By Carole Therrien, Carleton University (Recipient, 2024 Salisbury Award)

The 2025 Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie conference asks its participants to reflect on the concept of “cconfluences”, and how the discipline reflects upon and navigates the academic space in the relationships between individuals, other-than-human beings and the environment in which they are situated and to “observe, analyze and interpret the relations between local realities and larger processes.” As an anthropological researcher, my research reflects on how women navigate the spaces of disaster recovery – a usually contested space where individual and collective interests and human/non-human entities interact – and how that navigation shapes their respective communities.

The island of St. Martin (SXM) in the Caribbean has had its share of disasters over the last decade: devastating hurricanes such as Gonzalo (2015) and Irma and Maria (2017) and COVID-19’s resulting stay-in-place orders and economic impacts in North America and Europe – their primary tourist markets – significantly impacted the island’s tourism economy and culture. The island’s precarious geographic placement in the Antillean Islands Chain provides an open eastern front to the Atlantic Gulf Stream which has seen worsening hydrometeorological storms, sea level rises, and storm surges over the last few decades in the Caribbean and along the Canadian and US coasts.

St. Martin also has weak and fractious administrative and political structures based on European colonial models. Economic support is conditional from international banks and corporations, and the island is highly dependent on the tourism industry, making it a risky place to live on multiple levels. But at the same time, this precarity seems to have enabled a community that is strongly anchored by connections to place and history, a community comprised dominantly of descendants from African and Indian slaves brought to the island in the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries.

Looking at middle-class women in St. Martin who are continually subjected to daily risk, frequent disasters, patriarchal constructs and colonial oversight, there is evidence that they play important roles in stabilizing their communities in long-term (and arguably multiple and repeated) disaster recovery environments. My research demonstrates that in the absence of state support for themselves and other people in times of great misfortune, the manifestations of generosity and munificence between themselves and others are not unconditional but also without malice. They work as a form of “social support” or social capital, to be relied upon if necessary for the periods prior, during and in between disaster settings.

Middle-class women in disaster recovery environments are both labour force contributors and caregivers in their communities above and beyond their family units. They have additional burdens in financially supporting extended families, friends, and neighbours, and heightened volunteer or unpaid care roles in civil society and faith communities; these responsibilities arise in part from the absence and distrust of the state and, in some cases, the inadequacy of international humanitarian organizations. Therefore, the “we take care of our own” ethos is key to their community’s cultural survival.

These women’s activities shape an informal and unspoken web of support, and functions as a form of social protection that mitigates crisis and its long-term impacts. They prioritize care for each other and themselves in a variety of ways, creating an environment that allows vulnerability to be expressed and offer spaces of respite and repair. By creating strong webs of reliance and resilience through their networks and in the social organizations in which they operate, the social and cultural aspects of disaster recovery remain under their control; it is widely assumed that more destructive hazards will strike in the future and island residents will be called to be resilient. In this case, resiliency means to help oneself through crisis, regardless of whether that crisis is job loss, a destroyed home, physical limitations or mental illness.

Over a 12-month period, I completed semi-structured interviews and participant observation primarily with two women’s middle-class organizations in St. Martin: the Business and Professional Women Concordia network, and the United Women Book Club. Outside and during fieldwork, I monitored social media accounts, read local news publications, attended and observed events, and consulted reports and historical documentation when available. Accessing secondary data on St. Martin was challenging; as colonial entities, formal data was woven into the metropole’s broader landscape and infrequently specified. Hurricanes over the last decade have flooded and destroyed physical and undigitized data in major libraries and archival depots. And a change of government is regularly accompanied by the destruction of any research work undertaken. There are significant efforts underway by not-for-profit organizations to leverage storytelling into formal databases, and local and international academic researchers interested in the Caribbean are creating digitized platforms to highlight research done in the region and by regional academics.

My research reveals that women’s networks, and work, family or church alliances, play central roles in cultural reconstruction and function. The paucity of litterature in disaster anthropology and feminist disaster anthropology as it pertains to Caribbean cultures demonstrates not only for a need for greater work in disaster anthropology but also nuanced reflections at the complex, nuanced and rich cultural fabrics of Antillean populations.

By examining women’s lifestyles, lived experiences, values and rituals of two women’s networks and associated individuals, I also argue that disaster vulnerability is a Western-based concept that fails to capture the social nuances of the process of disaster recovery, especially the contributions of women. Despite often being characterized as “at-risk” by virtue of their gender, middle-class Caribbean women feel that their work in building bridges and filling gaps in community needs is unrecognized and taken for granted economically and politically. They are the leaders that move their society forward in precarious times.