Richard Keller Book Forum

Somatosphere | September 25, 2015
Book Forum:
Richard C. Kellers Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat

Wave of 2003
Sara B. Pritchard
Cornell University
Peter Redfield
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Camille Robcis
Cornell University
Kim Fortun
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Miriam Ticktin
The New School for Social Research
Richard C. Keller
University of WisconsinMadison
Edited by
Todd Meyers
Wayne State University
Richard Kellers Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful
accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods
surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time
in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, and precarity in
order to consider the scale, grain, reach, and quality of disaster (natural, designed). By weaving
together official history, epidemiological forecasting, and statistical reckoning along with
what Keller calls anecdotes, individual stories that give necessary texture to the invention and
indifference of catastrophe the book tells a story that allows the unease of the events
chronology to come through: slow and then all of a sudden, concluded but lingering long after all
is said and done, a rupture with a long preamble.
Book Forum: Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003
What follows is a collection of commentaries that take up Kellers masterful study in different
ways: some are deeply reflective and personal, others more directly highlight the civic, political,
and global character of disaster, and underscore the associated alienation and negligence which
both precedes and follows seemingly anomalous events. We hope you enjoy the comments on
Richard Kellers Fatal Isolation and his response.
On Vulnerability and the Anecdote

Sara B. Pritchard
Cornell University
She tottered down the narrow, pedestrian-only street. Tiny, white-haired, and bent awkwardly at
the waist, she struggled to pull a small wheeled cart over the cobblestones. I wasnt sure how she
was managing. And knowing what many Parisian apartments are like, I wondered how she and her
groceries were going to get home. The stairs in my sublet around the corner narrow, dark, worn
in the middle of each slippery stone step from centuries of use spiraled tightly upward for six
stories. Perhaps a kind neighbor or gardienne (building manager) would help her.
I could write about Pariss 2003 heat wave, the centerpiece of Richard C. Kellers new book, Fatal
Isolation, in good academic fashion, but instead Im thinking about the elderly woman I saw on a
Paris street that July. I could engage with one of Kellers arguments, drawing on Charles Perrow,
that the canicule was a normal accident.[i] Building on Kellers evidence and analysis, I could make
the case that the heat wave was an envirotechnical disaster a deadly result of the confluence of
environmental, technological, and political factors.[ii] I could invite us to consider Paris as an
envirotechnical system a city, like many worldwide, where the infrastructure of the built
environment, when combined with natural processes like weather, produce an urban heat island
effect that can be fatal, especially for societys most vulnerable citizens.[iii] I could place the 2003
heat wave and Kellers narrative in the context of French environmental history,[iv] the field of
environmental history, or related scholarship that has explored the human body in and as
environment.[v]
But instead, I want to think about the anecdote as methodology and narrative strategy what it
does for Kellers examination of the 2003 heat wave, what it does for readers, and, in particular,
this reader, who has found herself fixated on a fleeting encounter of her own from that summer.
Keller uses the anecdote to locate and recover les oublis (the forgotten): the 95 victims of the
Paris heat wave who died between August 1 and 20, 2003, individuals whose bodies were never
identified and claimed by loved ones, and who were interred in the secteur dindigents (poor
section) of the Parisian public cemetery of Thiais.[vi] As Keller writes, the anecdote has a long
and important history as both a literary form and empirical evidence for ethnographers, historians,
and literary critics. The anecdote is, however, not pure objective fact. Inevitably, the ethnographer
inscribes through interpretation, not merely as a transcriber of the voices of the past.
Nonetheless, the anecdote has an almost unique capacity not merely to illustrate historical
narratives, but also to rupture them by producing what [literary critics Catherine Gallagher and
Stephen Greenblatt] call counterhistory through its status as an interruption in a larger narrative.
The anecdote can thus advance scholarly arguments and challenge dominant historical
narratives.[vii]
Kellers anecdotes of the forgotten are the result of long, painstaking, labor-intensive fieldwork
consulting old phone books in the Bibliothque Nationale and making call after call (often to the
wrong person), walking through quartiers, climbing steep spiral staircases, knocking on doors,
chatting with neighbors. Some of the books most powerful moments are these anecdotes brief,
fragmentary glimpses into lives not usually visible.
Bodo. An immigrant from Germany who had lived in France for decades. Home was a chambre
de bonne (former servants quarters) in Pariss fifth arrondissement. Ninety square feet on the sixth
floor directly beneath the buildings zinc roof with western-exposed windows. He lived alone and
his only known family member was a half-brother back in Germany. Bodos neighbor found him
that August, door ajar, his body blocking the half-open door.[viii]
Sonia. Age 87, former domestic servant. She lived in a seventh-floor walk-up on the Avenue
Bugeaud. No windows, just skylights, no hot water, only cold.[viv]
Marceline and Claude. Lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the twelfth arrondissement for over
fifty years. She was almost deaf, he seemed paranoid; they heated with coal. Their bodies were
found August 17.[x]
Jeanne R. Age 91. She died in a nursing home, but had spent most of her later years in a tiny, thirdfloor apartment in Saint-Denis after her husband died in 1972. No elevator, toilet, or running water.
She had no children and her only social contacts were a niece and a social worker. When
interviewed by French social scientists in 1995, Jeanne explained, Depression overtakes me, but
Im used to it. I have no visitors, before I knew the old neighbors, we saw each other a bit, but the
new ones I dont know.[xi]
Fragmentary remnants of 95 lives. And what little we know about them is largely mediated by the
voices of neighbors and building managers, shopkeepers and social workers. They are the ones
producing these anecdotal lives.[xii]
At times, we know much more about where they lived than who they were. Sixty percent of les
oublis lived in chambres de bonne or other marginal housing. Seemingly uninhabitable, inhumane
apartments grandfathered into housing codes. Insulating buffers for the rest of the building in the
summer heat and winter cold.[xiii] They lived and died in what Keller calls a landscape of
vulnerability, a vertical geography prescribed by poverty.[xiv]
My elderly neighbor. Who was she? Where did she live? What was her life like? And did she
survive the heat wave that August?
