Lessons from The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery

Introduction Hurricane Katrina's arrival at the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005 was only the first in a chain of events that would change the face of the city for years to come. Between the dramatic beating from the storm and the second wave of damage from the broken levee, communities throughout the city suffered enormous damage. Destruction to property was estimated to total between $125 and $165 billion while 270,000 homes were ruined and 1,600 lives were lost (Chamlee-Wright 2010: 1). Ks Emily Chamlee-Wright's The Cultural and Political Economy of Recover. demonstrates, the responses of the communities within New Orleans in the days and months immediately following the disaster played an important role in determining how and indeed if these devastated communities would recover. (1) At the theoretical level Chamlee-Wright's book seeks to better understand the nature of the relationship between market behavior and the cultural context within which exchange takes place. For this particular endeavor Chamlee-Wright borrows both methods and insights from anthropology, sociology, and economics to ask the question of how the cultural context of the various New Orleans communities affected market processes and social order. Her primary empirical tool is an extensive face-to-face interview process that enables Chamlee-Wright to gather, to the greatest extent possible, the in-depth local knowledge of those who actually experienced Katrina and its aftermath. The gathering of personal knowledge through the interview process allows Chamlee-Wright to illuminate the impact of culture on the broader recovery process. This essay reviews four of the central themes in The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: (1) the cultural toolkit, (2) the use of qualitative methods in social science research, (3) polycentricism and disaster recovery, and (4) entrepreneurship in non-priced environments. Our purpose is twofold. First, to make clear Chamlee-Wright's contributions to our understanding of disaster recovery. Second, to demonstrate how these themes provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary/exchange by blending insights from across the social sciences. In what follows we dedicate a section to reach of the four themes. In each case we provide a brief overview of Chamlee-Wright's core arguments, as well as areas for future research and exploration. The Cultural Toolkit At the outset, Chamlee-Wright describes her project as an exercise in cultural economy, a research program that "seeks to understand why and how market processes work within specific cultural contexts" (Chamlee-Wright 2010: 16). The key intellectual progenitors of this research program are a diverse and multi-disciplinary group including: classical economist Adam Smith, political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, new institutional economist Douglass North, and cultural sociologist Ann Swidler. The intellectual core shared by all of these scholars, including Chamlee-Wright, is the notion that the context within which a society operates will influence the functioning of the market and other social processes. For Chamlee-Wright, socio-economic outcomes are the result of complex interactions between culture and the institutional rules of the community in question. She proposes that these interacting processes can be divided into four categories, each of which affects and is affected by every other: generalized norms, social networks, shared mental models, and cultural tools. In combination these processes form "the structure of socially embedded resources" (Chamlee-Wright 2010: 16). Generalized norms and social networks are highly similar phenomena, with both seen as generally arising from repeated mutually beneficial social interaction. Their compatibility is illustrated with the example that a social network of individuals who grow to trust each other can lead to a general social norm of trust in exchange. Mental models and cultural tools are also similar in nature. …