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Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters

March 2015, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp 1-16.

Religious Actors in Disaster Relief: An Introduction

Robin Bush

Research Triangle International, Indonesia

Ratu Plaza Office Tower, 25th Floor

Jl. Jend. Sudirman 9

Jakarta 10270

Indonesia

Tel: +62 21 722 7961

Email: robinlbush@gmail.com

Philip Fountain

Asia Research Institute

National University of Singapore

NUS Bukit Timah Campus

469A Tower Block #10-01

Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259770

Tel: +65 65166124

Email: aripmf@nus.edu.sg

and

R. Michael Feener

Asia Research Institute

National University of Singapore

NUS Bukit Timah Campus

469A Tower Block #10-01

Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259770

Tel: +65 65164213

Email: arifm@nus.edu.sg

The neglected intersection between religion and disaster relief should be given much

greater attention. This emerging field is an intellectually compelling area for study,

though much work stills needs to be done to explore the processes that take place on

the ground in different settings. It is also important for practitioners and policy

makers involved in disaster response to have a nuanced understanding of the work

that religious actors undertake. This special issue begins with an interview with

representatives of prominent humanitarian organizations, all of whom call for greater

Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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attention to the work of religious actors in disaster relief. The following case studies

provide a textured empirical analysis of religious responses to disasters in

contemporary Asia. By attending to particular contexts it is shown that religious

actors can and do play important yet complex roles in relief processes. This special

issue – edited by Philip Fountain, Robin Bush, and R. Michael Feener – aims to

critically examine these diverse intersections and also help set future research

agendas on the subject.

Keywords: Religion, religious actors, disaster relief, Asia, humanitarianism

After years of neglect within scholarly research and wider humanitarian and

disaster relief discourses, religious actors have recently begun to gain greater attention

(Barnett and Stein 2012a).1 This special issue builds upon this emerging interest with

detailed case studies of the disaster relief work of religious actors in a number of

specific contexts in the Asian region. The central premise of the special issue is that it

is no longer possible—ethically, practically and intellectually—to ignore the

important work of religious actors in responding to disasters. Disaster researchers and

humanitarians of all stripes need to pay careful attention to the wide range of local,

transnational, state and informal actors involved in relief processes. Such attention

should include detailed, basic research into a wide array of religious traditions and

institutions. This is not to suggest that religious actors are necessarily somehow better,

more compassionate, or more effective than their secular counterparts, nor the

opposite, that religion might somehow be inherently more coercive or inspiring of

division and violence than non-religious formations. As one critical religion scholar

has argued, these simplistic tropes—which he glosses as the “angel in the house” and

the “irrational maniac” respectively, and which he argues permeate discourses on

religion in ‘the west’—suffer from a chronic lack of explanatory power (Fitzgerald

2011, pp. 78–79).2 Our goal here is to go beyond such unhelpful dichotomies to

provide textured, contextual accounts of the differing roles that religious actors

actually play in disaster relief processes. We propose that such studies are vital and

necessary, regardless of whether the activities are interpreted as positive, negative or,

somewhere in-between.

In exploring this topic we draw on Tierney and Oliver-Smith’s (2012) recent

incisive introduction to the theory of disaster recovery. Tierney and Oliver-Smith

acknowledge that attention to social, as opposed to purely physical, elements of

recovery and resilience is now well-researched, but they argue that there are still a

few important gaps in our understanding of how societies recover from disaster. Two

of these in particular provide entry points for the papers in this special issue. First,

Tierney and Oliver-Smith highlight the ongoing lack of emphasis on ‘broader societal

and global change processes that affect recovery’. This opens a window of enquiry for

us to explore how religious traditions and ‘spiritualities’3 operate as important drivers

of societal change and to explore various facets of how religious social change

informs disaster and emergency relief. Second, they also note the ongoing US-centric

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nature of existing disaster research and propose that a broader geography should be

taken into account. We agree, and it is for this reason that all the papers in this special

issue focus on Asia.

