Markets

of Sorrow,
Labors
of Faith

New Orleans in the wake o f katrina

vincanne adams
Markets
of sorrow,
Labors
of faith
New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

Vincanne adaMs

Duke University Press Durham & London 2013

© 2013 duke University Press
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and typeset in Minion Pro and Franklin Gothic
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Figures 1–8 appear courtesy of Taslim van Hattum.

Figures 9–11 appear courtesy of Vincanne Adams.
Figure 12 appears courtesy of Tina C. Russell.
This book is dedicated to
the people of New Orleans,
Gay Becker & John Norby.
 Contents

1 It’s Not about Katrina 1

2 The Making of a Disaster 22

3 “If This Could Happen to Us,

It Could Happen to Anyone” 55

4 Navigating the Road Home 74

5 Getting to the Breaking Point 99

6 Faith in a Volunteer Recovery 126

7 Charity, Philanthrocapitalism,
and the Affect Economy 153

8 Katrina as the Future 176

Acknowledgments 191
Notes 193
Bibliography 213
Index 225
one

it’s not aboUt katrina

Why should [we] continue to carry the full burden of this recovery on
[our] backs? . . . We are in a dead standstill, as there is no money for building
materials. We were devastated both physically and emotionally. Our mental
health is in crisis. The depression has shifted from the storm to the hope-
lessness and stress of the Road Home. Yes, it is that bad. . . . A little girl came
to volunteer with her mom from Boston. She was nine years old. And she
asked her mother on the third day of working in [our community], “Mom,
when are we going back to America?” You know . . . that really . . . [crying].
Sorry. I said I wasn’t going to do this. But it’s overwhelming. . . . [taking a deep
breath]. . . . So I think I’m here to ask you all. . . . We are Americans. We are
homeowners and we pay taxes and we are citizens. My question to you is:
when can we rejoin the country?—Caroline reeves, community
organizer, testimony for the U.S. Senate, May 2007

t his book is not about Hurricane Katrina. It is about Americans who

have managed to survive a second-order disaster that was precipitated
by the success of profit-driven solutions to a crisis of need at the turn of
the twenty-first century. It is about the disaster of stalled and prolonged re-
covery, not the disaster that preceded it. It is about the price that is paid in
human terms for the success of processes set in motion long before Hurri-
cane Katrina, about the effects of privatizing our most public social services,
and about the failure of these services to respond to Americans in need
because they are tied to market forces guided by profit. It is also about the
other face of privatization: the grass-roots, community, and faith-based re-
sponses that rose up in the wake of these failures and the new economy that

figure 1. The destruction was widespread and pervasive (2006).

 has emerged in the wake of such responses. This economy is based on the
circulation of an affective surplus—the emotional responsiveness and ethi-
cal inducement to action generated by a recognition of ongoing need among
Americans—and the unpaid labor force it mobilizes. Finally, this book is
about the infringements of market logic that impinge on even the charity
sector in ways that promise, once again, profits gained from the spoils of
a disaster and its victims. New Orleanians are in a good position to tell us
this story, and perhaps none are better qualified to do so than the Bradlieus.

the bradlieus
In August 2005, Henry and Gladys Bradlieu lived comfortably in retire-
ment in one of the oldest properties in the Gentilly neighborhood of New
Orleans.1 Henry had served in Vietnam, had been shot several times, and
was a three-time Purple Heart recipient. He then became a civil servant for
the U.S. Postal Service; after he retired he spent his free time golfing at the
public course. Gladys had worked different clerical and assistant jobs her
whole life and had last been a data entry clerk at City Hall. They owned their
two-bedroom home on a corner lot in what was, in 2005, a densely packed
mixed-race neighborhood. They were a success story of middle-class com-
fort that surpassed many of their relatives who lived across town in Mid-
City and the Upper Ninth Ward. The Bradlieus had no idea how quickly
everything they had lived and saved for in order to retire in modest comfort
could be taken away from them.
On August 27, 2005, the Bradlieus evacuated to Texas and watched the
storm on television; they didn’t know yet that their home would survive the
hurricane but would be swallowed up by the floods resulting from the col-
lapse of the levee system thereafter. Their home filled with ten feet of water,
and it sat like that for three weeks. When they finally came back to the
city a few months later, Gladys recalled it was so quiet. “No birds, no trees,
no color. Nothing. Just gray, everywhere gray.” Furniture was covered in
layers of lifeless mud. Silverware that had floated off of kitchen counters was
strewn about in layers of smelly, gooey sludge. Family photographs were
blackened and moldy. Clothing, linens, books, and shoes were indistin-
guishable from the walls, which had wallpaper peeling away in sheets from
the stained brown-gray sheetrock beneath. Worst of all, Gladys said, were

2 Chapter one
the trees. Most of the trees had been uprooted, and the rest were covered
in brownish-gray mud. They were as lifeless as the neighborhood around
them.
Like a lot of returning residents, Henry and Gladys didn’t really know
where to begin. They had received a check for $2,400 and a trailer from the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). The church folks in Texas
who helped the Bradlieus while they were displaced sent them home with
some $500 taken up in collection from parishioners, a few items of cloth-
ing, some dishware, glasses, and linens. In December 2005, they moved
into their three-hundred-square-foot trailer parked lengthwise on what was
once their front lawn. As African Americans who had lived through the
years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they were used to pulling
themselves up by their own bootstraps, or at least with nothing if not the
Lord’s help. Henry said, “We’ll rebuild.”
Five years later, in January 2011, at the age of seventy, Henry Bradlieu
died, having spent most of the last three years of his life in his cramped bed
at one end of a Fema trailer, paralyzed by a stroke that he suffered in 2008
on the day he learned that he would be denied, for the second time, fed-
eral assistance for rebuilding from the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s Road
Home Program. Gladys recalled her husband’s anger on that day in 2008.
“He was beside himself,” she said. His two-and-a-half-year struggle to prove
to Road Home that he owned his home, including getting an affidavit from
the previous owner, months and months of lost paperwork, repeat visits to
agency offices, being treated like a criminal, and the sheer discomfort of
living in his little Fema trailer, was too much. Gladys had tried to reason
with people at the office of the Road Home Program, providing the paper-
work and the bond-for-deed sale records showing that they owned their
home. Bond-for-deed sales were common among those who had been de-
nied opportunities for mortgages through conventional banks. Despite the
fact that Gladys had retrieved documentation from City Hall that showed
such transactions were legal and conferred ownership, she was unable to
convince them. She was resigned, but “Henry was different,” she said.

