Governing Disasters

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Governing Disasters: Beyond Risk Culture
edited by Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier, translated by Ethan Rundell
Governing Disasters
Beyond Risk Culture
Edited by
Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier
Translated by
Ethan Rundell
GOVERNING DISASTERS
Copyright © Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-43545-3
All rights reserved.
First published in French in 2013 as Le gouvernement des catastrophes
by Karthala
First published in English in 2015 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-49320-3 ISBN 978-1-137-43546-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137435460
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gouvernement des catastrophes. English.
Governing disasters : beyond risk culture / edited by Sandrine Revet and
Julien Langumier ; translated by Ethan Rundell.
pages cm.—(Sciences Po series in international relations and political
economy)
Translation of: Le gouvernement des catastrophes. Paris : Éditions Karthala,
2013.
1. Crisis management. 2. Emergency management. 3. Disasters—Social
aspects. I. Revet, Sandrine, editor of compilation. II. Langumier, Julien,
editor of compilation. III. Title.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CON T E N T S
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier
Part 1 Anticipation, Preparedness,

and Controversies
One Governing by Hazard: Controlling Mudslides and
Promoting Tourism in the Mountains above
Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan), 1966–1977 23
Marc Elie
Two Monitoring Animals, Preparing Humans:
An Ethnographical Study of Avian Inf luenza 59
Frédéric Keck
Part 2 Participation and Consultation

Three Cultivating Communities after Disaster:
A Whirlwind of Generosity on the Coasts of
Sri Lanka 87
Mara Benadusi
Four A Critical Look at the “Risk Culture”: France’s
“Plan Rhône” 127
Julien Langumier
vi Contents
Part 3 Issues of Memory

Five Memory and Methodology: Translocal and
Transtemporal Fieldwork in Post-Disaster
Santa Fe (Argentina) 163
Susann Baez Ullberg
Six Investigating the “Discrete Memory” of
the Seveso Disaster in Italy 191
Laura Centemeri
Postscript: Thinking (by way of ) Disaster 221
Nicolas Dodier
Notes on Contributors 245

Index 249
AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S
This edited volume is the result of a long, collective effort that began
with our first workshop in 2008. Held under the aegis of the recently
founded ARCRA (Association for Anthropological Research on
Disasters and Risks), the workshop brought together French anthro-
pologists working in the field of risk and disaster.1 It elicited the interest
of a wide range of students and scholars in this field, which had only
recently begun to receive attention in France. Between 2009 and 2013,
we thus pursued and enlarged the discussions begun at ARCRA, orga-
nizing a research seminar at Paris’ Sciences Po (CERI) to which we
invited anthropologists and other social scientists.2 In 2010, we decided
to seek collaboration with colleagues from other parts of the world,
organizing an international conference for this purpose.3 Throughout
this period, we profited from discussions and exchanges with a large
number of anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians, and
political scientists, all of whom shared our dissatisfaction with con-
temporary scholarship on these themes in France and, more broadly,
Europe, and whose work spoke to our common preoccupations. We
would like to thank them all, as well as those who have contributed
to our seminar at Sciences Po, for their contributions, discussions,
inputs, and comments. They have done much to hone our thought on
these questions and move this project forward. We would also like to
acknowledge Cécile Quesada and Violaine Girard for their company
and support during the foundation of the ARCRA.4
This project has benefited from generous financial support from
Sciences Po and the French Ministry of the Environment, Energy, and
Sustainable Development (Ministère de l’Ecologie, de l’énergie, du
développement durable et de l’aménagement du territoire). We would
like to thank CERI and its team for the logistical support they have
supplied in organizing various events and, in particular, Miriam Perier,
viii Acknowledgments
who enthusiastically accompanied us throughout the process of prepar-

ing this book for publication in English.
Jean-François Bayart, editor of the Questions internationales series at
Karthala, where this book was initially published in French, expressed
his interest for this project when it was still little more than an embryo.
We would like to thank him for his encouragement and for the confi-
dence he has shown in us. We would also like to thank Nicolas Dodier
for keeping a close eye on our work since 2007 and for agreeing to write
the postscript to this volume, which, we believe, considerably enriches
it. The interest shown by the Palgrave team in the book’s English trans-
lation has also played an important role. Thanks to them, we hope to be
able to yet further broaden our discussions with colleagues from around
the world. We thank Ethan Rundell for his conscientious work in pre-
paring many of the translations that appear in this volume.5
Last but not least, thanks to Eukeni, Brigitte, Lou, Lucie, and
Emile for their patience, without which this project would have been
impossible.
Notes
1. Workshop “Catastrophes et risques: regards anthropologiques,” Paris, EHESS,

