INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND DISASTER:PERSPECTIVES FROM DISASTER STUDIESJC Gaillard

The University of Auckland

Good day everyone! I have been tasked to provide some reflections on ourdiscussions from the perspective of disaster studies and disaster risk reduction.
First and foremost, it has been very useful and insigh�ul for me to attend thismeeting. I did not really know where I was going because I am beyond my comfortzone here. I have no background whatsoever in heritage nor folklore studies. I am ageographer with a background in disaster and development studies and have realizedthat our field has a lot to learn from living heritage, ICH and heritage studies at large.
I think it is not so much about the contents, that are ICH and living heritage, because
disaster studies and disaster risk reduction consider most of what we have beentalking about over the past few days. Many things that are relevant to our discussions
here have indeed been in the disaster literature since the 1950s.
I think it is more about the process and how you do things in your field, both in termsof research and policy/practice, that we may learn a lot from you. This was reflectedin our discussions and seeing local researchers, local practitioners, talking about theirown experiences, talking about their own localities, wherever it is in the world, wasvery refreshing because we seldom have that kind of se�ng in disaster studies anddisaster risk reduction. Disaster studies and disaster risk reduction are the playgroundof Western researchers and Western ideas. Our field is skewed and biased by Western
epistemologies. I am going to give you just a couple of figures to illustrate that.
Over the past 40 years, 93% of people who died in disasters were living in countries
that are not members of the OECD. I am using the OECD as a proxy for the West. I
know it does not really work for Japan, Chile and Mexico, but this is the closest I canthink of. So, 93% of those who died in disasters over the past 40 years were living in
non-OECD countries. At the same time, you look at the authorship of papers
published in the leading journal in our field, which is titled Disasters, and you realizethat 84% of the lead authors are aﬃliated with institutions located in OECD countries.
There is a huge discrepancy to the point that with some colleagues we have beentalking about a ‘gold rush’ of researchers flocking to places affected by disasters in lesswealthy countries, doing research there with so many biases and skewed assumptions
about what is happening. This is problematic. I think seeing local researchers, local
people, talking about their own experiences is something that has been veryrefreshing during this meeting, especially because we, in our field, claim to be radical.
We claim to do things differently but we are not as radical as we claim we are. We

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have changed for the better, I promise, over the past 40 years. We have moved froma hazard-focused and technological approach to an approach which is more peoplefocused, everyday life-focused. But we are still reproducing a neocolonial, or sort oforientalist approach to studying disasters and doing disaster risk reduction.
Just look at the concepts we use. The very concept of disaster is a very Westernconcept. It was challenged 40 years ago as something which is very hard to translate
in most languages of the world. In the Philippines, for example, we do not have anexact translation in many local languages. The same is valid for vulnerability.
Vulnerability was suggested 40 years ago, in the mid-1970s, as a prompt to change
the way we look at disasters, to move from the hazard perspective to a more peoplecentered perspective. But in no way we were meant to roll out the concept elsewherein the world because it does not work; it does not translate. But this is what we arestill doing 40 years a�erwards.
So, we claim to be radical – but we are not, especially in terms of the process, how
we research and how we do disaster risk reduction. You are showing us the way, I
think, in how you do things in your field of heritage studies. I think there are a lot ofthings to learn on our side.
I have been personally encouraging people in our field to engage in some sort ofsubaltern disaster studies. I am not sure if you are familiar with subaltern studies. Itwas suggested in the 1980s by a number of South Asian, mostly Indian, historians whowanted to study South Asian history away from colonial sources, colonial records, andaway from colonial epistemologies. The likes of Guha and Spivak who conductedfantastic studies in the 1980s and 1990s. I think we should encourage people to dothat in disaster studies. Local researchers, local practitioners, studying their ownlocations, their own disasters from their own perspectives and trying to design policies
and practices from their own perspectives.
I think you are going in this direction by encouraging local researchers. This issomething we have seen over the past three days and there have been many
examples of this kind of approach. I am going to use Fadjar (Thufail)’s study of Merapi
as a sort of highlight, because we have a lot of studies of Mt Merapi in disasterstudies. Most of these studies have however been conducted by American, French,
German, Belgian and British researchers while very few have been carried out by local
Indonesian researchers. Fadjar’s study was so refreshing, pitching the whole topic froma very different perspective, a very sophisticated theoretical approach. It shows that it
is possible. I mean, our ideas in the West are not the only way. I include myself in
those people who need to be challenged here because I have been using theconcepts of vulnerability and disaster and I am a culprit as much as others. But it was
so refreshing to see such a study of Mt Merapi. I think we should go in this direction
and there is a lot to learn from you.
So, a lot of opportunities, but as well, I think, some challenges ahead if we want tobring our fields together. The challenges I see in terms of pulling things together orlearning from you are actually challenges we are both facing at the moment in our144

