In disaster-related policies and practices, culture is often treated as tangible, homogenous, static. The diversity of communities and places, on-the-ground actions and networks for how things are actually accomplished, intricacies of local politics and maneuvering and layers of socio-historical inequalities, are often missing from expert calculations and official frameworks for action. The basic but most important first question goes unasked: “What would you do and how?” Disaster anthropology relentlessly arrives at the all-too-common problem of “policies and practices need to consider local culture.” Here too culture is framed as static, passive, homogenous. Understanding the complexity and dynamics by which we experience and understand the world is much more challenging than at first glance. Culture is fluid, evolving, and intertwined with a host of economic, political, and social relations and tensions that are constantly altering seemingly stable processes. This leads to at least two related questions. First, how do we theorize beyond this point to better interpret and explain the persistent issue of cultural insensitivity in disaster-related policy and practice? And second, how can we develop more useful and successful prescriptions for incorporating cultural sensitivity into policy and practice? Overall, this article puts forward the argument that disaster reconstruction is a complex, culturally sensitive dynamic, within which decisions are embedded in tensions of social, political, and economic priorities. While disasters can function as a mechanism to sustain and perpetuate power relations, disaster survivors have distinct agency through the disaster recovery process and are empowered citizens that should be treated as equal partners to guide the process in a way that makes sense on-the-ground in the given local contexts. In the unfolding plays of disaster, the interpretive, behavioral, and material repertoires we refer to as culture exhibit some of the characteristics of emergence, insomuch as they are not fully determined by arrangements that precede them; yet, neither are they without antecedents, relationships with the past and other ongoing processes.

中文翻译：

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在灾害实践中考虑文化

在与灾难有关的政策和实践中，文化通常被视为有形，同质，静止的文化。专家计算和官方行动框架经常缺少社区和地方的多样性，实际完成事情的实地行动和网络，地方政治和行动的复杂性以及社会历史不平等的层次。基本但最重要的第一个问题尚未提出：“您会做什么以及如何做？” 灾难人类学无情地提出了“政策和实践需要考虑当地文化”这一普遍问题。这里的文化也被构造为静态的，被动的，同质的。与乍一看相比，了解我们体验和了解世界的复杂性和动态性更具挑战性。文化是流动的，不断发展的，并与一系列不断改变看似稳定的过程的经济，政治和社会关系及紧张局势交织在一起。这导致至少两个相关的问题。首先，我们如何从理论上超越这一点，以更好地解释和解释与灾害相关的政策和实践中文化不敏感的持续性问题？其次，我们如何开发更有用和成功的处方，将文化敏感性纳入政策和实践中？总体而言，本文提出了这样的论点，即灾难重建是一个复杂的，对文化敏感的动态，其决策嵌入在社会，政治和经济优先事项的紧张关系中。灾难可以起到维持和维持权力关系的作用，灾难幸存者在灾难恢复过程中拥有独特的机构，并赋予公民权利，应被视为平等的伙伴，以在给定的本地环境中切实可行的方式指导该过程。在不断发展的灾难中，我们称为文化的解释性，行为性和物质性表现出某些新兴特征，因为它们并没有完全由其之前的安排所决定；但是，他们也不是没有先例，与过去的关系以及其他正在进行的过程。我们所称的文化文化表现出某些新兴特征，因为它们没有完全由它们之前的安排所决定；但是，他们也不是没有先例，与过去的关系以及其他正在进行的过程。我们所称的文化文化表现出某些新兴特征，因为它们没有完全由它们之前的安排所决定；但是，他们也不是没有先例，与过去的关系以及其他正在进行的过程。