Group study
Anthropologists studying post-Katrina New Orleans ask why some communities survived, and others washed away
THE NEW ISSUE of America's flagship journal of anthropology, the American Anthropologist, is devoted to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. One article offers an overview and presents the familiar, numbing statistics: 90,000 square miles flooded, 350,000 homes destroyed, more than 1,700 dead.
Yet that same article also points to some lesser-known numbers. Did you realize that, while New Orleans was 3 percent Latino in August 2005, since then some 80 percent of debris-removal jobs in the city have been filled by Latino laborers? The new, smaller New Orleans, whatever shape it takes, will probably be less black than it was -- a much-discussed demographic shift -- but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be whiter.
Latinos, particularly from Central America, represent a growing New Orleans community. But there are vanishing ones as well. According to the anthropologist Thomas McGuire of the University of Arizona, the subculture of oysterers, who since the early 1900s have leased oyster beds from the state and sold their bounty locally, may not make a comeback. Before the storm hit, a long legal battle over the oyster beds had strained relations between the oysterers and gulf residents, and that lost social capital may be what prevents this industry -- once vital to the city's identify -- from reviving.
New Orleans, as portrayed in these anthropological studies, emerges as an even more complicated place than you thought, though its predicament remains no less grim. American Anthropologist editor Benjamin Blount, who teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio, says the project was conceived because so much of the public discussion of New Orleans was broad-brush: about the death of a city, not of smaller groups and their social milieus.
"Anthropology, if it does anything well at all, is able to understand communities -- the key values and concepts that hold them together and make them persist over time," Blount said in an interview. In this instance, it helps us understand what leads certain groups to survive -- and others to be washed away.
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In some cases, New Orleans residents' peculiar social networks helped create the conditions that abetted the Katrina disaster.
When it comes to the erosion of the wetlands surrounding the city, for example, Diane Austin, a professor at the University of Arizona, writes that oil and gas companies are "the elephant in the room." Their dredging projects, their pumping, and their pipes destabilize the land. But it's hardly a clear-cut case of Big Oil acting selfishly as the little guys protest. Marginalized local communities, like the Cajuns and the Houma Indians, have for generations provided services to the oil companies. Cajun mariners, for instance, became famous for their intrepid skill in guiding geologists to oil.
These ties with companies that needed them have been especially important for "people who have been excluded from the social life of Louisiana or the United States," Austin says. (Black Louisianians historically had a tougher time breaking into skilled oil-rig work.) Beyond economics, these ethnic alliances help explain why reining in on- and offshore drilling, a vote-winner across the Gulf in Florida, is a nonstarter in Louisiana, even now.
The mostly black, and mostly destroyed, Ninth Ward has gotten a lot of attention since the disaster, but several anthropologists delve into the stories of specific housing complexes and other distinctive communities. Joyce Marie Jackson, of Louisiana State, explains how the 40-odd black families of Fazendeville village, a settlement 7 miles southeast of New Orleans, founded by free blacks in 1867, were forced after a legal battle to relocate to the Ninth Ward in 1964, to make room for an expansion of a park celebrating the storied Battle of New Orleans. Many of them moved to the same part of the Ninth Ward, attended church together, and remained acquainted, and a Fazendeville social network persisted -- until Katrina hit. The storm upended a social group that could trace its roots to Reconstruction.
One anthropologist who took part in Katrina cleanup efforts, Shannon Lee Dawdy, an archeologist at the University of Chicago, says the sight of people salvaging little from their ruined homes offers lessons to archeologists who study evidence of earlier disasters, large and small. (Dawdy has written about the goods left behind in a burned-out house in the French Quarter, in 1788, after an infamous city fire.) Just walking away and starting over is "a particular post-traumatic reaction," Dawdy says.
It will not be so easy to start over again in New Orleans, at least for the residents of the Ninth Ward. Despite hopeful talk from some politicians and activists that the new New Orleans will be less riven by class differences, Dawdy notes that one of the key landfills for Katrina cleanup abuts the Ninth Ward. "The social landscape of New Orleans," she writes, "was not to be significantly rewritten."
Indeed, a certain pessimism permeates the special issue. While one writer lauds the "open, flexible, and provisional" way former New Orleans residents retain a sense of community -- through "cellphone conversations" and weekend trips to visit each other -- others have dim views of the prospects of many social communities to sustain themselves. About Louisiana's efforts to lure back, through subsidized housing, low-income black residents who ended up scattered across the United States, four anthropologists who work for a firm called Impact Assessment Inc., in La Jolla, Calif., state flatly: They "will fail." The former New Orleanians are already creating and recreating dense social networks. But they're doing it elsewhere.
Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net. 