Standing in the Need
Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home after Katrina
In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.
"This is a book we must read in our book groups, university courses, city halls, and centers of bureaucracy. It should be the entrance exam for employment at FEMA.”
—Mindy Fullilove, MD and Professor, Columbia University
—Mindy Fullilove, MD and Professor, Columbia University
“A stunning ethnography".
—Carol Stack, PhD, author of All Our Kin and Call to Home
—Carol Stack, PhD, author of All Our Kin and Call to Home
“Browne imparts to us all what we have so blithely neglected. With uncommon discernment she shows how culture, history, language, customs, rituals, and especially kinship, so often ignored, are key factors in recovery and when they are disregarded, create far worse devastation for survivors.”
—Dr. Susanna Hoffman, disaster anthropologist and director, Hoffman Consulting
—Dr. Susanna Hoffman, disaster anthropologist and director, Hoffman Consulting
“ . . a shining example of anthropology at its most revealing…a beautifully written, compelling and insightful ethnography.”
—Natural Hazards Observer
—Natural Hazards Observer