We argue that the cartographical (US-centric) bias that Tierney and Oliver-Smith

highlight has affected research agendas in regard to religion and relief. For, while

actors affiliated with various Christian and other religious traditions have long been

active in relief processes in the US (Santos 2009; Wiebe 1976)4, these have often

either been overshadowed by vast centralized state governance and disaster

management structures or else marginalized on account of legal and ideological

imperatives that inscribe and police church-state separations. The papers in this

special issue foreground the findings of empirical research on contemporary Asia

where neither of these features can be taken for granted. While we avoid the

orientalist assumption of Asia’s inherent religiosity vis-à-vis the secular West (van

der Veer 2001), it is nevertheless clear that, in many if not most disaster contexts

around the Asian region, religious actors of a wide range of types and orientations are

at the forefront of relief processes.

Our focus on Asia is also due to the fact that the region has witnessed some of the

worst ‘natural’5 disasters in recent history. Consider the following, altogether too

brief, list of disasters during the past decade alone: the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake

and tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Cyclone Sidr which struck the

Bangladesh coastline in November 2007, Cyclone Nargis which in 2008 crashed into

Myanmar, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Pakistan floods of 2010, the 2011

Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the major Thailand floods of 2011. Even stating

these in this way threatens to obscure from view the numerous other disasters, both

large and small, that have impacted the region. Yet this list does illustrate the sheer

propensity for disasters across large swathes of the region. The pertinence of disaster

research in Asia was acutely felt by the editors during the writing of this introduction,

as we read and watched media and humanitarian reports of the devastation wrought in

the Philippines by Super Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Typhoon Yolanda) in

November 2013—among the strongest typhoons ever on record.

Asia’s susceptibility to disasters is due to a complicated mix of factors. Frequent

hazard events across the region are clearly part of the problem. The region includes

some of the most active tectonic movements and geothermal activity of anywhere in

the globe, such that earthquakes, tsunami, and volcanic activity are, geologically

speaking, very frequent. Extreme weather events including typhoons/cyclones,

droughts, torrential rain and floods are, in many parts of the region, seasonal rather

than irregular or abnormal. Such events appear to be increasing in frequency and

severity due to effects from global climate change (Coumou and Rahmstorf 2012;

IPCC 2012; Mirza 2003; Trenberth 2012). But Asia’s disasters are also connected to

significant, if highly uneven, poverty that informs a population’s vulnerability and

resilience, as well as the governance, architectural, economic, and social structures

that help shape preparedness and response. Indeed, as the comment about the impact

of climate change suggests, even ‘natural’ hazards may be influenced by

Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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anthropogenic activity. Disasters are political and social matters as much as anything

else.

The argument that disasters should not be approached solely as ‘natural’ problems

that can be solved or prevented by purely technical solutions involving engineering

and technology is hardly new. As far back as the turn of the twentieth century,

American missionaries and development workers in China argued that famine and

underdevelopment was a result of political and economic governance problems rather

than nature alone (Ekbladh 2010, p. 28). More recently, disaster studies and related

fields such as urban political ecology have argued that incentive structures,

governance, and vested interests on the part of elites are all vital elements of

understanding how disasters affect different populations differently, why certain

technical solutions have or have not been adopted, and the necessity for considering

the social and political dimensions of responses (Collins 2010; Keefer 2009; Keil

2003). What has been almost completely unaddressed in this literature is the scope for

religious actors to play political roles in leveraging resources for disaster response, or

for advocacy for disaster prevention and mitigation efforts. Religious actors across

much of Asia have considerable social, cultural, and political capital, as well as

extensive experience navigating bureaucracies as they are often embedded deep

within them. The political dimension of the engagement of religious actors in disaster

response is a theme that is woven through many of the articles in this special issue.

