Having witnessed the 2015 earthquake and aftershocks in Nepal, Aiden Seale-Feldman has derived her observation, experience, and engagement through a rigorously produced, captivating ethnographic monograph, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care along the Himalayan Fault Line. The book deals primarily with the social life of the cascading disaster vis-à-vis emerging transient mental health care, exploring its various forms, facets, and actors involved in providing care. Following the cataclysmic seismic movement, mental health became a concern for both national and international aid agencies, leading to an unprecedented surge in humanitarian aid projects. The crisis narrative cleared the way for donors and international experts to bring it to the forefront, paving the way for psychic life as its object of intervention (131). These interventions also brought in increasingly biomedical model approaches to intervention, which pose that issues related to mental health can be treated with medicine and counseling (103).
Moving ahead of the general academic enthusiasm for the consequences of disaster, this book engages with the earthquake that interrupted the normal course of survival, gazing at what it generates as well as elevating the analytical strength of the author reflected here. Seale-Feldman substantiates her claims through ethnography of the post-earthquake recovery process in Kathmandu NGO offices, sloped hills, trails, psychosocial interventions, and the affected settlements. In Nepal’s gendered and caste segregated society, and sixty-plus years of foreign aid development, the author presents her fieldwork reflexively through the lens of a white, foreign, young, female in this post-disaster environment. Analyzed through a phenomenological perspective, the book portrays the function of the tremor and responsive human efforts in a typical material and historical context amid the prevailing ethnic and cultural diversity, highlighting the embodied experience of how suffering gets into the limelight.
The book adequately covers the topic in question and helpfully clarifies and engages new theories whenever they are introduced in the text. The book’s use of Nepali and local terms is rich in ethnographic flavor but may prove troublesome for readers with none or limited fluency to keep track of this constellation of terms. However, the book’s detailed depictions of what the seismic rupture dismantled and what it created allows readers to experience the movement of people, power, aid, intervention, and generosity in post-disaster Nepal.
The critical phenomenological approach allows the author to consider how rift and replenish are conceptualized in typical times and places, but also the way “materiality of a disaster becomes embodied, shaping ways of being, feeling, thinking, and caring for others” (21), where care is not only socially constructed but also deeply influenced by geography. After the earthquake, there was an unprecedented flow of resources into Nepal’s mental health sector, mainly for and among NGOs. The author is skeptical of this mainly because such a hike and a particular direction of mental health governance in Nepal came with the discursive construction of a “crisis” and adopted the WHO’s “building back better” (25) framework. In this way, chapter 1, “Crisis,” deals with how the future of Nepal’s mental health could unfold from a biomedical perspective. The narrative of Nepali people’s illustrative resilience in times of crisis to portray rural Nepali served to euphemize their choice less patience to wait by covering up the inability of the government to timely address the people’s needs (30). Chapter 2, “Loss,” describes the multiple understandings of loss and how it shapes the course of potential repair following the destruction. Chapter 3, “Solidarity,” underscores how the shared vulnerability to risk in Himalayan disaster zones furnished a conducive backdrop for solidarity in what can usually appear as a hierarchical model of humanitarian care. Leaving behind academic traditions that confine geographical terrains and barriers as harming care seekers, the book argues for accommodating them within the notion of embodied caregiving. Moreover, the mutual recognition of the embodied experience of toil to reach the clients added value to the therapeutic work for the counselors and their clients. The materiality of nature and environment construed the typical form of counseling.
In chapter 4, “Efficacy,” the monograph explains the implications of the effort to build better, which overlooked the chronic problems (such as poverty, domestic abuse, ghosts and spirits, risks of migration, and unrelenting psychic afflictions) that predated the earthquake, paving the way for biomedicalization and seeking solutions to social problems within the sphere of medicine. Therefore, this chapter highlights the limitation of humanitarian comprehensions of efficacy “bound to predefined temporalities of crisis and imaginaries of victimhood” (89). Chapter 5, “Care,” examines the incongruity of humanitarian interventions in the context of chronic suffering, depicting how short-term therapeutic encounters both bear the violence of transient care and, at the same time, open ephemeral yet telling possibilities for kindness, hope, and alternative futures. When victimhood in a time of crisis becomes a donor-driven prerequisite to access care (112), the subjects are reduced to unidimensional creatures to meet the eligibility requirements.
The strength of the book is reflected in the overall presentation, methodological rigor, and clarity, which are in harmony with the book’s theoretical perspective and arguments presented throughout all seven chapters. The title does justice to its ingredients. The book has not constrained itself as either a polemic division between considering mental health care as a form of medical imperialism that eliminates local care practices or viewing access to psychiatry and counseling as a human right. Rather, it sought to present a balanced view by showing what happens when mental health becomes a momentary object of attention post-disaster and the consequences of transient care (137).
The Work of Disaster will be of interest to scholars in anthropology and from different domains of the social sciences dealing with mental health and healing. Equally, it is worthy of consideration for the people and institutions involved in humanitarian aid in general and psychosocial counseling in particular, as it shows exemplary pathways and “ethical caution while handling mental health concerns in crisis situations” (120) as they often have to balance the donor requirements and address the mental health issues at hand. The author has aptly shown that the humanitarian psychosocial interventions in post-disaster Nepal often do not function as sites of therapeutic governance, and instead, they turn up as sites of geophilosophy, where they allow people to critically reflect on the meaning of existence, world, and loss amid the realization of their impermanence.