April 3, 2008 (with Violaine Girard and Cécile Quesada).
2. Seminar, “Catastrophes, risques et sciences sociales,” Paris, CERI, 2009–2013.
3. International conference, “Disasters and Risks: from Empiricism to Critique,”
Paris, CERI, June 17–18, 2010.
4. http://www.arcra.fr/
5. Chapters 3 and 5 were written in English, originally.
Introduction
Sa n dr i n e R e v e t a n d
Ju l i e n L a ngu m i e r
Hardly a week goes by without some “disaster” brief ly casting its

shadow over the television news headlines. Whether “natural,” “tech-
nological,” or “sanitary,” these disasters are as remarkable for the cur-
sory manner in which they are discussed in the media as for their
brutal and unpredictable character and devastating consequences.
Although long marginal to the study of these distinctly exceptional
events—unfamiliar terrain for disciplines accustomed to focusing on
relatively stable phenomena1—the social sciences have recently made
deep inroads into this field of study.2
In fields marked by disaster, however, scholars are confronted with
a major difficulty,3 one that puts them in an uncomfortable position
comparable to that encountered in the study of situations of extreme
violence.4 How are they to study situations of destruction, displace-
ment, and death while negotiating a particular place for themselves
among all of the other actors—journalists, NGOs, rescuers, experts,
politicians—who in various ways “intervene” in the aftermath of these
events? What stance are they to adopt vis-à-vis the resulting demands
and, in particular, what we will here refer to as the double imperative
of the “culture of risk”?
Moving beyond the “Risk Culture”
The notion of the “risk culture” has become emblematic of the ref lexive
modernity movement that formed around the figures of Ulrich Beck
2 Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier
and Anthony Giddens,5 who see it as “a fundamental cultural aspect of

modernity, in which awareness of risk forms a medium of colonizing
the future.”6 It has its roots in Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky’s
cultural theory of risk,7 which proposed a typology of perceptions of
risk in terms of the “culture” to which one belonged and the social
group with which it was associated. Encountering growing success
in the 1990s, the culture of risk was transformed in pace with new
research. As this happened, the notion came to be diversified, taking
on distinct forms—for example, that of a “culture of prevention” or
“disaster subculture” encompassing “all knowledge, rules, values and
measures taken at all levels of the social organization that determine, in
a given space, a more or less elevated degree of preparedness in view of
a disaster experience.”8
The manner in which these concepts are applied by actors involved
in risk prevention or, in the event of disaster, rescue efforts (whether in
the framework of public policies or on behalf of international and non-
governmental organizations) can often be summarized in terms of two
types of imperative. The first asserts the existence of an expert culture
of risk that is allegedly possessed by all actors tasked with intervening,
who it is supposed have received training in that connection. Faced
with risks that are presented as “real” and tangible, this culture, which
consists of a collection of knowledge, discourses, and practices, allows
action to be taken to save lives, mitigate damage, and reduce costs. The
objective has thus been to disseminate this culture of risk as broadly
as possible within populations otherwise seen as powerless and vulner-
able. On the pretext of risk, there has thus been a concerted effort to
“acculturate,” educate, raise awareness, and “transform mentalities” in
order to instill the “good practices” proposed by “experts.” This outlook,
however, does little to supply a relevant analytical framework for the
complex situations encountered in the field.
The second imperative seeks to go beyond this stance. Most often,
it is expressed by scholars, practitioners, and activists who are closely
acquainted with local spaces and hope to win recognition for the
knowledge and practices used by inhabitants to protect themselves
from risk or disaster. From this perspective, the objective is thus to pro-
mote “traditional knowledge,” “local cultures of risk,” and “cultures of
disaster”9 for inclusion in good practices guidelines. These attempts to
affirm local or traditional ways recognize the plurality of knowledge;
a priori, they seek to avoid excluding local knowledge in preference to
its more established, expert counterparts. Yet they tend to romanticize
“local communities” and continue to draw a “great divide”10 between
Introduction 3
victims and administrators, residents and technicians, disaster victims