Of course, the perspective that disasters are necessarily due solely to natural or

human causes would seem to many disaster victims as too restrictive an interpretive

framework. Theological or doctrinal interpretations of disasters remain important

elements in disaster responses in large parts of the globe, helping shape relief efforts

as well as preparedness and mitigation. For example, Fountain and colleagues (2004)

analyze the epistemic conflict that took place over ascribing the causes of 1998 Aitape

tsunami disaster in Papua New Guinea, which included disagreements between

anthropogenic (in this case, a political interpretation involving speculation about the

intentional use of underwater explosives) and natural explanations as well as

theological understandings. Theological/doctrinal interpretations of disaster events

continue to be articulated across the Asian region and beyond (Chester 2005; Feener

2013; McGregor 2010; McLaughlin 2013; Merli 2010; Schlehe 1996, 2010; Schmuck

2000), rejecting or recalibrating secular frameworks that have come to dominate

Western scholarship and governance structures (cf. Huet 2012). Such interpretive

frameworks, as Aijazi and Panjwani argue in their contribution to this special issue,

have important implications for disaster response.

The frequency of disasters in the Philippines, and this can certainly be

extrapolated, has prompted environmental historian Greg Bankoff (2003) to suggest it

is possible to trace the contours of what he provocatively calls a ‘culture of disaster’.

That is, Filipino society has been so impacted by disaster events that the cultural and

political formations now present in the archipelago have been, in significant part,

formed by and through disasters. We argue that this can be extended to include

attention to the theological/doctrinal and other religious formations that have arisen

throughout the region in response to disastrous events. Across Asia one can observe

Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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what might be called ‘religions of disaster’ (Fountain and McLaughlin, forthcoming).

This includes the disaster relief activities undertaken both formally and informally by

religious actors. Often based on deep roots—though increasingly adopting modern

forms as is apparent in the widespread NGO-ization of religious institutions (Brouwer

2010; Choudry and Kapoor 2013; Huang 2009)—such networks and organizations are

significant players in humanitarian operations and disaster relief across contemporary

Asia and further afield (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2009; Bornstein 2012; Fiddian-

Qasmiyeh 2011; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Ager 2013; Kawanami and Samuel 2013;

Smith 2011). Tierney and Oliver-Smith (2012, p. 132) themselves note that religious

institutions may “supplement” formal bureaucracies, “or even act as alternative

conduits for disaster response and recovery services”.

It is tempting to suggest that the recent prominence of religious actors within

disaster relief processes constitutes some kind of ‘global resurgence’ (cf. Thomas

2005). However, given the difficulty in empirically establishing such a shift it may be

best to describe the current juncture as involving what theologian Graham Ward

(2009) calls a ‘new visibility’ of religion. Indeed, the renewed attention that religious

actors are currently receiving may be primarily due to the changing intellectual spaces

within academia, and related forums, for critical reflection on religion and secularity.

Certainly, there has been a remarkable “surge of interest” (Hovland 2008) in the

broader field of ‘religion and development’ within the past decade,6 as well as

growing interest in religion and humanitarianism (Barnett 2011; Barnett and Stein

2012b; Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2009; Tusan 2012; Bornstein 2012).7 Similarly,

new attention is being paid also to ‘religious NGOs’ (Bornstein 2003; Fountain 2011;

Hefferan 2007; Occhipinti 2005; Petersen 2011) as well as to the theological

genealogies undergirding even apparently non-religious humanitarian formations

(Fassin 2012). While critical reviews have noted some of the shortcomings of this

‘religious turn’ in development and humanitarianism (Fountain 2013; Jones and

Petersen 2011), the new discursive space that has been opened up remains a

remarkable achievement.

Though discarding the notion of a general resurgence, we nevertheless suggest

that it is possible to discern significant changes in the political economy of certain

contexts that influence the opportunities and constraints operating on religious actors.

In Southeast Asia, one of the repercussions of the growing transition to middle-

income status of many of its nation-states, and of increasing self-reliance and

confidence, has been a shift in the disaster-response impulses of its governments.

