ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a dialogue regarding two objects of anthropological research: disasters and epidemics. Disasters and epidemics shatter the taken-for-grantedness of the everyday; that is, the ordinary, self-evident ways in which people live in the world and interact with the human, nonhuman, material, and abstract. At the same time, scholars have stressed the multiple uncertainties and wide range of effects that emerge in disasters and epidemics. In post-disaster and post-conflict assistance and recovery, medical anthropologists similarly draw on narratives as reflections of political and bureaucratic processes through which humanitarian, government, and other agencies ferret out what they categorize as worthy or truthful. While dramaturgic and narrative structures have proved particularly helpful for analyzing epidemics, medical anthropologists introduced a third heuristic, the social construction of temporality, into the study of disaster and recovery. Time and narrative also figure in the production of epidemiological knowledge.