He wanted to cuss them out. One time we had one meeting and we
went all the way to [Governor] Blanco’s office and he cussed them
out and they had to get people to escort him out of there. . . . He was
so mad. . . . They were trying to say that we hadn’t flooded in our

it ’ s not about Katrina 3

 home. Can you imagine? Henry said, “I fought for my country. Look
what my country did for me? They kicked me in the head.”

By 2008, Henry and Gladys’s savings were gone. Their pensions were
not enough to afford even the building materials for repairing their home.
He was out of time, out of money, out of patience. In the same year that
Henry was denied his request for a mere $50,000 to rebuild, the execu-
tives at iCF International who ran the Road Home Program under a no-bid
federal subcontract awarded themselves $2 million in bonuses and posted
record earnings for their stockholders. When Henry got the letter that de-
nied him funds for a second time, he couldn’t believe it. That afternoon, he
told Gladys he was going in to take a nap; within minutes of lying down in
his tiny trailer bed, he suffered a massive stroke that left him nearly totally
paralyzed.
Gladys took care of Henry after that. She fed him, cleaned him, tended
his bed sores, got his medications, and, in her spare time, tried to figure out
what to do with her gutted, empty home that sat some fifteen feet from her
trailer door. Even the tasks of keeping the weeds down and the rats out were
challenges. When the Bradlieus finally moved back into their rebuilt home
two years later in July 2010, it was only because a neighborhood volunteer
group had championed their cause. It took two years, eight hundred volun-
teers, and a steady stream of donations from ordinary people—people who,
upon hearing Henry’s story, would say things like “Screw the government!
We’ll rebuild it ourselves!”
The wait was too long for Henry. Only six months after moving in, he
died. Gladys said she believed Henry had waited to die until she was settled
back in their home. “You know,” she said, “it wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that
killed him. It was the recovery that killed him.” Remembering the day of
his stroke, she said, “Look what they did for him. “Look what they did to
him.”

delayed recovery and Market-driven Governance

There are specific reasons it took so long for people to recover in New
Orleans. These reasons are largely tied to forces that were far beyond the
control of any returning resident or any local official. They were mobilized
in and through political and economic arrangements that allowed them.

4 Chapter one
These arrangements turned disaster recovery into a for-profit endeavor that
enabled private companies to obtain government relief funds while offer-
ing little accountability to the people for whom these funds were intended.
They allowed banks to offer loans that drove up debt among victims while
generating interest-based returns for lenders. They allowed insurance com-
panies to evade culpability when they refused to pay for damages but extract
further insurance payments from people whose homes could no longer be
inhabited. Finally, they ensured that real recovery would be left up to local
volunteers, churches, and nonprofit charities. Recovery that should have
taken a few years was turned into what locals called a “funeral that would
not end.” For people like Henry Bradlieu, the funeral became all too real.
Henry Bradlieu’s experience was not exceptional; it was exemplary.
The testimonies and analyses of New Orleanians’ experiences of trying
to rebuild and recover offer a glimpse of the inevitable outcome of what is
often called neoliberal capitalism. In New Orleans, we can see in bold re-
lief the contours of our political and social predicament created by neolib-
eral policies of governing, or what Margaret Somers has more descriptively
called market- driven governance.2 Emerging out of a half-century commit-
ment to neoliberal policies that favor and advance market-based solutions
for our most pressing economic and social problems, we see now a steady
transformation of public-sector institutions into market-based consortia
wherein fiscal, for-profit transactions become the means by which access to
federal resources, even for things like disaster relief, is determined. George
Soros has called attention to the dangers of this trend—a form of market
fundamentalism3—in which popular support prevails for ending “big gov-
ernment” alongside policies that allow the free market to determine how
we allocate our national resources in order to solve not only our fiscal prob-
lems but also our social problems. What New Orleanians’ stories offer is a
glimpse into how the trend toward letting the for- profit market serve as the
engine that drives public-sector work is both much more complex and more
pervasive than we have seen in the past, and also how it fails.4
Despite calls for ending big government, New Orleans offers evidence of
an ongoing dependence upon big government to fund the work of things
like disaster recovery in ways that help markets and companies but hurt
people. To be sure, market-driven governance has in no way ended gov-
ernment involvement in socioeconomic affairs. Market-driven governance
simply offers new ways to bring the market and its rationalities of profit into

it ’ s not about Katrina 5

 governance. Somers notes that these trends have been successful at convert-
ing popular legislative agendas, which historically favored and protected an
ethos of “shared fate, equal risk, and social justice” into a situation in which
exclusions on the benefits of citizenship are determined by contractual op-
portunities governed by the market.5 Market-driven governance is what
happens, she writes, when “disproportionate market power disrupts the
carefully constructed balance [of power among state, market, and citizens,
adjudicated in the public sphere], as risks and costs of managing human
frailties under capitalism once shouldered by government and corporations
get displaced onto individual workers and vulnerable families.”6
The conscription of the profit sector to do the work that the public needs
has in no way resulted in more efficient or effective recovery for those try-
ing to return and rebuild after a disaster. New Orleans offers an example of
how this happens. The costs of shouldering responsibility for recovery were
shifted to families and individuals, while profits were generated for corpo-
rations that were given responsibility for managing what many people still
think of as civil and social welfare needs. Companies that were hired to help
New Orleanians rebuild developed high-profile ipo offerings and upward
trends in stock values, while homeowners were forced to go into debt, arbi-
tration, and lawsuits to recover funds they were promised. The delayed re-
covery produced a second-order disaster that had its own logic and ratio-
nales that were nearly as deadly as those that produced the floods in the first
place.
The disaster of market-driven governance emerges today as an en-
trenched set of institutional arrangements in which government continues
to play a key role in protecting the interests of market-oriented businesses
that, in turn, are increasingly authorized to make money not only on key
government activities like defense contracting and infrastructure but also
on key commitments to social welfare, including assistance for disaster and
recovery aid—that is, on the business of social suffering. These arrange-
ments define the contours and also the predicament of our current political
economy; accounts from New Orleans in the five-year aftermath of Katrina
offer us insights about the uneven success of such policies when it comes
to the social contract, demonstrating how well this arrangement is work-
ing for some and how poorly it works for others. In the chapters herein, we
will see how market-oriented policies deployed to effect and augment re-
covery instead enabled and encouraged private-sector investment in public-

6 Chapter one
sector problems in ways that prioritized corporate financial rewards and fis-
cal growth over other measures of success that have, at different historical
moments in the United States, held sway because they were protected by a
strong public sector.

