In recent years the popularity in policy-making of resilience – as the capacity of individuals and communities to adapt, transform or re-organise themselves and eventually recover and carry on in the context of sudden change – has known a renewed enthusiasm. Governmental, non-governmental and private organisations alike, inspired by risk management and preparedness frameworks, have seen in people’s capacity to endure and persevere a way to deal with today’s multiple ‘crises’ (i.e. economic, ecological, humanitarian, health-related, conflict-related, etc.) and the uncertainties they bring. In this way, many organisations have emphasised the necessity for individuals and communities to be more resilient, and designed policies to strengthen and measure resilience performance.
This situation raises questions about local perceptions of resilience and social encounters with resilience narratives and policies. It is also timely to reassess the value of the concept for anthropological theory. Indeed, resilience has been previously considered with ambivalence; it has been being described as, for instance, a-historical, decontextualising, obscuring power relations, promoting the reproduction of the status quo and legitimising existing inequalities, as well as being linked to neoliberal and colonial thinking.
This panel therefore aims to explore critically whether resilience in cross-cultural contexts withstands examination. We welcome empirically grounded and theoretically informed papers addressing in particular, but not exclusively, the following questions:
- What are local definitions of resilience?
- Are there vernacular notions that are comparable to the notion of resilience, and how are they defined?
- What are the temporalities of resilience? How long can resilience be sustained?
- Are there instances in which resilience is used to drive change?
- How do local perceptions of resilience fit with policy definitions?
- Are resilience narratives and policies contested by individuals and communities, and how?
- What happens in the interaction between indigenous and policy definitions? Are new practices and subjectivities created? Which ones?
