Michele R. Gamburd's December 2014 publication of The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka's Tsunami Disaster commemorates the ten-year anniversary of the Indian Ocean tragedy. Gamburd self-consciously provides a “holistic” account of the disaster and its aftermath in Sri Lanka's southwestern littoral by broadly situating the tsunami in terms of the science of the waves; the experiences of death, destruction, and remarkable survival; and the moral discourses and political-economic features of the recovery. The chapters are interspersed with short first-person accounts of that fateful day, which the author suggests are intended to inject an element of “chaos” that reflects the disorder thrown up by the tsunami. Yet, these chapters offer systematic and insightful discussion of the chaos and initial solidarity that upended existing enmities, and of the strained provisioning of aid through which hierarchies were reasserted and conflicts resumed. Significantly, Gamburd also discusses the local economic and political ramifications of national and transnational aid distribution, as well as the struggle over distribution of resources between the Government of Sri Lanka and the insurgent Tamil nationalist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The book is named for the idiom through which Gamburd's interlocutors constantly critiqued the post-tsunami condition in which disadvantaged Sri Lankans were seen as taking ample advantage of the material benefits newly available through humanitarian assistance. The work explores local perceptions of material misconduct, offering important reflections on perceived corruption and the fine line between salvage and thievery. While beneficiaries of aid were often cast as greedy, unscrupulous people of low caste status, Gamburd notes that middle-class people affected by the tsunami were careful to craft narratives that emphasized their generosity as donors so as to assert their socially and morally superior positions. She explores how karma (a reckoning of theodicy that is widely prevalent in Sri Lanka) and social habitusFootnote ¹⁸ were interpreted by her Sinhalese interlocutors as factors of vulnerability and resilience in the face of disaster. Gamburd draws lightly on anthropological theories of the gift to describe the debts and merits accrued to beneficiaries and donors. She could have gone further with such theorizations of the gift, altruism, reciprocity, and the “wounds” of indebtedness.Footnote ¹⁹ But perhaps it is precisely because consideration of Mauss's theory of the giftFootnote ²⁰ is a well-trodden approach within the growing body of literature on humanitarianism that she applies this theoretical material with a light touch.

In my eyes, two moments in the ethnography shine in terms of the analysis of political and economic upshots of the tsunami disaster and the influx of material aid. First, Gamburd analyzes a moment of code-switching between Sinhala and English performed by a local politician-cum-MC in the ceremonial opening of a tsunami housing complex. In one breath, in Sinhala, the politician engaged paternalistic rhetoric to admonish and dictate to beneficiaries the proper use of tsunami houses. “Neediness” was transformed by Buddhist concepts of karma and merit, which signaled to beneficiaries the value of “sedentary stewardship.” In another breath, for the benefit of the foreign corporate donors, in English the MC extolled the paradigm of international development, and emphasized capitalistic concepts of leadership, entrepreneurship, and business recovery. Gamburd cogently remarks upon how this intermediary “deftly balanced local and foreign systems of value” (pp. 84–85).

In a second moment of especially rich analysis, Gamburd relates how from her interlocutors' vantage point, the mytho-historical tale of an ancient tsunami, which has been cast as a vehicle that restores Sinhala Buddhist sovereignty over the island, dovetails with the nationalistic storyline given to the chain of events that started with the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 election of the hawkish President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the Government of Sri Lanka's military defeat of the Tamil nationalist insurgents. Gamburd points out that while national-level debates over aid distribution to Tamil areas in the north and east of the island were at first relatively amicable, they eventually gave way to the re-entrenchment of nationalistic ethnic polarities and resistance to aid sharing, which stimulated a return to war after a period of ceasefire. For her Sinhalese interlocutors, the direct resonance with the ancient chronicle gave force to the contemporary majoritarian glorification of the war.

Gamburd's ethnography relies a great deal on the reported speech of her interlocutors in the village she calls Naeaegama. With very little paraphrasing, the result is that certain chapters are filled with English translations of colloquial Sinhala. In my view, this occasionally flattens the prose. On the other hand, the simple language makes the book especially accessible for students at the undergraduate level. Moreover, the reported speech nicely illustrates the author's methodological use of ethnographic interviews. Gamburd eloquently ends the book, writing, “Foreign concepts swept ashore with the tsunami, but local cultural logic buffered their arrival” (p. 198). The Golden Wave would be ideal for use in introductory-level undergraduate anthropology or sociology courses on disasters and humanitarian aid. It would also be well placed in introductory courses on economic anthropology.