Reflexivity, habitus and vulnerability: Vietnamese farmers’ attribution of responsibility in a post-disaster context
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/0965-3562.htm Reflexivity, habitus and vulnerability: Vietnamese farmers’ attribution of responsibility in a post-disaster context Kien Nguyen-Trung BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Clayton Campus, Clayton, Australia Responsibility attribution Received 18 May 2022 Revised 11 November 2022 10 December 2022 Accepted 10 December 2022 Abstract Purpose – This article examines how farmers’ assignment of responsibility for the disaster in late 2015 – early 2016 connects with reflexivity, habitus and local vulnerability Design/methodology/approach – This article uses semi-structured interviews with 28 disaster-affected households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta to answer the question Findings – This article finds out that Vietnamese farmers actively accepted their responsibility for the disaster In their explanation, they link their action with the root causes of vulnerability embedded in their socio-cultural traditions and collective identity Research limitations/implications – This article makes a case for the importance of local culture and epistemologies in understanding disaster vulnerability and responsibility attribution Originality/value – This article is original in researching Vietnamese farmers’ responsibility attribution, their aesthetic reflexivity, collective habitus and the socio-cultural root causes of disaster Keywords Attribution of responsibility, Bourdieu, Disaster, Farmer, Habitus, Reflexivity, Responsibility, Vietnam Paper type Research paper In early 2016, the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD), Vietnam’s rice bucket, whose production is responsible for 95% of rice export (General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2020) suffered from a historic disaster that combined a 20-month drought and the worst-in-90-year saline intrusion It heavily damaged the Winter–Spring rice crop (hereafter referred to as crop 3) Crop is the third rice crop of a triple cropping system, which was cultivated from December to April in the dry season Local farmers suffered not just crop failures, economic losses, but also food deficits, growing debt and livelihood disruption (FAO, 2016; United Nations, 2016) The disaster provided a great opportunity to understand how local farmers attributed responsibilities and the underlying social, cultural and political reasons for why they did so Attribution of responsibility has been a topic of interest, especially in the sociology of health and illness (McClean, 2005), political science (Arceneaux and Stein, 2006; Malhotra and Kuo, The author wants to thank Linda, Cherry and Jenny for their unconditional love, support, and understanding Heartfelt thanks to Associate Professor Helen Forbes-Mewett and Professor Dharmalingam Arunachalam (Monash University) for their tremendous support Thanks also go to Monash University for assisting this work with the Monash Postgraduate Publication Award (2021) Competing interests: The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose This work reproduces materials from Dr Kien Nguyen-Trung’s PhD thesis with permission Author contributions: The author did all the works leading to this manuscript Consent for publication: All participants provided consent for publication of the data anonymously Funding: The author declare that Dr Kien Nguyen-Trung was received the fund from Monash University’s Postgraduate Publication Awards to this work Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal © Emerald Publishing Limited 0965-3562 DOI 10.1108/DPM-05-2022-0118 DPM their roots in the historical evolution of the affected society, which could be traced back hundreds of years (Oliver-Smith, 1999) or several decades (Nguyen-Trung, 2019) As a result, if limiting our analysis of attribution of responsibility to immediate single actions/events, it is likely to overlook the larger structural factors shaping why they as they did As such, it is necessary to ask, “why you think who is responsible for what?” This “why” question, as Lash (1993) would argue, helps research participants question their reflection on “who is responsible for disaster” and thus link the current actions to the deepseated causes embedded in the social structures of their community (Bankoff, 2001, 2004; Oliver-Smith et al., 2017) Figure illustrates the link between these key concepts Data and methods This article draws on a case study (Yin, 2014) conducted in 2018 in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) The study’s ethics application (Project number11022) was approved by Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC) in late 2017 Before conducting interviews, the author obtained permission from research participants to collect data and record the interviews Because not every farmer was familiar with the process of research ethics, oral consent was more frequently used To protect the participants, all the names of persons and villages cited in this article are pseudonyms The 2015–2016 disaster caused a devastating impact in 52 out of 63 Vietnam’s provinces, forcing 18 provinces to declare a State of Emergency (Nguyen-Trung, 2021) Tan Hung commune in Long Phu district of Soc Trang province in the VMD was chosen for this study because of the following characteristics It is a typical agriculture-based commune, with 90.4% of its area (2,918 ha) devoted to agricultural production as of 2020 (Nguyen-Trung, 2021) About 51.9% of the total 3,078 households were largely based on agriculture The commune is typical for a triple rice cropping system (cultivating three rice crops a year), with the Winter–Spring crop (or crop 3) being cultivated entirely in the dry season This crop is highly vulnerable to drought and saline intrusion and was the one affected most by the 2015–2016 disaster The commune has three ethnic groups, including the Khmer group, which makes up the largest share of the population (63.9%), followed by the Kinh population, the ethnic majority in Vietnam (35.2%) and Vietnamese Chinese (the Hoa) and others (0.2%) (Soc Trang Division of Statistics Office, 2017) As of 2018, the commune had 13.8% of households (424 households) classified as poor households and 5.1% as near-poor households (158 households) (Tan Hung CPC, 2018) Under the impact of the 2015–2016 disaster, 40.3% (645 households) of total agriculture-based households in Tan Hung suffered heavy crop losses, making it the most severely affected commune in Long Phu district (Tan Hung CPC, 2016b; Tan Hung CPC, 2016a) This study uses semi-structured interviews with 28 farm households Households were selected based on three criteria: (1) They were more or less affected by the 2015–2016 drought Figure Understanding disasters’ root causes through aesthetic reflexivity DPM vulnerability” (Wisner, 2013) The importance of culture and localised knowledge production as a barrier to farmers’ disaster-responding capability in this article contributes another structural blockage to the “circle of capacities” that aims to understand structural forces limiting or blocking people’s access to political, economic, social, human, physical and natural resources (Wisner et al., 2012) Exploring local culture and their way of knowing (epistemologies) is of substantial importance in the project of decolonising disaster scholarship (Gaillard, 2021) As such, by listening to, valuing and trying to “understand the plight and experience of ordinary people in everyday settings and the victims of disaster” and “who they are and where their experiences take place” (Hewitt, 1983, p 330), this article contributes to the dismissal of Western discourses portraying the world as “dangerous places” (Bankoff, 2001) References Adkins, L (2003), “Reflexivity: freedom or habit of gender?”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol 20 No 6, pp 21-42 Arceneaux, K and Stein, R.M (2006), “Who is held responsible when disaster strikes? 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Gaillard, J and Kelman, I (2012), “Framing disaster: theories and stories seeking to understand hazards, vulnerability and risk”, in Wisner, B., Gaillard, J.C and Kelman, I (Eds), The Routledge Handbook... “Understanding disaster vulnerability in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta”, PhD thesis, Monash University, doi: 10.26180/15089910.v2 Nguyen-Trung, K (2022), “Risk epistemologies and aesthetic reflexivity