Collectively, these anecdotes remind us how hard it is to write social and subaltern
histories.[xv] They serve as important correctives to official representations of the disaster
constructed through political, media, and scientific narratives.[xvi] In particular, they thwart
generalization. They reveal what aggregates do not indeed, cannot tell us.[xvii] Yet, even as
they undermine aggregation, they make the general powerfully specific. The reinscription of
poverty through Haussmannization, the limits of French republican citizenship, and aging in latetwentieth- and early-twenty-first-century France are not vague historical processes affecting the
faceless masses. These anecdotes, however fragmentary, individuate and rehumanize.[xviii] Kellers
careful and intentional use of the anecdote gives us insight into the lived experiences of actual
people during normal accidents. They help us understand not simply the broad structure of
envirotechnical systems, but the ways real people navigate them and suffer because of them.
As Franois Michaud Nrard, director of Pariss funeral services department, put it that August,
we need to recognize that a death is not a statistical unit. Its a being of flesh and blood, which
has social links, which has loved ones. Behind the numbers, there is a person, a human
reality.[xix] The anecdote thus helps recover les oublis, individuals categorized by a term that, as
Keller points out, is a double indignity. The forgotten collectivizes and remarginalizes in death
those who were usually cast as marginal in life.[xx]
No doubt, Kellers counterhistory, centered on the anecdote, particularly resonates with me
because I was in France for nine weeks that summer. Ive spent a lot of time in France since the
mid-1990s, but my memories of that time are especially vivid.
Dragging a thin mattress down the ladder from a sweltering loft in Lyon to sleep on the living
room floor. Buying various creams and potions to calm what turned out to be heat rash. Schlepping
a small, overpriced fan on my archival tour de France. An electronic sign in the Montpellier train
station flashing 40C. Three showers a day offering temporary relief from the oppressive Parisian
heat.
I remember the heat, still, though I experienced it so differently than Bodo or Jeanne. For one, I
was able to escape it. By chance, I had arranged to leave Paris and fly home on Saturday, August
2 the beginning of the vacation exodus, and what turned out to be the beginning of the threeweek, unrelenting, deadly heat wave.[xxi]
***
Ive rented apartments in the same quartier twice since that summer of 2003. Each time, I have
looked for the elderly woman, struggling with her cart. I doubt I would recognize her, but I look
anyway.
After all these years, she remains vivid to me, perhaps because I lost a good friend, someone who
also loved and worked in France, two weeks earlier. I may not have been in Paris during the heat
wave, but I had just been there. And when news of the heat waves severity finally broke on August
10, the loss of 15,000 people in France, including the 95 forgotten, became entangled with another
loss.[xxii]
Anecdotes have the power to connect us across time and space, to engender compassion across
vast difference. Kellers project helps me see how my memories of that summer of heat, of
grief, of that elderly woman in Paris somehow tie me to the forgotten. It pushes me to reflect
upon different kinds of vulnerability in both scholarly and deeply human ways. It has also taught
me the power and necessity of remembrance.
This essay is in memory of Lara J. Moore. Her dissertation was published posthumously
as Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in
France, 18201870 (New York: Litwin Books, 2008). Many thanks to Amy Kohout for her insightful
comments on previous drafts of this essay, and Robert Kulik for his editorial assistance.
Notes
[i] Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, 2nd ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999). For Kellers engagement with Perrow, see Richard C.
Keller, Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 11, 53.
[ii] Sara B. Pritchard, An Envirotechnical Disaster: Nature, Technology, and Politics at
Fukushima, Environmental History 17 (April 2012): 219-243. See also the special issue on
Disaster in French History, edited by Elinor Accampo and Jeffrey H. Jackson, in French
Historical Studies 36:2 (2013).
[iii] Keller briefly discusses the coupling of human and natural systems (1011), a related mode
of analysis. On technological system and sociotechnical system, the classic work is Thomas
Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 18801930 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). On envirotechnical system, see Sara B. Pritchard,
Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhne(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011). On infrastructure, see Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of
Infrastructure, American Behavioral Scientist 43:3 (1999): 377-391; Paul N. Edwards,
Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of
Sociotechnical Systems, in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and
Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 185225.
[iv] For just some of the environmental histories of France and its empire, see Michael D.
Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960
2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Michael D. Bess, France, in
Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe, ed. Mark Cioc, Environmental History 5:4
(October 2000): 545-56; Michael D. Bess, Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature
and High Technology in Postwar France, Technology and Culture36:4 (October 1995): 830862; Michael D. Bess, Ecology and the Crisis of Agriculture in Postwar France, French
Politics and Society 13:4 (Fall 1995): 33-50; David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and
Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); David Biggs,
Breaking from the Colonial Mold: Water Engineering and Nation-Building in the Plain of
Reeds, Vietnam, Technology and Culture 49:3 (July 2008): 599-623; David Biggs,
Reclamation Nations: The US Bureau of Reclamation and Nation-Building in the Mekong
Valley: 19451972, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 4:3 (December 2006): 225-
246; David Biggs, Managing a Rebel Landscape: Conservation, Pioneers, and the
Revolutionary Past in the U Minh Forest, Vietnam, Environmental History 10:3 (July 2005):
448-476; Diana K. Davis, Enclosing Nature in North Africa: National Parks and the Politics of
Environmental History, in Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and
North Africa, ed. Alan Mikhail (New York: Oxford University Press), 159-179; Diana K. Davis,
Lco-gouvernance en Algrie franaise: Histoire environnementale, politique et administration
coloniale, Tracs, 22:1 (2012): 189-204; Diana K. Davis, Introduction: Imperialism,
Orientalism and the Environment in the Middle East, and Restoring Roman Nature: French
Identity and North African Environmental History, in Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle
East and North Africa, ed. Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2011): 12-40 and 95-134; Diana K. Davis, Power, Knowledge and Environmental
History in the Middle East and North Africa, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42:4
(2010): 657-659; Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History
and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Caroline
Ford, Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial
Algeria, American Historical Review 113:2 (April 2008): 341-362; Caroline Ford, Nature,
Culture, and Conservation in France and Her Colonies, 18401940, Past and Present 183 (May
2004): 173-198; Caroline Ford, Landscape and Environment in French Geographical and
Historical Thought: New Directions in French Historical Writing, French Historical
Studies 24:1 (Winter 2001): 125-134; Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris Under Water: How the City of
Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (New York: St. Martins Press, 2010); Keiko
Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669
1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Keiko Matteson, Bad citizens with
murderous teeth: Goats into Frenchmen, 17891827, Proceedings of the Western Society for
French History34 (2006): 147-161; Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern
France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres, 17801830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1999); Peter McPhee, The Misguided Greed of Peasants? Popular Attitudes to the
Environment in the Revolution of 1789, French Historical Studies 24:2 (2001): 247-269;
Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994); Sara B. Pritchard, From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism:
French Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond, Social Studies of Science 42:4
(August 2012): 591-615; Pritchard, Confluence; Sara B. Pritchard, Paris et le dsert franais:
Urban and Rural Environments in Post-World War II France, in The Nature of Cities: Culture,
Landscape, and Urban Space, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester: University of Rochester
Press, 2006): 175-191; Sara B. Pritchard, Mining Land and Labor, Environmental History 10:4
(October 2005): 731-733; Sara B. Pritchard, Reconstructing the Rhne: The Cultural Politics of
Nature and Nation in Contemporary France, 19451997, French Historical Studies 27:4 (Fall
2004): 766-799; Peter S. Soppelsa, Reworking Appropriation: the Language of Paris Railways,
1870-1914, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 4:2 (Summer 2014): 104123; Peter S. Soppelsa, Water and Power in Modern France, French Politics, Culture and
Society 31:2 (Summer 2013): 117-132; Peter S. Soppelsa, Pariss 1900 Universal Exposition
and the Politics of Urban Disaster, French Historical Studies 36:2 (Spring 2013): 271-298;
Peter S. Soppelsa, The Instrumentalization of Horses in 19th Century Paris
in Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, ed. Rob Boddice (Leiden: Brill, 2011),
245-264; Peter S. Soppelsa, Urban Railways, Industrial Infrastructure and the Paris Cityscape,
18701914, in Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails, ed. Benjamin Fraser and Steven
Spalding (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 117-144; Peter S. Soppelsa, Visualizing
Viaducts in 1880s Paris, History and Technology 27:3 (September 2011): 371-377; Peter S.
Soppelsa, Finding Fragility in Paris: The Politics of Infrastructure after
Haussmann, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 37 (2009): 233-347;
Samuel Temple, Forestation and its Discontents: The Invention of an Uncertain Landscape in
Southwestern France, 1850Present, Environment and History 17 (2011): 13-34; Samuel
Temple, The Natures of Nation: Negotiating Modernity in the Landes de Gascogne,French
Historical Studies 32:3 (2009): 419-446; Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in
Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
[v] On scholarship that has explored the environmental history of the body, see Conevery Bolton
Valenius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their
Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher
Sellers, eds., Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem
of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006); Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment,
Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gregg
Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2007); Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disrupters and the
Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Joy Parr, Sensing Changes:
Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 19532003 (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2010); Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in
Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families,
Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
[vi] Keller, 1-2, 73-75. Keller complicates the abandoned, unclaimed, and forgotten; see
82.
[vii] Keller, 77-78.
[viii] Keller, 27-28.
[ix] Keller, 111.
[x] Keller, 64, 80.
[xi] Keller, 142-143.
[xii] Keller, 59, 74-81.
[xiii] Keller, 107.
[xiv] Keller, 13, 96.
[xv] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak, in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988).
[xvi] Keller, 4, Chapter 2, Chapter 5, especially 159, 176-180.
[xvii] On agnotology, see Robert N. Proctor and Londa Shiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The
Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
[xviii] Keller, 65.
[xix] Keller, 43.
[xx] Keller, 55.
[xxi] Keller, 26, 75.
[xxii] Keller, 33.
Sara B. Pritchard is Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at
Cornell University, the author of Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the
Rhne (Harvard University Press, 2011), and co-editor of New Natures: Joining Environmental
History with Science and Technology Studies (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/on-vulnerability-and-the-anecdote
10
Modernity as a Fragile Milieu

Peter Redfield
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
For some time I have wondered over the current force of the term precarious less its
heightened political resonance before an eroding welfare state than the sense of generational loss
and betrayal that seems to swirl beneath it. I am pretty sure this latter sentiment would baffle
ancestors from a long list of disparate traditions, all those concerned with keeping rituals, placating
deities, and praying in the face of one uncertainty or another. When was life not precarious? More
to the point, when have threats and burdens fallen evenly? Is not someone, in every narrative,
always more vulnerable? Richard Kellers careful dissection of the Paris heat wave in 2003 offers
an implicit answer to such questions. By interrogating not just the selective devastation left behind
by this slow disaster, but also the selective explanations given for why some died more than others,
Keller reminds us that security is as much a matter of storytelling as a state of being. How else
might we imagine ourselves governed into total safety? And is that not actually the great, everbetrayed promise of a modern, securitized life?
Kellers choice of example is itself telling. Paris, after all, has served as an epicenter of European
efforts to remake humanity, civilizing peasants at home alongside savages abroad. This is the seat
of revolutions, ground zero of the metric system, the natural habitat of the Enlightenment! A
monument of infrastructure, Haussmanns planned citadel, birthplace of biopower! That the zinc
roofs of the City of Light would amplify sunshine through neighboring windows, turning a poorly
ventilated attic into an unintentional solar oven (171-2) thus seems a particular perfidy. And yet
this is precisely the story that Keller tells, insisting that we recall the history of inequality built into
rooftop rooms, and the place of the chambre de bonne in the citys urban heritage (105-6). Even
privileged central Paris includes suffering within its postcard faade. He likewise insists on
sketching the biographies of particular individuals who became statistics during the heat wave,
tracing the journey through social marginalization that led many of them to make the long climb
to such stuffy former servant quarters where they would breathe their last. In epidemiological
analysis, Keller stresses, we should not forget other factors beyond unexpected heat and
unforgiving buildings, or quick demographic links to old age. Isolation and exclusion again play
the role of tireless villains, quietly at work behind the scenery.
