The hand of God: capitalism, inequality, and moral geographies in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina.

The hand of God: capitalism, inequality, and moral geographies in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. The metonymic quality of our everyday concept of place hasparallels in the characterization of place in myth. In mythical thought,necessary connections link events and their locations, and thesubjective and objective are weakly differentiated. Places take on themeanings of events and objects that occur there, and their descriptionsare fused with human goals, values, and intentions. Places and theircontents are seen as wholes. (Entrikin 1991:11) Place is lived through myths (cf. Hirsch 2006:151) that naturalizeparticular understandings of space, time, and identity or community. If,as Entrikin suggests, there is a necessary link between the stories wetell of a place and the events that occur in it, what happens when aplace is destroyed? What "goals, values, and intentions" arereconstructed when the contents of a place are gone? How dounderstandings of space and time inform the experience of placedestroyed? This essay begins to address these questions with referenceto the narrative that emerged after Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi.There is a growing body of work on the aftermath of this storm, howeverit has largely focused on the case of New Orleans, with relativelylittle attention directed to the state of Mississippi. The work that hasbeen done has also paid more attention to social structures, such asrace and poverty, and representations of these in the media than to theunderlying narratives of the nation and place (with the exception ofsome work on the distinctiveness of New Orleans) that shaped therepresentations themselves or the narratives mobilized by the people inthe affected areas. Anthropological insight suggests that cultural myths represent coretruths of societies, truths that may be at least partially orpotentially independent of objectively verifiable truth. What I have inmind here is what Rappaport called "ultimate sacredpostulates" (1999:287-290), those things that represent core truthsof a culture that are not objectively verifiable or falsifiable.Christ's divinity would be an example of an ultimate sacredpostulate in Christianity. However, it is not only in religion that wecan have sacred postulates. I would suggest that the beliefs inmaximizing individualism and progress might be thought of as fundamentalpostulates of capitalism and the US social order. In other words, I aminterested in narratives, which I am calling "myths" here notto imply that they are objectively false, but because they convey corevalues. It would make sense then that places destroyed would be rebuiltin the image of the myths that motivate the societies that create themand that control the reconstruction. In the case of the United States,this involves attention to the myths that give meaning to theunderstandings of capitalism and the United States as a nation. Thesenarratives of belonging, place, space, and time are part of what isunderstood by modernity and are integral to what it means to be a partof this country. In this paper, I begin to trace some of the discourses mobilized byMississippians to give meaning to the lived space and time of theMississippi Coast, paying particular attention to the ways in which thetime-space of capitalism and United States nationalism informedrepresentations and expectations of events after Hurricane Katrina. Thisessay is based on what I have learned in nearly five years living inSouth Mississippi, conversations with Mississippians after HurricaneKatrina, discussions with students in my classes at the University ofSouthern Mississippi (USM), public discourse found in the press, andoral histories archived at USM. I will organize my presentation of placeand space temporally into before, Katrina, and after; while recognizingthat those temporal categories are as constructed as the spatial ones Iwant to explore. For example, one of the most important post-Katrinadivides may be between those for whom life is back to normal and thosefor whom the hurricane is not yet over. I first turn to the moral andcultural geography of Mississippi prior to Hurricane Katrina in order tobetter understand the politics of place after the disaster. Moral Geographies of Belonging Before the Storm Countries have their factual and their mythical geographies. It isnot always easy to tell them apart, nor even to say which is moreimportant, because the way people act depends on their comprehension ofreality, and that comprehension, since it can never be complete, isnecessarily imbued with myths. (Tuan 1977:98) Mississippi stands for something in the United States, wherenational myths narrate history through stories and discourses that grantbroadly and directionally defined regions cultural characters oridentities rooted in different historical epochs. Although Tuan arguesthat in the United States, unlike some traditional cultures, cardinaldirections are not the "stage set for the enactment of cosmicdrama" (1977:99), they are associated with different historicalevents and epochs in our national history and with different values andcharacters. The founding of the country is primarily narrated in thespace of the eastern seaboard, particularly the northeast, which acts asthe center of deep-seated national origins and remains the site ofnational power. In contrast, the South is associated with the Civil War,forces that threatened to break the country apart, and the violence ofracial oppression. The stories tell how the West was settled by pioneerswho worked hard and gambled much in search of dreams for a betterfuture. The old Northwest, now the Midwest, narratively became a placeof stolid and reliable yeoman farmers and workers, the solid (if boring)core and backbone of a country: the location of the country's"breadbasket" farms, factories, and "hog capital of theworld." East and West are contrasted in time, with the East beingthe site of the original founding of the nation and the Westrepresenting the future of Manifest Destiny and dreams. This is true inthe historical construction of the nation and the contrast betweenWashington, DC and Hollywood. North and South are similarly paired assites of opposed character traits, with the North symbolizing industryand equality, progress and rationality, and the South"backwardness," poverty, racism, and inequality (c.f. Jansson2003). The ascription of these traits to the South make that region less"American" and permits the rest of the country to projectnegative traits onto an internal other? The mythical and factualgeographies are intertwined, as Tuan suggests, with the mythical as wellas the factual shaping perception and action. In the national mythos andpsyche, Mississippi often