Temporalities of Catastrophe in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka

In person event organised as part of the "Disasters and Risks" seminar.

Speaker : Mara Benadusi, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Catania, Italy

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Sri Lanka, this talk explores the shifting status of catastrophe across time. Rather than treating the tsunami as a bounded event or as an endlessly unfolding aftermath, I follow its changing trajectory through successive regimes of relevance. At different moments, the tsunami functioned as a humanitarian emergency, a development opportunity, a political resource, a security concern, a commemorative object, and a fading public memory. Its significance did not simply persist or disappear. It was continuously displaced, eclipsed, reactivated, and reconfigured.

The question, therefore, is not only when a disaster begins or ends. It is how the significance of disasters is displaced, eclipsed, reactivated, and reconfigured over time. Revisiting the Sri Lankan tsunami twenty years later, I argue that the temporality of catastrophe cannot be understood solely through analyses of root causes and long-term aftermaths. It must also be approached through the shifting conditions that allow disasters to remain, cease to be, or become once again objects of public and political significance.