Doing fieldwork in disaster areas - Nurturing the embodied for analytical insight

This paper recounts my fieldwork amongst tsunami victims in east Sri Lanka and Chennai, South India from 2006 through to early 2010. The fieldwork coincided with the intensification of the long-drawn civil war in Sri Lanka and the subsequent tensions in Tamil Nadu, responding to the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka. This fieldwork was an integral part of a study of post-tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka and India that was conducted together with Dr. Martin Mulligan using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The people in the places where I was conducting fieldwork were not just recovering from the traumatic impact of the tsunami, but also dealing with the intensification of the civil war. For these communities, it was an overwhelming feeling of grief, despair and fear; especially for those who remained marginalised by inequitable recovery measures and rebuilding inefficiencies and blunders. In this article, I want to discuss the challenges of conducting fieldwork in such situations of conflict and natural disasters, where fieldwork inevitably involves an ethnographic immersion in the life of traumatised victims that is not only draining, but also emotional and politically demanding. To be able to critically reflect on what it means to participate and share the emotions and political angst of the individuals whilst maintaining an analytical capacity may appear contradictory. But I want to argue that that such an ambiguity or apparent contradiction is in fact, critical and useful. It may be the only way to grasp the experiential and embodied dimensions of human behaviours within disaster or conflict situations. It could be these very radical disjunctures between different sorts of emotional flows and uncertain landscapes that can build on our capacity to recognise, empathise and critically reflect; and deepen analytical insight.