Emergent Conversation 26

This essay is part of the series Making Vulnerability Work
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 26

By A.J. Faas

I remember the second of three times I cried while giving a public lecture. Each time, I had been presenting my research on the anthropology of disasters in campesino communities in Penipe, a rural canton in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. I sometimes feel it coming on, almost as if from a distance. The first outward sign is likely either the quiver of my lip as I speak or the faint flooding of my eyes, but for a fraction of a second that seems like forever, I sense what I can only describe as the inflation of a balloon in my chest that I swear feels purple, until it swells into the lower region of my throat. If I have the presence of mind and am quick enough, I can suppress some of the outward signs by pressing my finger to my cheekbone just below my eyes. Or else I can turn away from my audience for a second, often under the pretense of gesturing at a slide projection. I doubt that I’ve ever succeeded in hiding it. It’s often just a matter of keeping it contained. Just don’t start openly weeping, man.

My interventions into how we think about disasters have thus far relied heavily on first-person narratives of Penipeños and in each of the three instances in which I was moved to tears, I had devoted significant portions of the presentation to the narratives of a woman I call Martina Barriga, whom I consider a friend and with whose family I have been close. Like most anthropologists, I’ve been trained to focus my attention on others, and even as probing reflexivity is part of this, I never center myself in my work. And yet here I am wondering if spending some time on this can help think through how anthropological practice, especially around vulnerability, can help foster the development of new and transformative relations.

The first time I cried, it was at a conference, and I was horribly embarrassed. I had felt so deeply connected to Martina and her story, the emotion just swelled up and caught me by surprise. As I felt first the swell, then the quiver, I was unable to contain it before a few tears streamed down my face. It felt genuine, like a real emotional connection, but I was concerned that it was somehow adulterated by my own melancholia. And it just seemed unprofessional. After I cried for the third time, at another conference just a few months later, I decided that I had to stop reciting Martina’s narratives for a while, at least until I could get a handle on my emotions while doing so.

The second time, however, was different. I was giving an invited lecture at a small public university in California. As on the other occasions, I spent some time relaying Martina’s narratives, and once again I choked up and ultimately several tears escaped. Unlike the conference talks, which were about fifteen minutes long, this was an hour-long lecture in which I returned to Martina’s and others’ narratives a few times, each time failing to contain the emotion that came over me. I fairly panicked, wondering at my inability to get it together. But when the lecture concluded, I was approached by two women I took to be mother and daughter, both Latinas, likely from southern Mexico, judging by the mother’s accent. The younger woman’s face was reddened and marked from sobbing, while the older of the two, who was about my age (mid-forties), was still weeping even as she was nodding and mustering a smile through the tears as she spoke in Spanish, “Thank you for sharing these stories. I see myself and other women I have known in them.” Suddenly, these emotions were coming over me in waves once again. I clumsily held out my hands to both of them, and each grasped a hand warmly and intensely. Having spent some time in the lecture engaging with how we imagine disaster vulnerability, as we stood there holding hands, I spoke through several tears and the purple balloon swollen into my throat, “Yes, this is another part of vulnerability. This is how we connect, how we actually feel it.” The entire interaction was over in just a few brief minutes, but it has stuck with me ever since.

While this encounter struck me at the time as making an intervention in how I conceive of vulnerability, it has taken me some time to write about it because I have felt like doing so could go wrong in so many ways. Even as I write, I am not certain that I will pull it off. Perhaps I should proceed in some order. What did I mean by vulnerability? Well, the core of my argument has long been that vulnerability is basically a question—not an answer or set of variables—about how disaster is historically produced and its effects unequally distributed in society (Faas 2026). My own approach entails a mix of genealogy and assemblage mapping, taking stock of the historical processes, institutions, and more-than-human relations that converge and break apart to produce widespread destruction and harm. This is, as quite a few disaster scholars have long argued, about much more than hazards and exposure, and has an awful lot to do with policies, practices, development, and, indeed, systemic inequality. I came to understand the production of vulnerability and disaster in Penipe as rooted in the iterative unfolding of colonial politics, governance, and resistance set in motion prior to and accelerated during the Spanish conquest.

