –
have you got social capital?

00:50:59.510 --> 00:51:04.289
Citizenship or political status.
And, in the case of disasters,

00:51:04.289 --> 00:51:08.789
we often have suffering, right?
The capacity to exhibit misfortune

00:51:08.789 --> 00:51:13.170
and merit that marks us as deserving.
Importantly, the politics of

00:51:13.170 --> 00:51:19.289
deservingness is not just the
exclusive sort of bailiwick of the elite.

00:51:19.289 --> 00:51:22.920
It plays out on multiple levels.
Villagers, local leaders and others

00:51:22.920 --> 00:51:26.380
frequently challenge the deservingness
of others in struggles for fairness

00:51:26.380 --> 00:51:31.249
and often due to anxieties about their
own access to scarce resources during

00:51:31.249 --> 00:51:34.819
periods of prolonged deprivation.
How come they’re getting this aid

00:51:34.820 --> 00:51:39.180
and we’re not, when we
have suffered so much, right?

00:51:39.180 --> 00:51:42.540
In summary, we find several
instances of well-meaning attempts –

00:51:42.559 --> 00:51:45.309
and I want to emphasize that, right?
Because I’m critical of a number

00:51:45.309 --> 00:51:48.600
of agencies here, but these
are well-meaning people.

00:51:49.520 --> 00:51:53.540
These are well-meaning attempts at risk
reduction and recovery that procedurally

00:51:53.540 --> 00:51:59.360
reproduced vulnerability even while
seemingly eliminating hazard exposure.

00:51:59.360 --> 00:52:02.319
In fact, in many cases, people,
in the end, volunteered for the hazard

00:52:02.319 --> 00:52:06.579
exposure over the deprivation they
would otherwise be subjected to.

00:52:06.580 --> 00:52:09.880
The lack of resources in resettlements
made people susceptible to poverty,

00:52:09.880 --> 00:52:13.739
continued hazard exposure, loss of
cultural practices and institutions,

00:52:13.739 --> 00:52:17.369
and eviction from their homes.
The interventions of outside

00:52:17.369 --> 00:52:21.979
agencies focused exclusively
on select elements of local culture,

00:52:21.980 --> 00:52:25.520
leaving their own cultural
practices unquestioned.

00:52:26.630 --> 00:52:29.980
This resulted in prolonged hardship
and exclusion from key resources

00:52:29.999 --> 00:52:32.339
that people would need to return
to rebuild their lives as

00:52:32.340 --> 00:52:35.140
agriculturalists in the
new resettlements.

00:52:35.800 --> 00:52:39.080
So, to turn on a dime and – oh.

00:52:43.300 --> 00:52:47.460
That’s where I meant to be.
Not sure how I came out of sync there.

00:52:47.460 --> 00:52:51.220
To conclude, I’d like to point out
that the framework I’m advocating

00:52:51.220 --> 00:52:55.020
for thinking about and responding
to hazards and disasters is not simply

00:52:55.020 --> 00:53:00.430
a story of what happens in
developing nations or Latin America.

00:53:00.430 --> 00:53:03.619
I could just as well have discussed
the production of disasters associated

00:53:03.619 --> 00:53:07.239
with wildfire hazards in the U.S.
with attention to unequal development

00:53:07.239 --> 00:53:12.410
at the wildland/urban interface, 
insider/outsider tensions,

00:53:12.410 --> 00:53:16.069
climate change, competing agendas
regarding the management,

00:53:16.069 --> 00:53:20.500
consumption, extraction, and
conservation of federal land resources.

00:53:21.500 --> 00:53:25.819
My colleagues and I have applied
approaches quite similar to what I’ve

00:53:25.819 --> 00:53:30.920
presented today along the
U.S. Gulf Coast, in the

00:53:30.920 --> 00:53:35.380
Pacific Northwest, coastal Alaska,
Mississippi River flood plain,

00:53:35.380 --> 00:53:41.539
Tornado Alley, and the New York
metropolitan area, to name but a few.

