Micro-responses to Disasters

Disasters elicit a range of emergency responses as methods of short-term or longer-term coping and recovery from their effects. Among these responses, ritual plays a part, and it is on this theme that we concentrate in the present paper (see, for example, Riboli et al, 2021 ). We have discussed ritual in many of our prior publications ( Stewart and Strathern 2014a , 2014b, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2021a; Strathern and Stewart 1999 , 2007). Here, we take up the significance of ritual practices in processes of response to and recovery from stressful results of disasters that impact human interrelationships and test capacities related to resilience. We give examples of spontaneous and often small-scale ritualized actions, both individual and communal, that aid people in their attempts to cope with difficulties arising from the physical and emotional outcomes of disasters, involving the sudden emergence of disorder, perhaps unprecedented, and the problems of recreating order in people&s;s lives. We ask here, what is the role of ritual in moving sufferers from one stage to another in disasters? Ritual in general functions as a way of bringing people together, and this function is enhanced in situations of stress and danger.