Many Southeast-Asian nations now have dedicated state agencies responsible for

disaster response and management and, with increasing economic growth making aid

budgets less important, there is a political imperative for them to exhibit less reliance

on international aid in the face of disaster. Nick Finney, Director of Humanitarian

Response in Asia for Save the Children, describes this phenomenon as no less than a

‘new paradigm of humanitarian assistance in Southeast Asia’ (Finney 2012). This

‘new paradigm’ means that states are increasingly by-passing the traditional UN-

based mechanism of disaster response, and relying on their own state agencies, with

strong back-up from NGOs and local agencies. Both state agencies and NGOs are

Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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frequently affiliated with particular religious traditions. Two examples, both drawn

from Indonesia, illustrate these processes.

The Muhammadiyah is the second largest mass-based Muslim organization in

Indonesia. In 2010, it established the Muhammadiyah Disaster Management Center

(MDMC), and since then it has rapidly become known as one of the country’s most

effective non-governmental disaster response organizations (Benthall forthcoming;

Bush 2013, 2015; Husein 2012). MDMC grew out of the Muhammadiyah’s disaster

response activities in Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, where the

Muhammadiyah’s presence within affected communities and vast, quickly

mobilizable networks made it a preferred partner for many large UN and INGO

disaster relief agencies. Muhammadiyah’s political and religious clout enabled it to

navigate the politics of providing aid within strongly Muslim Aceh—intentionally

occupying centrist doctrinal territory, it effectively forged partnerships with non-

Muslim INGOs like World Vision, while sidelining more Islamist groups like Hizbut

Tahrir International (HTI)—see Riza’s article in this special issue—in the post-

disaster space in Aceh (Bush 2013). Muhammadiyah has also been a founding

member of Humanitarian Forum International (HFI), a consortium of international

organizations led by Hany El-Banna of Islamic Relief. HFI aims to promote dialogue

and cooperation between Muslim humanitarian organizations and their counterparts in

the West, with a sub-text of seeking to circumvent some of the restrictions placed by

Western nations on international Muslim organizations. The MDMC works very

closely with the Indonesian National Agency for Disaster Management (Badan

Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana, BNPB). Muhammadiyah and the MDMC thus

leverage their own religious networks and identity to operate successfully with in

disaster response circles at local, national and transnational levels.

At the same time, the state had its own visions of how religion figured into

projects for disaster relief and reconstruction. Five years before the tsunami hit at the

end of 2004, the Indonesian government had already established provisions for the

implementation of Islamic law in the province as part of a broader strategy to put an

end to the violent conflict with the secessionist ‘Free Aceh Movement’ (Gerakan

Aceh Merdeka/GAM). However, the initial years of Aceh’s twenty-first century

Islamic legal system made only a modest impact on Acehnese society, as the province

continued to be wracked by violent clashes between GAM and the Indonesian

government. The situation changed dramatically in the wake of the tsunami, as the

overwhelming destruction forced a reconsideration of priorities on many sides and

accelerated the peace process. A contemporaneous religious revival further helped to

breathe new life into the project of state Shariʿa in Aceh during the post-disaster/post-

conflict period. In this context, the development of new initiatives and institutions for

the implementation of Islamic law came to be ratcheted up to a new level as an

ambitious project of ‘social engineering’ within a broader framework of ‘total

reconstruction’ that has had significant and potentially long-lasting effects on the

redefinition of Acehnese society during its recovery from the twin traumas of armed

conflict and natural disaster. Subsequently, political vicissitudes accompanying

diminished fervor in some sectors, and the assertion of significant voices of

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opposition in others, have contributed to a decrease in the energies and resources

devoted to the formal Islamic legal system. Nevertheless, the project of state Shariʿa

in Aceh provides a powerful example of the role that religion can play in the framing

of post-disaster relief and reconstruction projects (Feener 2013).

