The Significance of the Deep Cultural Perspective for Understanding Tempestuous Tales of Power and Compounded, Cascading Storms of Disaster

The Significance of the Deep Cultural Perspective for Understanding Tempestuous Tales of Power and Compounded, Cascading Storms of Disaster

Abstract as pdf

Corresponding Author:

Irena Leisbet Ceridwen Connon
University of Dundee United Kingdom
i.l.c.connon@dundee.ac.uk

Author(s):

This paper examines the impacts of and responses to prolonged power outages resulting from periods of extreme weather within four case study sites in Scotland and England, UK. Drawing on ethnographic evidence obtained over a two-year period, the paper explores how increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather, inadequate infrastructure provision, increasingly limited emergency support, and problematic community-based preparedness and planning initiatives, came together to result in compounded, cascading forms of crises. I argue that these storm-related power outages, as an example of a compounded crisis, not only challenge mainstream conceptualizations of environmental disasters as singular ‘events’ that take place along a linear continuum with clearly defined stages and which continue to dominate existing Disaster Risk Reduction research, but reveal how inadequate official response procedures risk enhancing suffering and generating new and intensified risks that can snowball into compounded and cascading forms of crises. In addition, the paper shows how examination of compounded disasters using the anthropological ‘deep cultural’ perspective and ethnographic method can help to reveal important insights into how unequal power relations produce both social and ecological vulnerability to weather-related disasters, hinder effective response, and impede the development of effective hazard prevention and disaster risk reduction strategies. Analyzing the significance of the findings from this research undertaken as part of a larger transdisciplinary research project that sought to improve responses to power outages during extreme weather, I explore how the deep cultural perspective allowed underlying, hidden power dynamics and inequalities of impacts at the local level to be made visible in ways that could not be ascertained from the originally proposed research design and methodology. From this, I argue that only by exposing, acknowledging and addressing the uneven impacts and responses to cascading crises, as well as the unequal power dynamics that generate the conditions of compounded disasters, can developments in disaster prevention and disaster risk reduction prevent the escalation of the unequal and unjust distribution of risk and suffering in an era of climate change.

Deep cultures of disaster: The significance of the anthropological perspective for understanding the interstices of hazards and disaster