Humanitarian Disasters in the Valley of the Hammocks
This paper concerns a particular aspect of humanitarian action, that of post-disaster reconstruction as it unfolded in El Salvador after the country was severely hit by two earthquakes in 2001. More specifically, it looks at the logics of reconstruction at both the national level and within a particular project headed by an important international NGO which was addressed to a hundred poor disaster-victims. Located at the junction of emergency and development, to which it aims to articulate itself, post-disaster reconstruction links to disaster studies that explain how a given disaster reveals conditions of vulnerability. The notion of vulnerability has become a key operational concept for reconstruction, the later aiming to reduce it. However, at the national level, reconstruction became the object of contested political interpretations between the government and civil society organizations. Then, within the context of a given project, the logics of reconstruction reified a communitarian ideal, as a means to combat vulnerability, but which did not correspond the participants’ motivations. As a contribution to an ethnographic account of reconstruction, this paper discusses some challenges that humanitarian practitioners may face.