Play to Survive - by Chika Watanabe

Book Synopsis

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tectonic belt in the Pacific region that routinely faces some of the most devastating disasters in the world. Based on ethnographic research spanning seven years, Play to Survive examines the work of preparedness training in Japan and Chile, two primary nations along the Ring of Fire that experience frequent and intense disasters. Experts from these countries have often collaborated to create some of the most advanced disaster preparedness systems in the world. Chika Watanabe traces how local city officials, NGOs, and members of neighborhood and grassroots organizations are, counterintuitively, using fun, playful methods to teach preparation for our darkest hours.

While there are many important studies of post-disaster response, much less is written about the future-orientation of disaster preparedness. This book shows how a transnational group of preparedness experts orient people toward potential disasters in gentle and hopeful ways, focusing on improvisation and repair. In a time of political and environmental destabilization globally, this book offers a unique look at how playful preparedness can reset relationships to environments, to the future, and to each other.

Review Quotes

"How do communities prepare for unpredictable disaster? Chika Watanabe takes us into the heart of playful preparedness movements in Japan and Chile. These citizen efforts are situated in everyday life, in fun and games, in social cooperation, and in memories of earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters. One of the architects of 'patchwork ethnography, ' Watanabe deftly and thoughtfully shows how we might write in a way that resembles the conditions of our research, revealing the collaborative ways we learn, think, and patch things together."--Carole McGranahan, author of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment

"In sharing the inspiring efforts and accounts of disaster preparedness educators and researchers across shared geographies of earthquake risk in Japan and Chile, Chika Watanabe offers a timely, poignant, and hopeful ethnography of how survival just might be possible in a world shaped by disasters."--Vivian Choi, author of Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka

"This beautifully written book rethinks both time--in which the disaster one prepares for is not only future-oriented but intimately a part of everyday life, while also coexisting with the past--and preparedness, where playfulness becomes central, through patchwork ethnography. A logic of fragility unfolds over the course of this book through a distinctive bringing together of transpacific places, processes, modes of thought, and the voices of diverse interlocutors. An original and compelling example of patchwork ethnography as a methodology and theory of encounters."--Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

About the Author

Chika Watanabe is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is author of Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (2019).