Jencson- Disastrous Rites

Disastrous Rites: Liminality and Communitas in aFlood Crisis

LINDA JENCSONDepartment of AnthropologyAppalachian State UniversityBoone,NC 28608-2016

SUMMARY A sense of communitas, well noted by social scientists, occurs in humansocieties during times of natural disaster. Using the Red River Valley Flood of 1997 as acase example, it is found that disaster communitas has similarities to ritual communitasspecifically because people consciously ritualize and mythologize their actions duringdisaster. While this sacralization of practical action serves to optimize disaster response,it also creates an expanded sense of self, community, and purpose that can leave manysurvivors of disaster with a sense that they have undergone a profoundly meaningful peakexperience.

Scholars have researched the spontaneous sense of communitas that arises inhuman societies in times of natural disaster. Some attribute this "disaster soli-darity" to a simple process of practical cost/benefit analysis by disaster victims(De Alessi 1975; Hirshleifer 1988). Others ascribe it to deeply felt emotionsbrought on by the stress of disaster, with stress defined broadly and vaguely. Butno one has ever sufficiently investigated it in its details (Chappie 1970; Oliver-Smith 1999). One assumes disaster to be stressful and leaves it at that. But is thestress emotional, involving grief, worry, and fear, or does it include physicalstress as well, that of injury, cold, and hunger? Are there aspects of disaster inaddition to communitas that resemble ritual? Are the similarities accidental, orare they conscious cultural creations? And importantly, is there something aboutthe active process of coping with stress that is the real creator of communitas inboth ritual and disaster?

Considerable progress has been made in the anthropological study of disasterover the past few decades. We have come a long way since Wallace's pioneeringdisaster studies of the 1950s (1956,1957). Yet we still have a long way to go, asOliver-Smith points out in his recent co-edited volume devoted to anthropologi-cal disaster studies (Oliver-Smith 1999; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999). Inparticular, Oliver-Smith cites a serious lack of holistic studies linking expressive-emotive human responses in times of disaster to those of practical action. Yet heviews this link as manifestly real and—although mediated by specific culturalsettings—as essentially universal, at least in potential. I agree with his assertionthat greater understanding of the ritualized and emotive aspects of disasterresponse, especially communitas, will contribute practical knowledge of use inthe mitigation of disaster consequences in an increasingly imperiled world.

To investigate the question of disaster communitas, I will focus on the NorthDakota/Minnesota Red River Valley Flood of 1997 in search of particularstresses, human choices, and rational and emotional motivations and actions.This particular flood produced a deep sense of communitas, which led many todescribe the month-long battle as "Our Finest Hour" and caused many victimsto describe the process by which they lost their homes as "a positive experience."Listen to the voices of flood survivors: "You live by the river, there's a chance

Anthropology and Humanism 26(l):46-58. Copyright © 2001, American Anthropological Association.

Jencson Disastrous Rites 47

you're going to get wet. But / can see it coming. The flood itself was not a negative,bad experience. It was something I don't want to go through again, but we madelemonade out of the lemons. And so that aspect of it was a very positive, goodthing that happened to us down here." And, "I think the camaraderie was justamazing. I mean people that I wouldn't have even thought of joining in, comingout from the lab, were here and just so glad to be here It was wonderful."Though much of the neighborhood is gone, during the flood there was a "carnivalatmosphere."

Some struggle with confusingly positive feelings about events that led towidespread destruction, as can be heard in one woman's argument with herself:"And it was kind of a social thing, actually We were preparing, but ah, it wasfun, and it was a lot of people bringing food. I don't mean that it was gay. I'mnot saying that it was a gay time, but it was, people had all their friends here, andit was people were helping one another. It was a very, it was just a wonderfultime in that sense of coming together."

Why is the loss of one's cherished home or neighborhood regarded so posi-tively? My hypothesis is that due to the convergence of certain natural events,practical intervention, and symbolic human action, "victims" of this flood expe-rienced it as a ritual of transformation, intensification, and revitalization—hence,as a peak experience.

