Examining the Cultural Politics of Natural Disasters in the US & Oman

• In Event: In the Hands of Gods or Men: Religion & Responses to Environmental Degradation

Abstract

Environmental advocates have long complained about the difficulty of mobilizing popular attention and pressure to address the dangers of climate change, on account of the abstract character and apparent distance of the problem. As such, some have hoped that the tangible, spectacular manifestations of climate change, like hurricanes, could focus popular attention and concern to feed an adequate political response to the problem. This paper investigates how that might happen, by examining the cultural politics of climate-related natural disasters. It examines the kinds of public meaning and political action that are ennobled and fought over when such events occur in order to clarify how power works through culture to shape the political outcomes of climate-related natural disasters. The paper has two parts. The first part examines three prominent models for the study of political culture, and how they could be deployed to examine how natural disasters might impact environmental politics. The first model extends from Émile Durkheim, focusing on the notion of modern political religion and its crises. This is exemplified in Sidney Verba’s writing on political religion in America and the JFK assassination, where he argued that the killing created a crisis that provided a moment of clarity and consensus regarding American national character, as well as a secularized, religious ritual that unified the nation in its mourning. The second model draws from Marxist interpretations of public ritual, conceiving of responses to crises as divisive arenas of class domination and ideological battle. This is exemplified in Ted Steinberg’s history of natural disasters in the United States. The third model draws upon the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, who consider political culture as competing arenas of discourses and practices, rather than attitudes or beliefs as in the first two models. The second part of the paper examines the analytic pay-offs of each model of power and political culture through the lens of two recent tropical cyclones—Hurricane Sandy in the US (2012) and Cyclone Gonu in Oman (2007). Through archival research, interviews, and ethnographic observations, it is shown that in spite of the fact that these two disasters occurred in ostensibly different political contexts, they nevertheless precipitated remarkably similar political phenomena. Most importantly, this included the emergence of “disaster nationalism,” a politically ambivalent celebration of national solidarity and the power of every-day people to overcome hardship through sheer force of will. I argue that each model of political culture differently helps explain these popular responses to natural disasters, and the political potential that such crises entail.

Author

• Tyler Schuenemann, UMASS Amherst