A heat wave is a relatively humble disaster. Too slow for arresting images, it seeps through a
population rather than striking a spectacular blow. Its victims are hard to count, or even to define
with absolute certainty. For these very reasons it reveals seams of vulnerability within bourgeois
hygiene and urban policy, pockets of heightened risk for those who fall outside crucial norms. It
11
can also expose blind spots of expert reason; efforts to explain mortality patterns and translate
them into policy can themselves obscure risk in a message of safety. Keller shows that under close
inspection the human toll grows both more painfully clear and difficult to enumerate, a collective
composed of revealing anecdotes rather than a clean dataset with a predictive variable. Yes, many
who died were indeed elderly, but factors of social isolation and poverty also played a crucial part,
and stubbornly complicate planning.
It is not clear, however, the extent to which a rejuvenated welfare state would resolve the problem,
or ensure future safety. For a heat wave reminds us of an older, deeper sense of precarity. From an
ecological perspective humans may appear remarkably adaptable, a species triumphantly dispersed
around the globe. Yet human bodies remain simultaneously fragile, requiring just the right
surroundings to survive. Ours is a Goldilocks formula not too hot, not too cold along with
plenty of air and adequate hydration. Compared to microscopic creatures like tardigrades (which
endure boiling, freezing, and being blasted into space) we are endlessly vulnerable. Heat leaves us
particularly trapped and dependent, once down to our skin. If anything, urban life has only
accentuated this frailty by covering it up, regulating the environment through additional layers of
mass artifice and infrastructure, even while fostering hidden isolation. As Kellers title reminds
us, we are deeply communal creatures, only achieving adult form in the company of others. Under
extreme conditions, social relations again grow vital, a primary hope for security, a matter of life
and death.
Peter Redfield is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is most recently author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without
Borders (University of California Press, 2013).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/modernity-as-a-fragile-milieu
12
History, Theory, and Limit Events

Camille Robcis
Cornell University
The historiography of natural disasters reminds me in many ways of that of trauma. Like other
limit events of extreme violence and massive or senseless death, natural disasters present a series
of conceptual difficulties for the historian. Namely, both natural disasters and trauma tend to resist
single explanatory frameworks as they involve structural factors (the weather, geography, the
economy, culture, society) as well as ideological ones (specific policies or beliefs of one or
several actors). Moreover, in both cases, the actual events appear profoundly entangled with the
victims experience of these events. This means that attention to memory to what is useful about
it and what is more problematic is also crucial.
In his engaging, provocative, and often chilling new book, Fatal Isolation, Richard Keller takes
on this historiographical challenge as he offers us a fascinating account of the 2003 heat wave that
left 15,000 dead in France. Rather than privileging numbers (structures) or individual policies
(ideologies), Kellers book explores three narratives: the official story of the crisis as it unfolded
and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the anecdotal lives and deaths of its
victims, and the ways in which they illuminate and challenge typical representations of the heat
wave; and the scientific understandings of the catastrophe and its management (4). By untangling
these three narratives and exposing their limits, Keller proposes to emphasize instead the
particularities of the French experience of the disaster, the social fault lines the disaster
revealed and the historical factors that shaped its course (9). Kellers book reminds us that
numbers, whether in the fields of biology, demography, epidemiology, or economics, are never
neutral and always political. It is a beautiful example of how historical analysis, when interwoven
with interviews and observations, close readings of the press, careful analysis of visual material,
and research in archives and libraries (12) can bring to light these political stakes and denaturalize
and question self-evident claims, in the tradition of what Michel Foucault has called the history
of the present.
What, then, does the heat wave tell us about France in 2003? According to Keller, the heat wave
casts in high relief two themes: The first is the social and political marginalization of large
populations in the contemporary period; the second is their resulting invisibility (12). If
citizenship is not simply limited to formal rights such as voting but requires the broader
integration of individuals into the public sphere on a community level (168), then the heat wave
reveals the difficulty of integrating the elderly, the sick, and the poor into the framework of the
nation. To make sense of this landscape of vulnerability (13), Keller turns to the framework of
13
biopolitics, to Agambens notion of bare life, and to Judith Butlers concept of ungrievable
deaths (15-16; 166-7). Although these vulnerable populations were not killed on purpose by
the state, they were let to die because of the differential valuations of their lives.
Much of Kellers account of why the poor, the elderly, the homeless, and the sick were the primary
victims of the heat wave has to do with factors that are specifically French. With admirable clarity,
Keller guides us through the history of paid vacations in France to understand why it mattered that
the heat wave happened in August; through the history of architecture and urban planning in Paris,
from Haussmann to today, to explain why some habitats (the chambre de bonne in particular) were
most susceptible; and through the history of French family policy to show how the state
progressively constructed the elderly as unproductive, useless, and burdensome, starting in the
postwar period.
This redefinition of aging was not simply a consequence of the bad economy, of neoliberal
policies, or of the destruction of the welfare state, as the left has often contended (147-8). Rather,
Keller argues, it was a French cultural and political phenomenon. While I find Kellers criticism
of the economic thesis persuasive, I wonder why the discourse of social fragmentation was so
appealing in this particular time and place (i.e. France in 2003). The population policy that focused
on the birthrate and immigration, that was devised in the 1930s to remedy Frances depopulation
problem and rethought after the Second World War in the context of Social Security, was
fundamentally entangled with the social question. The architects of family policy believed that
the family could operate as the constitutive pillar of the social order, and as such, that it could
serve as the basis of solidarity, a concept especially important in republican political culture.
