"Crisis and disaster are words that are commonly used to describe extraordinary conditions. Crisis is often mobilized to indicate an individually or collectively experienced moment when the customary flow of everyday life is brought into question and when those states of affairs that were previously credited as normative come to be seen as no longer tenable"
"Going beyond the world of technoscientific experts, anthropological engagement with subaltern communities illuminates how populations directly experiencing disasters articulate their own narratives about risk and hazards"
"In the early twentieth century, when “modern” anthropology was coming into its own, ethnogra- phers could uphold the illusion that the people with whom they worked were part of isolated cul- tures, social islands that remained untouched by European or North American cultural influences or capitalist market forces."
" For anthropologists rooted in the political ecology approach to vulnerability, a focus on building resilience also threatens to steer policy and analytical concern away from the human practices that shape disasters and promote the resilience of those development trends that shape vulnerability, increasing the risk of disaster"
" Furthermore, the legitimization of the biopolitical state’s authority on the basis that its disaster response practices save lives can function as a powerful justification for enacting policies that further exclude subaltern populations from urban spaces and economic resources and muffle their voices in the political arena"