and donors.
The present book takes a stand against this great divide and the two
imperatives with which it is associated in favor of an alternative, sym-
metrical, empirically based approach. Such an approach reveals a new
tension, one that each of the various texts in this volume attempts to
conceive in its own way. Two contrasting poles of activity are at the
source of this tension: the first consists of the dispositifs11 that consti-
tute a government of and by disaster; the second concerns the familiar
practices and routines that dilute disaster in everyday life. Each of these
areas of activity may monopolize the scholar’s attention and thereby
overshadow the importance of the other. What we are seeking to do
here is conceive of this tension and identify the methodological stances
that allow one to strike a working balance between these two poles of
activity so as to at once grasp the power of these dispositifs and the room
they nevertheless leave for criticism and everyday practices. Research
in fields located at the point of contact between these two poles reveal
the forms of interaction that are in play and cast light on the inf luence
exercised by dispositifs on practice as well as the manner in which these
dispositifs are adapted and transformed when implemented.
Governing (by) Disaster
Disasters are events of exceptional impact that call for a response. There
exist today tools, dispositifs, and practices for “managing” disasters at
all levels, from the local to the transnational. The work of rescue, assis-
tance, and reconstruction no longer takes any government by surprise.
As the rhetoric they employ becomes ever more homogenous, the
number of guidelines increases, resulting in a litany of practices, from
the construction of emergency hospitals to the management of refugee
camps to the size of homes to be reconstructed. The consequence of
this avalanche of dispositifs for the government of disaster is to supply
norms for the exceptional. The latter is thereby routinized, normalized,
and, ultimately, rendered unexceptional. Counting bodies, caring for
the injured, transferring survivors, and feeding refugees supply the
contours of a biopolitic12 that sometimes seems to content itself with
maintaining bare life13 in the name of a humanitarianism that has been
converted into a principle of management. It is the government by
disaster that thus becomes visible in these contemporary emergency
situations.14
Disasters also contribute to feeding an economy of fear, one of the

contemporary era’s distinctive modalities of government. Since the
mid-1980s, the introduction of risk and the imminence of disaster have
been notable phenomena in many domains. This has had an effect on
modes of government, political forms, and conceptions of “security.”15
The great technological disasters of the late 1970s and 1980s16 led to a
breakdown of faith in progress, technology, and science to which the
Enlightenment had given rise. For the German sociologist Ulrich Beck,
ours is now a “risk society,” insofar as many actions are now assessed in
terms of risk, even if the dangers are no greater than before.17
One is thus witnessing the emergence of systems that seek to mas-
ter uncertainty and govern the future, whether by way of prevention
policies or via the introduction of the principle of precaution to antici-
pate risk. The notion of preparedness which locates the government
of disaster in a different rationality, is also central.18 From the perspec-
tive of preparedness disasters will happen, even if their probability is
difficult or even impossible to assess. Preparation therefore entails the
development of an alert mechanism in society. Various techniques—
including scenarios and simulations, early warning systems, response
coordination plans, crisis communication systems, and the stocking of
rescue materials—support the idea that risk is permanent and can strike
anywhere at any time. One must therefore be prepared.
Although these systems are a priori exceptional and restricted to
emergency situations, they nevertheless shed light on certain charac-
teristics of contemporary modalities of government. One aim of the
present work is thus to account for them. We will not simply take note
of the power of these dispositifs, however, but will also examine their
cracks and fault lines, what remains of everyday practices, and possibili-
ties for critique in moments of disaster.
Everyday Practices and Tactics in Disaster
Indeed, the second area of the axis of tension driving the present work
is often ignored by studies that focus on the power of dispositifs for
governing of and by disaster. It is part of a more localized perspec-
tive and takes the everyday aspect of these exceptional situations into
account. In doing so, the aim is not so much to draw attention to the
generalization or routinization of the exceptional dispositifs described
above as to acknowledge the critiques to which they are subjected19
and the manner in which disaster is diluted in the practices of those
Introduction 5
who experience it. Living, working, raising children, eating, paint-

ing, writing, taking photographs, getting married . . . The everyday life
of “disaster victims” and those “displaced” by catastrophe cannot be
summarized solely in terms of the management of a day-to-day exis-
tence that has been impacted by these events. Far from the cameras
and in unspectacular fashion, life very quickly resumes its course on
the ruins and traces of disaster. The practices and tactics that are then
put to use are not entirely centered on efforts to “recover” or “cope”
with the event, as is too often suggested by research preoccupied with
the question of “resilience.” Rather, they bring everyday know-how
to bear upon the new issues, actors, and resources that the disaster has
introduced. The issue is therefore no longer to recognize and account
for what disaster destroys but rather what it contributes to producing,
the social recompositions it brings about.
Moreover, as soon as they are set in motion and come into con-
tact with everyday life, modes of governing the exceptional (hous-
ing reconstruction, vaccination campaigns, the construction of public
works, victim compensation, and so on) are likely to be questioned,
transformed, misappropriated. In short, they will be subject to what
Boltanski and Thévenot refer to as “critique”20 and Rancière refers to
as “dissensus.”21
As the fact of disaster is gradually eclipsed by more run-of-the-mill
concerns, some of which predate the event, it also reconfigures everyday
life. These two dynamics, which jointly enter into play in many fields
marked by disaster, must also be conceived together. One must thus
guard against being confined to an ecology of problematics dominated
by the frontiers of disaster (vulnerability, resilience, reconstruction,
causes). Rather, one must be ready to examine vernacular practices22
that are not inf luenced by the event or are only very slightly so.
At the Intersection of Dispositifs and Practices:

Dynamics of Interaction
Because disaster constitutes an unusual time in which exposed popu-

lations find themselves in close contact with public authorities and
humanitarian aid groups, the objective of the present work is to open
the inquiry so as to symmetrically grasp the ethnography of vernacu-
lar practices and the study of exogenous interventions. This ambition
raises methodological questions and calls into question the stance of
the scholar in the field, who often has to choose between working
mainly with institutional actors or mainly with inhabitants. Disaster

encourages the scholar to move among these various scenes in several
possible ways.
The first option consists in conserving ethnography’s unity of time
and place by profiting from the opportunity created by the context of
disaster to at once grasp the multiple interventions, arenas, and mobili-
zations that simultaneously develop there. In the case of a territorialized
disaster, academic fieldwork may thus allow to compare observations
of institutional interventions with public reactions to them in order to
understand the transformations and negotiations to which these inter-
ventions give rise. It may also compare interviews conducted among
policy actors, technical administrators, and humanitarian actors with
those conducted among the public at large to better understand their
reciprocal relations. These interactions thereby reveal the dynamics that
cut across and transform the scenes explored and allow the disaster to be
grasped as an object that is constantly being redramatized and negotiated.
In particular, the new configurations that emerge contribute to shifting
the initial frontiers between “administrators” and “inhabitants.”
The second option consists in privileging a shift in space in order to
connect the site of disaster with the various actors and organizations
involved in managing it. By thus following humanitarians, diplomats
responsible for cooperation, scientists, political, economic, and national
actors as well as objects exchanged and viruses, the inquiry aims to
reconstruct the network that the disaster has activated. By following
the social life of the gift at the international level or the various ways in
which a scientific alert is translated, one may grasp the dynamic process
by which systems are “indigenized” or, on the contrary, normalized and
brought under control, as well as all of the issues that these dynamics
entail.
Finally, by attending to the to and fro of institutional response and
local mobilization, the third option privileges diachronic depth and
displacement—no longer spatial but rather temporal—in order to fol-
low the social reconfigurations brought about by a threat or disaster.
This perspective allows one to grasp not so much “the” reaction to
the disaster as the interlocking logics of positions that respond to one
another, a procedural dimension on which the historical perspective
sheds particular light. As a result, the very moment of disaster is not
necessarily the point of departure adopted by research in the field.
Rather, the scholar can train his or her gaze on the genesis of a techni-
cal decision—for example, urban and rural planning or the creation
of an industry. Technical, scientific, and administrative controversies
Introduction 7
therefore inform us about the genesis of disaster, allowing us to release

ourselves from the mere present of the event and restore its contextual
density.
Combined in the present work, these three types of approach allow
multiple perspectives to be brought to bear on what are a priori very
different fields. These fields nevertheless present numerous dimensions
authorizing comparison.
Thus, however specific work on these two fields may be, the chapters
on the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and the aftermath of the 2003 f lood-
ing of the Rhône in France both problematize the dominant frames23
of reference of the inhabitants’ “participation” or “consultation” in
responding to disaster. This is done on the basis of close observation
of local reactions to humanitarian aid and government intervention.
By selecting the way a humanitarian intervention is structured as her
main theme, Mara Benadusi shows how it is based on the principles
of “communitarian participation” and is anchored in the practices of
a “community,” albeit one that has been formed by a Western imagi-
nary and remains a mirage in the field. Local actors thus accommodate
themselves to donors’ expectations and seek to appear legitimate ben-
eficiaries so as to draw some profit from international aid. Similarly, for
Julien Langumier, who discusses an institutional process of public con-
sultation and dynamics of local mobilization, the rhetoric of the culture
of risk appears to supply the population with a legitimate vocabulary
for interacting with institutional leaders. On the sidelines of the care-
fully prepared public consultation meetings, resident mobilizations
nevertheless do not respond to the (too narrow) appeal of the culture of
risk but rather call into question planning choices by repoliticizing the
geography of the f lood. The export of the “community” and the impo-
sition of the rhetoric of the culture of risk appear as models offering a
dramatization of the local and local inhabitants by and for the benefit
of external stakeholders. Conversely, these two studies show how local
actors strategically position themselves in response as neo-inhabitants
and neo-disaster victims, images that are at once ref lected and distorted
by dispositifs of intervention.
The memory of a disaster also crystallizes the strong tensions between
institutional dynamics seeking to confer public or even political recog-
nition upon the event and local practices of commemoration that often
belong to the private, indeed intimate sphere. As Laura Centemeri’s
examination of the Seveso dioxin disaster shows, faced with the expert
discourse of risk and attempts to politicize the disaster, local inhabitants
longed for a return to normalcy and refused to publically express their
troubles by way of denunciation or the construction of a political cause.