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respective fields. I am just going to focus on three of these challenges. There could be
more, but three will be enough for the little time I have.
The first one is the kind of imperative we feel to list or label things and people. You
have your UNESCO lists. We have our lists of vulnerable people. Section V of theSendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, for example, lists a number of people
deemed vulnerable in disasters. People with disabilities, women, children, older
people, migrants and indigenous people. Should we actually label these people asvulnerable? Should we actually list them? The upside is that is we steer attention, andobviously NGOs get traction. They can get funding because the governments need toreport on what they have done to foster let’s say women’s participation in disaster risk
reduction. But at the same time what about those who are le� out? I work withprisoners at the moment. I also work with homeless people. They are not in any lists.
There is therefore a threshold of attention. They get further marginalized.
At some point it is good to label people, to list things, and I guess it is the same foryour heritage lists. However, what about the places, the practices, the cooking recipes
and everything that is not on the list? Do they get noticed? Or do they get further
marginalized because we think that we have captured everything? There is a real
challenge here. So, we have to be careful if we think of importing your list of ICH andlist of whatever into disaster risk reduction or into disaster risk assessment or postdisaster needs assessment. We have to be careful of being exhaustive. That leads me
to my second challenge which is somehow related.
It is a tension that I have felt very strongly about as both an academic and apractitioner over the past three years. It is the tension between the moral imperative
we feel to care for the most vulnerable but at the same time an obligation to respect
local culture. My question to you is what if, by safeguarding ICH we, in the end,
further marginalize and make some people more vulnerable than they already are?
I could use many examples of such dilemma. However, I am going to use just one
from Australia. We are currently doing some work on a very remote island in theNorthern Territory. It is an Aboriginal community located one hour and a half east ofDarwin by plane. We are doing some participatory mapping, exactly what Abner(Lawangen) showed us on Friday, for water management. In that particular place, weneed to work with the traditional owners of the land, the TOs, and it is a completely
fair requirement to respect Aboriginal culture. I fully believe in this. But, by doing so,
it means that we do not get any women’s input on the map. If women in thisparticular place have to fly over the island, they have to cover their eyes because they
are not entitled to look at some particular places that are sacred places. So, werespect local culture, we respect ICH, we maximize ICH by building on the TOs
knowledge of the land but we further marginalize women. How do we deal with sucha situation?
It is a classic humanitarian dilemma. Think of people working in a famine-type se�ng,
in a patriarchal society, for example, where you have a very strong leadership of theelders, male elders. If you want to respect local culture and ICH then you have to go

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through the male elders but in the end you may starve those who are most in need
and who are possibly the women and the kids. If you want to feed the most in needthen you have to bypass local culture. This is a challenge in terms of ICH. If we wantto emphasize ICH, we may further marginalize some people. I do not have any definitesolution but we need to think about such dilemma across our fields.
The third challenge is the balance we need to strike between what we talked about on
Friday, which was safeguarding ICH (which is definitely very important) and what wetalked about this morning, which is more about fostering ICH, or building on ICH, toactually foster disaster risk reduction or foster recovery. ICH, I would say, is part ofwhat we call people’s capacities. I have not heard the word capacities during thismeeting. It is a Western concept again; biased, skewed. But we use this concept tocapture the skills, knowledge, resources that people use to deal with hazards and toovercome disasters. This concept is important because capacities are endogenous (notindigenous). You are made vulnerable by how power and resources are shared withinsociety but you hold your own capacities. So, it is much easier, from a practitioner’s
perspective, to enhance capacities than to reduce vulnerability.
These capacities are the extension of people’s everyday life. Every one of you thismorning referred to the concept of, or the idea of everyday life, especially Ryusuke(Kodani). You emphasized the importance of everyday life and how we should groundpeople’s experience in everyday life. This is what capacities are about. It is theextension of people’s everyday life.
We know that disasters are the extension of everyday life too. Disasters are in no way
extreme and rare events dissociated from the regular social fabric. They are just theextension of this social fabric. That is why all these festivals, rituals, we heard about
this morning are so important in terms of ge�ng ICH into disaster risk reduction. Not
as one more vulnerable thing to consider because if we go down that road ofsafeguarding only ICH, then it is going to be one more box to tick in our proposals andreports. A few years ago, we had gender. Gender, ticked. Then now we have ICH. ICH,ticked. We have to go beyond that. We have to look at ICH as a form of capacities andground this in everyday life, ground this in the regular social fabric and build towards
strengthening people’s livelihoods and lives on an everyday basis. I think this issomething that you have shown very strongly over the past few days.
In conclusion, I think that it has been a very useful experience for me to attend thismeeting. I did not really know, as I said, where I was going. But it has been very
useful. So, thank you very much.

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