We Live with the Sea

Andrew Littlejohn is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.

“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

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: “Living with Everything Together” 1Part I. “What Kind of Town This Was”1. Histories of Entanglement 372. What Happened That Day 61Part II. A Total System3. Partitioning the Sensible 894. On Higher Ground 118Part III. Protecting Otherwise5. Ecologizing Safety 1516. Political Becoming 178Conclusion: “A Town Where We Live with the Sea” (Umi to ikiru machi) 201Notes 211References 217Index 237