The Red River Valley Flood of 1997 was no flash flood. It was the result of arecord year of snow in a climate so cold that snow does not melt betweensnowfalls. That winter nearly ten feet of snow all began to melt at once duringthe approaching spring at the end of March. This meant that people had weeksto prepare, but diking and sandbag operations were interrupted by "the Motherof All Blizzards," a killer storm with raging winds that began as rain on Friday,April 4, and turned to ice overnight. The ice and wind pulled down the largestpart of the power grid in the region and did not stop until late Sunday whenpeople emerged from frigid, darkened homes to find everything but the deepest,faster moving floodwaters turned to ice. But what looked like solid ice often hadseveral feet of floodwater beneath it. Prefilled sandbags had turned into "frozenturkeys" that would not stack and settle to fill holes. Sump pumps and small-town sewage stations failed without power, and the rest of the week saw theevacuation of farmsteads and several small towns. Tens of thousands of citizensmobilized to build dikes, to rescue neighbors, and to staff shelters. By mid-Aprilin besieged Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River was beginning to crest at aremarkable 23 feet above flood stage. On April 18, the next largest urban area inthe region, Grand Forks/East Grand Forks, began the rapid evacuation of some40,000 people. On April 19, water rushing through breaches in the 18-foot-highdikes defending "The Forks" became mixed with Grand Forks' recently restoredelectricity. As a result, downtown Grand Forks and many homes went up inflames above the icy water. The Grand Forks Air Base and the cities of Fargo andMoorhead, Minnesota, huddled behind leaky dikes, then became the center ofincreasingly urgent relief operations.

I did not arrive as a researcher after the fact. I experienced the flood with fellowresidents of Fargo, like Malinowski's fateful stranding in the Trobriands, thiswas participant-observation by default. During the flood I served as a sandbag-ger and a Red Cross disaster volunteer. I also photographed, audio and videorecorded, and took notes. I began my interviews at commemorative festivitiesmarking the first anniversary of the flood. I taped interviews with over 50individuals from Fargo and neighboring areas: city officials as well as ordinarycitizens.1 In this article, I focus on Fargo, a city that battled the flood and won (forthe most part) although half of my informants came from devastated neighborhoods

48 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 26, Number 1

within Fargo. Reactions in towns harder hit, such as Grand Forks, await furtherstudy.

During the flood I noticed aspects that reminded me of classic anthropologicaldescriptions of ritual communitas, but it was only after going back to theliterature that I realized how perfectly the flood meets scholarly criteria. I havechosen a list of traits of liminal ritual communitas described by Victor Turner inThe Ritual Process (1969:106-107) against which to test my hypothesis. The readershould keep in mind—in all cases where I cite examples or quote survivors—Iam editing for space: there are innumerable examples of everything I describe.

Ritual communitas takes place within a specific, sacralized, bounded space.The flood created bounded space in a quite literal sense. Most roads, includinginterstates, were under water. Cities, urban neighborhoods within them, andsmall towns and farms that survived did so as diked islands in a lake of fresh icewater some 8,000 miles square.2 Access was often by boat and helicopter. Thefinal blizzard of the record snow season that caused the flood knocked out thepower grid for the eastern half of North Dakota, leaving many with a sense of"being cut off from the 20th century." As news broadcasts told of town after towngoing under all around the major cities, residents of Fargo became increasinglymotivated to suspend normal activity and engage in disaster response on afull-time basis.

