ABSTRACT

Post-disaster reconstruction is a version of ‘slum development’ that is compressed in time and expanded by way of resources. The index of this is the slogan build back better. It implies that communities affected by a disaster are a dilapidated lot a priori and disasters like the tsunami are a great cleansing: one that offers aid agencies a clean slate to transform a blighted existence into a civilised one. Each of them arrives not only with a heraldic logo but with their own plans to build back better. The result is a plethora of architectural styles and ownership patterns leading to difference, hierarchy and heart-burn between victims; a realigning of relations between victims and non-victims, where the victims, in a climate of sudden and large influx of money and material goods, go from being victims to villains; and, finally, this sudden influx, by addressing shelter under the sign of disaster-proof build back better, leaves power, water and sanitation to local governments, whose inability/unwillingness to address them transforms these reconstructions into a form of pro tem development, with the missing pieces of the puzzle, especially water and sewage, converting them into veritable slums. Such pro tem development is ripe for the exercise of what I have christened as hafta democracy, where the victims either pay exorbitant prices for power and water, or source them illegally by paying ‘weekly protection money’ – hafta – to the slum lords and the police. The hafta inserts them, as potential vote banks, into electoral cycles, where they become for electoral democracy pro tem citizens in waiting, with the redemptive promise of a patta (title deed) to property on the outskirts of the city. This tantalizing promise, from an extortive and quotidian hafta to the redemptive patta, appears to be the soteriology of third word democracies.

SPEAKER DETAILS

Harish Naraindas is professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where he works on the history and sociology of science and medicine. He has published on a range of topics, including an epistemological history of tropical medicine, a comparative history of smallpox from the 18th-20th century, on the creolisation of contemporary Ayurveda, on spa medicine in Germany, on pregnancy and childbirth within the context of competing medical epistemes, and recently on how anthropology attempts to explain the non-human. He is currently working on epigenetics and Ayurveda; AyurGenomics and P4 medicine; past-life aetiologies and therapeutic trance in German psychosomatic medicine; a multi-sited study of perinatal loss and bereavement in the Anglophone world; and a comparative study of alternative medicine and well-being in India and Switzerland. Among his recent publications are a co-edited special issue of Anthropology and Medicine called ‘The fragile medical: the slippery terrain between medicine, anthropology and societies’ (2017), and two co-edited books: Healing holidays: itinerant patients, therapeutic locales and the quest for health (London: Routledge, 2015), and Asymmetrical conversations: contestations, circumventions and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries (New York: Berghahn, 2014).

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

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Meeting ID: 815 0288 7104 | Password: 14846878