00:53:41.539 --> 00:53:45.390
My sense is that we often fail to put
the world back together after disaster

00:53:45.390 --> 00:53:49.739
because we are working from a flawed
and often privileged and powerful

00:53:49.739 --> 00:53:52.880
understanding of how the world
was constructed in the first place.

00:53:52.880 --> 00:53:56.790
And thus, how risk, vulnerability,
and disasters are produced.

00:53:56.790 --> 00:54:00.299
When we train our focus exclusively
on hazards and exposure in our work

00:54:00.299 --> 00:54:03.729
and take our own ways of doing things
for granted, much like the well-meaning

00:54:03.729 --> 00:54:06.700
organizations in
Penipe and Pusuca,

00:54:06.700 --> 00:54:10.320
we are likely to reproduce
vulnerability in our efforts.

00:54:10.320 --> 00:54:13.900
And so here’s what I want to do.
I want us to cast aside the notion that

00:54:13.910 --> 00:54:18.499
disasters are natural and recognize
that they’re built out of what we built.

00:54:18.499 --> 00:54:21.989
I want us to leave behind the notion
that disasters constitute external shocks

00:54:21.989 --> 00:54:26.520
to our human systems and recognize
them as intrinsic to our systems.

00:54:26.520 --> 00:54:30.200
I want us to resist the idea that disasters
happen to us no matter who we are

00:54:30.210 --> 00:54:33.030
and confront the fact that they
do not affect us all equally.

00:54:33.030 --> 00:54:36.460
And this is a result, essentially, of
how we treat people in a society.

00:54:36.460 --> 00:54:41.170
Often, and to an extent, disasters
compel us to extend ourselves

00:54:41.170 --> 00:54:44.479
beyond our limitations and
our hierarchies to bridge

00:54:44.479 --> 00:54:49.049
old divisions and swells of mutual aid.
But the sad fact is that our divisions

00:54:49.049 --> 00:54:52.829
and hierarchies tend to
re-emerge with a vengeance.

00:54:52.829 --> 00:54:54.999
I want us to jettison the
taken-for-grantedness with which

00:54:54.999 --> 00:54:58.980
we regard our hierarchies and our
divisions and our own culturally

00:54:58.980 --> 00:55:04.069
derived inventories of possibility.
And learn from disaster contexts

00:55:04.069 --> 00:55:08.140
that other worlds are possible.
To find creative and robust means

00:55:08.140 --> 00:55:14.420
for sustaining the spirit and practice of
mutual aid, solidarity, and cooperation.

00:55:14.420 --> 00:55:17.560
And with that, I thank you
very much for your time today.

00:55:17.560 --> 00:55:23.800
[Applause]

00:55:24.580 --> 00:55:25.900
And apologies.

00:55:25.900 --> 00:55:29.200
I didn’t notice it – perhaps it
was a result of having my notes

00:55:29.200 --> 00:55:31.749
on top of the computer.
I don’t know if, at some point, my slides

00:55:31.749 --> 00:55:34.280
came out of sync with my talk there.
- You did great. It was fine.

00:55:34.280 --> 00:55:38.080
- Thank you.
- All right. Does anyone have

00:55:38.080 --> 00:55:40.700
any questions for A.J.?

00:55:43.020 --> 00:55:48.460
[Silence]

00:55:48.469 --> 00:55:53.890
- I have two unrelated questions.
Very fascinating talk.

00:55:53.890 --> 00:55:57.960
First one, you didn’t use the term
“resilience” at all, and it seemed to me

00:55:57.960 --> 00:56:04.180
your comments about vulnerability
are in some ways answered by the

00:56:04.190 --> 00:56:09.140
usage of “resilience” in risk reduction.
And the second question is,

00:56:09.140 --> 00:56:13.480
who actually made the decision for –
was it Penipe Nuevo to be

00:56:13.480 --> 00:56:16.300
rebuilt like it was?
Was that a distant government

00:56:16.300 --> 00:56:19.460
organization, or where
did that come from?

00:56:19.460 --> 00:56:23.559
- Okay. So that – the second question
is easier to answer than the first one.

00:56:23.559 --> 00:56:32.319
So this was negotiated –
I’m finishing the book right now.

