And now for something completely different. In 2005, I had the honour to publish the book „The Nicobars Islands. Cultural Choices in the Aftermath of the Tsunami“ by my friend Simron Jit Singh, then a scholar at the Institute of Social Ecology Vienna. Simron is an Indian anthropologist who’s work on the Nicobar Islands proved to tremendously exceed the enormous scientific value of the publication in itself as it became the reference book for that part of the population of the Nicobar Islands who had survived the apocalyptic Tsunami of Christmas 2004. With this book the survivors were at least partly enabled to re-establish their culture in spiritual and material terms. At the same time the population had to struggle with a second aftermath, that of aid organizations, bureaucracy, and the general onslaught of „civilisation“. In 2014, Raphael Barth presented his film „Aftermath-The second flood“ re-telling these events and processes. The screening of this film next week at the Boku Kino will be followed by a panel discussion, among others yours truly participating, hosted by the formidable Verena Winiwarter and organized by BOKU – Universität für Bodenkultur Wien, Boku Kino, and Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The book was published by Czernin Verlag and should still be in stock. The foreword can be found here. Do come.

Edit 19|10|08: The research project on the negative impact of disaster aid was conducted by Marina Fischer-Kowalski (Institute of Social Ecology) and her team, and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). For more see abstract