{"id":122,"date":"2019-03-04T15:54:10","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T02:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/inplural\/?p=122"},"modified":"2019-03-04T16:02:28","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T03:02:28","slug":"fire-and-flood-grounding-disaster-trauma-and-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/inplural\/fire-and-flood-grounding-disaster-trauma-and-emotion\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire and Flood: Grounding disaster, trauma, and emotion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I recently read Sociologist Timothy Recuber\u2019s<\/a> (2016) book, Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Media in America\u2019s Decade of Disaster. <\/em>It is a great book, and I loved it particularly for acknowledging that media is not just informational, but involves aesthetic and performative cues for emotional response. Recuber draws on case studies of 9\/11, and Hurricane Katrina, among others. His writing is specific to the USA and acknowledges its scope as such.<\/p>\n

As an Antipodean social anthropologist, I am struck by the need for a cross-cultural and de-centred lens on these topics. There is space for ethnographic studies that highlight the locally situated nature of disaster and disaster-response \u2013 the way the narratives, symbols, words and meanings that make sense of catastrophes around culturally grounded and particular,<\/p>\n

Black Saturday: reviewing art on the anniversary of disaster<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Last week I attended a talk by Dr. Grace Moore<\/a>, called \u2018The Art of Recovery\u2019. Before moving to Otago\u2019s English Department, Dr Moore worked with the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions<\/a>, her research focussing on fire in Australian historical writing and art. But timing and location meant her response also engaged heavily with the devastating Victorian bushfires of \u2018Black Saturday\u2019, in 2009. On this 10-year anniversary of the event, she presented some pieces from a collection of art created by survivors.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

William Strutt’s oil painting ‘Black Thursday’ (1861). Referencing the largest fires ever recorded in Australia, taking place in Victoria 1851.<\/p><\/div>\n

Dr. Moore\u2019s work makes some fascinating comparisons between this, and 19th<\/sup> century European colonists\u2019 narratives and paintings of bushfire. As such she has been able to highlight some of the moral frameworks and social relationships (i.e. heroism, mateship<\/a>) that have made sense of bushfires in a culturally-specific way. She notes also that there is a rich tradition of depicting fire among many indigenous Australian communities, which would beg deeper research.<\/p>\n

The connection between Moore\u2019s talk and Recuber\u2019s book struck me, in that both addressed representations of disaster (and its aftermath), and also that both discussed the role of emotion and affect as they circulated through particular mediums of communication.<\/p>\n

Emotion and trauma: inside, outside, on the page and screen<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Dr. Moore\u2019s talk at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, art was framed as something used to \u2018confront\u2019 and \u2018work through\u2019 trauma. It is \u2018cathartic\u2019, and \u2018therapeutic.\u2019 The vested interest in such processes, after trauma, is not entirely individual. Amidst controversy about accountability and the inadequacies of long-term support, Grace noted the investment of local government in programmes that allow people to \u2018channel their emotions\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I could also say a lot here, from an anthropological perspective, about the culturally-grounded metaphors of emotion that this all relies on, and in particular the hydraulic metaphors of emotion. These are central to psychodynamic frameworks that emphasise the destructive potential of un-<\/em>expressed (\u2018bottled up\u2019) emotions, and the moral and therapeutic values of sharing (\u2018venting\u2019) emotion.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

I have also written about the distinction between \u2018channel\u2019 and \u2018vessel\u2019 metaphors of emotion.[ii]<\/a> In this case I think it is the intersubjectivity <\/em>of affect that the frequent appearance of \u2018channel\u2019 metaphors hint at. They highlight art as not only a personal process but a relational one, a channel<\/em> for survivors to connect with other people who were not present, across what is often framed as an ineffable void of experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Image from the DAX Centre. Source: http:\/\/castlemaineart.com\/artists\/konii-c-burns\/konni-c-burns-dax-centre\/<\/p><\/div>\n

Alternatively perhaps the art itself is the vessel, the receptacle, which holds the emotion channelled into it. Indeed Moore noted that emotion and memories are \u201cembedded\u201d into the work. Regional exhibitions focussed on \u2018Recording and Collecting Black Saturday\u2019<\/a> and the longer-term efforts of DAX Centre<\/a> to collect these works (and others by victims of broadly-defined \u2018trauma\u2019) could be analysed through this lens. It certainly opens up some interesting questions:<\/p>\n