00:56:32.319 --> 00:56:38.469
There’s actually – I already took us
all the way back to sort of the Incas,

00:56:38.469 --> 00:56:40.549
right, in order to illustrate
some of my cases.

00:56:40.549 --> 00:56:43.739
And I have to go almost
as far to explain that too.

00:56:43.739 --> 00:56:50.619
But, because Penipe became its
own municipality in the early ’80s,

00:56:50.619 --> 00:56:57.539
but it never met any of the constitutional
requirements, including the population,

00:56:57.539 --> 00:57:02.140
to become a municipality. And so it’s
always had this threatened legitimacy.

00:57:02.140 --> 00:57:08.269
And so, as the Ministry of Urban
Development and Housing – MDUVI –

00:57:08.269 --> 00:57:12.979
was working on finding land,
they were working on this sort of

00:57:12.979 --> 00:57:18.150
risk reduction strategy as part of
this sort of, you know, divestment

00:57:18.150 --> 00:57:23.690
from that entire high-risk area.
They were looking for land –

00:57:23.690 --> 00:57:30.410
the municipality of Penipe offered up
land around the town right there.

00:57:30.410 --> 00:57:33.559
And in two other – I don’t know precisely
the stories where they took place in the

00:57:33.559 --> 00:57:39.880
other – you know, how the siting
decisions worked in the other province.

00:57:39.880 --> 00:57:43.630
But in the province of Chimborazo
around Penipe, it was at the invitation

00:57:43.630 --> 00:57:50.730
of the municipality, with encouragement
from the Provincial Council as well.

00:57:50.730 --> 00:57:57.269
And essentially one municipal worker,
who spoke to me anonymously in this

00:57:57.269 --> 00:58:01.130
regard, said, they built another Penipe.
And that’s what they wanted to do.

00:58:01.130 --> 00:58:07.150
Because there was anxiety about the
long-term viability of the town itself,

00:58:07.150 --> 00:58:10.160
right, and how it might be
incorporated or re-incorporated

00:58:10.160 --> 00:58:16.339
into an adjacent municipality
after years of population decline.

00:58:16.339 --> 00:58:19.959
So it was the municipality,
along with the federal Ministry

00:58:19.960 --> 00:58:25.760
of Urban Development and
Housing that made those decisions.

00:58:25.760 --> 00:58:27.720
And it was incorporated
into the development plans

00:58:27.740 --> 00:58:30.580
of the municipality
and what have you.

00:58:31.840 --> 00:58:33.360
Resilience.

00:58:34.600 --> 00:58:40.680
Resilience is – I find it complicated.
I think a lot of people try to think

00:58:40.680 --> 00:58:44.270
about it – well, I mean, all these
matters are complicated, in fairness.

00:58:44.270 --> 00:58:52.049
But I think a lot of people try to
imagine resilience as sort of

00:58:52.049 --> 00:58:58.969
the inverse of vulnerability.
And I’m not so sure.

00:58:58.969 --> 00:59:03.539
I’ve tried – I’ve literally tried to map it
out in different ways and tried to see –

00:59:03.539 --> 00:59:09.549
like, okay, these are the characteristics
of vulnerability in this column sort of

00:59:09.549 --> 00:59:11.499
thing, and then what is the –
what is the counterpart?

00:59:11.500 --> 00:59:17.289
If this is the negative column, and then
this is the positive column of resilience.

00:59:18.440 --> 00:59:21.120
I’ve never seen it add up.

00:59:22.560 --> 00:59:29.099
I find it a seductive concept, but I don’t
see how it speaks to all the aspects of

00:59:29.100 --> 00:59:33.280
vulnerability that I tried to unpack
today and a few that I spared you.

00:59:33.280 --> 00:59:41.269
And I’ll – to be succinct, I’ll say that
one common question that my

00:59:41.269 --> 00:59:46.280
colleagues in anthropology and I
frequently ask is, resilience for whom?

00:59:47.940 --> 00:59:55.480
And also, how does it scale, right?
Because small resilience could –

00:59:55.489 --> 01:00:01.280
can add up to very big vulnerability.
I could use a hazard-centric example.