This sense of isolation lent itself to metaphorical comparisons with a war zone,and parades of veterans were interviewed in the media to validate the metaphor.The bounded space became "Fort Fargo" defended by "Team Fargo," in citizenand official descriptions of the ongoing "battle." Now, four years later, peoplecontinue to tell stories of individuals they encountered during the flood whowere moved to relive events such as the London Blitzkrieg—brought back intomind by the battle against the Red River. Rites of passage and intensificationusually create communitas in the process of reenacting traditional myths, allow-ing participants to experience roles in the sacred history of the people. The warmetaphor became the core of a myth that was created about the flood fight as itwas fought. This myth was essential to control strong emotions and ensure fullparticipation of citizens. It appears to have been generated at an interpersonallevel, perpetuated by mass media, and carried to an even greater number ofpeople by word of mouth.

As in ritual communitas, there was acceptance of intense pain and suffering.Said one proud husband, "Amy, my own wife, came home and she had two wristbraces on. I said, 'Well what's goin' on?' and she said, 'Well, I was up sandbag-gin', up at the Solid Waste.' And I said, 'Well, we're tryin' ta set that up fortwo-hour shifts, you know, cuz it's demanding work.' She was there six hours!"This shared acceptance of hardship was a tremendous part of the sense ofbelonging generated by the flood. Folklorists have noted endurance of hardshipas a key component in Midwestern regional identity (Carlin 1992; Danielson1990). After passing through the transformation of a Midwest disaster, copingwith hardship becomes part of personal identity, but the expanded sense of selfis embedded in a strong sense of community. Regarding sandbagging injuries,"Several people were talkin' about it after the first few days. One guy says (and'I been havin' exactly the same problems he's havin'), he says, 'I can't feel myarms.' And it's true—numb! It would take a full 15 or 20 minutes to get the feelin'back in your hands some mornin's." Even the significance of bodily sensationswas constructed out of shared experiences.

According to Turner, ritual communitas requires simplification of life. AsOliver-Smith and Hoffman note, "Disasters take a people back to fundamentals"(1999:11). Flood life in the Red River Valley became simplified in many ways.


Conversation dwelled on basic sandbox topics: piling things on top of otherthings so they don't fall over, dirt, lots of dirt, getting dirt, good dirt: "I'm cold.""When will the food get here?" "Can I take a nap now?" One extended familydescribed the daily arrival of the Red Cross and Salvation Army food trucks astheir neighborhood battled the river. They described the family grandfatherchasing the truck down the road, lest it pass them by, shouting, "Wait for me,wait for me!" like a child chasing an ice cream truck. The scene is now part ofneighborhood folk history, as well as family myth.

As with ritual communitas, regular activities stopped. Schools dosed forweeks or months. The three Fargo /Moorhead universities adopted a rotatingcommunity service schedule whereby one school held classes, another didsandbag duty, and the third held classes on standby. Businesses released employ-ees to dike one another's homes. In one case, when a single mother's outlyingfarm home .was completely surrounded by water, her employer "just said, takeall the time you need. They didn't make me dock sick leave or vacation days, andI started going back to work half days after five weeks." Sports competitionshalted; the sports segment of news broadcasts reported how various local teams(as well as the Minnesota Vikings) were sandbagging. For over a month, dtizensresponded to TV, newspaper, and call-in radio requests for hundreds of volun-teers a day in Fargo alone.

Regular structure was replaced with an emergency structure that eliminatedstatuses or turned them upside down. "Todd is our executive director, and sowhen it came to, 'What are we going to do?' he was really respectful of myknowledge in the area and became more my assistant.... Actually, it was kindof funny because someone asked if we were married. We had worked so muchtogether that we could finish each other's sentences."

