Play to Survive

“How do communities prepare for unpredictable disaster? Chika Watanabe takes us into the heart of playful preparedness movements in Japan and Chile. These citizen efforts are situated in everyday life, in fun and games, in social cooperation, and in memories of earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters. One of the architects of ‘patchwork ethnography, ’ Watanabe deftly and thoughtfully shows how we might write in a way that resembles the conditions of our research, revealing the collaborative ways we learn, think, and patch things together.”–Carole McGranahan, author of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment“In sharing the inspiring efforts and accounts of disaster preparedness educators and researchers across shared geographies of earthquake risk in Japan and Chile, Chika Watanabe offers a timely, poignant, and hopeful ethnography of how survival just might be possible in a world shaped by disasters.”–Vivian Choi, author of Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka“This beautifully written book rethinks both time–in which the disaster one prepares for is not only future-oriented but intimately a part of everyday life, while also coexisting with the past–and preparedness, where playfulness becomes central, through patchwork ethnography. A logic of fragility unfolds over the course of this book through a distinctive bringing together of transpacific places, processes, modes of thought, and the voices of diverse interlocutors. An original and compelling example of patchwork ethnography as a methodology and theory of encounters.”–Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

Chika Watanabe is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is author of Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (2019).