01:00:01.280 --> 01:00:05.099
You know, every time we put out
a small fire, we increase our risk,

01:00:05.099 --> 01:00:07.690
right, for the bigger fires
around the wildland/urban interface

01:00:07.690 --> 01:00:11.140
or something like that
in the wildlands.

01:00:11.140 --> 01:00:15.039
And this is also true
in seismic contexts, like in –

01:00:15.040 --> 01:00:18.400
say in, like, central
Asia or something.

01:00:18.400 --> 01:00:23.470
It’s not always clear to me how,
you know, resilience at large actually

01:00:23.470 --> 01:00:27.829
scales down to particular people and
how local resilience actually scales up.

01:00:27.829 --> 01:00:31.400
It doesn’t – it doesn’t seem
consistent scale-wise for me.

01:00:31.400 --> 01:00:35.630
That’s not to say that I’m against it.
I just – I have a hard time using and

01:00:35.630 --> 01:00:39.569
operationalizing the concept myself.
I recognize that others do, and it’s

01:00:39.569 --> 01:00:43.269
important to talk about, you know,
what I instead call sort of creative

01:00:43.269 --> 01:00:46.609
agency, cooperation,
solidarity, local capacity.

01:00:46.609 --> 01:00:51.220
I find it more comfortable to talk about
it in those terms for my own purposes.

01:00:51.220 --> 01:00:55.800
But – and I also have these
abiding questions about resilience.

01:00:55.800 --> 01:01:00.359
I mean, you know, if you go back to
the C.S. Holling definition of it, right,

01:01:00.359 --> 01:01:03.240
it’s an external shock, and I’m making
a point here that these shocks are

01:01:03.240 --> 01:01:07.219
intrinsic to our systems, right,
and we’re not sort of bouncing back

01:01:07.219 --> 01:01:11.019
from an external shock. And I also
wonder – and I do this from time

01:01:11.019 --> 01:01:13.880
to time. I’ll say, you know, how many
people in this room are more than

01:01:13.880 --> 01:01:16.750
one medical emergency away from,
you know, living in their cars?

01:01:16.750 --> 01:01:18.809
Don’t actually raise your hand.
That’s rhetorical.

01:01:18.809 --> 01:01:22.640
I never want to [laughter]
put anyone on the spot.

01:01:23.960 --> 01:01:26.240
You can imagine how many
people would raise their hands.

01:01:26.250 --> 01:01:29.710
You know, I’m a professor here
at San Jose State University.

01:01:29.710 --> 01:01:31.729
How many of my students would
raise their hands if I genuinely

01:01:31.729 --> 01:01:35.789
asked them to on that question, right?
And, if so – if we’re supposed to bounce

01:01:35.789 --> 01:01:41.859
back from a disaster, and resilience is
our ability to recover our original way

01:01:41.859 --> 01:01:47.860
of life after this external shock, I mean,
who cares to simply rebuild back to a

01:01:47.860 --> 01:01:50.029
situation where that many people
would raise their hand that

01:01:50.029 --> 01:01:53.750
they’re at risk of living in
their cars after one emergency?

01:01:53.750 --> 01:01:56.559
So these are the questions
I have about resilience.

01:01:56.559 --> 01:01:59.690
And I understand it means something
to people, and that others find it useful.

01:01:59.690 --> 01:02:04.060
So I engage in those conversations,
but I don’t typically use it myself.

01:02:05.900 --> 01:02:08.600
- Yeah, hi. Thanks very much
for coming today. I really enjoyed

01:02:08.600 --> 01:02:13.259
your talk. I will take your
challenge on the approaches.

01:02:13.259 --> 01:02:16.220
And I heard a little bit, like,
one versus another, whereas,

01:02:16.220 --> 01:02:20.430
I’d like to ask, is it not collectively
all of them have something to

01:02:20.430 --> 01:02:23.670
contribute to solving the problem?
For example, if they had done

01:02:23.670 --> 01:02:28.060
a hazard-centric approach, they
might have had their response in place,

01:02:28.060 --> 01:02:32.220
when they didn’t.
You know, as a first cut.

