This thesis is the result of a period of ten months of participant-observation while resident in the town of Buras, Louisiana during 2011. During this time I also conducted 46
unstructured interviews in the region ranging from 30 minutes to over three hours. The names of all participants have been anonymised, and where possible terms such as ‘senior member of the fire department’ have been substituted for the informant’s actual rank.
My principle entry points into life in the Parish centred around the Buras Volunteer Fire Department, the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus1, several local fisherman’s associations, and two local churches – St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Port Sulphur, and Faith Temple Ministries in Triumph. I was also supported by the local Parish government and the Louisiana branch of FEMA who made their staff available to me. These spheres of interaction facilitated the development of my research in two key ways. Firstly, through forward recommendation via members of these groups who might introduce me to new potential participants, and secondly by conferring a certain legitimacy on my presence in the Parish.
This was important as I both observed and experienced a strong culture of
‘insider/outsider’ within the Parish (a topic I return to later in Chapter 5). My British accent certainly did not help my access or initial integration into the community, as at that time ‘BP’ was still being referred to incorrectly as ‘British Petroleum’ by several media and political commentators. By volunteering with the Knights of Columbus and especially with the Fire Department (I acquired a baseball cap with the department’s logo on it early in my fieldwork and seldom left my trailer without it) I sought to both distance myself from any association with BP and simultaneously be seen as contributing to local
community life. Also in Chapter 5, I chart my own progress towards integration into Parish life through a series of personal anecdotes.
Most of my fieldwork was conducted in, and most of my interviewees were recruited from the town of Buras where I was based, Triumph (the town directly south of
1 A Roman-Catholic fraternal charitable-service organisation founded in 1882 and with over 1.8 million members, most of whom reside in North America.
2 Though this understanding was given further refinement and development in his subsequent publications
Buras), and three towns further north; Empire, Nairn, and Port Sulphur (see Image 2 below). I consider these four communities to constitute my ‘primary’ field site. I gathered additional data in the northern town of Belle Chasse and on the east bank of the Parish in the town of Port à la Hache. Several interactions and interviews also took place beyond the Parish border, in New Orleans, Gretna, Lafayette, Baton Rouge and Galliano in Louisiana, in Bay St. Louis and Gulfport in Mississippi and Tuscaloosa in Alabama. Given the heavily publicised nature of both the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, I continued my observation of how these disasters were being presented in the mainstream press even after I returned from the field.
Image 2: Plaquemines Parish map with key towns noted, ©Wikicommons
Coffey’s The Ethnographic Self offers a summary of a ‘field site’ which captures much of my experience during my fieldwork:
“Fieldwork takes place in a variety of social and cultural settings. We use the term
‘the field’ to refer to a heterogeneous group of locations and contexts. Everyday life as an area of social enquiry makes the boundaries of observation and analysis almost limitless. While generalizations about the field are difficult, and often unhelpful, all fieldwork sites will have at least one common factor. The field is a site peopled by social actors and, implicitly, by the social researcher. The primary task of the fieldworker is to analyse and understand a peopled field. This task is achieved through social interaction and shared experiences. It follows, therefore, that fieldwork is dependent upon and guided by the relationships that are built and established over time” (Coffey 1999: 39).
In this case of course, these relationships encouraged my research to focus on the lived experience of the everyday, which included the normalised experience of disasters.
My data collection was however also shaped in other ways due to the networks I was able to access. Many of these networks were significantly shaped by the prevalence of particular gender roles within the Parish, thus my data exhibits a notable masculine gender bias. Around a quarter of my interviewees were female and although my participant-observation was somewhat more gender-balanced it would still not be close to an even representation. This reflects the networks of participants which I was able to access within the particular gendered social structures of the Parish. Once this is acknowledged, it can provided key insights to assist the researcher navigate a particular social context (Rivière 2000). In particular the local volunteer fire department of which I became a member and the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus with whom I worked were both extremely gendered organisations. To a lesser extent this is also true with regard to race within the Parish as it is certainly true that more of my respondents were White than Black. It would therefore be of great value for further research to be conducted within rural communities on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico which focussed more explicitly on the experience of
women and African-Americans, and I discuss these possibilities further in the concluding chapter of this thesis.