Despite outside attempts to exploit the tragedy, the local response con-
sisted an affirmation of the community and of a “local culture” that
was worth preserving and did not center upon the Seveso tragedy. Local
activists had called for the creation of a “path of memory” reminiscent
of the duty of memory familiar to psychologists who treat posttrau-
matic syndromes; instead, the disaster was relegated by the inhabitants
to the status of a “discreet memory.” Susann Baez Ullberg, for her
part, examines the memory of the Santa Fe f loods in Argentina and its
spatial inscriptions, showing how circumscribed institutional recogni-
tion of the problem as well as one-off local mobilizations cohabited
with the invisibility of “regularly f looded” peripheral neighborhoods,
where only the practices of the inhabitants bore witness to the memory
of the f loods. These two chapters therefore examine processes of collec-
tive memory that constantly refashion and redescribe a past experience
from the perspective of present issues and according to dynamics of
selection that combine overinterpretation and forgetting.
Finally, Marc Elie’s historical study can be compared with Frédéric
Keck’s ethnographic voyage to ref lect upon the anticipation of disaster
and contexts of preparation and prevention in cases of predicted catas-
trophe. Addressing the risk of an avian bird f lu pandemic as seen from
Hong Kong and the anticipation of glacial mud slides in the foothills
of Alma-Ata, these two texts examine disaster as a scenario demanding
response. In the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan of the 1960s,
the monumental construction of a dam on top of rock blasted from
great swaths of mountainside was in keeping with the positivist political
discourse of the Soviet regime, which based its power on the scientific
and technological victory over nature. Faced with the prospect of a
global, avian bird f lu pandemic in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, public authorities responded by combining the surveillance of
viruses and bird populations with efforts to prepare humans by imple-
menting a biosecurity policy that attempted to reexamine relations
between humans and animals. In both cases, the studies show how
novel systems of prevention and preparation displace the scene of the
disaster toward that of the effects of the measures adopted or projects
implemented. Thus, Elie shows how prevention operations may lead to
disaster; in this case a result of the decision to open up mountain areas
to development following construction of the dam. Keck underscores
the emergence of a virtual space defined by disaster in which actors’
practices nevertheless have very real—and sometimes catastrophic—
effects, such as the massive slaughter of birds. In contexts as different as
Introduction 9
these, neither the implementation of a global policy of biosecurity nor

the realization of an unusual development project takes place without
interaction with the population: in the case of Hong Kong, Buddhist
and Taoist resistance; in that of Alma-Ata, the exclusion of critical local
experts and the relocation of inhabitants.
Inescapable Ref lexivity
The fields under consideration here are particularly burdened with

