Doctoral Dissertation Research: Obligation and Relationality in the Wake of Critical Events

Critical events can catalyze new forms of social relations or anchor new modes of collective life. Critical events (major occurrences, such as natural disasters, conflict, or economic crises that redefine social categories) have typically been explored in the aftermath of isolated incidents. This doctoral dissertation project investigates how people’s sense of obligation to others comes to be defined, experienced, and materialized in the context of multiple critical events that accrue over time. Existing research on obligation focuses on reciprocity and exchange and tends to paint a linear account of how solicitations of obligations form and bind people to one another. This dissertation research will instead attend to the tangled processes through which people’s sense of obligation to others is brought into relief and called into question in the wake of layered critical events. In addition to supporting the training of a doctoral student, the findings from this project will be shared with academic audiences as well as humanitarian and cultural non-governmental organizations. The project traces different modes of response, including assistance and documentation, that people draw on to respond to layers of critical events. This multi-sited ethnography will encompass members of different generations and residents of different locales, and will deploy a combination of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and oral life history interviews to explore the factors that guide people’s responses to events, how sociality and community boundaries become (re)configured as a result of these responses, and how meanings of critical events change as they accrue over time. In doing so, this broadens the spatial and temporal scope of the anthropological study of obligation and contributes to social science by better understanding the processes and forces through which boundaries of community are made and remade. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.