Fishers, Vulnerability, and the Political Economy of Dispossession and Reconstruction in Post-Tsunami Tamil Nadu

Anthropologists who study disasters share the widely acknowledged understanding that the effects of disasters tend to be more severe among economically and socially marginalized communities than others. Moreover, while poverty intensifies the effects of disasters, it also places survivors at the mercy of policies they have little control over because they often tend to be socially and politically marginalized on account of their poverty. Social vulnerability in other words is a determining factor in shaping the vulnerability of populations to catastrophic events. While scholars tend to focus on the catastrophic event itself as the locus of analysis, it has also become amply clear that such studies need to be in conversation with those that explore the long-term trajectories and effects of social inequality. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in southern India among artisanal fisher communities affected by the tsunami of 2004, this paper argues that the conceptual aims and claims of the vulnerability concept ought to be extended beyond the confines of the disaster (conceptualized as event), to the broader historical sweep of unequal social relations of production, exchange and consumption within which such communities find themselves. Positioned at a disadvantage in relation to powerful players such as the state, multilateral entities and private big capital, such communities nevertheless might also become important loci of possibility, as they bring to bear their own critiques of power, and fashion political strategies that often frustrate and undermine the conceptual frameworks and goals of contemporary capitalist-led development.