moral considerations and operational expectations.24 In what concerns
discussions of the scholar’s “engagement” in the field, the contribu-
tors to the present book are free from an obligation to transform their
research into how-to guides for decision-makers seeking to harness the
voice of the local.25 Indeed, our approach is resolutely nonnormative.
This work will therefore not conclude with a set of recommendations,
however well-intentioned we might be toward the “populations” or
inhabitants with whom we rub shoulders in the field. By contrast, the
chapters brought together here seek to clarify the research stances that
have been adopted. These often ref lect the difficulties encountered by
the scholar in the course of his or her research, including the method-
ological difficulties involved in studying places that have suffered or
are at risk from disaster. Two objectives therefore orient the scholars’
shared compass: on the one hand, to shield oneself from the impera-
tive to respond to emergency or act when confronted with risk; on
the other, to construct a symmetrical field between institutional or
humanitarian intervention and the practices of the population.
Whatever the differences among their investigative strategies, ref lex-
ivity plays a vital role for all of them. Laura Centemeri thus sets aside
her initial expectations regarding the emergence of an environmen-
tal health movement in the aftermath of the Seveso disaster to focus
instead on the silence in which the inhabitants’ troubles are shrouded.
In order to win the trust of those she studies, she turns her attention
to forms of involvement and local participation. In doing so, the focus
of her research shifts away from the “scandal” of nonmobilization and
toward the reasons for and extent of this silence.
By attempting to establish and maintain contact with a large number of
often conf licting actors in the field of the disaster, Susann Baez Ullberg
is faced with the complexity of preserving these multiple and antago-
nistic relationships, as well as with the (sometimes silent) reproaches of
her interlocutors.
Mara Benadusi for her part chose to study the practitioners of disaster
management rather than its beneficiaries. Such an approach required
greater vigilance and steadfastness faced with the repeated demands
of experts, who expected her work to relieve the multiple conf licts to
which their intervention had given rise.
Julien Langumier offers to transform his position as an actor at the
heart of the public policy of prevention into a post for observing dis-
positifs of public consultation. It is thus in the work of analyzing and
writing that ref lexivity becomes essential, restoring symmetry to the
situation under observation via comparison with other, more classic
ethnographic studies.
The silence of some of his sources leads Elie to jointly analyze what
the archives do and do not say regarding popular reactions to the Soviet
authorities’ ambitious technoscientific projects.
Finally, to carry out the nearly impossible project of a “global” eth-
nography of avian bird f lu, Keck must find an appropriate investigative
framework. To that end, he offers both a planetary survey of biosecu-
rity policies and a close look through the lens of the biologist’s micro-
scope, where viral recombination takes place and the barrier between
man and animal is crossed.
At once imposed by the objects of investigation, the studies that are
carried out and the shared work of writing, this ref lexivity provides the
contributors to the present volume with common ground for discus-
sion and permits one to explicitly formulate relations between inves-
tigative methods, the definition of objects, and the resulting analyses.
The material we have assembled here thus ref lects a sociological, his-
torical, and anthropological density that exceeds the mere register of
the event and the exceptional, and anchors itself in an understanding of
a complex everyday experience.
Beyond the Great Divides
When these stances are encouraged, they allow one to move beyond
the great divides that usually inform the literature on these objects.
Thus, the generic divides between risk and disaster, natural and indus-
trial danger, North and South, expert and layman, local and global
seem largely ineffective in fields characterized by the encounters and
articulations of these interdependent notions.
The processes of categorizing and qualifying risks and disasters
therefore become objects in their own right. The actors resort to these
Introduction 11
qualifications from the perspective of issues that often exceed the imme-
diate context of disaster or danger. The question is thus to understand
“what disaster is made of ” for each of the actors involved. What “risk”
makes sense and in what situation? In order to move beyond the idea
that what is at stake is a faulty “perception of risk,” one can only slowly
and carefully reconstruct the dense fabric of the situations in which the
actors find themselves. It is only in this way that one may grasp all that
disasters are capable of “revealing.”26
One also sees fault lines emerge that cut across and structure the
world of “experts,” as well as “scientific” knowledge circulating out-
side of the worlds in which it is produced. Studies that look closely
at technicians, scientists, and institutional leaders thus undermine the
image of these social worlds as unified and homogeneous. Very often,
confrontations take place in contexts where multiple interests are at
stake. These can give rise to genuine controversies concerning the
state of knowledge. Conversely, research, more attentive to popula-
tions exposed to risk or disaster, ref lects the development of rationali-
ties that articulate issues relating to “living”27 and ways of taming fear.
These draw upon knowledge based as much on practical experience as
on expert discourse, which goes well beyond a mere “layman’s under-
standing” of the situation. On the stage of risk or in the theater of
disaster, the actors intervene within social configurations and power
relations on the basis of their (often multiple) identifications with the
figures of victims, experts, mediators, and donors. In order to grasp the
regimes of engagement that are thus at work, it is very instructive to
adopt the symmetric perspective or to observe the articulation of various
levels, from that of international organizations to the most localized
scenes of interaction.
Finally, this perspective also allows one to extract situations of risk
or disaster from the mere register of the exceptional and show how the
social dynamics that act on these fields reconstruct themselves without
ever having been suspended. It therefore appears essential to take tem-
porality into account—whether by returning in global perspective to a
time prior to the event or, on the contrary, allowing time to pass—in
order to put what happened back into perspective. Tracing this conti-
nuity encourages the researcher to extend the analytical focus beyond
risk and disaster to embrace the transformations of a territory as well as
of its political history and social struggles.
By articulating modes of qualifying and regimes of engagement, the
question of power is put back at the center of research into risk and
disaster. It also allows one to understand how the “governmentality of
unease”28 characteristic of the present day acts, while at the same time
attending to the spaces of tension and confrontation to which these
systems give rise.29 What is at issue, then, is to shed light on the forms
of critique30 that emerge in response to these modalities of government
and to be attentive, in the words of Michel de Certeau,31 to all of the
makeshifts (bricolages), tricks, and ways of doing that accompany the
implementation of the government of risks.
Depoliticization/Repoliticization
Finally, it is to be underscored that the present work does not instru-

