We Live with the Sea
Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan
Will be published approx. on 21. July 2026
Book
Hardback
260 pages
978-1-4780-3394-3 (ISBN)
Description
In We Live with the Sea, Andrew Littlejohn addresses the implementation and controversy surrounding safety infrastructures following the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan. While the Japanese government proposed and enforced infrastructural transformations in the wake of the tsunami, these changes did not consider the impact on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on the tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn highlights alternative proposals offered by the local residents as well as the environmental, ecological, and more-than-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. In doing so, he argues that imposed modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, showing how attempts to "ecologize" safety may offer more sustainable ways of thinking about security, preservation, and infrastructure.
Reviews / Votes
"Littlejohn's sophisticated project returns us to the Japanese village, free of nostalgia yet committed to making sense of the embodied knowledges, practical traditions, and human and non-human relations that organize life there. Deeply ethnographic and attentive to the politics of the everyday, it reveals the complex and conflicted processes of reimagining and restoring fractured infrastructures and reorganizing communities in the aftermath of unimaginable catastrophe."-Christopher T. Nelson, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"Taking us into the 'debris of progress'-modernist seawalls meant to contain the risk of flooding-Littlejohn contrasts their futility with the alternative ways to 'ecologize safety' that local residents have creatively devised. Speaking to the times about the world(s) we should, but often neglect to, seek entanglements with, We Live with the Sea is utterly powerful: a theoretical and ethnographic tour-de-force."-Anne Allison, author of Being Dead Otherwise
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
11 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
572 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-3394-3 (9781478033943)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Andrew Littlejohn is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.
Content
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: "Living with Everything Together" 1
Part I. "What Kind of Town This Was"
1. Histories of Entanglement 37
2. What Happened That Day 61
Part II. A Total System
3. Partitioning the Sensible 89
4. On Higher Ground 118
Part III. Protecting Otherwise
5. Ecologizing Safety 151
6. Political Becoming 178
Conclusion: "A Town Where We Live with the Sea" (Umi to ikiru machi) 201
Notes 211
References 217
Index 237
Introduction: "Living with Everything Together" 1
Part I. "What Kind of Town This Was"
1. Histories of Entanglement 37
2. What Happened That Day 61
Part II. A Total System
3. Partitioning the Sensible 89
4. On Higher Ground 118
Part III. Protecting Otherwise
5. Ecologizing Safety 151
6. Political Becoming 178
Conclusion: "A Town Where We Live with the Sea" (Umi to ikiru machi) 201
Notes 211
References 217
Index 237