An odd mixture of famous, high-status individuals—music stars Travis Trittand David Crosby and politidans Al Gore, Elizabeth Dole, and Bill Clin-ton—could be seen along the river, talking and working with the people. Chaingangs were released from jail to throw sandbags side by side with those of highrank. Mayor Lanning of Moorhead has continued to indude in political speecheshis time spent bagging with the dry's convicts. Stretch limousines, a symbol ofelite luxury (and ritual occasions), were used to transport grubby sandbaggersto crisis spots. And in a complete reversal of the usual U.S. media litany of "lostyouth" stories, constant praise was heard on radio, TV, and street corners about"our youth: the pride of the state, the saviors of the dties":

And those are very affluent areas, there's not a $100,000 home, most of 'em are . . .$300,000 or more. And there was about 300 kids, I mean they were all ages, but most of'em were young people standing there in that rain [sandbagging]. Not complaining, orwhining, or running for cars or cover or whatever. So then as I continued south, I gotto 52nd Ave. and went by Greenfields, which is kind of affordable housing. And therewas 400 people standing there. And there was no dass structure in the fight. I mean,you could be . . . standing beside somebody that had a lot of money!

As the flood myth expanded, symbolic culture heroes were created to inspireall to greater efforts. One was Mayor Pat Owens of Grand Forks—a secretarywho thought she could run the town better than the bureaucrats above her, soshe ran for mayor and won just in time to take the helm of a sinking ship goingdown in flames. In mythic terms, Pat Owens—who comforted her peoplethrough the spectacular loss of their dty to flood and fire—served as a role model"Lady of Sorrows." Her famous words, "My own home is going under, I'm inthe same boat with all the rest of you," are well remembered. To compliment herrole as noble sufferer, she and her dty were comforted by a person given the


eponym "The Angel," an anonymous billionaire donor who gave $2,000 to everyhousehold in the ravaged cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.

Unlike the unfortunate Owens, Fargo Director of Public Works Dcnn is Walaker—the Superman to the South—led his people to victory. Walaker went from beingthe head of "the guys who drive the snowplows" to a position of fame andadmiration. A middle school actually sent him a superhero cape, and an editorialcartoon in the Fargo Forum (Stark 1997) showed him wearing it. In keeping withthe ritual reversal of status, both great leaders, Owens and Walaker, were ofcommon origins

Walaker received increasing fan mail during the latter blizzards and sub-sequent flood, much of it including prayers for his strength, endurance, andwell-being (see Figure 1). Like that of sacred priest-kings of early city-states, hiswell-being was identified with that of the city. One letter told him, "You'll nodoubt find it interesting to hear that our pastor, in his sermon about service toeach other this morning, referred to you as 'Saint Dennis.' " Another wrote, "Irecall during the War, on the Island of Saipan we were going out on a dangerousmission, and before our squadron took off, the base chaplain came down and Irecall his words which seems like yesterday, 'Greater love than this hath no manthat he lay down his life for his fellow man.' These words certainly depict whatyou did for your people." The symbolic flood heroes were loved deeply, as onebonds with ancestors, fellow initiates, and the gods in sacred rites (Turner 1969;Van Gennep 1960). And through identification with the heroes, the battle mythof the flood was lived by all. People often slept with the radio on, waking whenvoices became overexcited or when Walaker's voice came over the air. News ofthe heroes was spread by word of mouth as well as mass media: some excitedly

Figure 1A visibly tired and distressed Dennis Walaker, Fargo's flood leader, surveythe Oak Grove Neighborhood after the dike breach. Photo by ColburrtHvidston III. Used by permission of The Forum, Fargo's daily newspaper.


tell stories of breathlessly meeting Walker on the street and fawning as if he werea top movie star.

Turner states that communitas erases gender roles. During the flood, tradi-tional gender roles were negated as women hurled bags on the front lines withthe men, taking leadership roles within family and neighborhood. Contrary tofindings in some other disaster events (Hoffman 1999), survivors' stories of thisflood reflect gender equity and reversal of standard roles. Walaker described thegender of sandbagging to me, "And once in a while, you know, sure you thinkabout a football player, 275 pounds you know, and workin' out all the time, butthere was women that were—unbelievably wiry!" One little girl describes atypical situation in her proud fan mail to him, "My mother and I sandbaggedwhile my father and my sister helped to run a Salvation Army food mobile."