figures as the apotheosis of southernness.Sometimes this is positive, as in the belief that the South is morehospitable than the North, but more often it is negative in theperception that the state is racist, ignorant, and"underdeveloped." Within the state, a more nuanced cultural geography distinguishesthe southern part of the state from several other regions. A person isnot just from Mississippi. He or she is from a particular part of thestate that carries distinctive geographical, historical, demographic,economic, and cultural connotations? The state is divided intoapproximately six to eight regions, which reflect a rough correlationbetween geological zones and the economic and settlement history. Thefollowing map (3) from the Mississippi Arts Commission will help clarifythe brief discussion of this regionalism that follows. [FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED] Although the precise number of regions varies between sources,there is a rough agreement and no serious discrepancies. To the right ofthe map of cultural regions recognized by the Arts Commission, you willfind a map of the geographical regions of the state (from Waltman2001:15). The maps clearly show a rough correspondence betweengeographical and cultural regions, a correspondence that stems from therelationship between geology and the historical settlement and economyof the regions. (4) The two most distinctive and consistently identifiedregions are the Delta and the Gulf Coast. (5) The Piney Woods or PineBelt is composed of South Mississippi with the exception of the Coastitself. The northeast section of the state is called the Hills. Theremaining central portion of the state is sometimes called theHeartland, sometimes the Capital area, and sometimes is incorporatedinto the Hills. Although the exact borders of many of these regions arevariable and the designations for them also varies somewhat, there is,as mentioned before, complete consistency in distinguishing the Delta,the Coast, and the northeastern hills from the center of the state, aswell as a recognition of the Natchez district and the Pine Belt. These regions correspond to zones that have risen to prominence inthe state during different historical epochs of economic development.The Delta occupies roughly the northwestern quadrant of the statebetween the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. An alluvial plain, this areahas fertile soils and had an economy largely based on cotton plantationsand farms from the early nineteenth century through the 1950s.Eventually the most important cotton producing region, it was not thefirst area planted because of the dense forest, frequent flooding, andunhealthy environment. Instead, it was increasingly planted as the soilsof the hills were depleted and the levee system was improved in the1890s (Giles 1973:183-4, WPA 1949:99). It was also in the 1890s that therailroad system expanded, facilitating the extraction of lumber. Thisregion is flanked to the west by a ridge of low bluffs or hills that runthe length of the state where much of the original plantation economy ofthe state resided. The lower portion of the Mississippi, along thebluffs, contains the River Cities of Natchez and Vicksburg, with theirarchetypical genteel ante-bellum plantations. The northeast portion ofthe state is called the hill country and it too was settled anddeveloped relatively early. The center of the state includes a wedgecalled the Jackson Prairie running from the bluff hills to Alabama. Thisarea was dominated by smaller farms, and truck farming became animportant industry there in the first part of the twentieth century,particularly as the railroads increased transportation options. The Piney Woods are named for the dense pine forests that coveredit. Lumbering was the focus of the economy when this area developed inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the trees, thetopsoil was thin, making farming a precarious endeavor after the forestswere cleared, although new forestry industries eventually emerged. TheWPA travel guide to Mississippi describes this southern region in theseterms: "Strong men and women have been reared here, but the earthhas been neither fecund enough to facilitate their getting away from itnor sterile enough to drive them away (1949:6)." However, in the1890s lumber became Mississippi's most important economic resource.By 1908, Mississippi ranked third in the country for lumber production(McLemore 1973:39). At the same time that lumbering was gaining economicimportance in the state, cotton was losing it as a result of soildepletion, boll weevils (Giles 1973:197-8), and some wetter-than-usualyears. Many of the towns in the Pinebelt, including Hattiesburg, werebuilt in this post Civil War era. Gulfport, on the coast, grew as a portto move the lumber, and a system of railroads was built connecting thecoast to the lumber-producing areas. Finally, the Coast is the region south of I-10. I-10 is the mostsouthern of the US coast-to-coast interstate highways, running parallelto the coast through the three most southern of Mississippi'scounties, approximately five miles inland. It is parallel to US-90,which lies right along the beach, but is a safer highway for evacuationssince it is unlikely to flood or be destroyed by hurricanes, as US-90was. The Coast is spoken of as less distinctively Mississippian bypeople above that line of demarcation. Often this may come up ingood-natured joking, but the ribbing gains meaning from the culturalgeography that marks the Coast as distinctive. The singularity of thecoast dates to a history that created a cultural region from Mobile toNew Orleans. For example, it is a place where Mardi Gras is celebrated(Biloxi was the capital of 18th century French Louisiana before NewOrleans), while it is not in the rest of the state. (6) Prior to theCivil War, the Mississippi coast served as a resort for New Orleaniansand planters from other parts of Mississippi, since it was cooler in thesummer and less affected by yellow fever. After the Civil War, thetourist economy served the coast well, and it recovered more quicklythan other parts of the state. In the 1880s, the seafood industry beganto flourish with the export of shrimp and oysters to other parts of thecountry. The economy of the coast continued in this vein untilprohibition, when it enjoyed a competitive advantage in illegalentertainment. Coastal communities could transport alcohol from theCaribbean (especially Cuba), and the 1920s and '30s saw the growthof an economy based on gambling and alcohol. This continued until a 1951US Senate investigation of organized crime led to a crackdown (Nuwer andO'Brien 2006:20). Gambling continued however, but in an alteredform in less ostentatious venues. Hurricane Camille destroyed the coastin 1969, and during the reconstruction of the 1970s, there was an effortto