the inefficiencies of Profit

When government funds allocated for relief are funneled through private
for-profit companies on their way to being distributed to victims of disaster,
something happens to the money. The interference of competing demands
of the market can impede operations, pulling resources in other directions
than downward to the recipients who are in need. What we will see herein
is an example of a privately organized, publicly funded bureaucratic failure.
The market, which many believe provides an impartial engine for sustain-
able infrastructure and social welfare, actually got in the way of hoped-for
outcomes. The assumption that government bureaucracy was to blame for
the disaster of delayed recovery was voiced, but it concealed a more pivotal
truth: such delays were actually a result of the inefficiencies of profit.
Commitment to neoliberal arrangements on the part of policymakers,
planners, and citizens alike in the United States has been growing for more
than fifty years even though it has never been universally supported. Today,
the market penetrates more and more domains of the public sector, where
one finds large-scale commitment to the idea that profit motivation will cre-
ate an equitable and efficient trickling down of resources to those in need
who deserve it.7 This trickledown is believed to occur in two ways: first by
the growth of businesses that find ways to solve problems of need while also
making profits and, second, by the recognition on the part of large profit
owners that charity will work better than public-sector institutions to take
care of those in need. Both of these processes are seen in post-Katrina New
Orleans.
Businesses organized to help with relief arose at the intersection between
government and citizen and seized opportunities to show that the private
sector could succeed where government would fail. Subcontracted to the
government to carry out redistribution activities, these businesses were
nevertheless allowed to work with little regulatory oversight. In the end,
they were able to profit from human tragedy, turning sorrows into oppor-
tunities for capital investment in what Naomi Klein calls a form of disaster

it ’ s not about Katrina 7

 capitalism.8 In New Orleans, one can trace this dynamic in the actions of
private-sector businesses like Halliburton, the Shaw Group, and Blackwater,
who were called in for rescue-and-relief operations, all the way to the re-
covery subcontractors like iCF International and the banks who obtained
Small Business Administration loan support and insurance companies who
denied payments to their clients.
Even more surprising, and frightening, is how the trail of profit making
can also be followed all the way to the nonprofit sector, with creeping mar-
ket penetration into the charities and faith-based groups that stepped up in
response to the failure of the for-profit sector. Organizations like HandsOn
and Points of Light Institute have emerged as part of a new national-level
corporate assemblage that makes use of federal funds in new ways, bringing
charity into the mix of market-oriented opportunities to take care of a needy
public. As this assemblage grows, so, too, does the degree to which our econ-
omy turns need and the affective responses it generates into a new source of
profit. Questions about how best to provide for people in need (and which
of these people qualify for help) after a disaster are vividly brought to the
forefront as the recovery industry becomes a new sector for market oppor-
tunism and growth.

transforming need into Profit

Understanding the trend toward increasing privatization of public-sector
resources, including social welfare services like those that emerge after
a disaster, requires understanding a new set of commitments, as Somers
notes—commitments to the subtle replacement of an ethics of public care
with an ethics of private profit. Although the idea of subcontracting govern-
ment work to the private sector is not new, what is new today is the particu-
lar way that for-profit businesses have come to be involved in public-sector
activities in largely unregulated ways and in ways that put our most impor-
tant safety-net infrastructures at risk.9 Institutions that are designed to pro-
vide public care (from welfare services to education) have become places
where profit making not only is deemed ethically tolerable as a mainstream
political proposition but also is desired as a measure of success, and often
the only measure of success. Naomi Klein notes that, under these arrange-
ments, revolving doors between government agencies and private-sector
businesses have enabled large for-profit corporations not only to deploy but

8 Chapter one
also to design public-sector programs, including federal programs to stimu-
late long-term recovery and the provision of rebuilding resources to post-
disaster communities. Such arrangements have allowed for a blurring of
investment potential with humanitarian need while also creating a slippery
slope for those who would use public resources for private gain at the ex-
pense of those who are left to fend for themselves.
Foucault noted that “the problem of neoliberalism was not to cut out or
contrive a free space of the market within an already given political society
. . . the problem of neoliberalism is rather how the overall exercise of politi-
cal power can be modeled on the principles of the market economy.”10 An
exploration of recovery after Katrina offers a good lens through which to
view the long-term success of neoliberal approaches to problems of gover-
nance and the subtle ways in which they are changing things—that is, an
exploration of what neoliberalism is today as a form of market-driven gov-
ernance. If, for example, neoliberal policies have always discouraged de-
pendency on the part of the poor and needy on government “handouts”
not only as failures of public policy but also as failures of personhood and
citizenship, then new regimes of marketized governance both reinforce and
reverse this logic. They enable the needy to become a site for the production
of capital, generating profits for companies that spring into existence after a
disaster.
Who is authorized to care for those in need, who determines how much
money a company should be able to make doing so, and what outcome in-
dices are used to determine whether or not the company has done the job
well are all forms of political power in which notions of fiscal enterprise
should be measured against the persistence of need. But what we see today
is that market-driven governance turns the persistence of need into an en-
gine of disaster capitalism. Measures of fiscal success are inversely tied to
the job of eradicating need in part because need is itself a source for further
subcontracting opportunities, as we will see.

the affect economy

New Orleans in the wake of Katrina shows how a new set of market trans-
actions has grown around the role of the poor and needy as both products
and producers in an economy that relies on specific kinds of suffering to
generate new and quite large profits. Creating an affect economy, the prob-