As these examples illustrate, religious actors including state, communal and non-

governmental entities, can have significant effects on disaster relief processes,

impacting both affected populations as well as the wider trajectories of disaster relief

and reconstruction. Yet, while clearly influential, it is necessary to also ask questions

about the appropriateness of religious relief, identified by Tierney and Oliver-Smith

(2012, p. 134) as a crucial factor deserving great attention. Of course, appropriateness

is always already contextual such that what is appropriate in one context may not be

in another. Broad sweeping strategies are unlikely therefore to acknowledge the

heterogeneity of approaches that may be appropriate at different times and places.

The notion of ‘appropriateness’ resonates closely with that of ‘cultural proximity’,

in which it is argued that particular religious-affiliated NGOs make more effective

disaster and humanitarian response providers, insofar as they engage communities of

co-religionists, because they are able to provide culturally ‘appropriate’ assistance,

they can have greater access in areas where security of foreign/western actors is

compromised, beneficiary communities may have a higher level of trust in them, and

they are often already embedded within the communities requiring assistance. This

concept, originally developed by the International NGO Islamic Relief, has received

critical attention in the scholarly literature with suggestions that it overplays notions

of identification and affiliation and downplays divisions within religious groups

(Benthall 2008, 2012, forthcoming; Palmer 2011). However, a recent report produced

by Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre proposes that the idea does have some

empirical basis and should not be too quickly discarded (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Ager

2013). Questions around the appropriateness of disaster responses resonate within

many of the articles in this special issue – ranging from a Buddhist monk who broke

highly-marked rules of ritual purity in order to allow pregnant women to give birth in

his monastery (Pu), and religious discourses as resistance to perceived ‘inappropriate’

aid in Pakistan (Aijazi and Panjwani), to fear of ‘unethical conversions’ by Christian

NGOs in Sri Lanka following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami (Hertzberg).

Despite the clear importance, if also complex nature, of religious actors in disaster

relief, and despite the growing visibility of their work among social scientists, there

remains a striking lack of analysis about the implications of the work of religious

organizations for the ‘disaster response industry’, much less strategic policy-making

or planning that includes a grounded understanding of the roles and impact of

religious actors in disasters. There thus remains a pressing need to explore the ways in

which different religious actors’ involvement in relief processes impact beneficiaries,

agencies, and in fact, themselves.

This collection of five articles and an interview with disaster response

practitioners aims to help enhance the body of literature that can feed into these

pressing concerns. By focusing on the social relations in disaster-affected

communities and how they are impacted by engagement with religious actors. All of

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the articles present textured, thorough, and grounded studies that pay close attention

to actual practices and processes of religious disaster relief within particular contexts.

Each of the papers is based on rigorous empirical qualitative research into actors

involved in disaster relief. The entire special issue seeks to speak equally to

practitioners and to scholars, and to present themes and discussions that will resonate

in both contexts.

We begin this special issue with an interview with three senior humanitarian

practitioners—Jeremy England of the International Committee for the Red Cross

(ICRC), Ajit Hazra from World Vision, and Nick Finney from Save the Children. The

initial conversation with these colleagues took place as part of the conference that all

of the articles in this special issue were drawn from—Salvage and Salvation:

Religion, Disaster Relief, and Reconstruction in Asia—which was held at the Asia

Research Institute, National University of Singapore in November 2012. An

interactive Practitioner Roundtable with these colleagues was a highlight of this

conference, and was intentionally forefronted in the conference and also in this

special issue, in an effort to co-mingle academic and practitioner voices. Development

practitioners bring incisive and unique insights to the issue of religious actors

involved in relief, both from a front-line and grounded perspective, as well as from

the multi-layered considerations that their institutions must weigh as they engage with

religious actors and communities in post-disaster contexts.

