Disasters

Disaster and Vulnerability

According to anthropologists such as Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman, disasters have pasts, presents, and futures. The past can [Page 287]be interpreted as the hazard itself, the present as the pattern of vulnerability, and the future as the expression of disaster, its treatment, and either deception or the possibility of deception. Oliver-Smith and Hoffman add that, “Whether rapid or slow in onset, disasters and the vulnerability leading to them unfold over time, often considerable amounts of time.” This argument implies that vulnerability sets the stage for disaster.

However, cause and effect do not entirely delimitate the relationship between disaster and vulnerability, for this relationship also happens to be of a circular nature: Preliminary vulnerability eventually determines the magnitude of the subsequent disaster, and the ensuing disaster leads to augmented vulnerability. As a result, a subject rendered vulnerable (a subject that can be an entire population) is more likely to seek out a savior who is capable of deception, but who promises a return to normalcy. (Obviously, this savior has multiple possible manifestations: a despot, government, ideology, or religion) There exists, therefore, a constant link between disaster and deception: vulnerability.

Hazards and Disasters

Disaster studies often begin by juxtaposing the words natural and disaster, and then proceed to distinguish natural disasters from non-natural or technological disasters. This approximation is of some value in an analysis of disaster as a concept and as an event because it suggests that in all disasters the initial tendency is to assign blame. The simplistic conclusion would be that natural disasters are the fault of nature, as opposed to non-natural disasters, which would be the fault of humans.

The next step is to classify as natural disasters events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, desertification, pestilence, drought, volcanic eruption, famine, and tsunamis, to name but a few. The problem with this categorization, however, is that it fails to mark a distinction between hazards and disasters.

...