In recent years, family policy has been successively revised and adapted to include divorced
families, single-parent-households, same-sex couples and parents. Those opposed to these changes
have often deplored the social fragmentation that will come about if the law recognizes these
new family formations. Social fragmentation is also routinely invoked in the context of
immigration to decry the new immigrants inability to embrace the values of the Republic. In other
words, the social fracture that was so often invoked after the 2003 heat wave is perhaps more
historically specific: these deaths seem to expose, once again, the failures of the republican social
model to integrate its citizens, the fractures of this model of solidarity that has privileged unity,
cohesion, and uniformity, at the expense of difference. It is interesting for example, that Keller
pauses on Michel Houellebecqs novel, The Possibility of an Island, since Houellebecqs work has
been, for the past two decades, one the most symptomatic expressions of this crisis of the
republican social model a crisis that according to Houellebecq was brought about by feminism,
Islam, multiculturalism, and liberalism, all of which he perceives as communitarian and divisive.
None of these factors are of course directly related to the heat wave but given their weight in
contemporary French politics and culture, I wonder how much they shaped the discourse around
the 2003 canicule.
But if Keller provides so much helpful context to help us grasp the significance of the 2003 heat
wave, the explanatory framework that he ultimately favors remains remarkably abstract. How can
Agambens notion of bare life address the historical and geographical specificity of this crisis?
Historians (such as Dominick LaCapra) have strongly criticized Agambens work for anchoring
14
his theoretical intervention on the case study of the Holocaust, for referring to the concentration
camp as the paradigm of modernity, thus blurring crucial normative distinctions. How then, can
we use Agambens understanding of biopolitics while remaining conscious of the temporal and
regional specificity of this crisis? By raising these difficult methodological questions about the
relationship between historical specificity and theoretical abstraction, Fatal Isolation is a perfect
example of how history and theory can complement each other to work through these extreme and
traumatic events.
Camille Robcis is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. She is the author of The
Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell University
Press, 2013) and of several essays that have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Yale French
Studies, Social Text, French Historical Studies, Discourse, and the Journal of Modern History.
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/history-theory-and-limit-events
15
Bodies of/and Knowledge

Kim Fortun
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
On a recent trip to Paris, I couldnt keep my eyes off the roof tops, always searching for the smallest
windows near the top of the buildings, openings into the rooms and worlds of people who died
during the 2003 European heat wave. By the numbers, 200 Parisians are expected to die at home
in a given August; 900 Parisians died at home in August 2003, many up near the gables
(207). Architecture, we have learned, can harbor structural violence.
I was also compelled to move through the city in a new way, mindful not only of which
arrondissement I was in, but also of which quartier within a particular arrondissement. This kind
of placement also mattered in the summer of 2003. Deaths were distributed throughout Paris,
occurring in rich districts as well as those recognized as poor. Despite the best laid plans of
Haussmann in the rebuilding of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, poverty in Paris today is
distributed vertically as well as horizontally. The poorest districts of the city are in the outskirts,
pushed there by Haussmanns urban development initiatives to improve sanitation, water supply
and other unquestionable public health goods. But this didnt fully eliminate poverty and
vulnerability in the city center. Within a particular arrondissement, particular quartiers are poorer
than others, and this is reflected in health outcomes if mapping and accounting tools have
sufficient granularity (98). Vertically distributed poverty is even harder to capture. Pushed upward
by building practices and codes that permit habitation in small, barely ventilated upper rooms,
many without plumbing, poverty lives on in central Paris often just above swank apartments
and shops. Exacerbated by the zinc roofs loved by tourists, the heat in room upper rooms reached
literally unbearable levels in August 2003. Paris has a truly deadly charm (188).
Richard Keller draws out these patterns of spatialized vulnerability and the enduring problems
of accounting for them in his new book, Fatal Isolation. It is a remarkable book, with many
provocations.
The potentially devastating human health impacts of heat waves were well known before 2003,
and it literally isnt rocket science to recognize that upper rooms will be hotter than those below.
It nonetheless was days into the heat wave in Paris in August 2003 before the medical and public
health community recognized that they were dealing with what would come to be recognized as
the worst natural disaster in Frances history. And the special hazards of life in upper rooms
often lived in by people also struggling with addiction, mental illness, or other cumulative factors
still remains under-articulated (108). Frances InVS epidemiological surveillance unit (with
16
responsibilities akin to the US Centers for Disease Control) did studies confirming that verticality
matters; those who lived on Paris top floors were shown to have been four times more likely than
their neighbors on lower floors to die in August 2003 (108). The numbers were even worse if the
rooms were especially small, and without a bath or shower. Habitual lack of social interaction also
dramatically increased vulnerability and complicated accounting of deaths. But even those who
lived alongside those who died couldnt pull all these factors and their cumulative effects
together. If someone was alcoholic, HIV positive, or just brutally poor, people tended to describe
their deaths as having nothing to do with the heat (169). Slow disaster injury through
accretion is hard to recognize, much less articulate in official forms. Multiple determination,
weighted by history, doesnt easily make sense.
Keller gives life to the numbers. He describes how and where people who died during the heat
wave lived, people whose bodies werent claimed by kin or friends, people who didnt register in
all senses of the term. Keller started with death counts and registries, turning his critique of
numeration and aggregative accounting into an impressive, not-so-matter-of-fact method.
Beginning in the poor section of Paris public cemetery, Keller then visited the buildings and
neighborhoods where the unclaimed dead had lived, talking to neighbors and landlords. What he
learned in his conversations allowed Keller to craft powerful anecdotes about individual lives that
stay with a reader, giving flesh and personality to abstractions, working at a different angle from
those that produce generalizations of vulnerable groups, offering a different kind of insight into
health disparities than that offered in usual public health accounting.