The three practitioners featured in this interview discuss their engagement with

religious actors in disaster response contexts from a range of positions in terms of

their own institutional identities. These particular positionalities become clear in the

course of the interview, in terms of varying degrees of comfort with engaging directly

with religion and religious actors as a matter of course in the institutional modus

operandi of the three agencies represented. Points of variance and points of continuity

among the three practitioners are equally important and relevant for our deeper

understanding of the multiple ways in which disaster response and religious actors

intersect. Their contributions here show us that for practitioners, engaging with

religious actors is indeed a matter of course—it is an assumed and consistent element

of disaster response.

What is also consistent across the three practitioners interviewed is a call for

deeper, more nuanced, and more contextualized understanding of religious actors in

order to more effectively engage in crisis situations. It is here that we hope the rest of

this special issue can make a contribution—as the six articles that follow each provide

an empirically rich, grounded and nuanced case of particular religious actors

operating in particular ways. It is our hope that these cases add to the contextualized

knowledge called for by development practitioners and scholars alike.

In the first article, the religious relief actors being explored are not the aid

providers, but rather the affected communities. Aijazi and Panjwani take a critical and

nuanced look at the religious narratives deployed by communities receiving aid in

Pakistan after the devastating 2010 floods. The authors employ James Scott’s notion

of ‘resistance’ and Saba Mahmood’s concept of a ‘capacity for action’ to argue that

the agency of disaster-affected communities was apparent in their deployment of

Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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religious language and concepts to push back against inappropriate aid—aid that did

not provide adequate segregated space for women (purdah), or aid that was simply

seen to be ineffective. They conclude that commonplace notions of ‘coping’ and

‘resilience’ in the disaster response literature are inadequate without careful attention

to religious narratives and religious dimensions.

The political dimension of disaster response, and the roles of religious actors, is

also a theme for other papers in this special issue. The issue of proselytization, and

concerns about religious organizations using disaster response activities to gain

followers is a contentious issue in the literature (Finucane and Feener 2013; Fountain

2015) and is probably one of the foremost concerns expressed by ‘non-religious’

disaster aid providers. Michael Hertzberg takes this issue on directly in his piece on

‘unethical conversion’ and the politics of Christian and Buddhist relations in post-

tsunami Sri Lanka. Hertzberg examines the genesis and context of the widely-

publicized Anti-Conversion Bill in Sri Lanka, and how different Christian and

Buddhist communities read the influx of disaster response actors after the tsunami.

Hertzberg examines the complex interplay of mistrust and public debate, and argues

that while there was indeed a temporary easing of hostilities immediately after the

tsunami, this did not last long, and the narratives of mistrust ultimately reinforced an

ultra-nationalist political discourse. Muhammad Riza takes on similar themes in

another post-tsunami context – Aceh.

In his discussion of the activities of the Indonesian chapter of the international

Islamic organization Hizbut Tahrir (HT), Riza uses a framework of globalization to

juxtapose the global religious and political agenda of the Hizbut Tahrir

(‘caliphatization’), with the concrete activities of its Indonesia chapter on the ground

in Aceh immediately after the tsunami. He argues that Hizbut Tahrir strategically

deployed particular disaster response activities with an aim of furthering its religious

and political agenda. This is a kind of ‘internal proselytization’ in which HT activists

sought to convince fellow religionists to follow a particular, and in the Acehnese

context a minority, political/religious/social agenda.

As mentioned earlier, a thematic emphasis in all of the articles in this issue is an

exploration of how social relations are impacted in the various contexts explored here.

Ted Chen’s article on Habitat for Humanity, a prominent Christian NGO, provides a

particularly helpful analysis of the effects of religious-affiliated disaster assistance on

social relations in post-disaster communities in Sri Lanka. Chen examines how the

theology of Habitat’s workers shaped and informed the spirit and the content of the

assistance it provided to tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka. He explores Habitat’s tenet

of ‘adequacy’, derived from biblical teachings, and how this philosophy and the

houses that emerged from it were received by disaster-affected communities. In

particular he examines how relations between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries

changed as a result of Habitat’s assistance.

