Bhopal to Bridgehampton: Schema for a Disaster Tourism Event

This experimental essay is a documentary-fiction account of two research trips undertaken in 2010 to Bhopal, India, and Bridgehampton, USA, by a photographer called Smith and an anthropologist called Willing. Their purpose was to investigate the social, cultural and environmental aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, with a view to proposing ways in which the disaster might be exploited for commemorative, educational and entertainment purposes. Smith and Willing enumerate here on the ways in which photography and ethnography, as well as the disaster's 'materiality' - its routes and objects - could be used to generate a disaster tourism event in both Bhopal and Bridgehampton, the home of Union Carbide's former CEO, Warren Anderson. Part fantasy, part political and cultural critique, Bhopal to Bridgehampton also represents a meditation on authorship and the limits of the autobiographical gesture in ethnography. While their experiences are loosely based on some of the author's own, Smith and Willing are emphatically fictional characters.