Turner also reports that status is concealed in communitas by a uniform modeof dress. Muddied rubber boots or waders, jeans, fatigues or work clothes,muddy jackets, shredded gloves, and ear-warming caps became standard garb.This did the job of erasing gender and class distinctions, but also clearly distin-guished flood survivors from outsiders: ever since the flood, neighbors from theflooded Oak Grove area of Fargo call the boots Walakers. They have become partof a standard costume at neighborhood parties—even in dry seasons.

Private property distinctions faded away, as all property was at risk, defendedby the same dikes. "And to do that, you see," one man told me, "you have toconnect with your neighbors. If you don't get along with your neighbors, youboth sank." Violations of general reciprocity were dealt with swiftly and effec-tively. One woman recounted a story told to her by her friend, Crissy, who hadbeen leading sandbag volunteers:

There was this other house where it was raining and really cold, it was right when theblizzard was starting, but it hadn't turned yet. And she said there was a whole bunchof them taking and sandbagging this house, and they were cold and wet, and they wentto the door and ask if she would make some coffee for the people that were volunteeringto help save her home. And [the woman in the house] said, "All I have is gourmet coffee,and I'm not going to feed them that" And Crissy said, "Fine." She went downstairsand she said, "Lef s go everyone," and they left.

Normally, neighbors gave freely of expensive pumps, generators, and otherequipment. KFGO radio ran 24-hour flood coverage that included requests notonly for sandbaggers but for needed equipment as well: "Well I was in thebasement working and somebody was callin' to me through the basementwindow, sayin', 'What do you need?' You know, it was like a shopping list. Youneed flashlights, you need pumps, you need generators?" This man went on totell me,

We had maybe a total of six or seven pumps. Well I had one that we had bought. See,the one we had bought, we never took out of the box until we heard on the radio thatthere was a crisis at [a specific address down the block]. And we realized it was thisguy Moreno, next to Carter, and we didn't know them very well, so we took the pumpdown there and said, "Do you need this?" And he did. And he used it for a day or two,to solve his immediate problem Our pump bailed them out in the short run. Thenhe lent the pump to Schaffer. [The major dike breach that finished off Oak Groveoccurred in Schaffer's backyard.] And our pump ended up at the bottom of Schaffer's. . . under water. So then we had Freestone's pump.

When Oak Grove flooded, power had to be cut to prevent fires in floodedhomes. This act doomed additional houses to flooding because their sumppumps stopped. The Lutheran Aid Society was there within what seemed like


minutes, with a truckload of gas-powered electric generators for free distribu-tion, but there were not enough. The man in line for the last pump was an elderlygentleman who turned to the young man behind him and said, "You have a newbaby, you take it." There was no question of "if," in this case: the man knew fullwell that he had just doomed his own home for the sake of his neighbor. In theultimate sacrifice, the Woodland Drive area voted to be "diked out," to be on thewrong side of an emergency dike built to save the northside sewer system if theirbackyard dikes gave way. Both of these incidents fly in the face of "cost/benefitanalysis" theories. Communitas values far outweighed any consideration ofdelayed material gain or personal safety through cooperation: personal propertywas sacrificed for others. As in ritual, flood communitas erased boundariesbetween one's own well-being and that of others.

Another trait of communitas is humility. Humility was practiced to the utmost.Sandbaggers who dedicated days or weeks of their lives to helping othersaccepted no rewards and were in fact, difficult to find for interviews, althoughresidents of crisis areas came forward for my research project eagerly to praisethem. After the flood, when citizens donated thousands of dollars for a dreamvacation for flood hero Dennis Walaker, he gave it to charity and spent his ownmoney to print commemorative posters to give volunteers. Although he receivedhundreds of pieces of fan mail for leading "Fort Fargo," Walaker struggled forwords when I asked him to summarize the experience: "The process was nota—ah, it was emotional, it was com—, it was humbling, the best word, it washumbling." Flood survivors all tell stones of people they wish they could thankbut do not know who it was that came to save them that day.