it ’ s not about Katrina 9

 lems of need after a catastrophe circulate as emotional calls for the witness
of suffering and also as urgent ethical demands to intervene and help. In the
wake of recurring disasters, whether caused by the disparities of a healthy
economy, the ravages of a declining economy, or the decimation induced by
so-called natural disasters and failed recovery, the sectors of our society and
economy that answer the call to help are on the rise. The job of taking care
of the needy, whose numbers grow in the wake of tragedies, is now offered
up as a new set of opportunities for profits, tethering market indices of suc-
cess to the humanitarian work of private for-profit companies and nonprofit
charities alike. New transactional opportunities emerge in the space of suf-
fering, even changing the role of charities in the process.
Moving beyond those who would argue that the task of the social scien-
tist is to provide witness to suffering after a tragedy, or that witnessing affect
alone might disrupt the structural conditions that produce it,11 my hope is
that the stories herein will help us to reconsider how the acts of witnessing
and the affective surplus produced by disasters like Katrina have become
themselves part of an economy in which affect circulates as a source of mar-
ket opportunity for profit. This is more than a situation in which companies
use people’s emotions to capitalize on them, as has been well documented
in the service-sector industries.12 The affect economy we live within today
makes use of affective responses to suffering in ways that fuel structural rela-
tions of inequality, providing armies of free labor to do the work of recovery
while simultaneously producing opportunities for new corporate capitaliza-
tion on disasters.
The growth of private for-profit industries within the world of relief and
recovery has had a significant effect on the way that nonprofits and chari-
ties do their work. It is particularly clear, for example, that nongovernmen-
tal and charity institutions, especially those that are faith-based, have been
called upon to provide support where for-profit federal subcontractors have
left gaps in the recovery landscape (or where the unregulated free mar-
ket economy has itself produced the catastrophe). While it is clear that the
churches have been largely successful in this work, it is also clear that the
machinery of our current political economy not only depends on but also
hopes to conscript this sector for new kinds of profit making. Tying together
the affective surplus of suffering with an outpouring of charity-based volun-
teering motivated by affective responsiveness, churches and charities offer
ideal sites for new investments of profit capital.

10 Chapter one
 New companies that blend public-sector work with for-profit private
business have today emerged as a growth industry in postdisaster locations
in the United States, and these firms continually seek new ways to grow by
exploiting the resources of unpaid or low-paid volunteers who are called to
action by the affective surplus that arises in a disaster’s wake. This predica-
ment extends far beyond disaster relief, as witnessed in the growing ranks of
underpaid AmeriCorps, HealthCorps and Teach for America workers. As
small charities and churches play a larger and larger role in filling in where
other recovery processes fail, larger for-profit corporations that are capable
of inserting themselves into the mix of recovery assistance increasingly
become monopoly intermediaries between nonprofit, faith-based, charity
safety-net resources and the people who need help.
The for-profit corporation has become a preferred model for assembling
together charity, government support, and people in need into what is some-
times called a virtuous circle, in which it is assumed that the work of pro-
viding charity can also be profitable. The assumption is that profits can be
made on suffering produced by need even while trying to attend to its elimi-
nation. The business of charity has become a big business opportunity for
those able to generate fiscal surplus out of the affective surplus aroused by
human suffering. The idea of using churches and faith-based labor to do this
work is built into neoliberal prescriptions that see the private charity sec-
tor as more efficient than government-run safety-net programs. Using labor
that is largely free because it is motivated by faith and moral conscience en-
ables this structural arrangement to suture infrastructures of profit making
to the problem of need. In this arrangement, the safety net becomes a kind
of affective choice, rather than a civil right protected by regulations that are
enforced by strong public sector policies and juridical protections. Helping
others in need is seen as a moral virtue, while making profits on this work
is seen as equally virtuous. In an insidious turn, however, this system repro-
duces need by paying low or no wages for the work volunteers contribute
under the banner of moral certainty. The arrangements of an affect econ-
omy insert the engines of affect into the machinery of corporate survival.
In the meantime, private-sector solutions enable companies to funnel fiscal
rewards upward toward executive and marketing portfolios as a system-
atic necessity of company operations and survival rather than downward
to those doing the work or those in need. This arrangement involving vol-
unteer labor alongside corporate profits is justified by the affective sense

it ’ s not about Katrina 11

 of purpose, sometimes tied to notions of Christian charity, that such work
arouses.
Thus, even though charity’s role in helping out where the government
and the free market are not able to take care of everyone is not new, we are
witnessing the flourishing of this arrangement today. Wealth owners are
asked to help take care of needy Americans without passing through the
systems of taxation and redistribution of the public sector. The involvement
of wealth philanthropy in charity caregiving (Andrew Carnegie is a good
example) is not new, but the support for this has grown in ways that have
given rise to the notion that, even here, there are profits to be made, turn-
ing charity itself into not a residual but a primary site for investment capital.
Venture philanthropy and philanthrocapitalism offer striking examples of
this trend, and both have been important in nonprofit charity work that has
helped New Orleans to recover. In the affect economy, the compulsion to
help those in need and the regeneration of need itself in and through such
things as prolonged recovery failure (and reliance on low or unpaid volun-
teer labor) now dance in tandem with one another because of the market’s
penetration. This arrangement not only spawns new profit opportunities
but also changes how humanitarian work gets done.
Accounting for the actual work that gets done to help people recover and
rebuild while also trying to track the upward flow of profits that are now
available through this work are not just tasks that charities must undertake:
they are also the goals of this book. Today, as nonprofit, charity, and church
organizations are brought into relationships with corporations who hope to
profit on the circulation of ongoing need and the affect it arouses, it is im-
portant to track how and when these arrangements work, as well as when
and why they fail.

federal relief and the free Market

Federal support for emergency relief, like support for those in need more
generally, has a long history in the United States. It did not emerge in the
Roosevelt years as a novel form of Keynesian government welfare against
laissez-faire regimes. Debates at the federal level over the effectiveness and
legitimacy of providing federal funding to support disaster relief and other
safety-net programs (as opposed to leaving this job to private-sector chari-
ties) are historically persistent within the United States and are fraught with

12 Chapter one
further debates over moral blame, Christian virtue, racial inequality, and
concerns about the legitimacy of Congress versus the courts in deciding
policy and federal action.13 Any history of the welfare state must include ac-
counting for the role of nearly a century of federal disaster relief in paving
the way for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Indeed, in the century prior to Roose-
velt—a century labeled as one in which “laissez-faire” capitalism reigned—
federal assistance programs were plentiful. Michele Dauber notes that these
programs provided the rationale for their augmentation during the Great
Depression.
The historical and contemporary persistence of federal support for dis-
aster relief is neither contested nor doubted here. A sympathetic state has
always been a necessary counterpart to the free market. What is surprising,
however, is how debates over federal disaster relief are not muted by larger
concerns over the most efficient and effective ways to distribute such relief.
That is, the state has not retreated, and it has not been minimized under
neoliberalism, but neoliberalism has now provided a new and robust ratio-
nale for involving big business in the operations of the sympathetic state
and few people are studying the outcomes of these shifts.
The story of post-Katrina New Orleans is thus not a story of the decline
of the welfare state or the rise of crony capitalism. It is a story about how
the two have become intertwined in new ways: crony capitalism now makes
money on the welfare state.14 As legislative policies call on the free market
to provide solutions to problems of poverty, dispossession, and postdisas-
ter blight, the government creates opportunities for new kinds of market-
driven networks that are designed to do many different things. Rebuilding
basic infrastructures such as roads, electrical grids, and sewage systems as
well as reconstructing schools, public housing, and neighborhoods are jobs
that require federal and state support. When support is given, what matters
is how it is routed and the relative weight placed on public- versus private-
sector priorities in deciding how and where to spend it. Post-Katrina New
Orleans illustrates that public-sector interests became blurred with private-
sector opportunities. As a result, there were few to no real mechanisms in
place to ensure that resources were used fairly. There were virtually no effec-
tive regulations placed on companies to ensure that profits were not sought
at the expense of people in need. In fact, it appears that showing corporate
profits counted for more than ensuring public recovery. Measures of fiscal
reward and corporate growth were used to account for progress in ways that