More generally, the nature of this field-site made interviewing an important supplement to participant-observation during data gathering. Due to the maintenance of clear delimitations of public and private spheres within the local community (a topic I discuss in relation to ‘normative’ social life in chapter 3) my interactions with local people were initially highly restricted to certain public spheres such as those discussed above.
Interviewing proved a useful tool; not only in gathering primary data, but also as a means to establish my credentials as a ‘legitimate researcher’ in a way that
participant-observation did not. The embodied process of conducting a formal interview was generally more easily understood locally to constitute the ‘doing’ of social research than, for
example, spending a morning working as a deck hand on an oyster boat. Often these interviews led to further social interactions and sometimes speeded the decline of the public/private restrictions mentioned.
Most of my research however was conducted outside of these interviews, and my weekly observation and participation in Parish life was usually structured by the local institutions mentioned above. The weekly training sessions with the fire department, the bingo night organised by the Knights of Columbus, and attendance at either St. Patrick’s Catholic Church or the non-denominational Faith Temple Ministries on Sunday ensured a regular weekly routine. Beyond this, I divided my time between the fire house (where members and their friends often congregated informally), the local marinas (where I engaged with local fishermen), local bars and restaurants, Buras library, and chatting with neighbours who lived near my camper van and their friends. I also participated in less frequent interactions with local people, such as parties, crawfish boils and BBQs, political rallies, meetings of local charities and government bodies, the local high-school’s
American football matches, and responding to emergency call-outs as part of my voluntary service with Buras fire department, amongst others. The emergency responses to fires or automobile accidents often also led on to a certain amount of socialising and ‘banter’ in the immediate aftermath of a successful call-out.
The data gathered during this participant observation was perhaps less ‘formal’
than my recorded interviews but was richer. As this research places a deep focus on the everyday normality of living in a landscape partly shaped by disaster, it was essential to participate and observe this intersubjective, embodied, mundane normality unfolding. As such, I took extensive field notes after every such interaction, usually once I had returned home, or in my car before driving back. Reflecting on the notes made in these field diaries would often generate questions, which I would put to respondents in interview settings, the answers to which then informed my subsequent observations and field notes. This on-going reflective process mirrored my progress in the community from being considered an absolute outsider, to being granted certain insider privileges, and highlighted details in local interaction which I had previously been unaware.
While I attempted to conduct my research in an overt and open manner, it was not always possible to make such a position clear in every public setting in which I found myself. For example, as part of my involvement with Buras Volunteer Fire Department I participated in a large charity crawfish boil-off with several thousand attendees, where it was impossible to adequately explain my role as a researcher to every person present.
Additionally, I would occasionally be introduced by friends of mine as someone “writing a book about life down here”. I considered this an adequate summary of my role in the Parish, but it did not perhaps offer a complete overview of my activities in any given context. However, amongst my key informants I was able to fully explain my role and purpose as a resident of the Parish.
This thesis is ethnographic in nature and therefore places significant emphasis on local narratives and meaning, a focus found in most anthropological works and discussed critically by Dresch and James (2000) amongst others. Furthermore I agree with Hockey and Forsey (2012) that the critical structures of ethnography can be deployed as easily within the interview context as in participant observation. This emphasis has allowed many
of the keys themes analysed below to emerge from interactions with local people and has proven extremely useful in identifying locally cultural specific topics upon which to focus.
Furthermore it has influenced the language used at certain points in the thesis, particularly when connected to naming places, or disaster-processes. Local people often switch between referring to their local Parish as ‘Plaquemines Parish’, and ‘the Parish of Plaquemines’ and this thesis therefore also uses both. Furthermore when referring to the major catastrophes most acutely studied here ‘Hurricane Katrina’, ‘Katrina’, and ‘the Storm’ where all used to refer to the same catastrophe, and while the oil spill is ‘officially’
referred to as the ‘Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill’, local people usually refer to it simply as the ‘BP oil spill’, the ‘oil spill’, or ‘the Spill’. This thesis reflects these locally
meaningful designators and uses all of the above throughout.