The women I met at the lecture in California were not Penipeñas, so why should they feel seen in my relating Martina’s narratives? Well, I can only speculate, but if disaster is born of the quotidian, this is also the space in which they felt recognized. This  surfaces what can seem like a bit of a problem in the anthropology of disasters: to borrow Marilyn Strathern’s (1996) metaphor for provisionally bounding an ethnographic case, where do you cut the network? So much of what makes a disaster happens so far afield of the spacetime people ordinarily recognize as disaster that investigations of root causes tend towards a mission creep of sorts that wanders into expansive historical investigations of whole societies (e.g., Faas 2023; Vaughn 2022). I refuse to generalize Latin American history as an uncomplicated tale of domination and exploitation driven by external actors, processes, and institutions (see also Castro-Gómez 2021). The root causes of any crisis in a given community have a good deal of specificity because neither capitalism nor colonialism nor racism are uniform in their manifestations and the resistance they are met with, and these histories are riddled with all manner of contradictions and contested interpretations. But as the emotional reactions of the two women who grasped my hands in California attested, there can be, and often are, correspondences that crosscut situations, and these are often deeply felt. When I told of the poverty that compelled Martina’s mother to send her out as a live-in domestic laborer when she was just twelve-years-old; of her short-lived return after a year, only to set out soon again to migrate for work as a day laborer on farms and then as a server and cook in restaurants in several cities; and of her struggles to help her family farm while raising her own two children as a single mother, my interlocutors in the lecture hall likely heard familiar tales.

Did the two women I met only briefly also feel seen in Martina’s struggle to be recognized by the humanitarian state apparatus, to whom her peripatetic existence was illegible? I have pushed back against the notion, put forth in some critical studies of governance and structural violence, that people tolerate the enduring poverty and suffering of others but are moved to save victims of disaster. The swells of what Mark Schuller (2016) has called “global humanitarian citizenship” do little or nothing to address the root causes of disaster, and are often complicit in legitimizing foreign interventions and the extension of the state into people’s everyday lives, while also providing psychological cover for donors to continue their lives unbothered by the structural violence that is a major root cause of disaster (and, as often as not, underwritten by their own patterns of consumption). I do not know if they have a common experience, but Latin American immigrants to the United States are plenty familiar with the procedural vulnerability of making their deservingness legible to the state (Faas 2024; Stepnitz 2024; Rivera et al. 2022).

How do I reflect upon my own emotions in my research on disasters? It often begins in the field. I have felt and expressed emotion, even tears, in conversations with Martina and others in Penipe over the years, just as they have with me. For what it is worth, I did not parachute into Penipe to extract “data” on people’s suffering during emergencies, and so I did not anticipate the emotional rawness as I encountered. I came to Penipe, where my doctoral advisor Linda Whiteford had established partnerships since volcanic eruptions in 1999, three years after the more powerful eruptions of 2006, to study life and recovery in the multiple resettlements to which thousands of Penipeños had relocated. Only after I spent some months there documenting how people struggled to live with houses, no land or economic resources, and a rather draconian governance of their everyday lives, did I realize that the disaster was still underway and that many people continued to experience heightened emotional sensitivity.

It does not happen every day, but in my years of fieldwork, men and women have occasionally shed tears while telling their stories during interviews. Each time, I would pause the interview to let people know that we could take a break or stop outright, that I did not want to upset them. Not only has no one ever taken me up on that offer, but each time I made it people insisted that it was important to share their stories so that they could remember, so that others could learn from them, and maybe get a sense of what it felt like to endure what they had gone through. They insisted on speaking through the tears, and I could not help but be moved. As when I caught myself choking up giving a talk about them years later, I was unsettled when I felt the urge to cry. This was not the space for my tears. I would even ask myself, as I had learned in therapy, if what I was feeling was rooted in the moment or in my past. If it was the latter, it had no business in the present. But the former? I have always insisted on being as honest and transparent with my interlocutors in the field as I ask them to be with me. I had to be real and emotionally available, but I would never dare allow my own emotions to make it anywhere near the center of these moments. Instead, it became about mutual recognition and a variety of reciprocity. As I got to know people, I could let them see that I was moved by their experiences. I would reach across the table and hold Martina’s hand for a moment, nodding reassuringly as she wept and my own eyes welled up. She would often be self-deprecating, calling herself “muy llorona” (which translates poorly as “crybaby”), and I would reply by gesturing to my own swollen and saturated eyes, saying, “As if I’m any better!” Martina told me more than once that she worried if her suffering and what she was struggling to build of her life mattered to anyone, if it would be valued or felt by anyone else. I know that she was thinking of her own children and community, and also of the world beyond that she might reach by speaking with me, of those who found themselves in similar struggles and those who would seek to help.