Turner lists foolishness as a trait of even the most intensely religious communitas.Well, in nonliminal times, the free giving of power equipment worth hundreds

Figure 2Local dialect humor with a serious message outside Kragness, MN. Photo bySharon Grugel. Used by permission.


of dollars would be perceived as foolishness in the United States. It would befoolish in ordinary times to vandalize one's own home with spray paint, butgraffiti became a norm for homeowners faced with destruction. Slogans ex-pressed a variety of puns, thank yous, threats to idle tourists, prayers, and—es-pecially—silly sayings (see Figure 2).

Consciously ritualized group foolishness was also a factor. After the OakGrove dikes failed, a florist boarded a canoe and decorated the breached dikesof flooded houses with potted flowers that many cherish in their new yards tothis day. Oak Grove neighbors had a barbecue amid their flooded homes, placinga grill in the icy water, mingling in hip waders, and climbing onto scaffoldingdraped around a flood-damaged home for a party. Those who did not wade inarrived by canoe—a new form of neighborhood recreation. Silly songs composedon sandbag lines are still remembered three years later:

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in Red River clay.In the air there's a feeling of panic

And,

Red River, wider than a mile.I'm diking you in style each day.You old scream maker, you back breaker.Wherever you're going, I haven't a say

For Turner, true ritual communitas requires sacredness, sacred instruction,and continuous reference to mystical powers. We already have a flood peopledby personae like Saint Dennis and the Angel. Here I am making some substitu-tions for these categories. I propose first that we examine a new category, "sightsand wonders." Tribal people know that a good rite of passage requires revelationof sacred objects and miraculous happenings. This is a primary medium forsacred instruction, which is rarely by word alone.3 During the flood, visualexamples of the miraculous transmitted the idea that something of a supernaturalnature was transpiring, but rather than being mere enactments, they wereuniquely real. For instance, when the Oak Grove dikes burst, neighbors rescueda car by carrying it to dry ground. Onlookers and participants were under-standably impressed.

Folklorists have noted that amazing stories of objects out of place are featuresof Midwestern tornado narratives (Danielson 1990); so too with the flood. OneOak Grove neighbor described seeing from his window on the river "a couch,that looked like if you could get to it you could have laid down on that couch—ona particular ice floe." Another family received the river's gift of a canoe. Otherout-of-place objects were placed by human hands. Lindenwood neighborhoodused a glowing plastic Santa atop its dike as a nighttime beacon to signalMoorhead residents on the Minnesota side of the river that the dikes in Fargostill held. While Santa "gave proof through the night that the dikes were stillthere," Minnesotans on the Moorhead side of the river flashed Christmas lightsback at North Dakotans. Holes in dikes were plugged by tennis balls; big holesrequired basketballs. Neighborhoods literally owed their continued existence tothese small items of sports equipment. The city of Moorhead found a similar usefor garbage trucks, parking them atop manhole covers in areas where waterpressure had been blowing them into the air on geysers of flood water. Furtherup the north-flowing Red River, Winnipeg was threatened by flood water stirredby ten-foot waves. The city protected its dikes from erosion by building a breakwall out of its school buses filled with rocks. Some out-of-place objects hence


became testimonies to the power of nature, and others, to the powerful wits offellow flood fighters.

Other miraculous sights and wonders were produced by a "higher power."The Hale-Bopp comet hung in the sky throughout the month-long ordeal, draw-ing eyes to the heavens as people patrolled neighborhood dikes and worked onpatching them. For example, "the glory of the Creator" is revealed in the narrativeof one midnight crew leader. He had come outside to find his dike patrol crewmissing. A brief search found them, staring agog across the swollen river andinto the sky. As he approached them shouting reprimands, he realized what theywere gaping at—the northern lights dancing above in the sky and below in thewater as well. He remained for some time, awestruck, with the rest of the crew.He tells listeners his tale that God sent the flood to lure the lazy out of bed towitness the beauty of His late night sky shows and other creations.

