Weathering the World

The Asian tsunami in December 2004 was reported on exhaustively all around the world. But this is the first full-length examination of the disaster. Providing an in-depth ethnography of the tsunami and its effects on a fishing village on the coast of Tamil Nadu, India, the author shows how disaster survivors have dealt with the tsunami and worked to regain their confidence in the environment on which they depend for their livelihood. The book testifies to a remarkable local recovery process and demonstrates the survivors' commitment to restoring a sense of certainty and future possibilities even when faced with disempowering disaster. Furthermore, through its focus on the physicality of disaster, i.e. its particular material character and the environmental dimension of recovery, the book adds new theoretical insight to anthropological studies of disaster that have so far tended to focus more on the politics of disaster than on the materiality of such events.

Frida Hastrup is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, and has conducted long-term fieldwork in South India. Hastrup's current research addresses local responses to climatic changes in the Bay of Bengal area with a specific focus on flooding, cyclones and coastal erosion.