01:02:32.220 --> 01:02:36.339
And I think the problem more is stop –
it’s where you stop, right?

01:02:36.339 --> 01:02:40.920
But is not each approach adding
cumulatively some more insight

01:02:40.920 --> 01:02:45.180
into what to do and understanding?
- Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean,

01:02:45.180 --> 01:02:48.480
I can’t pretend that the volcanoes
aren’t there or that, you know,

01:02:48.480 --> 01:02:54.960
El Niño or climate change isn’t real.
Yeah. I take them quite seriously.

01:02:54.960 --> 01:02:59.319
And – which is why I say in the talk
that it’s a logical place to – you know,

01:02:59.320 --> 01:03:03.040
hazard is a logical place to begin.
But I don’t think it’s a logical place

01:03:03.040 --> 01:03:11.200
to end. And so – yeah, I mean, yeah,
I take the hazards seriously.

01:03:11.200 --> 01:03:16.559
But I don’t think that the hazard is
the explanation for what makes the

01:03:16.559 --> 01:03:22.210
disaster or what makes the vulnerability.
I think it’s an element in the equation.

01:03:22.210 --> 01:03:25.160
And I’m reluctant to consider it
at the exclusion of these other ones

01:03:25.160 --> 01:03:29.200
that I think are
remarkably important.

01:03:31.840 --> 01:03:33.420
- Questions?

01:03:34.720 --> 01:03:36.820
- I’ll wait for your mic.

01:03:38.680 --> 01:03:44.760
- Thank you. Bringing it all back home,
have you given it any thought to how

01:03:44.769 --> 01:03:50.699
to promote a minga mentality
in a modern high-infrastructure

01:03:50.700 --> 01:03:55.100
wealthy community like
Mammoth Lakes, California,

01:03:55.100 --> 01:03:59.180
for instance, where half the people
live in million-dollar homes

01:03:59.180 --> 01:04:01.780
all over the slopes
of the volcano?

01:04:02.580 --> 01:04:07.560
- Yeah. Well, yeah, it’s a lovely thought.
No, I haven’t really tried to work that

01:04:07.560 --> 01:04:13.620
particular equation out or try the
Malibu minga approach. [laughter]

01:04:15.180 --> 01:04:23.579
It’s interesting. There’s an article
that cites one of my several articles

01:04:23.579 --> 01:04:30.109
on minga, and they’re trying to
use it as – to inspire principles

01:04:30.109 --> 01:04:32.890
for community-based design
strategies and stuff like that.

01:04:32.890 --> 01:04:37.620
I haven’t read the article myself,
but I keep meaning to.

01:04:37.620 --> 01:04:40.860
And I – it’s one of several
occasions I’ve had to be, like,

01:04:40.860 --> 01:04:43.979
oh, interesting.
I hadn’t thought of that.

01:04:43.979 --> 01:04:49.430
I think – though I have had versions
of this question previously.

01:04:49.430 --> 01:05:02.410
I think that, yes, it’s possible.
And the – I can point to a good example.

01:05:02.410 --> 01:05:08.460
My colleague, friend, and mentor –
sort of the founding mother of the

01:05:08.460 --> 01:05:13.420
anthropology of disaster is a woman
by the name of Susanna Hoffman.

01:05:13.420 --> 01:05:17.829
Never intended to be an anthropologist
of disasters until the Oakland fire storm

01:05:17.829 --> 01:05:21.809
burned her home and her every
material possession in 1991.

01:05:21.809 --> 01:05:26.520
And so there, in Oakland, these
were wealthy folks in the hills.

01:05:26.520 --> 01:05:35.140
And Susanna documents very, very well,
in several publications about this,

01:05:35.150 --> 01:05:39.249
how neighbors came together in
these initial swells of mutual aid.

01:05:39.249 --> 01:05:43.789
And they were able to
sustain this for a time.

