Papers by Alicia Sliwinski
Le concept de globalisation désigne l'interconnexion et l'interdépendance accrues de tout... more Le concept de globalisation désigne l'interconnexion et l'interdépendance accrues de toute une gamme de relations sociales à l'échelle planétaire recouvrant d'importantes dimensions politiques, économiques, culturelles, environnementales et subjectives. Depuis les années 1980, la globalisation est devenue un discours dominant pour décrire la mise en place d'une nouvelle condition planétaire. Si nul ne nie que la globalisation soit un processus, la période historique qu'elle est censée marquer a fait l'objet de maints débats, aussi bien en anthropologie que dans les autres sciences sociales. Pour certains, la globalisation prend son essor au 19ème siècle avec les bouleversements liés au colonialisme, les avancées technologiques en matière de transport et de communication et l'expansion sans précédent des échanges commerciaux. Pour d'autres, la globalisation réalise la consolidation d'un système capitalisme mondial ou d'une « économie-monde ...
Participatory methodologies are regularly used by NGO’s in post-disaster housing reconstruction p... more Participatory methodologies are regularly used by NGO’s in post-disaster housing reconstruction projects addressed to poor victims of rural origin, especially in the developing world. One rationale behind the choice of such methodologies is that they are supposed to encourage people’s appropriation of project objectives. A corollary aspect refers to the communitarian ideal. In other words, the active participation of beneficiaries – often as manual labour – is believed to enhance a shared sense of community. This presentation addresses these issues as they revealed themselves in a reconstruction project taking place in a Salvadorian municipality after the 2001 earthquakes. The objective is to explain how the success- or failure- of participatory methodologies depends on their appropriateness to the local context, including cultural values and the economical well-being of beneficiaries. This paper will discuss how models that inform the day-to-day practices of a reconstruction projec...
La « vallée des hamacs » est le nom sous lequel on désigne parfois le Salvador, le plus petit pay... more La « vallée des hamacs » est le nom sous lequel on désigne parfois le Salvador, le plus petit pays de l'Amérique centrale où la terre ne cesse de trembler. L'histoire du pays « du Sauveur », telle est la traduction littérale de El Salvador, est marquée par les tremblements de terre qui en font intimement partie. Qui plus est, dès le début de l'occupation coloniale, la capitale de San Salvador a été édifiée dans la zone la plus sismique de toute la région, si bien qu'elle fut souvent détruite, en tout ou en partie, au cours des siècles (vingt-deux fois, dit-on). Les derniers tremblements de terre d'envergure eurent lieu les 13 janvier et février 2001, jour pour jour, causant la mort de plus d'un millier de personnes et la destruction de près de deux cent mille maisons. Parmi les nombreuses municipalités touchées figure celle de Lamaria 1 , une ville de près de vingt-quatre mille habitants sise dans le département de Sonsonate à quarante kilomètres à l'oues...
History and Anthropology
ABSTRACT This paper considers hope and utopia as value-making processes and their relation to spa... more ABSTRACT This paper considers hope and utopia as value-making processes and their relation to space. It examines two localities built for homeless families and elderly individuals in post-disaster El Salvador during the early 2000s, and explores what these spaces say about their makers’ hopes for better futures. Drawing on recent works in the field of utopian studies that adopt a materialist view on utopia as an imperfect contingent process, this paper explores whether the notion of everyday utopia is helpful in order to appreciate the actualization of these spaces. It argues that anthropological scholarship on value and ordinary ethics can be a productive framework to study the pathways between hope, utopianism, and space.
Other refereed and awarded contributions (R): co-author in the publication of multidisciplinary r... more Other refereed and awarded contributions (R): co-author in the publication of multidisciplinary research involving various case studies and/or tests (active participation in writing, editing and in fieldwork research). In all articles at least one case study corresponds to Gonzalo Lizarralde's research.
There is a common consensus about the importance of community involvement in post-disaster projec... more There is a common consensus about the importance of community involvement in post-disaster projects. However, there is often less clarity on what type of participation is most advantageous and how a ‘community’ is defined. A case history in El Salvador illustrates the importance of matching participation to the expectations of the beneficiaries.