market the coast as a wholesome, family-oriented resort area(ibid:23). Nelson and Mason describe the coast of 1990, when a new lawwas passed to make gambling legal under restricted conditions, as"down-at-the-heels vacation destinations" (2006:27). The 1990s were marked by the intensification of a symbolicalignment of the Coast with New Orleans, with the legalization ofgambling as a development strategy. At the time, the Coast had notrecovered from Camille, and the Delta was the poorest area of thepoorest state in the country. Legislators from the two areas joinedforces to pass a law legalizing casinos, as long as they remained onwater and the citizens of a county voted to legalize them. (7) Placingcasinos on water or Native American lands displaces vice while leavingit readily accessible. Originally, the casinos would have cruised inMississippi waters, but one of the sponsors removed the words"under way" from the description of casino vessels at the lastminute (Nelson and Mason 2006:32), and it passed, clearing the way forcasinos to be located on barges located just off shore and connected torelated onshore buildings, such as hotels. In the Coast and Delta (northMississippi River) areas, casinos led to higher than state averageemployment growth (Yon Herrmann 2006:76). (8) In 1999, Mississippiranked third in the country for the size of its casino industry (Richard2006:156). Coastians take pride in being different from people north of them,but also talk of feeling neglected by the more northern centers of statepower. People from both above and below Highway 10 have commented to meon the cultural difference, either commiserating with me for being soclose but not actually on the coast, or telling me I am fortunate to benorth of the cultural divide. "They" are different, ofquestionable political, moral, or social character: socially either tooliberal or too conservative. In this moral geography, the MississippiGulf Coast is a place caught between the lure of a licentious NewOrleans to the west and, to the north, the Mississippi proud to belocated in the Bible Belt. Religiously, the Coast is understood by SouthMississippians to have a stronger Catholic presence than the rest of thestate. It is said by residents to be socially freer and lessconservative than other parts of the state. The sense I get from talkingto Mississippians in the almost five years I have lived there, andconfirmed in conversation with some of my students, who could not recallstudying it in their state history curriculum, is that the Coast isdeemed less "Mississippi" than other parts of the state.Images and narrative constructions of the history of the state are moreclosely tied to the cotton plantations farther north in the Delta thanthe history of trade in the Gulf. In contrast, the Delta is, in thetitle of one book, "the most southern place on earth" (Cobb1992). In Mississippi, then, the Delta plays a representational rolesimilar to that of Mississippi for the nation in being the archetype ofthe South. This is reflected in the way in which both Mississippi andthe Delta are represented as poor and black. (9) In contrast, there is aclear similarity in the representational roles of the Coast and NewOrleans for other Mississippians. Hurricane Katrina thus hit at a time of change in Mississippi, butone in which the traditional cultural geography remained intact ...until the storm destroyed much of the landscape south of the railroadrunning between I-10 and the coastline, decimated a large area north ofthe tracks, and caused major damages far inland through the southernpart of the state. In the next section, I examine the first narrativereconstructions of Mississippi within the state in the immediateaftermath of the storm. In these stories, the state's culturalgeography was reconfigured in dialogue with that of the nation itself.The narrative that emerged in those first months reflected theexperience of place destroyed, but also served to rhetorically unite thestate and present it and its citizens as truly national citizens. Themoral geographies that separate Mississippi from the nation and theCoast from Mississippi were temporarily washed away by the winds andwaters of the storm. Moral Geographies Transformed by the Storm It is rather the very gaps and proportions of meaning, space, andtemporality that allow locality itself to emerge at all. (Weiner2002:25) The damage of the hurricane led to realignments in culturalgeographies at three levels. It fractured social distinctions withincommunities, symbolically incorporated the Coast into the rest of thestate, and Mississippi (a state accustomed to national disparagement)aligned itself with the nation. The governor, Haley Barbour, in thefollowing quote from the first speech he gave after the storm, acts as astate representative in echoing the narrative mobilized by peoplethroughout the affected area: From Pascagoula to Pass Christian, from Waveland to Waynesboro,from Meridian to Moss Point, from Pearlton to Petal, Mississippiansconsistently display resilience and self-reliance. Our peoplearen't whining or moping around; they're not into victimhood.From the very beginning Mississippians have been helping themselves, andGod bless them, helping their neighbors. The unselfish, even selflessattitude of people who've lost everything is awe-inspiring to me.Katrina did not discriminate. It leveled rich neighborhoods and poorneighborhoods. It knocked down the mighty as hard as it clobbered thelowly. Black or white, Vietnamese or Hispanics, Katrina leveled themall. (Barbour 2005) A great deal of representational work is happening in this, whichsummarizes in one short paragraph a host of common understandings in thestate. In particular, we see the recurrent themes of southern"resilience," "self-reliance," and"community." First is the creation of community. Barbour repeats a common themein the state after the storm: "Katrina did not discriminate."This observation perhaps takes on particular salience in the state thatis so often equated with discrimination on the national stage. Thetruism that forces of nature cannot deliberately single out one race orclass of people meant that the differences of class and race could berepresented as wiped away by the winds of the storm. So, for example, aprofessor whose house was damaged made this observation when he told methat he had to borrow money and a car from someone in his church inorder to leave town after his house was damaged. It is not hard to findrelatively affluent and powerful people, including staterepresentatives, affected by the storm. For example, Senator Trent Lottlost his home in Pascagoula. The fact that he had three homes has beenless salient in stories of Katrina than the loss of the one. A focus onthe one house puts him in the same situation as all the other people whowere affected by the storm. Not only did the storm