01:05:43.789 --> 01:05:47.000
There are some people that have
offered models – Susanna is one

01:05:47.000 --> 01:05:51.920
of them – that we see mutual aid
in the immediate aftermath, but then,

01:05:51.930 --> 01:05:57.359
as soon as the external aid comes in,
people start, right, sort of competing

01:05:57.359 --> 01:06:00.279
for that – that sort of politics of 
deservingness that I talked about before,

01:06:00.279 --> 01:06:03.849
right? So once the external help
comes in, then those initial swells

01:06:03.849 --> 01:06:09.049
of mutual aid tend to dissipate.
I don’t think that’s a –

01:06:09.049 --> 01:06:12.060
I don’t think that’s
a universal model.

01:06:12.060 --> 01:06:15.039
Because, you know, we can look at
what happened in Katrina

01:06:15.039 --> 01:06:18.559
and Hurricane Harvey.
There are certainly plenty of examples

01:06:18.559 --> 01:06:23.890
of the very violent inverse of mutual aid
that was going on in these places, right,

01:06:23.890 --> 01:06:27.119
and the banners of, you know,
looters will be shot on sight,

01:06:27.119 --> 01:06:30.809
and people being rounded up,
and there was a lot of tough stuff there

01:06:30.809 --> 01:06:34.720
that demonstrated to me that
mutual aid – that these old hierarchies

01:06:34.720 --> 01:06:39.430
and boundaries don’t necessarily
dissipate in that initial swell of altruism.

01:06:39.430 --> 01:06:42.450
So I try not to be
overly idealistic about it.

01:06:42.450 --> 01:06:45.269
But there are examples,
yes, in these wealthy communities

01:06:45.269 --> 01:06:48.500
in Oakland and in other places.
You see it in Australia,

01:06:48.500 --> 01:06:52.620
and in Tanzania.
Tasmania. Not Tanzania.

01:06:52.780 --> 01:06:57.440
And plenty of other places
where there are wealthier folks

01:06:57.449 --> 01:06:59.999
that do band together.
And you see these odd things.

01:06:59.999 --> 01:07:02.160
Even around the wildland/urban
interface and around federal lands

01:07:02.160 --> 01:07:05.920
in the United States, surprising
coalitions of, like, environmentalists

01:07:05.920 --> 01:07:13.359
and ranchers in the interest of,
you know, resource conservation.

01:07:13.359 --> 01:07:17.799
So I think that they’re possible.
And I think the key is to find ways

01:07:17.799 --> 01:07:23.249
of sustaining this and building
this potential. But I sure wish

01:07:23.249 --> 01:07:27.060
I had a magic bullet.
I do not. Yeah.

01:07:28.989 --> 01:07:34.580
- What is the state of land
ownership in that area?

01:07:34.580 --> 01:07:36.240
- In what – oh, in this area
that I’m talking about?

01:07:36.240 --> 01:07:37.240
- Yeah.

01:07:38.289 --> 01:07:41.839
- Well, it’s interesting.
So I talked about those sort of

01:07:41.839 --> 01:07:44.339
different land reforms and different
bits of legislation that were

01:07:44.340 --> 01:07:51.640
created beginning in the 1930s in
Ecuador right up through the present.

01:07:51.640 --> 01:07:55.740
And some of which is sort of – work
at cross-purposes to one another.

01:07:55.749 --> 01:08:00.119
But it seems remarkly progressive that
what they did was that – you know,

01:08:00.119 --> 01:08:06.450
people didn’t have deeds to their lands.
These were peasants – essentially

01:08:06.450 --> 01:08:09.200
like sharecroppers, right?
So they were – had permission

01:08:09.200 --> 01:08:11.890
to cultivate on the land so long
as they kicked up a certain portion

01:08:11.890 --> 01:08:14.230
of their harvest to the
large landholder, right?

01:08:14.230 --> 01:08:20.080
And, as these different reform bills
were passed by different administrations

01:08:20.080 --> 01:08:24.410
and military juntas throughout the
20th century, they tried to break that up

01:08:24.410 --> 01:08:31.410
by giving people rights to –
and deeds to their land if they

01:08:31.410 --> 01:08:35.420
could prove that they worked
there for more than 10 years.

01:08:35.420 --> 01:08:38.270
And so people did get
deeds to their lands.

