Page 51 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

20 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

of people that had formed, watching dumbfounded, until a wild-eyed man
made his way toward the small group that had formed. He told us, mania-
cally, that he had seen people flinging themselves from burning buildings.
“They were falling to the ground in flames,” he said.
Thinking him a raving lunatic, I continued on to my Hindi class at New
York University. Class, of course, had been cancelled. As the dutiful and
zealous new graduate student—and at a loss for what else I might do—I
wandered into NYU’s Bobst Library, which was deserted save for some
befuddled-looking staff. It was then I realized my day was not going to be
completely normal, as the initial shock dissipated enough for the enormity
of what was happening to sink in a little bit.

Anthropology, Culture, and Disaster

A year later, I began working for the Nathan Kline Institute on a project
for the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, studying the
role of clergy in disaster mental health response. As an anthropologist, I
have tried to understand the different interpretive frameworks employed
by those with whom I have been working, and often how these different
frameworks are connected to very real histories. I have also tried to under-
stand how abstract ideas, scientific and medical discourses are employed
in real-life settings. Do disaster caregivers—clergy and mental health
professionals—distinguish between religious suffering and mental health
suffering? Where are the lines and are they as clear as some would like us
to believe? These are at once theoretical and pragmatic questions that, in
the midst of disaster, demand quick action.
I offer that it is crucial to step back from the maelstrom of disaster work
and understand that what we are wrestling with today is part of complex
history and cultural context. By understanding the history and cultural
particularity of what we are confronting, we stand a better chance of main-
taining an open stance, learning from experience, and creating collabora-
tion between spiritual care and mental health orientations. Anthropologists
engage in participant observation, or what is often called “an ethnographic
approach.” We spend our days watching and talking to people, where over the
course of time, we try to understand the way different groups perceive their
“local worlds” (Kleinman & Benson, 2006). The hallmark of ethnography
is the attempt to see things from the perspective of the “native.” This native
might be a FEMA worker, a spiritual care provider, mental health provider,
or any one of a number of others commonly involved in disaster response.