The Golden Wave Culture and Politics after Sri Lankas Tsunami Disaster [Paperback]

In December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions of Sri Lanka. Six months later, Michele Ruth Gamburd returned to the village where she had been conducting research for many years and began collecting residents' stories of the disaster and its aftermath: the chaos and loss of the flood itself; the sense of community and leveling of social distinctions as people worked together to recover and regroup; and the local and national politics of foreign aid as the country began to rebuild. In The Golden Wave, Gamburd describes how the catastrophe changed social identities, economic dynamics, and political structures.

[Provides] a rich human context to a catastrophic event too often reduced by statistics and policy analysis to an exemplary abstraction (or by sensationalism to a kind of voyeurism) . . . . I can well imagine general readers picking it up to try to figure out why the tsunami was 'golden' and getting hooked by the many stories.

Michele Ruth Gamburd is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Portland State University. She is author of The Kitchen Spoons Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lankas Migrant Housemaids and Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka and editor (with Dennis B. McGilvray) of Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions.

[G]amburd shows that all of the narratives demonstrate how 'Under cover of disaster, capitalist interests can pursue neoliberal agendas, humanitarian workers can implement culturally inappropriate policies, and people pursuing international economic and political agendas can ignore or refuse local input'--a story that is repeated over and over from Nicaragua to New Orleans to Pakistan and beyond, and to which Gamburd has added rich narrative coupled with insightful analysis.71.2 2015Gamburds political ethnography of this disaster is brilliant, poignant, and will help anthropology in its nascent theorizing of disaster, and will help all of those who want l3½