The 2003 European heat wave thus becomes memorable, prompting basic and important questions
in what I have come to think of as disaster analytics: How across times and places is injury
produced, recognized, legitimated, disavowed, addressed? What vulnerabilities and injuries must
we anticipate in our late-industrial times? What modes of knowledge production can help us make
sense of these times and vulnerabilities?
Knowledge and associated social contracts are problems throughout Kellers story. The spatialized
vulnerability that he describes was, in part, produced by Haussmanns initiatives to improve public
health in Paris by design. Critical historical studies of Haussmans work in turn created other
invisibilities, directing attention to horizontal rather than vertical distributions of poverty,
indirectly contributing to the inability to recognize crisis on Paris upper floors in the summer of
2003. Epidemiological mappings and aggregations of the 2003 crisis pointed to strong associations
between old age, poverty and heat wave vulnerability, leading to new and important public health
programming while also deflecting attention from forms of heat wave vulnerability other than
those linked to age. Important work to codify understanding of particular groups as vulnerable
works against recognition of other, often emergent forms of vulnerability; Keller describes people
in these not-yet-categorized spaces as forgotten.
Kellers stories of individuals who died during the health wave draw out important differences,
but these stories, too, arent complete, or completely reliable. Neighbors told Keller stories about
people that couldnt possibly have happened blaming the heat weave for the death of one elderly
woman that Keller later learned had died the year before, for example. As Keller rightly points
out, it isnt only the facts that matter; memories even if flawed are important evidence in
their own right. Accounting for disaster is not and should not be expected to be matter-of-fact. But
17
the problem of knowledge remains, and is at the center of Kellers story, as in all stories of disaster,
though sometimes latent.
Im left sobered, inspired, and questioning ways we can make new sense of disaster, fast and slow.
As Keller emphasizes, aggregation and abstractions leave a lot out, while doing important work.
Aggregations and abstractions allow us to see things that cant be seen at street level (or even from
the gables). But they leave out the quotidian, the stuff of everyday life that enriches both
explanation and empathy, and capacity to imagine things done otherwise. Ironically, given the
posterior status of the qualitative and anecdotal in policy and practice, it is stories such as the ones
Keller provides that help me imagine what mitigating disaster vulnerability could really look
like. But such stories cant help us anticipate disaster, and recognize it as it emerges. The
granularity is off. Yet we need this anticipatory capacity ever more in our late industrial times.
Heat waves again riveted the world in the summer of 2015, with clear links to climate change.
India and Pakistan, Japan, Israel, and the southeastern United States were particularly effected. In
Delhi, temperatures reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius); roads melted. In many
places (including Alaska), the extreme heat ignited fires. Extreme temperatures are an increasingly
persistent problem, exacerbating already out of control energy consumption. Routine summer heat
is also expected to increase quite dramatically, calling for massive retrofitting with air conditioning
capacity, as happened to some extent in Paris over the last decade. And with more air conditioning,
new risks are generated; air conditioning can facilitate the spread of communicable diseases, for
example. Solutions and cures create their own cascades of problems.
What kinds of knowledge production and social contracts can sustain us in such times? The studies
that help us understand climate change, and both routine and extreme temperatures are
extraordinarily complex and aggregative. Individual data points literally make no sense. And both
the methods and findings provoke and deserve debate. Translating scientific findings of this
sort into public health programming is even trickier. But it must be attempted. The social contract
undergirding this translation will also need to be re-thought continually.
Late industrialism urgently calls for ambitious attempts to make sense of globally distributed injury
(associated with climate change or toxic contamination, for example), with an eye for the way
injuries play out at the local level, and can be addressed on the ground. Complex modeling and
simulation will be essential; historical and ethnographic insight will make modeling and simulation
data meaningful and actionable. As Keller emphasizes, thinking in terms of aggregation is part of
the problem. We need different knowledge forms (historical, ethnographic, quantitativelyobserved, modeled, simulated) to run side-by-side, working kaleidoscopically, allowing us to
move between different ways of seeing displacing tendencies to hierarchically order or conflate
them. Recognizing that isolation (of people as well as forms of knowledge) is fatal.
Kim Fortun is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Science and Technology Studies at RPI.
Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, and on experimental
ethnographic methods and research design. Fortun is the author of Advocacy After Bhopal:
Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/bodies-ofand-knowledge
18
19
The Temporality of Disaster

Miriam Ticktin
The New School for Social Research
There have been a number of books about heat waves and disasters in the past fifteen years,
paralleling the growth of the field of emergency disaster preparedness. Focusing on the event,
these by and large reveal how the social dimensions of disaster have a determining affect on who
lives and who dies.
By focusing on the 2003 heat wave in Paris, Richard Kellers important and insightful book Fatal
Isolation joins these books in telling us about what determines who lives and dies during disasters;
but as a historian, he extends our field of vision beyond the immediate present of emergency, and
beyond the future of disaster preparedness. To me, the great feat of this history of the present is
to extend our understanding of the temporality of disaster. It opens up increasingly pressing
questions about responsibility and accountability questions that apply equally to other
environmental injuries.
Fatal Isolation takes us well into the history of Paris, from the French Revolution to nineteenthcentury Hausmannization, to show how inequalities were built into the urban landscape. In
particular, in chapter 3, Keller reveals the vertical stratification of those affected by heat that is,
the most vulnerable were those who lived higher up, under the tin roofs of the classically beautiful
Parisian buildings, in what were chambres de bonne, or maids quarters. We might have
imagined a different social geography of poverty and vulnerability, centered on the infamous
Parisian banlieues; but Keller shows us otherwise, and how this vulnerability is designed into the
urban infrastructures. Indeed, his argument is that this type of marginalization primarily based
on age, yet combined with poverty has been rendered invisible by being physically locked away.