01:08:38.270 --> 01:08:42.040
As often is the case in
disaster circumstances, a lot of

01:08:42.040 --> 01:08:45.170
people lose their paperwork, right?
So people lost their paperwork and

01:08:45.170 --> 01:08:48.890
then had to go through this same
process after the eruptions

01:08:48.890 --> 01:08:51.771
of getting their neighbors to
testify on their behalf that they

01:08:51.780 --> 01:08:55.000
actually were the rightful
owners of this land.

01:08:55.880 --> 01:09:03.420
Looking over at the resettlements in
terms of their property ownership in

01:09:03.430 --> 01:09:12.580
the resettlements, that was a bit of
a gamble, or a dodgy sort of issue.

01:09:12.580 --> 01:09:17.850
So Samaritan’s Purse, to their credit,
gave everybody their property deeds

01:09:17.850 --> 01:09:22.800
right off the bat. As soon as they came
to occupy their homes in late winter –

01:09:22.800 --> 01:09:27.670
it would be winter for us – of 2008,
they had deeds to their homes

01:09:27.670 --> 01:09:29.970
and their properties. There were,
of course, liens and conditions.

01:09:29.970 --> 01:09:34.750
They couldn’t sell it for 20 years and,
you know, all this sort of stuff.

01:09:34.750 --> 01:09:39.461
But they had the deeds to their
properties. The state – the Ministry

01:09:39.461 --> 01:09:43.050
of Urban Development and
Housing did not grant deeds.

01:09:43.050 --> 01:09:46.109
In fact, I don’t think people had
physical deeds to their properties

01:09:46.109 --> 01:09:50.030
until as recently as 2017.
And so people were frequently

01:09:50.030 --> 01:09:53.770
threatened with eviction if they didn’t –
right, because they would migrate to

01:09:53.770 --> 01:09:56.940
a city, and if – they would do these
night visits. Like, you know, like,

01:09:56.940 --> 01:10:00.050
the U.S. sort of welfare agency
in the 1970s – these night visits.

01:10:00.050 --> 01:10:02.850
They would knock on the doors and
come in and see who was living there.

01:10:02.850 --> 01:10:05.570
And people would do everything.
They would stuff dummies in their

01:10:05.570 --> 01:10:09.160
beds and keep the lights on
and do different things.

01:10:10.020 --> 01:10:18.420
And – but what was interesting is,
up in Pusuca, the Esquel Foundation,

01:10:18.420 --> 01:10:22.810
they – people were told that they
wouldn’t get their deeds until they

01:10:22.810 --> 01:10:27.560
met all of their minga obligations.
And until they paid their dues to the

01:10:27.560 --> 01:10:33.540
community and did all this sort of stuff.
And I was meeting with one of the

01:10:33.540 --> 01:10:39.540
community managers in – well,
this would be late 2011, early 2012,

01:10:39.540 --> 01:10:42.330
from the Esquel Foundation.
And I said, you know, things got

01:10:42.330 --> 01:10:44.620
really contentious here, and people
feel like they’ve been threatened

01:10:44.620 --> 01:10:49.690
with eviction in different places, and
they don’t have their deeds or whatever.

01:10:49.690 --> 01:10:52.440
It seems a rather
precarious situation here.

01:10:52.440 --> 01:10:58.060
And she said, the fact of the matter is,
at this point, no one can evict anyone.

01:10:58.060 --> 01:10:59.670
Because they all have
rights to their land.

01:10:59.670 --> 01:11:02.270
And I said, but just the other day
in the community meeting,

01:11:02.270 --> 01:11:05.290
everyone was freaking out about,
they don’t have the deeds to their land.

01:11:05.290 --> 01:11:09.900
And she said to me, well,
this is a little trick I’ve pulled.

01:11:11.560 --> 01:11:16.560
Anyone in the village could go down
to the registry of property in the

01:11:16.560 --> 01:11:20.380
ministry in the city and request the
deeds to their lands, and they have it.

01:11:20.390 --> 01:11:25.031
They already have it. I’m holding it over
their heads because they don’t realize

01:11:25.040 --> 01:11:31.380
that. To get them and to goad them into
fulfilling their community obligations.

