Dr. Katherine E. Browne (Colorado State University) will undertake research on how the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is impacting populations who are still recovering from the effects of the 2005 hurricane, Katrina. The epicenters of both these disasters have also occurred in the same New Orleans area of the Gulf Coast, affecting large numbers of the same people. Some of the impacts are indirect and unexpected. For example, contaminated fishing waters are affecting seafood supply which is linked to the maintenance of family networks and the resilience of the very family support systems that proved critical for dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
With this award, Browne will follow-up on field research she conducted on the post-Katrina recovery process of a large kin network of 150 African Americans. Browne's research will advance science in three ways: 1) methodologically, by demonstrating the value of systematic, qualitative interviews with disaster-affected residents to collect data that is otherwise unobtainable; 2) theoretically, by modeling long-term disaster recovery as a volatile, non-linear process, rather than a defined episode or event; and 3) by demonstrating the value of communicating science findings to the public as well as to the scientific community. In addition to scholarly publications, Browne's Katrina research produced a documentary film, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina, which was aired by the Public Broadcasting System across the country.
This research involved the effort to identify secondary, or indirect impacts of the BP Oil Spill on a local community of black residents in St. Bernard Parish, LA. The community of 300 members lives in the lower parish, just minutes from the marshes and wetlands that open into the Gulf of Mexico. This community has depended for generations on cheap, fresh, and accessible seafood from their immediate environment. In the last 50 years, residents in this group have satisfied their demand for seafood through informal economic relationships with local white fishermen. Both groups have deep roots in the area, and both groups are modest income. The PI had already studied the impacts of Katrina on the same community, and was still conducting interviews at the time of the oil spill. She expanded her field of vision and applied her methodological toolkit to include an investigation of how the oil spill impacted everyday reliance on seafood among black residents. The PI further examined whether the weekly gatherings of 60 or more family members became altered because people’s access to cheap seafood had been compromised. Methods of research included dozens of semi-structured and informal interviews with residents, retailers of seafood, and local politicians. In addition, the PI conducted archival research related to the scope and impact of the spill itself, as well as research related to the role of food in culture. The PI conducted all interviews, transcribed the interviews, coded all interviews, and analyzed these data. She produced two peer-reviewed journal articles with support from this grant, and has completed a book manuscript that is under contract with University of Texas Press. The PI’s findings pointed to some unexpected results. First, damage to the everyday supply of food due to the oil spill aroused quick and effective solutions for people who have depended on gulf seafood for generations. These solutions were unsurprising, though it would not have been easy to predict the most common substitute for seafood: turkey necks. Black residents’ ready adaptation to using cheap, alternative foods in the face of seafood shortages and high costs made clear that for this group of bayou residents, adapting their diet was a reasonable solution. The apparent non-issue for residents may be explained by their generations-long capacity for adapting to shifting supplies of small game and seafood based on seasonality and breeding cycles. In addition, the family’s post-Katrina efforts to adapt to new problems never before encountered presented a useful comparative frame of reference. As struggles went, the oil spill appeared to cause them only a low level of inconvenience. However, a second impact sits below the surface of this seemingly straightforward adaptation. Replacing seafood with turkey necks became an important strategy for more than a year, but seafood remained a key part of the diet on special occasions. The continuing demand exposed an invisible effect in the circuitry of economic relationships that had constituted the buying and selling networks of local seafood. Once these relationships could no longer be counted upon because of the oil spill’s impacts on fishing in the local waters of the lower parish, these longstanding exchanges of seafood effectively unraveled a generations-long relational tie of blacks to whites in the lower parish. As seafood became increasingly desired and available from sources outside the parish, black family members were forced to buy seafood from white retailers who did not reside in the lower parish and who were themselves resellers of seafood from less sullied waters in the area. The interactions with these "up the road" retailers re-stimulated blacks’ perception of white racism that had occurred blatantly in the years following Katrina. (Note: as the PI discusses in the book she is completing about this research, whites and blacks in the lower parish have deep roots, whereas whites in the upper parish primarily arrived to escape desegregation laws in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s). For blacks, the indirect effects of the oil spill combined with the accretion of a post-Katrina erosion of blacks’ sense of dignity, belonging, and agency. This "double dunk" of back to back disasters produced a cascade of first-ever impacts on this community. Ultimately, the new feelings of disempowerment led middle-aged family members to seek leverage from a national advocacy group, the NAACP. This research points out the importance of longterm ethnographic methods, and of paying attention to indirect as well as direct effects of external actions. This research also contributes to anthropological theory: unprecedented behaviors of deeply rooted groups may arise from unprecedented attacks to that group's conditions of belonging or exclusion. The experience of stress in one part of group life (such as food supply problems) can produce novel impacts on vulnerabilities that are perceived as new, and in turn, produce their own material effects that are real.