It is thus ungrievable. And while we might have imagined that those who died were made more
vulnerable by the recent downfall of the welfare state and its related forms of isolation and neglect,
in fact, Kellers fascinating analysis shows how the French welfare state never did smooth out or
regulate inequalities such as these, but literally built on them. Heat and cold regularly affect the
life expectancy of those living beneath the roofs, and have for more than 150 years, due to a spatial
and environmental layout that includes amplified temperatures, the lack of ventilation, no elevators
(despite the often 6 or 7 flights up) and no on-site bathrooms.
This chapter, which locates the disasters early life in century-old urban structures, prompts us to
ask when such deaths are accumulated into the label disaster and when they are simply part of
life as usual, where some people are allowed to die. Where is the start and end of this crisis?
20
What do we look at when we measure crisis how far back do we look? And if and when we
take a longer temporal view, how does this change or force us to change our structures of
accountability? Indeed, these are questions being asked in other contexts that produce slow deaths:
from cancer (Jain), to chemical industries (Murphy), and nuclear disasters (Masco; Petryna).
Keller pushes us further on this in chapter 5, in his exploration of the science of epidemiology and
how it models vulnerability, particularly during epidemic or emergency periods. He analyses the
practice of aggregate pictures of mortality based on averages at the collective level and the
harvesting effect: the idea that heat simply hastens mortality for those in poor health, rather than
causing it. Aggregate models of risk led to the view that the typical heat wave victim was elderly.
Yet there were 3,000 non-elderly who died during that time for instance, people who were drug
users, HIV+, homeless, or mentally ill. Keller argues that even as aggregation can render certain
patterns visible, it can render others invisible it can expand our ignorance. In this sense, we
cannot even ask whether these non-elderly were victims of the heat wave the epidemiology says
that they would have died somehow, soon, anyway. These measures do not allow for a more
nuanced analysis; they refuse an analysis of the body in time and space. Keller poignantly argues
that the harvesting effect renders these deaths less tragic and less substantive, by leaving the
various, sedimented causes unnamed, unknown, and ultimately, therefore, seemingly unimportant.
How do we name the moment of disaster, when its beginnings may be solidly built into our
landscapes, into our tools of measurement, into the very air we breathe? How do we attribute not
just cause, but blame and accountability, for mortality related to environments that are
compromised and toxic, yet which never erupt into disasters emergency framework? By shifting
the temporality of disaster, by questioning its scales and boundaries, Kellers treatment of the Paris
heat wave opens up and directs us to ask these critical questions.
References
Jain, S. Lochlann. 2013. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: the Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New
Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Murphy, Michelle. 2008. Chemical Regimes of Living. Environmental History 13 (4).
. 2013. Distributed Reproduction, Chemical Violence, and Latency. The Scholar and Feminist
Online 11.3.
Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and
co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. She is the author of Casualties of
21
Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press,
2011) and co-editor (with Ilana Feldman) of In the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat
and Care (Duke University Press, 2010), along with various other articles and book chapters. She
is a founding editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights,
Humanitarianism and Development.
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/the-temporality-of-disaster
22
Response
Richard C. Keller
University of WisconsinMadison
Its an extraordinary privilege to read these responses to Fatal Isolation from five scholars whose
work Ive long admired. They constitute an ideal field of critics three anthropologists and two
historians who study issues such as humanitarianism, disaster and advocacy, citizenship, the
environment, and the welfare state and marginality in contemporary France interests that
intersect with the central problems I explore in the book. Fatal Isolation engages with a particular
disaster. But in doing so it explores the role of the state and citizenship in producing vulnerability
and resilience; with the ecological particularities of Paris and its micro-environment of risks; and
with the historical shaping of a hazardous landscape, a population at risk, and the social
imagination of marginality.
A glance at the death toll of the 2003 heat wave indicated it was an extreme event by any measure.
Producing nearly 15,000 deaths in less than three weeks, it ranks as the worst natural disaster in
contemporary France. The disaster also struck powerfully unevenly, with the elderly (and elderly
women in particular) as well as urban populations bearing the brunt of the mortality burden. While
there are so-called natural factors that explain these disparities, a growing literature on disaster
indicates that social factors are at least as important in understanding such inequality. Disasters,
like epidemics, expose social fault lines at least as much as they reveal trends of nature.
The population I study in the book illustrates these fractures with stunning clarity. I quickly came
to focus on a particular subset of those who died: the roughly one hundred forgotten victims of
the disaster, those whose bodies remained unclaimed by friends or family after their deaths, and
who were buried at public expense in a cemetery outside Paris in September 2003. They
represented one in ten of those who died in Paris during the heat wave, and their stories reveal a
tragic lapse in citizenship, social solidarity, the welfare state, and the social ecology of
contemporary France. They were those who lived and died alone, mostly in desperate poverty, and
with a host of other burdens that left them isolated and vulnerable to the particular agency of the
heat. The forgotten constitute a biased sample they were by definition marginal, with little
family and few social contacts. But by focusing on a marginal population who lived every day of
their lives in a state of extremity, I learned a great deal about the uneven burdens of extreme
circumstances on different social groups.
Peter Redfield, Camille Robcis, Sara Pritchard, Kim Fortun, and Miriam Ticktin have each hit
upon critical elements of what I attempted to achieve in Fatal Isolation, and I thank them for their
23
close readings of the book. Redfield and Robcis focus on the intersections of security and the social
in contemporary France. Redfield signals exactly what gripped so many French in the immediate
aftermath of the disaster: a sense of betrayal at the notion that such a humanitarian disaster was
possible in a place whose very identity rests on a notion of itself as the birthplace of human rights
and humanitarianism. He raises the question, when has life not been precarious? And this is of
course the case: life, especially for those on the margins of society, has always been fragile it
is merely our expectations that have changed. This is especially the case in a place like Paris,
whose extensive artifice and infrastructure, as Redfield notes, has offered a near-perfect
technology for regulating the environment and its arbitrary powers. Yet it was precisely the built
environment of contemporary Paris that was a principal mechanism of vulnerability during a
disaster that stripped a population to its skin as it sought an elusive refuge from the heat. While
those who died during the heat wave lived lives that were precarious by any measure, it was the
particular agency of a heat disaster that exploited this urban social and architectural ecology to
deadly effect.
