Publications by authors named "Jesse Hession Grayman"

Disaster survivors are often criticised for being dependent on humanitarian (and development) assistance. This dependency is perceived pejoratively by civil servants and other elites, including non-governmental organisation staff. Officials offered up such narratives in relation to the disaster response and recovery programmes following the Nepal earthquake of 2015.

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Disasters can have substantial impacts on people's livelihoods in developing countries. Further, if the need for livelihood interventions is ignored or delayed, the crisis may trigger unexpected harmful consequences in the affected households in the aftermath. Therefore, restoring livelihoods should remain a priority in the post-disaster recovery process.

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After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh's coastal communities. This article presents a medical humanitarian case study based on ethnographic data I collected while working for a large aid agency in post-conflict Aceh from 2005 to 2007. In December 2005, the agency faced the first test of its medical and negotiation capacities to provide psychiatric care to a recently amnestied political prisoner whose erratic behavior upon returning home led to his re-arrest and detention at a district police station.

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In both the Acehnese and Indonesian languages, there is no single lexical term for "nightmare." And yet findings from a large field research project in Aceh that examined post traumatic experience during Aceh's nearly 30-year rebellion against the Indonesian state and current mental distress revealed a rich variety of dream narratives that connect directly and indirectly to respondents' past traumatic experiences. The results reported below suggest that even in a society that has a very different cultural ideology about dreams, where "nightmares" as such are not considered dreams but rather the work of mischievous spirits called jin, they are still a significant part of the trauma process.

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