01:11:32.100 --> 01:11:34.220
Again, this is a
well-meaning organization.

01:11:34.230 --> 01:11:36.671
The person who told me that is one
of the most delightful people I’ve ever

01:11:36.671 --> 01:11:41.170
had the pleasure of meeting in my life.
I mean that sincerely too.

01:11:41.170 --> 01:11:46.190
They meant well, but my skin crawled
instantly when she told me that.

01:11:46.190 --> 01:11:49.590
Because it seemed a sly sort of
manipulation of people that were

01:11:49.590 --> 01:11:53.580
in a precarious situation, right?
And so those are the – to answer

01:11:53.580 --> 01:11:56.380
your question, those are the varieties of
sort of – now everyone has their deeds.

01:11:56.380 --> 01:11:59.440
They do now. But after –
people have been there

01:11:59.440 --> 01:12:05.550
three years or more and still
wondering if they would have

01:12:05.550 --> 01:12:09.510
a roof over their heads in that
resettlement on any given day.

01:12:09.510 --> 01:12:13.710
- Who owned the land underneath
the relocation cities initially?

01:12:13.710 --> 01:12:15.000
- The municipality.

01:12:15.000 --> 01:12:17.210
- Pardon?
- Well, in – that’s interesting.

01:12:17.210 --> 01:12:20.540
So, in the – in the case of the
Penipe Nuevo down in the town,

01:12:20.540 --> 01:12:24.230
it was the municipality that owned it.
And there’s a story as to why

01:12:24.230 --> 01:12:29.960
I mentioned that Samaritan’s
Purse built 102 homes.

01:12:29.960 --> 01:12:33.590
Because there’s a story behind those
two, is that the municipality did

01:12:33.590 --> 01:12:37.270
appropriate some private lands of
large landholders to do it, and they

01:12:37.270 --> 01:12:39.500
were given – two of them were
given their own homes in the –

01:12:39.500 --> 01:12:40.780
which they never used.

01:12:40.790 --> 01:12:43.190
They – you know, they
threw parties there a few times.

01:12:43.190 --> 01:12:47.060
But the municipality owned all of
those homes, including the ones

01:12:47.060 --> 01:12:51.840
that Samaritan’s Purse did.
And they had the responsibility

01:12:51.840 --> 01:12:55.490
for sort of enforcing those
liens over the longue durée.

01:12:55.490 --> 01:13:01.000
In the case of Pusuca – that small
resettlement up on the hill – that’s

01:13:01.000 --> 01:13:05.880
actually still some contention there.
Because, again, there were these sort of

01:13:05.880 --> 01:13:12.920
legacies of use of worked land rights there.
And there is still one rancher landowner

01:13:12.920 --> 01:13:17.640
that raids and claims agricultural lands
around that area, claiming that they

01:13:17.640 --> 01:13:21.260
were his and that they were
appropriated without deed from –

01:13:21.260 --> 01:13:25.040
by the municipality. So that’s ongoing.
And it’s been – and it’s been in and

01:13:25.040 --> 01:13:29.540
out of the courts a dozen times
over the past 10 years.

01:13:29.540 --> 01:13:31.780
But, so by and large,
it was the municipality.

01:13:31.780 --> 01:13:35.360
But then there – and a couple
of large landholders and one area

01:13:35.360 --> 01:13:41.220
that is still, at this very
moment, contested. Yeah.

01:13:44.740 --> 01:13:46.640
- Any further questions?

01:13:47.680 --> 01:13:50.820
All right. This was a wonderful talk.
Thank you so much, A.J., for coming.

01:13:50.820 --> 01:13:53.790
I really appreciate it.
We’re all going to take A.J. out to lunch

01:13:53.790 --> 01:13:56.540
now, and anyone who wants to come
and join us, please come up to the front,

01:13:56.540 --> 01:14:01.390
and we will organize transportation
to take him out. With that being said,

01:14:01.390 --> 01:14:03.760
let’s thank A.J. one more time,
and thank you for coming.

01:14:04.180 --> 01:14:08.880
[Applause]