Sustainable Disaster: Fantasies of Resilience, Global Adaptation Science, and East Asia’s Seawomen

This article examines how the labor and community structures of female skin-divers, the Japanese ama and Korean haenyeo, believed to exemplify the primitive ability to adapt to extreme climates, became staple research subjects for global adaptation-resilience science. In the context of development studies, adaptation-resilience discourse has been seen as reflecting the emergence of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, this article frames adaptation-resilience as a reactionary technological response that emerges in times of scarcity and crisis. This article demonstrates how the discourse can be traced back to interwar Japanese physiologists, who saw themselves as rescuing Japan from the ills of modernity through a socio-biological development program that drew on the diver’s adaptability as a means to create subjects not only capable of surviving extreme deprivation but willing to do so in the service of the community and the state. These scientists and their research were taken up uncritically in the postwar by international science and development organizations, who found in them a shared vision of a labor-intensive and low ecological impact model of community-rooted development that offered a sustainable and healthier alternative to capitalism, one that could help humanity overcome crises of modern excess such as climate change. However, sustainability meant the valorization of absolute austerity as a development goal, ruling out relief for suffering marginalized populations. This article therefore suggests that resiliency-based development entraps its subjects in a regime of self-exploitation that forces them into a constant state of emergency, paradoxically deepening their vulnerability in the process.