not discriminate, the devastation and lackof resources in the most affected areas brought people together. Wheneveryone was affected, the only way to survive or recover was to rely oneach other. The narrative after the hurricane emphasized the role ofneighbors and civil sector institutions such as churches that mobilizedto help those affected by the storm while FEMA and the Red Cross, formalinstitutions sanctioned by the government to do that job, weredisorganized and tardy. (10) Stories about the days after the storm arepeopled by neighbors and strangers who offered assistance. Barbour also emphasized the unification of the state throughcalamity. In the quote that opens this section, the state is unifiedinto a single imagined community through the alliterative listing oftowns that maps the entire length and breadth of the part of the statethat Katrina passed through. In fact, a large part of the state wasaffected, and the governor, as we might expect, emphasized this, forexample in the same address about a month after the storm he states: I never thought there could be a storm worse than Camille, but this hurricane was far, far worse--spreading decimation not only across the entire Coast but extending its wrath more than 150 miles inland. Katrina is not just a calamity on the Coast; it is a major disaster for so much of South Mississippi. [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] After Hurricane Katrina, the entirety of Mississippi was eligiblefor what FEMA calls "Hazard Mitigation." Forty-nine countieswere declared a disaster area eligible for individual assistance and theentire state (eighty-two counties) was eligible for public assistance(FEMA 2005). The map produced by FEMA, in which the darker shadingindicates the area designated for individual assistance, illustrates theway in which the disaster was constructed as a state-wide calamity. Although the Coast was more affected than areas in the center andnorth, in this map there is no distinction made between the area southof I-10 and the rest of the state. On the ground (and in the pace ofrecovery after), the difference between the damages, sometimessubstantial, suffered by people farther inland and those of residents ofthe coast was much clearer, but this map and the Governor's wordsproject a "we're all in this together" sentiment ofinclusiveness. In doing so, they subverted the old moral geography ofcoastal difference. This state unification was reflected in the placement of the Biloxilighthouse on the first license plate design to come out after thestorm, in October 2007. (11) The Mississippi State Tax Commission (2007)announcement of this newest design echoes the themes of citizen valorwhile also introducing the idea that the storm integrated the state intothe nation. After a brief history of the lighthouse, the press releasecontinues: And, on August 29, 2005, it stood defiant against the wind and surge of Katrina. Today, it is no longer just a beacon to seafarers, but a tangible testament of resilience. The Biloxi Lighthouse stands proud and tall representing those who weathered the storm. Joe Blount, Commissioner of Revenue, said "this tag design is intended to be a reminder to us of all those who lost so much from Katrina, to serve as a symbol of our citizens' commitment to recovery as well as a symbol of our gratitude to all Americans for their prayers and generous support." Just as the classification and mapping of counties into a disasterarea blurred the difference between the coast and the rest of the state,the stories of how Mississippians responded to the disaster blurred thedifference that normally sets the state apart from the country. Feelingabandoned by government agencies, those affected helped themselves andeach other, identifying as Mississippians with a "can-do"attitude that didn't wait for handouts. As Barbour put it,"Mississippians consistently display resilience andself-reliance." Those traits, with community involvement,frequently recur in Mississippian narratives of the aftermath of thestorm. Self-reliance and a positive attitude based on hard work, ratherthan self-pity or a sense of entitlement, are signs of good citizenshipin the United States, as is civic responsibility and reaching out to thedeserving who are in need. Mississippians' self-representationafter the storm then highlighted the ways in which they provedmeritorious in the face of disaster and the failure of the nationalgovernment. Symbolically, Mississippians repositioned the state to bemore truly a part of the country through the exemplary character andcitizenship of the affected population. Ironically, then, it was throughthe destruction of the state physically that it was able to claim aplace in the nation rhetorically. The hurricane re-incorporated the Coast into Mississippi andMississippi into the nation by narrating the leveling of difference anda coming together of a community of self-reliant citizens. In doing so,Mississippians tended to displace the usual otherness of the Coast inthe state and the state in the country onto Louisiana. For example, in arecent editorial on the coincidence of Mississippi ranking first inreligiosity and third in use of on-line pornography, Rogers (2009)begins with the invisibility of the state in national consciousness ofHurricane Katrina and the churches' role after the storm. He livesin Washington, DC and makes people guess where he is from when they hearhis Southern accent. His favorite clue is "I come from the statethat was hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina," to which peopleguess Louisiana. He continues: "We know they are wrong about thatone, and we know why: Mississippi pulled itself together during Katrinain a way that minimized the attention it received." "The statestepped up." The story of Mississippian resourcefulness, mobilizedby citizens and government of the state alike, (12) is in clearcontradistinction to the representations of New Orleans in the media inthe days after the Katrina. Mississippians (at least those who do nothave close ties to New Orleans) reflect those familiar images incommonly representing Louisiana and Louisianans as waiting for help,"with their hands out," unable to pull together to helpthemselves and their community. In contrast, Mississippians representthemselves as fitting the model of the "worthy American" whopulls himself up by his bootstraps while placing Louisianans in the roleof the unworthy who required rescue. The contrast extended beyond thelevel of individual citizens and communities to the states themselves,since the elected representatives of Mississippi were perceived ashandling the crisis well, while Louisiana was seen as ineffective. This narrative is implicitly and sometimes explicitly racialized,since the tragedy of New Orleans stands metonymically for the effects ofthe hurricane on Louisiana (little was