it ’ s not about Katrina 13

 displaced other measures of success such as seeing many people returning
to rebuilt homes or gauging residents’ access to reconstruction funds with-
out an increase in their personal debt.
Henry Giroux, in his book Stormy Weather, noted that “market funda-
mentalism prevails when the values of the market and the ruthless workings
of finance capital become the template for organizing the rest of society.”15
We saw this before, during, and after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina,
when the conditions that caused the disaster could be traced to cronyism
between private companies and the Army Corps of Engineers. It was seen
when rescue-and-relief operations were handed over to private-sector firms
that made money through Homeland Security operations that were puta-
tively hired to provide humanitarian relief.16 It was visible in the recovery
processes that were deployed and came into being in the five-year aftermath,
as we will see.
Returning New Orleans residents were asked to participate in the cir-
cuits of capital that flowed from the government through corporations and,
finally, to them in ways that were belabored and inefficient because such
capital was used to show corporate profitability alongside recovery success.
This process entailed not an erasure of government but an active converting
of government effort into a process of “allowing” the market to do the job
of reasoning for us or, as Foucault noted, in the passage above, when “the
overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the
market economy.”17 Post-Katrina New Orleans in this sense offers an exem-
plary case of market-driven governance, even if the situation there was in
some sense historically and culturally unique.18 The consequences of these
arrangements, more than of any natural disaster, figure visibly in the stories
of the people of New Orleans, many of whom, more than five years after the
actual hurricane and the weathering of a second crisis precipitated by the bp
Gulf oil spill, were still searching for ways to rebuild and recover.

disaster stories
In some ways, the story of what happened between the initial hurricane and
the five-year mark as I began to write this book, when New Orleanians who
did come back were in some cases still digging out of gutted homes, try-
ing to avoid debilitating debt, and fighting deep depression, is a story that
is familiar to other American communities that suffered catastrophes and

14 Chapter one
never recovered. Eric Klinenberg’s account of the devastating 1995 Chicago
heat wave; Kai Erikson’s study of the Buffalo Creek Flood in West Virginia;
Anthony Wallace’s study of a coal-mining disaster in St. Clair, Pennsylvania;
and a host of other sources on Hurricane Katrina’s effects have all offered
insights about how tragedies should be conceptualized in terms of the social
vulnerability they reveal and the ramifications of existing inequalities that
explain not only patterns of morbidity and mortality but also adjustment,
recovery, and well-being or the lack thereof in a tragedy’s immediate after-
math.19 Following Klinenberg’s example, what we need is a way to read dis-
asters in terms that provide a social autopsy of what went wrong before but
also in the long-term aftermath.20 Comparative cases show how, as Anthony
Oliver-Smith notes, disasters are events that reveal the existing crises of
social vulnerability.
Comparative analyses of disasters have noted that it is in part the sus-
tained rhetoric of disasters as “natural” phenomena that enables their politi-
cal causes and consequences to be overlooked. In Catastrophe in the Making,
William Freudenberg and his coauthors make it clear that Hurricane
Katrina’s devastation was not an unpredictable accident. The floods and dis-
placements that followed could easily have been predicted given the exist-
ing structures of inequality and dispossession and the growth industries
that governed the fragile relationship between wetlands, canals, levees, and
human populations in this Louisiana landscape. The disaster of Hurricane
Katrina didn’t “happen” accidentally; it was produced by the industries that
shaped the Gulf region in and around New Orleans in the fifty years prior
to the hurricane, about which we will hear more. Similarly, treating disasters
as “natural events” can conceal the ways in which they reinforce and conceal
political arrangements that enable violations of human and civil rights and a
furthering of political agendas in the name of humanitarian aid.21 This, too,
could be seen in New Orleans as federal proclamations of a state of emer-
gency enabled private-sector paramilitary groups like Blackwater to do the
work of humanitarian relief.22 The racial and class contours of Hurricane
Katrina’s impact made it possible for the relief to exacerbate preexisting in-
equalities along these lines.23 The storm’s impacts on poor and middle-class
African American families were much harsher than for middle- or upper-
class Euro-American families, often entailing infringements of both civil
and human rights.24
Nandini Gunewardena and Mark Schuller, as well as Naomi Klein, note

it ’ s not about Katrina 15

 that the same agents that produce disasters are often involved in capital-
izing on spoils in the aftermath.25 The form of this profiteering is not just
in fiscal rewards but also in renewed contracts and expanding protections
from public scrutiny, since subcontractors usually answer to the same legis-
lators who fund the programs involved in creating the disasters in the first
place. In what follows, we will see how market forces of recovery augmented
class and race disparities in the city and also articulated profits in large part
in and through recovery strategies that were set up to fail for some people
more than for others.
However much we can learn from the similarities to comparative cases
of other disasters, post-Katrina New Orleans also presents us with new in-
sights. Studying the disaster from the perspective of the five-year aftermath
offers us a slow-motion lens through which to watch the unfolding of long-
term recovery failure and the operations of everyday arrangements of our
contemporary political economy that are implicated in this failure. In this
sense, this story is not just a postdisaster story. It is a story of the effects of
market-driven public policies that have reached their apogee. Following the
work of Adriana Petryna, I hope to show how conditions of postdisaster life
are contoured and configured by the political economic landscape and the
rhetoric of salvation and care that, as a new form of governance, is mobi-
lized to deal with it. When it comes to understanding the impacts not only of
the disaster but also of the lingering effects of recovery under conditions of
market-driven governance, New Orleans offers a glimpse into the future for
those who will experience catastrophes like Katrina and perhaps for many
other citizens in need, for many different reasons, in the years to come.
Many of the insights here will be familiar to anyone who has read about
or experienced the processes of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New
Orleans. For New Orleanians, this is not a new subject. It is old, familiar,
and frustrating. For others from outside the city for whom these stories may
hold something new, they should also be frustrating. Much of what has been
written about Hurricane Katrina has tended to focus on larger social ana-
lyses of the structural causes of the tragedy, on the social inequalities it re-
vealed, or on personal experiences, but not on the linkages among them.26
There are numerous insightful accounts of the social dynamics of Hur-
ricane Katrina.27 And there are very compelling firsthand accounts of the
disaster and of residents’ return.28 Revisiting interviews and rereading the
stories from those who decided to return and rebuild New Orleans, it was

