Matter of absence: navigating loss and renewal through post-disaster material culture

Environmental disasters deeply affect communities, leaving both physical and emotional scars. For survivors, these ‘traces’ of the material world that was lost can help to appease the absence of the ordinariness of their familiar everyday lives. This paper, based on ethnographic research in North-Eastern Japan after the 2011 tsunami, explores how salvaged objects and surviving spaces and landscapes can help disaster-affected populations make sense of their new realities. The paper identifies three performative strategies employed by survivors to engage with this material absence of their ordinary lives: reconstruction, integration, and untouching; further showing how salvaged objects and altered landscapes play a central role in rebuilding identity, memory, and new trajectories into the future. By examining how survivors interact with ‘traces’ of material absence, the paper contributes to the growing field of post-disaster material culture, highlighting the agentic power of absence to make sense of their experiences, while empowering their coping with loss and reimagination of new futures.