heard or reported on places thatwere affected outside New Orleans). Yet while New Orleans is representedas African-American, Mississippi's coast in contrast is not themost "Black" region of that state. This perception has somebasis in demographic facts, as compiled by the 2007 US Census estimates.The percentage of Blacks in the United States as a whole is 12.8, but inMississippi it is 37.2. The percentages in the three coastal countiesvary, but are lower: Hancock County 6.9, Harrison 22.5, and Jackson22.3, although this varies by town within the counties. In contrast, inthe seventeen counties of the Delta, the percentage of Blacks rangesfrom 20.2 (DeSoto County) to 80.8 (Holmes County). In comparison, thepercentage of Blacks in Louisiana is 31.9, roughly similar toMississippi. However, the percentage of Blacks in New Orleans in the US2000 census was 67.3. Thus, although the percentage of Blacks on theMississippi Coast is high compared to the country as a whole, the effectwithin the state is to make the coast seem relatively white. The images of New Orleans in the national media, which informedperceptions within Mississippi of what was happening in Louisiana, oftendrew on the representational strategies that Koptiuch (1992) calls"third worlding at home." (13) Marginalized citizens,particularly urban African Americans, are frequently represented asdistant from national norms of citizenship and consequently lessdeserving of assistance because they are not perceived as helpingthemselves. In the process, Koptiuch argues, a "third world"or non-modern and under-developed place is created within the space ofthe United States. In many ways, Mississippi has long played this rolewithin the country. It has been an "underdeveloped" state withan economy that was primarily based on the extraction of primaryresources until industrialization picked up in the last decades of thetwentieth century, drawn by labor that was cheaper than in the north.The poorest state in the nation, it has been represented as theantithesis of all that the country wants to believe that it is. (14)After Hurricane Katrina, however, the state and its citizens representedthemselves as part of the nation and many people from the rest of thecountry continue to contribute to that reintegration materially bycoming to South Mississippi to offer their volunteer labor inreconstruction. The United States takes much of its character from theidea of being a modern, developed place. So, ironically, althoughMississippians implicitly represented their state and themselves asexemplary citizens after the storm, they did this in a context in whichthe modernity that characterizes the country was destroyed. In the nextsection, I consider how this destruction was viewed and thereconstruction of the Coast. The Destruction and Reconstruction of Modernity The cosmological space of God's dominion was usurped with thespace of increasing privatization and commercialization of land.Eschatological time was replaced with an increasing sense of markettime, technological time, productive time. (Wood 2004:516) When the governor of Mississippi first visited the coast afterKatrina, his impression was that it "looked like the hand of Godhad wiped away the coast." Barbour has continued to resort to thisimage of God's hand in the years since (e.g., Henderson 2006 andBarbour 2007), so it clearly resonates with him, and he must feel thatit will with others as well. For example, a 2007 campaign ad featuredhis voice declaiming: Katrina turned out to be so much worse than Camille. It looked likethe hand of God had wiped away the Coast. As strange as it seems, one ofthe biggest outcomes of Katrina is that it has tremendously helped theimage of Mississippi. Our people are strong, resilient, self-reliant.How can you not be optimistic about Mississippi? We're not onlyrecovering, but Mississippi's image has never been better, becausepeople saw after Katrina the spirit and character of the people ofMississippi, and all the world and all of America liked what they saw.Governor Barbour. (Campaign ad) We understand the present through stories of the past. Camille, thehurricane that devastated the Coast in 1969, provided a recurrenthistorical reference point for understanding Hurricane Katrina. (15)Apart from the governor's use of the disaster for political ends inhis campaign, we again see the elements of the larger narrative with theimplicit reincorporation of the state into the moral nation madeexplicit here: "and all of America liked what they saw." It isnot clear this was the case, since as Rogers noted in the editorialdiscussed earlier, the effects of the storm on Mississippi were nearlyinvisible to the national audience in the face of the tragedy of NewOrleans. Mississippians, with the apparent exception of those withpersonal connections to New Orleans, resented that invisibility (c.f.Warneka 2007:8). (16) The image of God's hand destroying the Coast was potentially,and I presume unintentionally, freighted, given the association of thecoast with vice and social liberalism. It eerily echoes the biblicalstory of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as those who suggested thatHurricane Katrina was God's retribution for the vice of either NewOrleans or the country. Franklin Graham, for example, explainedHurricane Katrina with these words: "There's been satanicworship. There's been sexual perversion. God is going to use thatstorm to bring revival. God has a plan. God has a purpose" (citedin Reyes 2005). Similarly, David Crowe, Executive Director of theorganization Restore America, quoted Psalm 107:25-33: He raiseth the stormy wind which lifted up the waves of the sea ... He turns rivers into a desert, and springs of water into a thirsty groups; a fruitful land into a salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it. And then he asked "[w]as there 'wickedness' in NewOrleans, Alabama, and Mississippi?" (2005) and answered, yes. Hespecifically cites the Gulf Coast gambling industry in Mississippi,noting that a new casino was to open that Labor Day weekend. He, withothers such as the organization Repent America (2005), also cites theassociation of homosexuality with New Orleans and the planned"Southern Decadence" celebration in that city. (17) AlthoughBarbour may have only been awe-struck by the immensity of thedestruction, without intending to invoke an image of God's wrathand agency, his choice to emphasize complete destruction that seems toleave no trace of the past conveniently clears the way to refashion theCoast in a new way. If God wiped the Coast away, Mississippians wouldrebuild it "bigger and better," to use the phrase I began tohear just weeks after the storm hit. What Barbour seems to have intended to evoke by his metaphor wasnot God's wrath, but rather to highlight the fact that HurricaneKatrina erased much of the built environment