Caring for Objects Affected by Disaster
Discover the 2025 awarded project "Caring for Objects Affected by Disaster: An Ethnography of a Recycling Centre in Fukushima Prefecture", selected by the Louis Dumont Fund for Research in Social Anthropology.
The project
In the small town of Namie (Fukushima Prefecture), evacuated during the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, community ties have been slow to reconstitute, even as new residents begin to settle. Exposure to ‘low doses’ of radiation has profoundly altered people’s relationship with their environment. In this fragmented territory, one of the central challenges is to take stock of the social bonds damaged by the disaster and to consider how they might be ‘repaired’.
The analysis begins with the singular trajectory of Izumi-san, who returned to Namie after 11 March. In her recycling centre, she collects objects left behind by those who were evacuated following the nuclear accident—items abandoned for nearly a decade. In this damaged world, the act of recovery, which brings objects back into the social realm, may be seen as a form of care—for both things and people.
Yet this gesture also raises further questions: why assume the burden of objects that have slipped out of the world?
Jeanne Bouillet
After completing a literary preparatory course for the competitive entrance exams to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and earning a bachelor's degree in anthropology—supplemented by a year abroad in Tokyo—Jeanne Bouillet is currently pursuing graduate studies at the EHESS in ethnography and social anthropology. Within the field of Japanese studies, her research focuses on disasters through the lens of materiality, particularly the management of domestic objects and the transmission of their memory, under the supervision of Alice Doublier-Akakpo.
