Research Seminar: ‘Our Society Works’: Disaster Solidarity and Models of Social Life in the Elbe River Valley

Presenter: Kristoffer Albris, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UCPH

Abstract: In this talk, I take point of departure in my doctoral fieldwork in Dresden, Germany, which examined flood adaptation along the Elbe River. In doing so, I connect the ethnography to wider discussions and scholarly work on revelatory crises and solidarity in disasters. Disasters have often been analysed as periods of exception that shine light on otherwise opaque circumstances of social life. However, less focus has been placed on the different forms that such revelatory experiences take in the wake of disasters and crises. This article examines how flood-affected residents of the Elbe River Valley region in Saxony, Germany, interpreted widespread activities of solidarity during a major flood event in 2013 as being radically different from everyday social life. I present two ways that residents experienced these emergent practices of disaster solidarity as revelatory: a prescriptive model, showing a wishful glimpse of what society could be, and a descriptive model, revealing a perceived hidden truth about what society already is. By exploring this interpretative duality of the experience of the floods, I discuss how crisis narratives exhibit a spectrum of responses that are not contradictory, and are made meaningful retrospectively.

Click here to read the paper, published in Ethnos.