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Copyright by Raja Harish Swamy 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Raja Harish Swamy Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: DISASTER CAPITALISM: TSUNAMI RECONSTRUCTION AND NEOLIBERALISM IN NAGAPATTINAM, SOUTH INDIA Committee: Charles Hale, Supervisor James Brow Kamran Asdar Ali Kaushik Ghosh Maarten Bavinck DISASTER CAPITALISM: TSUNAMI RECONSTRUCTION AND NEOLIBERALISM IN NAGAPATTINAM, SOUTH INDIA by Raja Harish Swamy, B.S.; M.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Dedication I dedicate this work to my mother and father Jayalakshmi and K.H. Yegnaswamy, and to my children Azad, Amar and Meena. Acknowledgements This dissertation was supported by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation. As in any act of writing, multiple individuals contributed and shaped the finished product in innumerable ways. While I wish to acknowledge and thank them all for their invaluable contributions, I also would like to point out that I take sole ownership of any flaws or deficiencies. I would first like to thank my advisor Charlie Hale for guiding me through this project from the early conceptual stages. The clarity that his many strategic interventions brought to my questions, helped shape some of the most critical components of this dissertation. This dissertation would not have been possible without the invaluable advice, guidance and friendship of Kamran Ali. At various stages his challenging engagements encouraged and inspired me to critically rethink ideas and assumptions. To Kaushik Ghosh I am grateful for reminding me about the important things in life, and for reminding me to keep at it even when things seem dismal. His combination of intellectual force and the ability to engage with the most complex ideas often in the most radically mundane ways, makes him an invaluable teacher and friend. I would like to thank James Brow and Maarten Bavinck for their critical engagements with drafts of this dissertation, as they helped sharpen my understanding and refine my arguments. Graduate school would not have been the same were it not for the incredible faculty who made it worthwhile at UT. I would especially like to thank Kamala Visweswaran, Harry Cleaver, Sharmila Rudrappa, Doug Foley, Jose Limon, Richard v Flores, Itty Abraham, and Snehal Shingavi for enabling me to partake in the rich intellectual engagements they facilitated as teachers. Many other teachers and guides helped shape the present work in a variety of ways. I thank the indefatigable Biju Mathew for constantly reminding me by example that the point of describing anything is to do so in ways that point to its resolution. The support, friendship, advice and exemplary work of Girish Agrawal, Shalini Gera, Ra Ravishankar, Mir Ali Hussein, Balamurli Natarajan, Usha Zacharias, and Ashwini Rao helped anchor and guide my academic interests, and taught me how to temper my expectations of academia even while drawing upon and nurturing its progressive premises and promises. Many individuals in Nagapattinam were incredibly generous with their time and effort, and patient with my questions and interference in their everyday lives. For opening my eyes to the complexities and challenges facing fishers, Dalits, women, children, working class people in all walks of life, I must thank particularly Revathi Radhakrishnan, Senthil Babu, Mathivanan, Kavitha Muralidharan, and Usha. I thank the courageous teachers, staff and students at Vanavil school, especially Chitra, Jeeva, Balraj and Sarathy, for their friendship and hospitality, and for many wonderful conversations as we often waited for electricity to return. I am indebted to Kumaravelu for all his assistance, guidance and support for my research in Nagapattinam and Karaikal. I thank Jesuratnam, director of SNEHA, as well as the staff of SNEHA for their patience and generosity. Rajendran, Vanaja, Sankar, staff at the SNEHA library, Indrani, Bhumati, research assistants Tamilarasi and Ravanan, and vi many others provided valuable help in helping understand the complex challenges facing fishers as they confronted relocation. I am especially grateful to Masilamani and Punita, Kuppuraj, Ratnavel, Thyaagu, Pandaribai, Pavunammal, Kalaimani, Senthil, Panchayatar Rajendran, and many others who welcomed me into their homes innumerable times as they also sought to understand what I was doing there. A special note of thanks goes out to my friend Sudarshan Rodriguez, whose research skills and commitment to the defense of coastal communities, combined with his penchant for riding a motorcycle on the beach made fieldwork in Nagai a memorable experience. I am indebted to both Sudarshan and Aarthi Sridhar for helping me make sense of coastal regulation. I will never forget those hilarious moments in Kodiakarai when the forest officer began lecturing us on how to read a map when we requested to see the department’s records. As a graduate student there were perhaps no better moments than those that involved laughing, talking, and of course engaging in interminable debates with colleagues and friends. I would especially like to thank my good friend Omer Ozcan for those innumerable occasions staying up reading Benjamin or listening to another entertaining salvo by Slavoj Zizek in between Kurdish and Tamil music videos. In this regard I also thank Noman Baig, who taught me that profound phenomenological explorations are always more interesting with good home cooked food. Among many wonderful colleagues and friends I would like to especially thank Mubbashir Rizvi, Alia Hasan Khan, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Mohan Ambikaipaker, Briana Mohan, Hisyar Ozsoy, Ruken Sengul, Can Aciksoz, Halide Velioglu, Kenneth Macleish, Alex Chavez, vii Damien Schnyder, Santiago Guerra, Jodi Skipper, Nick Copleland, Diya Mehra, Indulata Prasad, Tathagatan Ravindran, Jogendro Kshetrimayum, Hafeez Jamali, and Abdul Haq Chang for their friendship and support over the years. To Nikki Martere, Luciane Rocha, Jaime Alves, Claudia Chavez, Elizabeth Velasquez, Sarah Ihmoud, and numerous friends who I may have forgotten to add, thanks for making graduate work so rewarding, and for the warmth and friendship over the years. I am particularly thankful to the Anthropology Graduate Students Association for continuing to defend education against the ravages of budget cuts and neoliberal restructuring in the university, and for connecting our individual and collective concerns with power and resistance to the concrete domain of the university and the department. To my parents I thank you for everything, and hope you find in this work some evidence of time well spent. To the three who make me smile at least three times every morning, Azad, Amar and Meena, thank you for your patience and understanding and I hope you will soon open this dissertation and scribble all over it. I also wish to thank Tiriza Saziru for her patience and understanding all these years. Last but not the least, I salute the incredible courage, determination and fortitude of Nagapattinam’s fishers, who in the face of the immense tragedy of the tsunami and the ignominious efforts of the state to dislocate them continue to ensure that it is they who define and defend the coast. viii Disaster capitalism: Tsunami reconstruction and neoliberalism in Nagapattinam, South India Raja Harish Swamy, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Charles Hale This dissertation examines the impacts of the tsunami of 2004 on economic development priorities in Nagapattinam, South India. By focusing on the manner in which the disaster was cast as an opportunity by the state and multilateral agencies, the unprecedented scale and ambiguous character of involvement by NGOs in reconstruction, and the distinction drawn between economic development and humanitarian aid in the constitution of a reconstruction agenda predicated on the relocation of artisanal fisher communities from the coast, this study demonstrates how post-disaster outcomes are increasingly being shaped by priorities tied to neoliberal globalization. At the same time the processes that unfold are also characterized by significant complexities particularly on account of efforts by affected populations to deploy various strategies to defend their interests, and substantive differences in the approach of NGOs. ix Table of Contents ! List of Tables ....................................................................................................... xvi! List of Figures ..................................................................................................... xvii! Introduction ..............................................................................................................1! Disaster as opportunity ...................................................................................5! 'Building back better' in Nagapattinam ...........................................................8! Disaster Capitalism .......................................................................................11! Theoretical orientations ................................................................................18! Neoliberalism: accumulation and expansion .......................................21! Security and the state of exception ......................................................25! The production of consent ...................................................................29!