While this research did not explicitly set out to utilise a phenomenological
approach, it is undoubtedly the case that phenomenology has been a significant influence to the final thesis. It is therefore useful to reflect upon the value of phenomenologically informed social research, and how this has ultimately strengthened this thesis.
Furthermore, as part of this discussion it is crucial to briefly discuss two key theorists to the overarching argument presented below, Tim Ingold (2004, 2005, 2011) and Cheryl Mattingly (2010) and how their work offers a key foundation upon which to build much of the analysis which follows.
Knibbe and Versteeg (2008) have conducted a useful review of the critical role phenomenology can play in shaping anthropological research, and their work is of great value in succinctly reflecting on this topic. They demonstrate that deep ethnography, and the embodied immersion it offers can tie closely to an approach based on phenomenology.
By placing the anthropologist as a sensory participant in the experience of the life-worlds of those he researches, a research path can be plotted which foregrounds their lived experience of reality. Embodiment here is key, and the mutual experience of having and
being bodies is that which allows the intersubjective production of meaning (Csordas 1990), and a focus on normative everyday life (Ferguson 2006).
By utilising the work of Stoller (1997) Knibbe and Versteeg (2008) demonstrate how the focus of phenomenological anthropology is centred around “the way in which meanings become and are reality to the people themselves: how meanings appear to them and coincide with the practical everyday world in which one needs to survive” (p.51). Such a goal is central to this thesis’ attempts to foreground the local perspectives and meaning-making of the residents of southern Plaquemines Parish and how they relate to disaster, as part of mundane, everyday life.
With the above stated, this research also follows Knibbe and Versteeg (2008) in recognising that through the creation of the anthropological text, and the research process which has led to its creation, the anthropologist is placed in a somewhat singular position both while in the field and once returned ‘home’. This thesis therefore does not make pretence to present a purely abstract exploration of ‘experience’ alone, and seeks to utilise a range of scholars to help structure, and add critical depth to the analysis offered.
Ingold’s (2004, 2005, 2011) conception of a landscape as an on-going process has been key to providing part of this analytical insight into the meaning-making of local people, a discussion most directly considered in chapter 5. With this analytical perspective, the processes of recovery engaged with by local people can be understood as not appearing as a result of a cause-effect impact of large-scale disaster, nor as following a recovery model generated outwith the field site, but as a constituent element in on-going everyday life, understood in the broadest sense. However, the process of recovery engaged by local people, while a part of this broad, everyday normality, has been given special attention within this thesis, as this research seeks to contribute most directly to corpuses of literature based around disaster studies.
Thus while landscape in this view can be understood as a ‘plenum’ (or always
‘filled’) local people might experience a disjuncture to a specifically post-disaster
landscape where embodied experience of ‘damage’ and ‘destruction’ is extensive. As such, recognising how processes of willing, emerging as a constituent part of local disaster-processes, as they form part of the continuing emergence of landscape, is key to bridging the conceptual gap in how a local person experiences the re-immersion into local processes of the everyday. Mattingly’s (2010) work is of great value here in exploring this process of willing in the aftermath of trauma, as it demonstrates how willing is not in fact an
individualistic direct action, but is a deeply intersubjective process, intrinsically forming part of the wider life-world of local people. This discussion of willing is most acutely considered in chapter 6.
Finally, as part of the agreement reached to gain the support of the Parish
government to conduct research in the area I agreed to make my final thesis available to both the general public of the Parish and the local government. It is hoped that following Borofsky’s (2011) framing of public anthropology as a means of making available
anthropological evidence to public discourse, this study can be of use to the community of southern Plaquemines Parish in their on-going and continuing existence in this post-disaster landscape.