By Carole Therrien, Carleton University (Recipient of the 2024 Salisbury Prize)

The 2025 conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie invites participants to reflect on the concept of “confluences” and on how the discipline is evolving within the academic sphere and in the relationships between individuals, non-human beings, and the environment. It also invites participants to “observe, analyze, and interpret the relationships between local realities and broader processes.” As an anthropologist, my research focuses on how women navigate recovery spaces following a disaster—a typically contested space where individual and collective interests, as well as human and non-human entities, interact—and on how this navigation shapes their respective communities.

The island of Saint Martin (SXM) in the Caribbean has experienced several disasters over the past decade: devastating hurricanes such as Gonzalo in 2015, Irma and Maria in 2017, as well as stay-at-home orders and the economic impacts of COVID-19 both on the island and in its major tourism markets—particularly North America and Europe—have all had a significant impact on the island’s tourism economy and culture. The island’s vulnerable geographic location within the Antilles archipelago exposes it to an open front of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, which has seen an increase in hydrometeorological storms, rising sea levels, and storm surges over the past few decades in the Caribbean and along the Canadian and U.S. coasts.

Saint Martin also has weak and fragmented administrative and political structures based on European colonial models. Economic support is contingent on international banks and corporations, and the island is heavily dependent on the tourism industry, making it a rather risky place to live on several levels. At the same time, however, this precariousness seems to have fostered the emergence of a community deeply rooted in the local landscape and history, composed primarily of descendants of African and Indian slaves brought to the island in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

By observing middle-class women in Saint Martin, who are constantly exposed to daily risks, frequent disasters, patriarchal structures, and colonial surveillance, it becomes clear that they play an important role in stabilizing their communities in the context of long-term (and undoubtedly multiple and repeated) recovery efforts following disasters. My research demonstrates that, in the absence of state support, they and others show generosity and magnanimity toward one another, though not without a certain shrewdness. They function as a form of “social support” or social capital that can be relied upon before, during, and between disasters.

Middle-class women in post-disaster recovery settings contribute both to the workforce and to the care of dependents within their communities, beyond their immediate families. They must shoulder additional burdens by providing financial support to their extended families, friends, and neighbors, and by taking on an increased role as volunteers or unpaid caregivers in civil society and religious communities. These responsibilities stem in part from the absence of—and mistrust toward—the state, but also from the inadequacy of international humanitarian organizations. Consequently, the philosophy of “we take care of our own” is essential to the cultural survival of their community.

These women’s activities form an informal, unspoken support network that functions as a form of social protection, helping to mitigate the crisis and its long-term effects. They prioritize caring for others and themselves in various ways, thereby creating an environment that allows vulnerability to be expressed and offers spaces for respite and healing. By building strong networks of trust and resilience through their social networks and the organizations in which they operate, they maintain control over the social and cultural aspects of post-disaster recovery; it is widely acknowledged that more destructive risks will strike in the future and that the island’s residents will need to demonstrate resilience. In this context, resilience means helping oneself get through a crisis, whether it involves job loss, a destroyed home, physical limitations, or mental illness.

Over a 12-month period, I conducted semi-structured interviews and participant observation primarily with two middle-class women’s organizations in Saint Martin: the Business and Professional Women Concordia network and the United Women Book Clubs. In addition to fieldwork, I monitored social media accounts, read local news publications, attended and observed events, and consulted reports and historical documentation when available. Access to secondary data on Saint Martin was difficult; as colonial entities, official data were integrated into the broader landscape of the metropolis and rarely specified. The hurricanes of the past decade have flooded and destroyed physical, non-digitized data in major libraries and archival repositories. Furthermore, a change in government is often accompanied by the destruction of all research that has been undertaken.

Nonprofit organizations are making significant efforts to incorporate these stories into official databases, and local and international academic researchers focused on the Caribbean are creating digital platforms to highlight the research being conducted in the region.

My research reveals that women’s networks and professional, family, or religious alliances play a central role in the reconstruction and functioning of culture. The scarcity of literature on the anthropology of disasters and feminist anthropology of disasters as they relate to Caribbean cultures demonstrates not only the need for more research in this area, but also for a nuanced reflection on the complex, rich, and nuanced cultural fabric of Caribbean populations.

By examining lifestyles, lived experiences, values, and rituals of two women’s networks and the people associated with them, I also argue that the concept of disaster vulnerability is a Western construct and fails to capture the social nuances of the post-disaster recovery process, particularly the contributions of women. Although they are often considered “at risk” because of their gender, Caribbean middle-class women feel that the work they do to build bridges and fill gaps in community needs goes unrecognized and is taken for granted, both economically and politically. They are the leaders who drive their society forward in times of uncertainty.