of the coast, removing fromthe landscape the places that marked people's lives. Thedestruction of infrastructure also distorted the time and space ofmodernity. It was nearly impossible--and for some people who wereblocked in by downed trees, completely impossible,--to move. This wastrue in some places and for some individuals even distant from thecoast, for example in Hattiesburg, sixty-some miles from the coast,there were stories of people who had to saw their way out of theirhouses. It took first responders seven and a half hours to go sixtymiles south from Hattiesburg down highway 49 to the coast. Narratives ofthe time after the storm contain frequent discussions of thedifficulties of movement: people stuck in their homes, roads that wereimpassable, the difficulty of obtaining fuel. This distortion of space and time was reflected discursively in thefact that for many people it seemed that the Coast destroyed could onlybe described with reference to other places. An analogy often used todescribe first impressions was that it looked like "a third worldcountry," which largely seemed to mean that the amenities andinfrastructure thought to accompany life in a "developed"capitalist economy and modernity were destroyed. This was not simply aspatial displacement, but also a temporal one given the common practiceof representing the "third world" and "lessdeveloped" countries and cultures as living in the past (c.f.Hayden 2006). As space and time were altered, so too was place. Modernity is often noted for destroying place (c.f. Entrikin 1991passim) because it leads to a decrease in the marked differences betweenplaces and because increased mobility means the ties between a personand place come to be contingent rather than necessary. The storm, intemporarily destroying the space/time of modernity, regenerated, atleast for some, a remembered place. In other words, the place becamepre-modern in both positive and negative ways for some people. For atime, one woman told me, the Coast reminded her physically of the placeof her childhood, before the construction of the casinos, with anunobstructed view of the beach that defines the place. (18) Despite thefact that even this "natural" feature is not quite what itseems, since the twenty-six miles of white sands had been distributed byhuman hands, not God's, it is the most salient and significantmarker of place that Coastians talk about in describing life there. Theaftermath of the storm also restored the coast socially to an idyllic,pre-modern, place torn from the mythic past when neighbor knew neighbor.As noted above, a recurrent theme when Mississippians talk about theirexperiences of the days after the storm is the way neighbors cametogether. In fact, people frequently say that it is when they got toknow their neighbors, as a consequence of the enforced immobility andmutual dependence. This recreated place and community from a pre-modernpast, albeit one that was in other ways nightmarish for the people mostcut off from what we have come to think of as modern amenities such asfunctioning sewage systems, clean water, and air-conditioning. Reconstruction after the storm meant restoring not just the place,but also--and more importantly--the space/time of modernism after aperiod first of apocalypse (and in certain respects "primitiveutopia" for some, at least in retrospect), as the world seemed tobe coming to an end (or at least was represented that way in nationalmedia) during the crisis, and then community. With the Enlightenment andthe expansion of capitalism, time became measurable, divided into evenunits, rational. Harvey (1990:424) notes that the mathematicalconceptions of space and time were necessary concomitants of"Enlightenment doctrines of political equality and socialprogress." For example, Jeffersonian democracy was accompanied andfacilitated by overlaying a grid on newly acquired land as the UnitedStates expanded. However, this separating and then parceling out of timeand space into uniform units also facilitated their expropriation anduse in a capitalist system that depends upon the production ofinequalities that are spatially (in addition to socially) distributed inorder to ensure the production of profits. It is not simply that experiential or social time is replaced witha linear and measured time that can be bought and sold in modernity. Incapitalism, the linear narrative of progress has assumed mythic power,and this is accordingly an important underlying theme in representationsof reconstruction. Immediately people asserted, in defiance of nature,that the Coast would come back "bigger and better," anexemplar of progress. If the time of capitalism is progressive, linear,and homogenously measurable, the space of capitalism is similarlysmooth--an empty container to be measured, discovered, privatized, anddeveloped. In fact, of course, historically space had to be emptiedbefore development could happen. This was done, for example, through theenclosure of common lands and the removal of indigenous populations. Inthe process, a workforce and new forms of inequality were created. Governor Barbour's image of the "hand of God" wipingthe Coast away emphasized the devastation, but also restored the Coastto an imagined time when it was empty space to be developed byentrepreneurs. Historical landmarks, including ones that survivedCamille, were wiped away; leaving a site without markers, aplacelessness that left many people unable even to locate where thingsused to be when they returned to their former homes on the Coast. Majorhistorical sites such as Jefferson Davis's house, (19) Beauvoir,and countless other significant landmarks and architectural treasuresalong the beach either disappeared or suffered major damage, as had morepersonal landmarks like houses and trees. Gone too were the restaurants,churches, and other places that marked people's lives. When astudent from the coast brought me photographs that fall, her explanationof them was filled with stories of where she used to go and things sheused to do with her friends and family. In the aftermath of the storm,when I met people and asked where they were from, it was common forCoastians to phrase their answer in the past tense. The possibilitiesthis emptying of space through the destruction of place would createwere captured in the words of Billy Guice, a lawyer from a prominentBiloxi family, in the days after Katrina" "Why zone thehistorical district if there's no history left?" And:"This storm just means you don't have to clear off thesite" (Boyer 2005). In both the Coast and New Orleans, there werereports and rumors of people who spoke about the storm as havingconveniently eliminated inconvenient people who seemed to get in the wayof progress. Enkidu (2005), for example, reports conversations shortlyafter Katrina saying that it was God's way to eliminate Blacks fromthe