16 Chapter one
clear to me that, despite having an ample supply of literature on Hurri-
cane Katrina, there was still a part of the story that had not yet been told.
This book fills that gap by illustrating how recovery experiences reflect a
larger set of structural changes in the contemporary political economy of
the United States. Hurricane Katrina did not come, destroy, and then give
way to recovery. Katrina is an ongoing disaster; even for those who con-
sider themselves physically recovered, it has permanently changed them
and their understanding of an American way of life.

the ethnographic engagement

The ethnographic materials used herein are based on formal research under-
taken in New Orleans that began in 2007 and continued through 2011. I was
asked to take on this research project after the death of my colleague Gay
Becker. Gay wrote an initial grant proposal to study age, race, and gender in
relation to disaster, but she passed away before she learned that it would be
funded. I was asked by our mutual colleague Sharon Kaufman, and then by
the National Institutes of Health, to be the principal investigator. I took on
this work in part as a way to honor her career and contributions. After delib-
erating for some time on the merits of turning my attention from a twenty-
five-year career of working in Asia, I finally began to see parallels between
what I had seen in the international world of development aid, especially
the effects of structural adjustment policies on those far afield, and the con-
dition of recovery and the infrastructures of aid deployed within the United
States. What I found was that, as one of my informants noted, New Orleans
had become a target community; America had become a place where “de-
velopment aid” was now needed. Looking at the new structural arrange-
ments of U.S. poverty helped me understand the ways in which the prob-
lems of market-driven governance operate on a global scale, and I also saw
the inner workings of its logics and failures close to home.
In taking on a project that was initially planned by Gay, I inherited an ex-
traordinary research team to which I added a few new faces. I worked with
two primary research assistants over a four-year period in New Orleans,
one of whom lived in New Orleans. Over the years, I also worked with two
other research assistants who lived in New Orleans and two other part-time
researchers from the San Francisco Bay Area, all of whom helped collect
information about community events, websites, rebuilding resources that

it ’ s not about Katrina 17

 were available in the area, and people who were involved in activism around
these efforts. Although our focus in the interviews was initially on age, race,
and gender inequalities in relation to disaster recovery, and although we
have published on these topics elsewhere, I found early on that the similari-
ties in recovery experiences between these groups were both more and less
than the differences. The larger story about recovery that needed to be told
was about how market forces involved in recovery were exacerbating exist-
ing inequalities, delaying recovery, and creating a new type of economy in
ways that were significant not just for those recovering from disaster but for
all of those involved in helping them do so as well.
In formal interviews, we met with 163 people, each at three to four dif-
ferent times. Roughly half of the participants were African American and
half were Euro American; a small portion claimed they were Creole, bi-
racial, or a mix of ethnic groups that some referred to as “gumbo.” All of
our formal interviews were with people who were forty and older, although
during extended stays in the region I came to know and experience people
from younger age groups.29 In our formal interviews we focused on stories
of evacuation, return, and struggles to rebuild homes and lives. In most
cases, we got a very clear sense of how things were progressing or not, as
was too often the case.
The interviews took place in Fema trailers, in gutted or partially repaired
homes, on front steps, or in one of the few coffeeshops that had gotten up
and running again. Each interview lasted from several hours to entire after-
noons. We also gathered demographic and health information during each
interview. Interviews were taped, transcribed, and coded. I read all of the
transcripts and participated in numerous interviews during my time spent
in New Orleans.
As an anthropologist, my findings were also formed by insights gained
from spending extended periods of time in the community. This included
from two to three visits per year, most of which lasted from ten days to a
month. On each of these visits, I interviewed and learned how people were
writing about, talking about, and engaging in processes related to the at-
tempt to recover. On one visit per year, I recruited family and friends to
become active volunteers in cleaning-up and rebuilding efforts. On these
visits, we helped to pull nails, strip moldy wood, clean up debris and over-
grown weeds from yards, plant and landscape, paint houses inside and out,
glaze windows, and, invariably, listen to people tell their stories.

18 Chapter one
 I was given the opportunity not only to see the recovery process in action
but also to be a witness to the testimonies of betrayal, frustration, anger, and
also hope that enabled people to deal with their frustrations. Every visit was
marked by moments of enormous sadness and tears, and also by moments
of extraordinary awe at the hopefulness and endurance, will, and can-do
spirit of the people I met who were, using what my friend Caroline called
“boots on the ground,” recovering step by step, brick by brick, house by
house.
In addition to drawing from the firsthand experiences of the members
of the team who lived in the city, I also attended community activities that
emerged in the wake of the slowed recovery, including protests against the
destruction of public housing as well as public hearings and talks about
the changing racial profile of the city. I watched performances, from film
festivals to poetry slams, where people creatively expressed their experi-
ences of displacement, racial inequality, and struggle. I read newspapers
and blogs, participated in Mardi Gras rituals, chased Mardi Gras “Indians”
through the back streets of the Bywater, and lingered over coffee, music,
meals, and second lines with the people of New Orleans who had become
friends. Together, we saw movies, bought groceries, went to church, and sat
in gutted and in new living rooms, and we sorted through our experiences
of the past years as we helped ourselves to the first fresh boiled crawfish of
the season.

