The political biography of an earthquake - aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India

摘要

Two significant phenomena tend to shape narrative formation in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. The first is a tendency towards the homogenization of crisis-affected populations, and thus their collective biological reduction and social reconstitution in the form of which Feldman refers to as an'anonymous corporeality' (1994,407). The second, and related, tendency is towards the erasure of local histories, the effect of which is the facilitation of a humanitarian narrative that depicts the moment at which the seismometer registers a calamitous tectonic shift as the point-zero from which context and consequence should be framed. The result: a 'dehistoricized universalism', and thus a suspiciously blank slate, on to which the policy and praxis of post-disaster reconstruction can be applied (Malkki 1996,378).