Habitat International, 2007
It has been widely accepted by policy makers and commentators, funding bodies and NGOs that the k... more It has been widely accepted by policy makers and commentators, funding bodies and NGOs that the key to performance in low-cost housing projects in developing countries lies in community participation. This paper proposes that this premise (extensively discussed in the theory and emphasized in grant applications) is not clearly reflected in the realities of reconstruction practice. In fact, there are many ways in which users/beneficiaries can participate in post-disaster reconstruction projects but not all types of participation ensure the best deployment of their capabilities. The systems approach shows that there is a continuum of possibilities for participation; at one extreme, users are involved in the projects only as the labour force, whereas at the other, they play an active role in decision-making and project management. Four case studies of post-disaster housing reconstruction projects (one each in Colombia and in El Salvador, and two in Turkey) illustrate this continuum. A comparative analysis of the organisational designs of these projects highlights the different ways in which users can be and were involved. We show the impact of the different approaches to the ''where'', the ''when'' and the ''how'', regarding incorporating the users into the organisational and technical design processes. This study shows that the participation of users in up-front decision-making (within the project design and planning phases, including the capacity to make meaningful choices among a series of options offered to them) leads to positive results in terms of building process and outcomes. However, despite often-good intentions, this level of participation is rarely obtained and the capabilities of the users are often significantly wasted.
Participatory methodologies are regularly used by NGO’s in post-disaster housing reconstruction p... more Participatory methodologies are regularly used by NGO’s in post-disaster housing reconstruction projects addressed to poor victims of rural origin, especially in the developing world. One rationale behind the choice of such methodologies is that they are supposed to encourage people’s appropriation of project objectives. A corollary aspect refers to the communitarian ideal. In other words, the active participation of beneficiaries – often as manual labour – is believed to enhance a shared sense of community. This presentation addresses these issues as they revealed themselves in a reconstruction project taking place in a Salvadorian municipality after the 2001 earthquakes. The objective is to explain how the success or failure of participatory methodologies depends on their appropriateness to the local context, including cultural values and the economical well-being of beneficiaries. This paper will discuss how models that inform the day-to-day practices of a reconstruction project ...
Anthropologica, 2014
Naomi McPherson and/Alicia SliwinskiAlicia and I welcome you to this issue and to May, the month ... more Naomi McPherson and/Alicia SliwinskiAlicia and I welcome you to this issue and to May, the month of spring flowers after a long winter, and to our annual CASCA meetings where we renew friendships, make new ones and recharge our intellectual batteries. I am so very impressed with the calibre and the variety of research undertaken by anthropologists and this issue is no exception. We are honoured to present our 2013 Weaver-Tremblay Award winner, Prof. Adrian Tanner of Memorial University, who offers us a glimpse into his remarkable record of 50 years research with Indigenous communities in Canada's north. Our thematic section focuses on Queer Studies in anthropology guest edited by Michelle Walks, who re-introduces us to the work accomplished in the anthropology of gender, sex and sexuality to contextualize this current research. These articles explore queer experiences and queer identities in Turkey, Singapore, Vancouver, Toronto and, in a research note, in Thailand. Through thes...
Anthropologica, 2016
Two thematic sections in this issue engage with contemporary theoretical and topical issues. Firs... more Two thematic sections in this issue engage with contemporary theoretical and topical issues. First, Frédéric Laugrand and Robert Crépeau guest-edit a fascinating set of articles on shamanism, a topic long central to anthropological theory and analysis. These articles move us to (re)consider shamanism in contemporary ethnographic contexts of changing cosmologies. From ethnographic research, archived interviews and archival data, Clinton Westman provides new data and interpretations on the wihkohtowin, a key ritual feast of Cree and Métis peoples in northern Alberta. MariePierre Bousquet cautions us that Anicinabek (Algonquin) shamanism cannot be framed as the survival or revitalization of a traditional social institution, since Anicinabek shamanism does not originate in the social realm and thus remains efficacious, even if ‘‘deactivated,’’ for as long as the world exists. Laurent Jérôme focuses on the cosmologies of First Nations people living in urban centres, tracing how the seden...
