ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the embodied experiences of women and men during and in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It explores ethnographic material collected in Thailand’s southernmost western province from December 2004 to March 2005 and on subsequent returns to the field to analyse how people lived the catastrophe through theirs and others’ bodies. The 2004 tsunami put the Global North into a shared vulnerability in a natural disaster rarely envisioned in a technocratic society. A different and more intimate relation between fish and human bodies turned out to impact the aftermath of the tsunami via a tangible fear of unintentional anthropophagy. The chapter considers perspectivistic analyses very significant for reflecting on the endangered definition of subjectivity, objectivity and personhood of the post-tsunami’s potential fish eaters. Gendered bodies as sexually active bodies were mentioned as a remote cause of the tsunami in religious interpretations that attributed the triggering of the disaster to unbridled sexuality and moral corruption.