Of course, public displays of emotion can be performative and naïve and serve to insulate people from critique. At another conference a little over a year after I’d decided to take a break from publicly reciting Martina’s narratives, I co-organized a session about anthropologists dealing with the fraught role of working directly in the administration of aid. My own rendering of a program I put together with local friends in Penipe during the COVID-19 pandemic got emotionally intense as well. But following three emotionally raw presentations by several female scholars—Puerto Rican, Afro-Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous Puerto Rican—dozens of audience members could be seen crying and a few called out supportive remarks. Afterwards, I went to lunch with one of those scholars, my friend and colleague Melinda González. She expressed frustration with the fact that there were so many tears and no questions. She wanted to know why the varieties of struggle and hurt she and the other panelists conveyed caught people by emotional surprise and lacking in the ability to participate in an informed conversation about the intersectionality of racism, impoverishment, and sexism she and her colleagues recounted in each of their talks. I have thought about this conversation each time I made notes toward writing about my own emotional struggles in doing this work.

How do we recognize disaster, and what do these events and processes reveal about society? There may be no clear and bright line, but there is nevertheless a very meaningful difference between recognizing the quotidian vulnerability at the root of disaster and being moved by the spectacle of what appears to be an extraordinary crisis event. I cannot claim that my own tears were unimpeachable expressions. After all, few if any people can claim full command and accounting of their emotions. But I persist in my interrogation of the emotions my interlocutors express with one another, to ensure that my expressions work more as conduits of connection with others than to center my own experience or somehow insulate myself, a White man, from critique. And I note also that my public expressions of emotion often come at considerably less risk to my perceived competence than my colleagues on the pandemic aid panel might experience (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012).

Ultimately, my sense is that when the two women held my hands, they were connecting with the quotidian as much as the crisis, and we were together experiencing something that until recently has garnered insufficient attention in vulnerability discourse: that vulnerability does not merely entail a capacity to be affected, but a capacity to affect others, to effect change (Vaughn 2022; von Meding 2021; Marino and Faas 2020; Butler 2009). To be clear, I am by no means claiming that emotion is vulnerability. As a matter of fact, I detect a real problem in vulnerability being regularly mistaken as an attribute of bodies, places, or communities. These are sites in which it is experienced materially, symbolically, and indeed emotionally, but the production of vulnerability is diffused through institutions, relations, and processes at greater levels of scale than bodies, places, or communities. It is not neatly legible, and our capacity to connect with it depends on either shared life experience or some real effort at education, relating, and connecting well beyond our usual boundaries of comfort and familiarity. Beyond the matter of knowledge construction and the assembling of facts, confronting the production of disaster and vulnerability has a great deal to do with people experiencing vulnerability recognizing each other and finding power in that—at the very least, finding that they are neither alone nor crazy—and using that power to reach others (see especially Aijazi 2024; González 2022; Bonilla and LeBrón 2019). If I am to imagine that my work plays any role in this, I cannot do so with any delusions of making some grand impact, but rather that I am engaging in practices of care and helping to story together relations and profoundly emotional experiences that might otherwise be mistaken as singular and alone.

Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful to Eve Helms, Melinda González, Mark Schuller, and Elizabeth Marino for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

A.J. Faas, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology and Graduate Coordinator at San José State University and President of the Society for Applied Anthropology. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of South Florida and his M.A. and B.A. in Anthropology from Montclair State University. His research focuses on disasters, displacement, cooperation, and memorialization across the Americas, with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in highland Ecuador. He is the author of In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador (Rutgers, 2023) and co-editor of Social Network Analysis of Disaster Response, Recovery, and Adaptation (2017), in addition to nearly fifty peer-reviewed articles and chapters. His scholarship advances debates on vulnerability, reciprocity, and statecraft in disaster contexts while contributing to applied projects in disaster prevention, response, and recovery. Faas is dedicated to engaged anthropology bridging research, practice, and leadership.

Works Cited

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Bonilla, Yarimar, and Marison LeBrón. 2019. Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Chicago: Haymarket Books

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Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2021. Critique of Latin American Reason. Columbia University Press: New York.

Faas, A. J. 2026. “Vulnerability is a Question: Four Sketches and Three Invitations to Make it Weird (In All Seriousness).” In Reducing Risks: A Reference on Preventing and Mitigating Disasters and Dangers, Vol. 1: Principles and Concepts of Disaster Risks, edited by Ksenia Chmutina, Danielle Rivera, and Ricardo Fuentealba, 95-118. London: World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789819816095_0006.

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—2023. In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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