We Live with the Sea
Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Publishing:28th Jul '26
£23.99
This title is due to be published on 28th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
In We Live with the Sea, Andrew Littlejohn addresses the implementation and controversy surrounding safety infrastructures following the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan. While the Japanese government proposed and enforced infrastructural transformations in the wake of the tsunami, these changes did not consider the impact on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on the tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn highlights alternative proposals offered by the local residents as well as the environmental, ecological, and more-than-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. In doing so, he argues that imposed modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, showing how attempts to “ecologize” safety may offer more sustainable ways of thinking about security, preservation, and infrastructure.
“Littlejohn’s sophisticated project returns us to the Japanese village, free of nostalgia yet committed to making sense of the embodied knowledges, practical traditions, and human and non-human relations that organize life there. Deeply ethnographic and attentive to the politics of the everyday, it reveals the complex and conflicted processes of reimagining and restoring fractured infrastructures and reorganizing communities in the aftermath of unimaginable catastrophe.”—Christopher T. Nelson, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Taking us into the ‘debris of progress’—modernist seawalls meant to contain the risk of flooding—Littlejohn contrasts their futility with the alternative ways to ‘ecologize safety’ that local residents have creatively devised. Speaking to the times about the world(s) we should, but often neglect to, seek entanglements with, We Live with the Sea is utterly powerful: a theoretical and ethnographic tour-de-force.”—Anne Allison, author of Being Dead Otherwise
ISBN: 9781478038825
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 445g
260 pages