From Calamities to Disasters: Pitirim Aleksandrovič Sorokin’s Insights

Abstract

When Sorokin wrote the book Man and Society in Calamity, it was very clear what he meant by calamities—natural or man-made (war and revolution, famine, and pestilence)—and how these “monsters” transformed the normal flow of individuals’ lives. Indeed, since calamities occur in each and every age, they exert great influence on many aspects of everyday life: from forms of thought to acting, from social life to the cultural processes of society. Sorokin defines the “typical effects” that are repeated whenever disasters of the same type occur. The principle still holds today; after many years, the lexicon has changed, preferring the term disaster to calamity (now considered archaic, obsolete), but the effects of the events that we call disasters—on the thoughts, behavior, social organization, and cultural life of individuals—have not changed. And this is true despite the fact that scholars not always agree on which events should and/or could fall into this category. In contemporary society, we can hypothesize, even if briefly, the classification and the characteristics of disasters, since these elements differentiate the actions taken by the community affected and by those providing aid.