mentally analyze dispositifs of intervention as one might do by recon-
structing their archaeology or genealogy to better understand the
underlying ideology or policy that is being defended. The authors
draw upon a certain number of invaluable academic references regard-
ing the Community Based Disaster Management (CBDM) in develop-
ment projects, the culture of risk characteristic of prevention policy,
“biosecurity” norms in preparation for viral pandemics, “risk evalua-
tion” in the event of environmental contamination, and sociotechnical
omnipotence in territorial planning policies. In each case, however, the
authors set these dispositifs in context to better understand their inter-
action dynamics with the population. Ultimately, this choice raises the
question of the depoliticization or repoliticization of fields character-
ized by a collective threat on the basis of an ethnographic observation
that makes no a priori assumptions concerning the political resources
that are in play, the possible depoliticization of dispositifs of interven-
tion, or the possible political mobilization of populations.
While f lood prevention efforts in France traded upon the discourse
of the culture of risk, the humanitarian intervention in post-tsunami
Sri Lanka presented itself as anchored in the practices of a community.
By appealing to a participative ideal that is taken to settle conf licts,
both may appear to be dispositifs of depoliticization. Neither, however,
came to terms with the political issues involved in decision making
and the nature of the expected projects. As a result, they found them-
selves submerged by these same issues once it came to implementing
decisions in the field. Local actors do not frontally mobilize against
these dispositifs: some succeed in skillfully profiting from them at the
risk of denaturing the intentions of their instigators, others keep their
distance, indicating by their absence a significant limit of the dispositif.
Biosecurity norms and risk evaluation may also appear to be legitimated
Introduction 13
by technoscientific expertise, which is taken to exclude any possible

choice in view of recommendations regarding how to most effectively
deal with danger or contamination zoning objectives. In practice, the
light shed on the plurality of expertise reveals the choices, arbitrations,
and power struggles that lead to these dispositifs.
Faced with the implementation of these new prescriptions and prohi-
bitions, populations turn to other forms of knowledge and experience
in order to challenge and circumvent expert dispositifs. The ethnog-
raphy of collective mobilizations thus takes into account the divisions
that cut across them, the power struggles that structure them, and the
preexistent social configurations that strengthen the demands of cer-
tain groups at the expense of others. Thus, humanitarian aid intended
for the most destitute of post-tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka led to
projects that profited landowners with ties to the current government.
The preparatory measures taken in response to the risk of an avian
bird f lu outbreak in Hong Kong gave rise to one-off, sector-specific
reactions among poultry farmers, shopkeepers, and religious groups
without forming a large-scale movement of political protest capable
of giving voice to more general demands. The demands made by the
community/association mobilizations of those living along the Rhône
River in France for greater fairness in river planning ref lected pro-
found sociological divisions between farmers and periurban dwellers,
old and new inhabitants. In Seveso, efforts to politicize the tragedy
were directed by outside actors who offered an interpretation of it that
bore little resemblance to the inhabitants’ experience. The inhabitants
were neither won over by the expert and technical discourse of evaluat-
ing the risk of dioxin contamination, partisan readings of the tragedy
as a capitalist crime, or the conservative Catholic representation of the
accident as an ordeal to be endured. In each of these cases, the inhabit-
ants chose to confine their experience within the contours of a discreet
memory.
This book thus does not outline the schema of institutional dis-
positifs leading, on the one hand, to depoliticization or, on the other,
to the mobilization of populations as an indication of attempts to repo-
liticize the management of these collective threats. Instead, it focuses
on the multiple intermediary levels that allow one to move from one
to the other: private reactions, individual practices, local mobilization,
external exploitation for political ends, and expert dispositifs. As soon
as one takes a detailed look at the choices and decisions that issue from
dynamics of depoliticization/repoliticization and ultimately determine
the construction of systems of intervention or the structuring of local
mobilizations, one finds that these dynamics cut across each of the
above-mentioned levels.
Disaster management dispositifs (prevention, assistance, reconstruc-
tion) can thus not be rendered “apolitical” via reduction to purely tech-
nical objects or mere administrative or health measures. On the one
hand, this is because the ideas and values driving these dispositifs do
indeed have political foundations. The manner in which population
transfers or behaviors are managed in case of risk, victims are chosen
(or not chosen) as deserving assistance and the very decision to describe
a situation as a “disaster” are indubitably political in nature. On the
other hand, it is because a close examination shows that these situa-
tions are the object of a constant process of politicization at the hands
of many different actors. Whether they are local elites who exploit
the catastrophe or self-mobilizing disaster victims, none of these actors
can lay claim to already established legitimacy vis-à-vis the collective
tragedy.
Organization of the Work: A Thematic