city. I heard of people making similar observations for both NewOrleans and the Coast since then, although on the Coast the examples Iheard were not racialized, but rather put in terms of class. The detailsof eligibility for grants also tended to favor the middle and upperclass (Petterson et al. 2006:659). (20) Petterson et al. noted in 2006that the hurricane had intensified gentrification and predicted that itwould lead to what they called "casinofication," as the largecorporations owning the casinos would have the resources to rebuild whenindependent non-casino tourist hotels would not (2006:660-661). The Coast is being rebuilt at a time when it seems impossible tothink about a place outside of the demands and invisible hand of theMarket, as reflected, for example, in the centrality that attractingjobs takes in local politics. One man from the Coast that I spoke within 2007 believed that tourism was the reason for the reconstruction thathad taken place, although it also benefits Coastians who need jobs. Heexpressed difficulty answering my questions regarding recovery, tellingme that he does not really know much about economics, although I had notphrased my questions in terms of economic development, which was not myprimary interest. More generally, there has been a pervasive fear thatit is being built, more than rebuilt, and that there will be no placefor Coastians. That is, the reconstruction is changing the face of theCoast because those who can afford to build are those with money. As oneresident said a year after the storm: So it'll come back. But, I think one thing we ought to keep aneye on is, who's going to come back with it? There are a lot ofpeople who have invested generations of heart and soul into this beach.And it may just look like a beach to people watching on IV, butit's more than that to people who've grown up here, whosegrandparents were here, and lived through Camille. (Shepard Smith quotedin Tattersall 2006) In particular, large buildings of condominiums rose where familyhomes had been. Geographies of power, including the difficulty ofobtaining affordable insurance, are reshaping the Coast into a placethat seems to be dominated by tourists and capital, with bothconstructed as necessary for the economic well-being of the locale.Waugh and Smith (2006:214) argue that this reshaping, or"redeveloping," of the Coast was always the goal, althoughofficial rhetoric focused on rebuilding communities, pointing to theinclusion of radically new types of "community" developmentbased on the model of "new urbanism, (21)" and the inclusionof new resorts and condominiums. The rhetorical erasure of social difference in the aftermath ofKatrina was accompanied by a social incorporation of hurricane survivorsinto the rest of the country through a massive outpouring of private aidand volunteer assistance that continues still. Similarly, the Coast wasincorporated into Mississippi, and social differences on the Coastmuted. National coverage of Hurricane Katrina, focused primarily on thecity of New Orleans, included recognition of the great inequalities inour society. However, the story told of Katrina in Mississippi served todissolve distinctions and reunite communities that had been divided. Thedestruction of place and homogenizing of space was reflected in thesocial leveling found in the re-creation of community, the unificationof Mississippi, and the rhetorical incorporation of the state into fullnational citizenship. Ironically, that work of re-incorporation into thenation was not reciprocated by the national media, and Mississippiansfelt, and continue to feel, neglected in comparison to New Orleans. Inpractice, however, the state continues to receive large numbers ofvolunteers from all over the country who are assisting inreconstruction. Their presence continually revitalizes the connection ofsouth Mississippi to the national community. However, that time of community has now been replaced partially bya participation of the Coast in the national system through thecapitalist economy, tourism, and immigration that reconstitute it as aplace of exclusions and inequalities. As reconstruction has continued,that sense of community and togetherness that emerged in the days afterthe storm has dissolved. Now there are at least two coasts, that of therelatively affluent who have been able to rebuild despite thedifficulties of uncertain building codes and the insurance woes, andthat of those who cannot mobilize the necessary resources or were eitherrenters or homeless. This outcome reflects the fact that the allocationof resources after a disaster reflects the power dynamics of who canmake their projects and needs heard in the years following a disaster(Petterson et al. 2006:646). In the process, some "preexistingtrends are amplified and others are diminished" (idem). Conclusion: the Perennial Gale of Creative Destruction Place, then, can be read as a geographical expression ofmodernity's paradox--that tension between progress and loss--acreative yet ambivalent space carved out somewhere between theoppressiveness of the new order and the imprisonments of tradition.(Oakes 1997:511) Capitalism and hurricanes turn out to have a lot in common.Schumpeter (1950) caught the nature of capitalism and its relationshipto place nicely in the memorable phrase "perennial gale of creativedestruction" and the warning that there is no "perenniallull." Both natural disasters and capitalism are social productsunderstood through mythic narratives of invisible hands guiding forcesoutside our control. In order to understand either, we need to take intoconsideration the geographies of power and discourses of space and timethat shape regional landscapes and forge competing places out of largergeographies. In both cases, also, social inequalities may be refractedthrough a lens of individual equality that makes the inequities eithermore or less visible. In national coverage, particularly of New Orleans,the storm was said to make inequality visible, as if this had been awell-kept secret. In Mississippi, a state notorious for inequality, thestorm was said to create equality and community that echo myths of anearlier, pre-modern, time. However, while that may have been true insome regards after the storm, in the long-run it has been clear thateveryone was not affected equally and that the preexistent inequalitiesgreatly impacted people's ability to recover from disaster.Capitalism, too, is a system of social and spatial inequality that isintricately tied to an ideology of individual equality inherited fromthe Enlightenment. Myths linked to the Enlightenment of progress andindividualism then shaped the reconstruction of the Coast. Myths not only give shape to our understandings of the form takenby the time and space that shapes our understandings of place, they alsodefine the nature of society and belonging. They are the stories thatform a kind of cultural constitution, defining core truths about wherewe come from and the nature of the world. I began this paper by askingwhat kind of space/time and what values are reconstituted as a placedestroyed is reconstructed. The answer seems to be that the fragmentedspaces and capitalist values that were shaping lives before the stormgain strength in the commitment to a "bigger and better"future. The storm briefly destroyed modernity, and in the midst of thepain, residents recreated an imagined place. Since then, reconstructionhas not been simply rebuilding physical infrastructure and buildings,but also reconstituting modernity in a place caught between progress andloss. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper was originally presented for a panel at the 2007American Anthropological Association meetings. I am grateful to DeborahJackson and Bilinda Straight for organizing that panel, the otherpanelists for a collegial and intellectually stimulating morning, andRuth Behar for her commentary. I thank Amy Young and Chimene Gecewiczfor reading a draft of the conference presentation and Barbara Hesterand Mark Miller for their readings of an expanded version. I amparticularly indebted to Deb and Bilinda for their insightful assistanceand encouragement on both the conference presentation and my firsteffort to expand on it, and Beth Notar, whose comments and suggestionssignificantly improved the final version. REFERENCES Barbour, Haley. 2005. "Haley Barbour's KatrinaSpecial-Session Speech." Vol. 2007: Jackson Free Press. Verbatimtranscription from September 27. Accessed fromhttp://www.jacksonfreepress.com/print.php?id=7332_0_7_0 on May 28, 2009. --. 2007. 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The lower part of the statealong the Mississippi river is often separated off into the River Citiesor the Natchez District (e.g. Higginbotham and Monti 1995, WPA 1949:5).The Mississippi tourism website extends that region over to the centerof the state and calls it Capital/River. That site, like Kirkpatrick(1997) also combines the next region, the Piney Woods, into the Coastalarea, to form South Mississippi. In other cases, the Piney Woods runover to the River Cities and the Capital, central, area of the state isincorporated into the Hills. (6) In the spring 2009 semester one of my students from Jackson,160 miles from the Coast, asked what Mardi Gras and the parades were.The rest of the class concurred that people there would not typicallyknow about Mardi Gras. (7) Nelson and Mason (2006) argue that part of how the bill couldpass is that its sponsors snuck it through with little publicity whilethe state was focused on a bill that would have created a lottery. (8) These areas, unlike the south river area (Natchez, Vicksburg,and Greenville), are within driving distance of large population centersthat increase their draw (Von Herrmann 2006:71). (9) The truth is that both Mississippi and the Delta within thestate have higher concentrations of poverty and Black citizens. However,the creation of an absolute difference out of relative ones serves toessentialize identities and inscribe them in space. As Jansson says:"In the process, the commonalities and kinship are obscured by thesignification of difference (2003:365)." As southerners like topoint out, racism also exists in the North. (10) Although it was presented as a critique of government failure,in fact this reflects the move over the past two decades to privatizegovernment functions. It also presaged the way that reconstruction wouldbe largely decentralized and organized by corporations and, particularlyreligious, non-profit relief organizations (c.f. Lassahn 2006). (11) The design on the state license plate changes every fiveyears. (12) Some scholars have examined the difference between Mississippiand Louisiana state government responses after Katrina. Jurkiewicz(2007) looks at Louisiana's "ethical culture" and howthis led to communication problems between groups. Waugh (2007) focuseson the different levels of experience that state officials had with TheEmergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), an organization thatstructures inter-state mutual aid during disasters. Others havehighlighted the fact that Governor Barbour of Mississippi is aRepublican with national ties, including rapport with President Bushwhile Governor Blanco of Louisiana was a Democrat who was not on goodterms with Mayor Nagin of New Orleans. (13) For some analyses of the media and Hurricane Katrina, seeGrismore (2007), Littlefield & Quenette (2007), Stock (2007), andTierney et al. (2006). (14) After Hurricane Katrina, many commentators suggested that thetragedy of New Orleans served to bring to light the ways in which raceand class fragment our country and create vulnerabilities that goagainst our image of the United States as a country. Howard Zinnsuggested (1964) that the South represented the essence of US society, aplace where the nation could see its "blemishes magnified." (15) Some people who chose not to evacuate made that decision basedon the reasoning that would surely be safe in buildings that hadsurvived that earlier "once in a lifetime" hurricane--andnobody believed another could be worse. (16) This relative invisibility of Mississippi seems to becontinuing in the academic literature that is coming out on HurricaneKatrina. For example, of the eleven articles in the 2006 special issueon the storm of the American Anthropologist (Paredes 2006), only one isabout Mississippi (Ethridge 2006). Another very rough indication of thisis that a search of Google Scholar for "Hurricane Katrina"yields 27,700 results, which diminishes to just 1,810 when both"river" and "New Orleans" are exluded. Anon-exhaustive inspection of edited volumes yields similar results evenwhen "the Gulf Coast" is in the title. (17) Others' suggestions for why God would either strike theGulf Coast or permit nature to do so included U.S. support for Israeliwithdrawal and evacuation of the Gaza Strip (Klein 2005) and abortion(Media Matters 2005). (18) We should not over-romanticize this, however, because she alsospoke to me of horrors of the days after the storm, for example of somepeople who were drinking sewer water before aid and fresh water beganarriving. (19) Beauvoir was the focus of a rapid and very high profile repairand reconstruction effort. Restoration was completed in May of 2008. (20) This need not be conscious class bias. For example, newbuilding codes required greater construction costs, poorer people areless likely to have insurance, and often poorer neighborhoods are inmore vulnerable locations. (21) Petterson et al. (2006:659) include a similar critique of NewUrbanism in the recovery plans for New Orleans: that if favors aromantic vision of community over the more complex, pre-existing,historical communities.