Abstract
This chapter introduces the notion of disaster and provides a selection of key themes derived from the current sociological and anthropological debate on undesired events. Disasters are interpreted as elements that can revitalize old fractures and lines of separation that are at the very basis of the processes of national formation. These crises generate multiple interpretations and are experienced differently by different groups. Disasters, thus, appear as cultural phenomena that reflect the plurality of positions and hierarchies present in a given society. That is, elements that produce different responses, and subsequent “structural amnesias” and “memories”. Tragic collective events, moreover, are seen as occurrences that “augment” social reality by increasing the visibility of social structures and hidden tendencies. This set of theories is applied to the case at hand to reflect on the cultural and political outcomes of the seismic crisis in the Sicilian city at the center of the study.
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Notes
- 1.
Zampieri (2018) is the only author who has underlined the importance of this distinctive category for the local culture.
- 2.
A similar point, on how economic injustice in the USA has been exacerbated through housing policy, is made by Rothstein (2017).
- 3.
Probably, such origins might be dated back to the eighteenth century. At least if, to remain in the field of disasters research, one follows, among many authors and studies on modern disasters, Placanica’s research on the 1783 Messina earthquake (Placanica 1985, pp. 162–164) or Pereira’s economic analysis of the 1755 Lisbon’s earthquake (Pereira 2009, p. 496). Albeit these two reconstruction processes were managed incomparably better than the seismic crisis of 1908, one will find the seeds of those tendencies whose origins are traced by Klein back to the capitalist restructuring processes of the early 1970s. The elements of institutional violence (the use of the army, in particular); the implementation of states of exception; the raise of new individuals and groups, or the use of disasters as a way to impose radical changes in the State organization and the law, can be found also in those experiences. Certainly, this hypothesis should be deepened. And one of the problems lies in the fact that many “minor” disasters have been discussed mostly in the national languages and are thus relatively difficult to know. But, certainly, there would be much to learn from those events that took place at the “outskirts of the empire”, and they remain virtually unknown to most observers.
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Farinella, D., Saitta, P. (2019). Researching Disasters: Theories for a Case Study. In: The Endless Reconstruction and Modern Disasters. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19361-4_2
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