Abstract
Disasters are critical and many times unexpected events that produce intense processes of meaning-making in society.1 How and why did the worst happen? Who is responsible? These are among the questions that those involved make efforts to answer. This makes disasters “good to think with” for social scientists, but how do we go about studying them in contexts of upheaval and loss? Disasters as disruptive events bring existing social and material relations to the fore, and they forge cultural, political, and economic processes of continuity and change. The field of disaster studies is growing quickly within and across different social science subjects. Such expansion makes it seem important to critically and reflexively discuss how qualitative methods shape the field of inquiry as much as the result of the study by way of the ethnographer’s own presence in the field. Drawing on my own experiences from carrying out translocal and transtemporal fieldwork in the city of Santa Fe in the northeast of Argentina between the years 2004–2011, this chapter discusses how the ethnographic fieldwork by its nature, more than merely being a tool of social inquiry, forges the field of study and opens up for empirical conclusions and theoretical insights. While this is not an exclusive feature of disaster anthropology, but rather of anthropology in general and other disciplines in which ethnographic methods are applied, the particular conditions of the disaster or post-disaster context seem to make ethnographic methods particularly useful.
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© 2015 Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier
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Ullberg, S.B. (2015). Memory and Methodology: Translocal and Transtemporal Fieldwork in Post-Disaster Santa Fe (Argentina). In: Revet, S., Langumier, J. (eds) Governing Disasters. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435460_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435460_6
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