organization of the book

This book is intended to take readers on a journey into two realms. First,
I hope to illustrate how conditions of market-driven governance are re-
shaping America. The five-year trajectory of recovery efforts in post-Katrina
New Orleans offers an extraordinary vantage point from which to watch the
long-term reshaping process and to trace the specific institutional contours
of our emerging social experiment among people who are in some sense the
“canaries in the coal mine” for the rest of us. Second, by focusing on the lives
of people in their prolonged effort to recover, my hope is to illustrate their
individual experiences and emotional effects. I devote considerable space to
people’s accounts of their experiences, beginning soon after the storm and
floods and then onward through the five-year period afterward.
The case materials and stories were chosen because they provide useful

it ’ s not about Katrina 19

 insights about both the mechanics of an affect economy and the arrange-
ments of recovery assistance that were formed under the pressure of neo-
liberal priorities. In using what are in many cases highly charged emotional
testimonials to tell a story about failed recovery and the reasons for it, how-
ever, I realize that I participate in the same affect economy that I write criti-
cally about. Here, the genre of disaster testimony is meant to suggest a mode
of truth telling that is unavoidable but is inevitably tied to the very machin-
ery of exploitation that is at play in recovering New Orleans. My goal is not
to problematize the ambiguity of constructions of the past and of the self
or to question the conditions of their production for this text in terms of
their truth content. Rather, I see them as an instantiation of the contingent
requirements of disaster testimony that are called forth by this economy.
As Thomas Laqueur has noted, the case history is a key textual modality
for humanitarian endeavors, and it justifies the notion of a factual basis for
suffering. As the economy of recovery both responded to and drew on suf-
fering in order to reproduce itself, we are equally drawn into the affective
whirlpools and eddies that this economy creates.
Chapter 2 offers a description of the setting for the recovery story by
describing the contours of disaster capitalism in and around the hurricane
and floods, the engines of profit that produced the catastrophe, and the
responses that generated dispossession and exclusions based on class and
race in the initial rescue period. In this chapter, the conditions of govern-
ment subcontracting that were in place years before the hurricane explain
not only the tragedy but also the abysmal relief effort in its immediate after-
math. These arrangements help us understand similar patterns of recovery
assistance that followed after the floods receded and the long process of re-
building began.
Chapter 3 explores the production of vulnerability that cuts across race
and class lines when market-oriented solutions are offered to help people
recover. Questions about who is vulnerable and who is able to benefit from
the recovery resources are explored here in terms of two of the main re-
covery programs that were mobilized to help: private insurance companies
and the federally supported Small Business Administration loan program.
Chapter 4 offers a close look at the largest federal program designed to
help people recover after Katrina, the federally funded Road Home Pro-
gram, deployed under the Louisiana Recovery Authority and subcontracted
to the private sector. Chapter 5 critically looks at the outcomes of these pro-

20 Chapter one
grams and at the production of morbidities, desperation, and a surfeit of
affect that could not be contained by the fiscal reasoning used to design the
program in relation to profits. I explore how experiences of recovery orga-
nized in this way have pushed people to their breaking points.
Chapter 6 turns to the arrival and growth of faith-based organizations
that, as time went on, provided the most significant response. Faith-based
organizations were the most numerous and the most effective in organiz-
ing volunteers to help people with recovery and rebuilding. It is important
to remember, however, that such organizations, along with secular non-
profit community-based organizations, emerged and flourished as part of
the neoliberal landscape by design. As a result, they, too, have been brought
into the fold of market-driven regimes.
Chapter 7 explores the private charity and volunteer sector of the re-
covery economy in relation to the market forces that were unleashed to
fund it. Philanthrocapitalism and venture philanthropy that have grown up
alongside disaster capitalism seek new ways to anticipate market rewards
from the nonprofit volunteer sector, which is devoted to helping people in
need. We’ll see how some private-sector subcontracting organizations, in
some cases the very same that failed to provide help through federal sub-
contractors, have turned their attention to these grass-roots faith-based or-
ganizations as well, inserting themselves once again into the space between
government and citizen in a new twist on neoliberal profit seeking.
New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is not a story about a
hurricane so much as it is a story about the inevitable outcomes of arrange-
ments that allow subcontracting to the private sector and market rationali-
ties to penetrate even the most important of government public-sector ac-
tivities and responsibilities. It is about how these arrangements have played
out in the lives of people who were trying with every ounce of strength they
had to rebuild and recover, and about the frustrations, the second-order
disaster, that these arrangements have produced. It is about how these same
engines of recovery left large gaps that were ultimately filled by private-
sector nonprofits, charities, and churches, and finally about how even these
nongovernmental organizations have had to contend with market demands
that potentially undermine their effectiveness in much the same way they
did with government-funded programs. Our story thus begins with the
Army Corps of Engineers many years before Hurricane Katrina.

it ’ s not about Katrina 21

 notes

one
it’s not aboUt katrina
1 With a few exceptions, the names used in this book are pseudonyms. Portions
of this story are also found in a separately published article (Adams, “The
Other Road to Serfdom”).
2 Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship. Somers explains her preference for the use
of Soros’s term over that of “neoliberalism” on the grounds that neoliberalism
is often ambiguously affixed misleadingly to notions of liberalism but more
importantly on grounds that it conjures images of small government antistat-
ism when, as she notes, what market fundamentalism has actually produced is
market- driven large government, a point I agree with. It is not surprising that
the events leading up to and shortly after Hurricane Katrina were the case in
point that spawned Somers’s original theorizing about this issue.
3 George Soros offers a global perspective on the notion that unfettered, or
laissez-faire, capitalism is problematic, writing, “If we care about universal
principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave
them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions
to safeguard them” (Open Society, xii). Carol Greenhouse’s edited volume
Ethnographies of Neoliberalism provides a series of essays on the ethnographic
effects of neoliberal policies and great comparative cases for this book.
4 David Harvey writes about these failures as being predictable in A Brief His-
tory of Neoliberalism. I have written elsewhere about the empirical case to be
made against market fundamentalists, using the upsurge in sales of Friedrich
Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom as a case in point. See Adams, “The Other
Road to Serfdom.”
5 See also Somers and Roberts, “Toward a New Sociology of Rights.”
6 Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 2.
7 A useful analysis of this ideology as a global phenomenon, in addition to
Soros’s work, is found in Gillian Hart’s “Development Critiques in the 1990s.”
 The so-called Washington consensus is built on the idea that the market can
provide the best solutions to social problems and that the market functions
best when it has little to no interference from government (in the form of
regulatory measures or taxation), a view that Hart notes is already misleading
in its suggestion that successful markets do not already have state provisions.
This market-solution view is an important feature of neoliberalism’s structural
adjustment programs advanced by the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank, for instance.
8 Klein, The Shock Doctrine.
9 I am aware of the fact, for example, that research for this project was funded
by the National Institutes of Health, making me something of a government
subcontractor. However, the difference between institutions like the nih and
those that turn over decision making about the allocation of resources to
private-sector companies, and the entailments of for-profit demands, is pre-
cisely the focus of this book.
10 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, 131.
11 There is a large literature on this in medical anthropology, by many excellent
scholars from Nancy Scheper-Hughes to Arthur Kleinman and Paul Farmer,
and they have explored the ways emotions and suffering are produced by con-
ditions of political and economic disparity. Similarly, the powerful works of
Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schoenberg as well as Angela Garcia demon-
strate that neoliberalism cannot be entirely disrupted by the liberal humanism
of materialist or poststructuralist social theory. The notion that aesthetics in
one case, and affect in the other, transcend the relations of production and the
discursive apparatuses that produce suffering provide a powerful antidote to
contemporary reductionistic thinking about markets, power, and structural
violence.
12 As described by Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart.
13 Dauber, “The Sympathetic State.”
14 See Gunewardena and Schuller, Capitalizing on Catastrophe, for more on dis-
aster capitalism globally and in New Orleans. I focus here on the specific ex-
ample of relief assistance for home rebuilding as well as the role of charity
nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in this new arrangement of disaster
capitalism.
15 Henry Giroux’s Stormy Weather offers a riveting exploration of the failed res-
cue in light of a critique of politics, marketization, and the production of
people who are treated as disposable.
16 See also Conniff, “Drowning the Beast.”
17 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, 13.