This paper concerns the tenacity of a binary way of framing post-disaster reconstruction between ... more This paper concerns the tenacity of a binary way of framing post-disaster reconstruction between so-called " phys-icalist " and " social " approaches. As a heuristic device used to contrast initiatives that either ignore the root causes of risk and vulnerability to disaster or that address their complexity and seek to lessen them, it was a popular way of framing reconstruction agendas in El Salvador after two powerful earthquakes hit the country in 2001. It was mainly used to compare the government's neoliberal approach and civil society's more socially inclusive approach. One would think that by now such binaries would be less relevant, especially in light of the new Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. However recent critical readings discuss the persistence of this tension in the Sendai framework. As a way to provide historical depth to this issue, I offer forensic vignettes from El Salvador that show the manner in which this distinction appeared in the discourses of Salvadoran NGO workers involved in post-disaster reconstruction. Revisiting interviews conducted at the time in light of the current challenges about disaster risk
Anthropologica
Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), invites you to submit a... more Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), invites you to submit articles for peer review. We welcome articles in both French and English that engage with any field of sociocultural anthropology, covering a broad range of topics relevant to the dynamics of contemporary life. We welcome articles that are grounded in innovative methodologies, such as visual anthropology, community engaged research, and critical studies of materiality. Submissions should be based on original ethnographic fieldwork in any part of the world.
The question of hope has received renewed attention lately (Harvey 2000, Zournazi 2002), and perh... more The question of hope has received renewed attention lately (Harvey 2000, Zournazi 2002), and perhaps this is indicative of how social scientists seek to establish new pathways of engagement. For some this may appear naive, akin to Utopian wishful thinking. However, the purpose of this article is neither to establish an emancipatory narrative nor to provide a novel theory on the subject. My objectives are more circumscribed, as I explore how a grammar of hope can be pertinent to the anthropological analysis of humanitarian action.For some time now, scholars including anthropologists working on humanitarianism have been unpacking the altruistic underpinnings of this transnational endeavour and in this article I do not suggest that altruism is the dominant trope of the humanitarian system. Indeed, there are numerous books and commentaries that expose the extent to which the humanitarian industry remains ancillary to geostrategic interests (Duffield 2001, Terry 2002), and has been chall...
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
International experiential learning – IEL, has various pedagogical concerns associated with the c... more International experiential learning – IEL, has various pedagogical concerns associated with the colonial and racialized lineage underlying its Global South engagements. Drawing on critical race theory, White privilege and globally engaged learning research as they inform IEL, this case-based study of ‘northern’ participant perceptions of their experiences in a partnership between Habitat for Humanity in El Salvador, and a Canadian university, focuses on a ‘catalytic moment’ in El Salvador. That is, a unique situation arose which prompted participant women of colour – PoC, to share distinct insights and counter-stories from their positions, providing an opening for deeper attention to race for all of the participants, and we believe, for IEL practice more broadly. And in this context, the host partners saw opportunities for IEL participation both North and South, to be strengthened through greater diversity in team-composition and in associated host-community learning and relationsh...
Anthropologie Et Societes, 2007
Anthropologie et Sociétés, 2007
Résumé Cet article porte sur une composante particulière de l’humanitaire, à savoir la reconstruc... more Résumé Cet article porte sur une composante particulière de l’humanitaire, à savoir la reconstruction après les désastres naturels. Il traite, plus spécifiquement, des logiques de la reconstruction au Salvador après deux séismes qui frappèrent le pays en 2001. Il aborde le niveau national et celui d’un projet mené par une grande ONG internationale et destiné à une centaine de familles pauvres et sinistrées. Sise dans l’espace-temps particulier entre l’urgence et le développement, auxquels elle tente de s’articuler, la reconstruction s’amarre aux études sociales sur les désastres qui expliquent combien ils traduisent des conditions de vulnérabilité. La vulnérabilité est devenue un concept opératoire qui structure le champ de la reconstruction dont l’objectif est d’en réduire la portée. Au plan national, la teneur de la reconstruction fit l’objet de tensions politiques fondamentales entre les orientations du gouvernement et le secteur associatif. Ensuite, au sein même d’un projet, les...
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Papers by Alicia Sliwinski
A richly textured, analytically nuanced ethnography, A House of One’s Own is a perceptive firsthand account of what happens on the ground in a post-disaster setting.