No one I interviewed interpreted the flood as God's wrath. In all cases, naturesent a flood, and God sent communitas. As everyone will tell you, no one diedin the larger cities, not even in the flooding and burning of Grand Forks, not evenhospital patients, loaded abruptly onto buses and humvees with no time toretrieve medication or medical records. Stories circulate among scientists fromregional universities: the Army Corps of Engineers inspected Fargo's backyardsandbag dikes after the water went down and proclaimed them scientificallyincapable of holding back that much water for mat long a time. Yet they held."It's a miracle!" the agnostics proclaim. No ritual elder was necessary to transmitthe sacred instruction in this case. Every citizen became a bearer of sacred,miraculous messages, repeated often, in the media and at home, school, work,and church.

Back now to the relationship among stress, ritual, disaster, and communitas.For example, rites of passage mark the transition of an individual from one statusto another, a type of change often accompanied by considerable personal stressin the form of doubts and fears about an uncertain future: "Will / be any good asa spouse/warrior/adult/mother? Can / give birth? How am I going to manageadult behavior and achieve adult wisdom? Will others recognize me as deservingmy new status? How can I do something I've never done before?" Rites ofpassage serve to mitigate these fears by symbolically re-creating them in a ritualuniverse successfully navigated by mythical ancestors. Initiates role-play beingthe ancestors, face the fears, are thereby made stronger, and are transformed bythe process.

For example, southwestern American Athabaskans (Navajo and Apache) re-quire girls to act out many feats of physical strength and endurance during theirinitiation into womanhood (Basso 1970; Farrer 1994). In view of guests the girlmust run, kneel, and dance for many hours, for many days. With the aid of elders,she acts out the creation myth of her people and is transformed into the foundingmother goddess/ancestress of the tribe. Among the Navajo she also displays hercooking skills by producing a gigantic cake cooked in the earth. In addition tothe stress of physical endurance, the ritual creates the performance stress of beingon display, in order to mitigate future stresses. In times of future crises the newwoman can recall her successful performance during the ritual, her experienceof oneness with the great ancestress, and proceed to face life with great confi-dence. So effective is the creation of ritual stress to alleviate real stress in thecourse of a lifetime that both the Apache and Navajo are experiencing a revivaland elaboration of old puberty rituals, investing considerable money and effortto make their daughters into capable women.

Other rites of passage heighten the degree of experienced danger even furtherto incorporate the fear of loss of life, dismemberment, and loss of community—the

Jencson astrous Rites 55

ultimate fears in real disaster. Australian aboriginal (Stanner 1966, Tonkinson1974) and African Ndembu (Turner 1967) manhood rituals for boys incorporatethese features. The rites occur in secret, the boys having never witnessed what isto happen to them. Circumcision is involved—a "genuine" dismemberment.Boys are allowed to believe that some initiates are likely to die and that castration(not just circumcision) is a real possibility. Rather than undergoing these ritessurrounded by the community, they are secluded from it, fearing permanentbanishment from home. The emotional impact of the transformations undergoneby participants is thus heightened to a maximum, they have faced death, dis-memberment, and social ostracism and have emerged victorious. If the ritualfunctions properly, the greater the amount of controlled stress survived in ritual,the stronger the "survivor" of the rite will be when faced with future trials in theworld of physical realities beyond the ritual.

Rituals also incorporate an artful balance of physical and emotional stress,often using the former to alleviate the latter. Physiological stress aids in thecreation of trance, which is related to faith and suggestibility. Thus physiologicalmeans are used to enhance belief and depth of positive emotion. Among thecommon physiological stresses used in religious rites are sleep deprivation andrepetitive rhythmic motion (Lewis 1989; Lowie 1954). Residents in Red RiverValley crisis areas reported as little as two hours sleep per 36 hours, for weeks ata time. This serious lack of sleep may have something to do with the silliness, butit also contributed to the overall depth of communitas. Do not forget the two-hoursandbagging shifts and the people who stayed at it for six hours at a stretch.

