ABSTRACT
Investigation of community resilience in the wake of disaster is clearly the empirical focus of this book. But this book attempts to do more than offer analysis of post-Katrina recovery. The post-disaster context gives us a window into the nature of the social order itself. A catastrophic disaster such as Hurricane Katrina and the flood that followed disables, at least temporarily, the social systems that make ordinary existence in a contemporary society possible. Not only are markets and the operations of government disrupted, the social fabric of civil society is torn apart, particularly in the context of large-scale evacuation and abrupt dislocation. If we understand how it is that communities rebound (or fail to rebound) in the wake of disaster, we are in a better position to understand how societies succeed in obtaining complex social coordination and cooperation more generally. In other words, we understand better the phenomenon known as “social learning.” Below I situate within the relevant literature the discussion of social learning as it pertains to market discovery and make the case for investigating processes of social learning in non-market contexts as well. I argue further that in order to carry out this line of inquiry, the development of an intellectual program on cultural economy is in order to complement more traditional political economy investigations, and I describe the basic framework that would comprise such a research program.
