"Tell Them We're Hurting": Hurricane Andrew, the Culture of Response, and the Fishing Peoples of South Florida and Louisiana

DISASTERS ARE EVENTS THAT CAN SEVERELY DISRUPT THE IMMEDIATE BIOphysical and social environments of human communities, threatening the ability of impacted cultural systems to adapt and survive (Fritz 1961; Barton 1969; Dyer forthcoming; Oliver-Smith 1996). As such, disasters provide opportunities to understand responses of individuals, communities, and institutions in crisis, allowing anthropologists to penetrate the core of culture systems, as people recover, restore, and reinvent themselves in the post-disaster environment. Also revealed by disaster is the influence of the political ecology on response, in ways that can determine when, where, and how much aid might be directed at a particular area, population, subculture, or minority group.