Furthermore, anyone who has ever stood in a sandbag line knows it is some-thing like a line dance. People stand in parallel rows facing partners. As the bagscome down the line, one sways to the left to receive it and then to the right topass the bag. If done properly, the full weight of the 35 to 60 pound bag is never

Figure 3Out-of-place objects testify to local ingenuity: highway marker cones invertedon a slanted board allow sandbags to be filled and passed rapidly at crisis sites.


carried—it is shared with those on either side. Hence the rhythmic motion iscoordinated with others, and communitas is enhanced physiologically (see Fig-ure 3). We sway together: to break the rhythm is to risk injury. As in ritual, Fargomusicians toured crisis areas to provide a better cadence for the dance of thesandbags.

If we are to have a full analogy to the type of communitas evoked by a rite ofpassage, we must ask, Did people feel truly transformed by disaster as they doby rites of passage? Was there a permanent change in psyche or status role? Formany, indeed there was. Take, for instance, the changes in "Pioneer Woman."She spent an entire month alone on the family farmstead, her children stayingwith friends in town. Without electricity, surrounded by icy water, wading outdaily to scavenge firewood from downed trees felled by the final blizzard,waking throughout the night to refuel her single pump, she saved their homeand the family's animals:

It was a real experience. My brothers call me "Pioneer Woman."... Actually, it wasn'tthat bad. It was something I'm glad that I went through because it made me stronger.[During our divorce, prior to the flood,] my ex-husband was very cruel towards theend. He told me I was—just a big zero. And so, my self-esteem was very low. And goingthrough something like [the flood] made me realize that I'm not a zero, that I canreally—I can do things! I can take care of things.

Like Athabaskan, aboriginal, and Ndembu initiates, she too learned to face thefuture by enacting the strength of her ancestors, becoming a "Pioneer Woman"just like them in the process.

I think, after this still sketchy analysis, attributing the sense of communitas indisaster to a vague and general "stress" or to an animal response to necessity canbe laid to rest. Necessity is involved, but it is no simple matter. In times ofemergency, humans must agree on new norms of behavior and create materialproductions at a whirlwind pace. To do so, they enlist the realm of the religiousbecause religion and culture are intimately connected and religion is the ultimatecultural motivator. Ritual is a profoundly effective tool for the alleviation ofstress. So people create sets of symbols and a mythos of culture heroes, super-natural powers, miraculous feats, visions, and messengers from the gods. Theyplace themselves within that mythos, redefining themselves by the symbol set,and by doing so, they take action, and by acting, they survive.

Oliver-Smith says, "Perhaps there needs to be less consideration toward thedelivery of more aid and more attention devoted to devising culturally appro-priate ways to nurture the potentials represented by postdisaster solidarity"(1999:168). I say get rid of the "perhaps," and let us also not forget: in some typesof disaster like the Red River Valley Flood, the solidarity /communitas need notwait until the water stops flowing, the wind stops blowing, or the earth stopsrumbling. Disaster communitas is a powerful force, equal in many cases to thepower of a raging flood, a hurricane, or a major earthquake.

Notes

1. Names of Red River Valley residents have been changed to protect anonymity.Names of famous persons, politicians, government leaders, and city officials are un-changed.

2. For an overview of the sequence of events and statistics related to the Red RiverValley Flood, please refer to Bakken et al. 1997, Sprung 1997, and Stensrud 1999.

3. In aboriginal Australian boys' initiation rites at Jigalong, there is in fact very littleverbal instruction to accompany sacred objects: repeated seeing and ritual context are themeans for transmitting the objects' sacred meaning (Tonkinson 1974:88).


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Documents

Jencson- Disastrous Rites