How do we understand a disaster? How do we interpret the aftermath of disaster, anyway? This presentation draws on a critical ethnographic approach for understanding what constituting the disaster and how the preexisting social condition shaping the disaster in the aftermath of 2009 Aila cyclone. Following the disaster, the people who get reliefs manifest perpetual discrimination that have become palpable through the frame of disaster. At the same instant, the power at different levels while are aware of the dynamics of crisis has strategically used the disaster as an opportunity to strengthen their positions in the name of building back better. I show how these phenomena are linked with the consequences of disaster. I argue by interpreting meanings as a lived intersubjective reality the ways in which a priori frames of disaster creates and foreclose the possibilities for restoration and for building back the world better.
