Standing in the Need

Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home After Katrina

Katherine E. Browne

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781477307397
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"The vivid story of one family's ordeal in Hurricane Katrina... offers completely new and highly relevant insights into disaster response." —Susanna Hoffman, disaster anthropologist and director, Hoffman Consulting Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family's experience after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives. In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable. "Standing in the Need delivers an epic story about disaster and the haunting problems imposed by our 'recovery culture.' The lesson in these pages is of urgent concern as the world moves into weather we have never seen before." —Mindy Fullilove, MD, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University "Browne suggests that recovery agencies could reduce suffering and speed healing by learning about the history, culture, and distinctive customs and needs of disaster-impacted communities." — Contemporary Sociology

INDEX

Family and community members are alphabetized by nickname or first name, with family name and given name, if any, in parentheses. Locators followed by f signify illustrations.

AAVE (African American Vernacular English), 92, 213n5. See also black dialect; language; stigmatization

ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), 87–88

affordable housing, 165, 166, 218ch10n6

African Americans: families and culture of during disaster, 5–6; as focus of ethnographic study, 203–204, 207ch1n2; and importance of home church, 217n20; and internal coping mechanisms, 129; and race complicating recovery, 125; and religion, 188; in St. Bernard Parish, 50, 80. See also black culture

Alton (Johnson), 101–102, 155, 174, 175

Anglo-American family structure, 36

Anitra (Moore), xxxf, 152, 199f

anthropologists: and advocacy, 119; and cultural competency mental health guide, 123; on cultural value of food, 40; on culture brokers, 23; and culture shock, 46; interviews of, 204–205; on local decision making, 219n10; on reciprocal relationships, 51; and recognition of post-disaster cultural divides, 208n2; as source of cultural knowledge, xi–xii, 194–195; tasks of, 30

anxiety. See culture shock

Arabi, 158, 159

Army Corps of Engineers, 17, 18, 207n10, 208n19, 210ch4n6. See also canals; levees

Audrey (Brown), 9f; as Buffy’s aunt, 73; and cooking, 34; in Dallas, 26; and daughter Adrian (Adra), 153; and family gatherings at her house, 129; and help with kin mapping, 148–149; and Katrina evacuation, 5, 11; in kin charts, xxf, xxiiif; and kin relationships, 31; on lack of respect from recovery authorities, 96–97; on new Verret church, 136–137; as post-Katrina family gathering place, 128; sixty-fifth birthday of, 190; and Trashell’s wedding celebration, 133; work of, 59

Audrey May (James), xxviif, 26, 33, 42, 48–49, 126

Audrey’s Branch, xxxif

Aurora (James), 138, 153

Baton Rouge, 31, 59, 214n17

bayou culture, 19, 45, 204. See also race relations; St. Bernard Parish

bayou environment, 53f, 128–129, 159–160, 170, 174, 193f. See also BP oil spill

Bayou Road, 30, 66, 211n11

Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, xxvf, 58, 66, 160f, 170, 211n11

Berrigan, Ginger, 165

black churches, 53f, 188, 193f, 217–218n4, 217n20. See also Christian faith; church; religion

black community: and leadership of pastors, 183; and NAACP organizing, 176, 179; and rituals honoring the dead, 185; and rituals h...