194 notes to Chapter one

18 Some might read New Orleans after Katrina as an example of a contingent as-
semblage that included a terrorism-obsessed federal administration, incom-
petent urban and regional governance, and opportunistic ngos, as one helpful
reviewer for this book noted. I would suggest, however, that there was noth-
ing contingent or exceptional about this assemblage and that these conditions
were themselves a byproduct of neoliberal demands that have been placed on
administrations and institutions all the way from the federal level to the city
and the ngos that sprang into existence to help.
19 Klinenberg, Heat Wave; Erikson, Everything in Its Path; Wallace, St. Clair;
Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; Hartman and
Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster; Button and Oliver Smith,
“Disaster, Displacement and Employment”; and Freudenberg et al., Catastro-
phe in the Making.
20 See also Erikson, Everything in Its Path; Oliver-Smith, “Post-Disaster Housing”
and “Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters”; and Klinenberg,
Heat Wave and “Denaturalizing Disaster.”
21 Fassin and Vasquez, “Humanitarian Exception as the Rule.”
22 See Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; the film by
Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke; Flaherty, Floodlines; and Fjord, “Disasters,
Race, and Disability.”
23 See Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; and Lubiano,
“Race, Class, and the Politics of Death.”
24 See Flaherty, Floodlines. For comparative works about the sociology of disas-
ter and disruption, which more generally inform this work, see Becker, Dis-
rupted Lives and Meanings of Place and Displacement; Erikson, Everything in
Its Path and A New Species of Trouble; Klinenberg, Heat Wave and “Denatural-
izing Disaster”; Oliver-Smith, “Anthropological Research on Hazards and Dis-
asters,” “Post-Disaster Consensus,” and The Martyred City; Wallace, St. Clair;
Phillips, “Cultural Diversity in Disasters”; Stallings, “Causality and ‘Natural’
Disasters”; Steinberg, Acts of God; Tierney, “Social Inequality, Hazards, and
Disasters”; Fjord and Manderson, “Anthropological Perspectives on Disasters
and Disability”; Bolin, “Family Recovery from Natural Disaster”; Bolin and
Klenow, “Response of the Elderly to Disaster” and “Older People in Disaster”;
Bolin and Stanford, “The Northridge Earthquake”; and Cazdyn, “Disastrous
Consequences.”
25 Gunewardena and Schuller, Capitalizing on Catastrophe; Klein, The Shock
Doctrine; Flaherty, “Fears of Cultural Distinction on the Gulf Coast”; and
Luft, “Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism.” There are many excellent accounts
and publications on the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans which I am not able to include here.

notes to Chapter one 195

 26 See Paredes, “Introduction”; Petterson et al., “A Preliminary Assessment”;
Hartman and Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster; Horne,
Breach of Faith; Brinkley, The Great Deluge; Dyson, Come Hell or High Water;
Igoe, “Reflections on Distance and Katrina”; Iverson and Armstrong, “Hur-
ricane Katrina and New Orleans”; Jackson, “Declaration of Taking Twice”;
Gabe et al., “Hurricane Katrina”; Flaherty, Floodlines; Congleton, “The Story
of Katrina”; Daniels et al., On Risk and Disaster; DeSalvo et al., “Symptoms of
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in a New Orleans Workforce” and “Health Care
Infrastructure in Post-Katrina New Orleans”; Bergal et al., City Adrift; and
Breunlin and Regis, “Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map.”
27 See Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans”; Button and Oliver-Smith, “Dis-
aster, Displacement, and Employment”; Browne, “From the Filmmaker ‘Still
Waiting: Life after Katrina’”; Wailoo et al., Katrina’s Imprint; Tierney, “Fore-
shadowing Katrina” and “Social Inequality, Hazards and Disasters.”
28 Harris, A Diary from the Dome; Montana-LeBlanc, Not Just the Levees Broke;
C. Rose, One Dead in Attic; Reed, The House on First Street; Baum, Nine Lives.
29 Although we interviewed a handful of residents who had decided not to re-
turn and who were living permanently in Baton Rouge or the San Francisco
Bay Area, we focused primarily on meeting and talking to New Orleanians
who had returned to the city.

t wo
the MakinG of a disaster
1 Freudenburg et al., Catastrophe in the Making. See also O’Neill, “Who Sank
New Orleans?”
2 See Cardé, American Betrayed.
3 Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office, “Land and Water Interface of Louisi-
ana from 2002.” See also MacGillivray Freeman Productions, Hurricane on the
Bayou.
4 Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making; MacGillivray Freeman Produc-
tions, Hurricane on the Bayou.
5 Goodman, “Introduction.”
6 The Army Corps of Engineers has variously, and with different levels of agree-
ment, contested the critical accounts of its responsibility for the levee failure,
according to Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making, chapter 6. See also
Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans,” 452.
7 See Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the
Making; and McQuaid et al., “Human Error Blamed.”

196 notes to Chapter two

vinCanne aDams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of
Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San
Francisco. She is the author of Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas, Doctors
for Democracy: Health Professionals in the Nepal Revolution, and a coeditor of Sex
and Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective and Medicine
between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Ground.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adams, Vincanne, 1959–
Markets of sorrow, labors of faith :
New Orleans in the wake of Katrina / Vincanne Adams.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5434-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5449-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Hurricane Katrina, 2005. 2. Disaster relief—

Government policy—Louisiana—New Orleans—
History—21st century. 3. Social justice—Louisiana—
New Orleans. 4. Emergency management—
Government policy—United States. 5. Privatization—
Government policy—United States. i. Title.

hv6362005.l8 a33 2013
976.3′35064—dc23 2012033717