In the final article in the collection, the focus is not so much on how religious-

affiliated assistance impacted beneficiary communities, as how engagement in

disaster assistance impacted religious practice and belief. Pu Chengzhong presents a

fascinating case of a monastery in Shifang, China immediately after the Sichuan

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earthquake of 2008, in which the head of the monastery was confronted with hard

choices between adhering to particular Buddhist tenets or saving lives. Pu argues that

in making some unpopular decisions, the abbot in fact drew on the Mahayana concept

of ‘skillful means’ to explain the unorthodox measures that he took in order to

preserve life in a crisis situation.

Taken together, the articles in this special issue aim to inspire greater attention to

the roles of religious actors in disaster relief processes among researchers, policy

makers and practitioners. But rather than aiming to establish a new sub-field of

disaster studies that would take religion as a central object of attention, our goal in

bringing these papers together is more ambitious: we propose that attention to

religious actors is a vital and necessary component of Disaster Studies as such and

that close, nuanced examination of religious actors should be a core part of the

discipline.

Acknowledgements

All the papers in this special issue, with the exception of Aijazi and Panjwani, were

presented at the conference on Salvage and Salvation: Religion, Disaster Relief and

Reconstruction in Asia, held at the Asia Research Institute, National University of

Singapore in November 2012. We are grateful for funding and support from the Asia

Research Institute, and also to Levi McLaughlin and Patrick Daly who, along with the

editors of this special issue, co-organized the event. We are also very grateful for the

assistance of Li Hongyan in the preparation of the collection.

Notes

1. See also particularly the special issues on ‘Religions, Natural Hazards, and

Disasters’ edited by Jean-Christophe Gaillard and Pauline Texier (Religion, 40:2,

April 2010), ‘Faith-Based Humanitarianism in Contexts of Forced Displacement’

edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (Journal of Refugee Studies, 24:3, September

2011), ‘Faith and Responses to Displacement’ edited by Marion Couldrey and

Maurice Herson (Forced Migration Review, 48, November 2014), and ‘Salvage

and Salvation: Religion and Disaster Relief in Asia’ edited by Philip Fountain,

Levi McLaughlin, Michael Feener, and Patrick Daly (Asian Ethnology,

forthcoming).

2. This is in large part simply an acknowledgement of the rather mundane point

about the analytical limitations of broad-sweeping generalizations. However, we

would also argue that attention to the historicity of ‘religion’ as a concept, that is

acknowledging that the very idea of religion has a history and that notions of what

constitutes religion (and therefore also not-religion) vary considerably across time

and space (Fountain, Bush, and Feener 2015). Such an acknowledgement

dissolves the very ground upon which such generalizations could be constructed

— see Asad (1993, 2003), Cavanaugh (2009), Fitzgerald (2003, 2007, 2011), and

Bush, Fountain & Feener: Religious Actors in Disaster Relief

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van der Veer (2001). We use ‘religion’ here as an entry-point into a range of long-

neglected subjects, not as a fixed, static and sui generis domain.

3. See Taves and Bender (2012) for the place that ‘spirituality’ plays in breaking

open and complicating religion-secular binaries.

4. This became particularly apparent among disaster researchers during the response

to Hurricane Katrina in 2005—see: Adams (2013), Angel et al. (2012, 123–126),

Cain and Barthelemy (2008), Lawson and Thomas (2007), Michel (2007), and

Paulson and Menjívar (2012).

5. See below for further discussion on this point.

6. See, for example, G. Clarke and Jennings (2008), M. Clarke (2012), Davis and

Robinson (2012), Deneulin and Bano (2009), Deneulin and Rakodi (2010),

Marshall and Keough (2004), and Ter Haar (2011).

7. Secularism has received considerably less attention, but even here attention is now

growing (Ager and Ager 2011; Grubbs 2009; Hopgood 2006; Lynch 2011;

Redfield 2012).

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