Robcis also focuses on the question of the social. As she argues, the deaths of marginal figures
during the heat wave seem to expose, once again, the failures of the republican social model to
integrate its citizens. The hand-wringing that surrounded the heat wave is in many ways
unsurprising. Those whom the heat struck down were those who had in many ways failed to
integrate into the republic. The homeless, the mentally ill, the disabled, and the elderly (and in
particular, the unmarried elderly women who died in droves in 2003) fail to be more broadly
representative of the republic, calling attention to difference rather than fraternity in much the same
way that, as Robcis has argued herself in her marvelous book, The Law of Kinship (Cornell, 2013),
alternatives to the heterosexual couple have threatened to disrupt the very foundation of the social.
These factors were, I think, critical in shaping the political and social responses to the canicule.
Robcis also wonders about the effectiveness of employing Agambens notion of bare life to the
heat wave, arguing that the centrality of the Holocaust to Agambens theoretical frame is
inescapable. This shadow is ever-present in Agamben, but I think that parts of his argument can
extend beyond that limited scope. One of the essential components of Agambens argument in
Homo Sacer is that a prior and near-total rhetorical dehumanization was an essential precondition
of genocide. As I argue in chapter 4 of Fatal Isolation, a powerful rhetorical dehumanization of
the elderly unfolded over the decades that preceded the heat wave, allowing not for their
extermination, to be sure, but at least to a general indifference to many of their lives and deaths in
isolation and poverty, at the margins of citizenship. My intention couldnt be further from blurring
the lines between genocide and disaster; it is rather that I find the rhetorical components of
dehumanization a compelling notion that can illuminate dramatically different categories of
marginalization and suffering.
Given the influence of Kim Fortuns work on Bhopal, Im deeply honored by her generous
response to the book. She and Redfield share an important insight into the intersection of lateindustrial social forms and new vulnerabilities the precarious lives betrayed in an era that
promises social security and signals the need for new methods to understand the emerging
hazards of the contemporary world. Much as Kai Erikson noted in his essay collection, A New
Species of Trouble (Norton, 1995), new political economies are colliding with environmental
change in unpredictable ways, often leaving the worlds least resilient populations reeling. The
24
extraordinarily rich work of demographers and epidemiologists in the aftermath of the heat wave
has produced a portrait of the aggregate nature of these risks for an aging, poor, and often isolated
French population. As Fortun notes, I attempted in Fatal Isolation to build on their work by
illustrating through ethnographic and historical methods the gaps that such aggregationist work
necessarily produces. But such work is often dependent on a rich quantitative foundation: what
Im arguing (to paraphrase Arthur Kleinman) is not that we need less science in epidemiology,
but instead that we need to think more inclusively about what kinds of science are relevant to the
production of epidemiological knowledge.
If there was one thing besides disparity that marked the 2003 disaster, it was its long-term making.
Miriam Ticktin seizes on this issue of temporality in her comments. The catalyst for this
overwhelming death toll was the extreme heat of August 2003, but the foundations for such a
catastrophe had been building for decades. One can make the same case for many disasters: while
it is easy to pinpoint a disaster in meteorological terms, it is far more difficult to identify its social
ends and beginnings. And indeed, it is the social component that most clearly defines a disaster.
One can argue that Hurricane Katrina formed on 23 August 2005, and that it dissipated eight days
later. Yet the social foundations of vulnerability poor housing stock, the concentration of
poverty in the Lower 9th Ward, a politics of mistrust developed over the course of at least a
century, and, as Anne Lovell has demonstrated, casualties of the disaster continue to mount, but
do not figure in any official death toll: those displaced by the disaster who may turn to suicide
years later as a function of deracination, or the chronically ill whose care regimes are disrupted by
displacement and who die prematurely as a result. The landscape of Parisian vulnerability, the
dehumanization of the elderly, and the discounting of marginal life formed over the long term, and
a true accounting of the disaster that restores legitimacy to those deaths rather than merely
attributing them to a harvesting effect that pushed the already frail to a slightly earlier death
must incorporate this broader temporal frame.
Finally, Sara Pritchard takes from her reading of the book the centrality of the anecdote. She offers
a poignant series of anecdotes of her own, indicating the ways in which the disaster may well have
registered for its survivors. She produces a heart-rending narrative of an elderly woman in her
neighborhood, a woman who struggled to carry her groceries down the street, much less up the
stairs to her apartment. Although Pritchard did not know her or where she lived, she thought about
her and her fate in the aftermath of the heat wave. Pritchard was not alone in this response: many
of the memories I collected in my fieldwork are similar, as neighbors and shopkeepers recollected
their witnessing of this kind of daily suffering in telling the stories of the anonymous deaths of
2003. Where aggregation serves a critical purpose in establishing the broad, population-level
trends that mark public health, the anecdote has a capacity to rehumanize and to individuate the
faceless nature of epidemiological bookkeeping.
Pritchard also reminds us of the ways in which our personal memories can affect our recollection
of entire periods. She writes that a close friend of hers a colleague and fellow historian of France
had died just before the heat wave, and that this death became enmeshed with a more general
sense of loss in that summer, as well as with her own experience of the heat in France. This was
also a colleague and friend of mine. For me as well, her death lingers in a sea of memory that
configures that time and place. It is perhaps as a result of this entanglement that I found the
anecdote such a compelling medium through which to tell the story of the heat wave: one rich with
25
the possibility of encapsulating the links between individual life and loss amid the broad sweep of
historical experience.
Richard C. Keller is Professor of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he is also Associate Dean in the International Division. He is the author
of Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago, 2007) and is the editor, with
Warwick Anderson and Deborah Jenson, of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial
Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke, 2011).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/response-3

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Somatosphere | September 25, 2015

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