Reading Inviting Comparison
Despite the diverse array of fields, contrasting contexts, and variety of

risks, threats, and disasters they address, the contributors to this volume
are united in their ambition to collectively explore the theme at hand.
Indeed, one of the more salient findings advanced by the present work
concerns the great heuristic value to be had from practicing compari-
son in connection with this type of object. This collective work is of
course based on the particular contribution of each of its authors; in
the interests of comparison, however, we have also sought to reprob-
lematize each field on the basis of a shared framework. This method,
which demanded a redoubled effort on the part of the authors to revisit
their empirical data so as to contribute to collective discussion, supplies
the book’s thematic structure but also encourages comparative reading.
This is why each section of the book consists of two texts addressing a
common theme, a theme that may itself be considered from the point
of view of a comparative reading of the two contributions.
Anticipation and Preparation

In the first of the book’s three sections, Marc Elie discusses the mon-
umental construction project to protect against the glacial f lows
Introduction 15
threatening Alma-Ata in the 1960s and Frédéric Keck addresses the

recent implementation of a surveillance and biosecurity policy in antic-
ipation of a global f lu pandemic. Major uncertainty concerning the
materialization of what is nevertheless taken to be a near-certain threat
characterizes these two fields. Both address the development of tech-
nicoscientific controversies concerning the relevance of implemented
measures of anticipation and preparation. In these fields, the prospect
of disaster recedes somewhat, opening the way for a time and space
dedicated to protection and preparation. In regards to a possible col-
lective tragedy, which debates and discussions take place concerning
the measures to be taken, which are at once disproportionate relative
to normal, everyday life and incapable of guaranteeing that the worst
will be avoided?
The “Local Community”

The second section of the book focuses on the involvement of the “local
community” in humanitarian interventions and the place accorded it
in the framework of consultation dispositifs by public policies of pre-
vention. Two ethnographic projects carried out by Mara Benadusi in
Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami and Julien Langumier concern-
ing f lood prevention efforts following the 2003 f looding of the Rhône
in France are brought together in order to examine the manner in
which the participation of the local population has been predefined at
the international level or by institutional actors. In such contexts, field
studies shed precious light on the strategic positioning of local actors,
who must come to terms with externally defined representations of
themselves. The ethnographic approach thus allows the researcher to
study in precise terms the status of disaster victim, which is a matter not
only of one’s personal experience of tragedy but is also overdetermined
by external interventions. Given this game of distorting mirrors, with
administrators claiming to intervene through and for the population,
and inhabitants adapting their practices and discourses to administra-
tive expectations, how is the ethnographic field itself to be redefined?
The Memory of Past Disasters

The book’s final section explores how the memory of past disasters sets
in motion a perpetual reconstruction of the past from the perspective
of present issues at both the private—nay, intimate—level among the
inhabitants as well as in terms of public and institutional recognition.

This part of the book brings together the texts of Susann Baez Ullberg,
who examines the manner in which the Santa Fe f loods in Argentina
were memorialized on the basis of an analysis of the spatial inscrip-
tion of past disasters, and Laura Centemeri, who adopts a diachronic
approach to explain the discreet memory of the inhabitants of Seveso
concerning the contamination of their territory by dioxin. Examining
disaster’s memory as an identity-based political resource of legitimation
opens the way for a discussion of the social uses that are made of it. By
abandoning the idea of an exclusive, singular memory, one may shed
light on the manner in which the memorial dynamics found at both the
individual and collective levels, whether locally inscribed or externally
exploited, cohabit and interact.
This is the comparative journey on which the present work invites
its readers to embark. Our hope is to provide them with an introduc-
tion to the many dimensions of the government of disaster as well as
to the critiques that are made of the government by disaster and its
watchwords: anticipate, prepare, cooperate, commemorate, mobilize
memory.
Notes
1. Alban Bensa and Eric Fassin, “Les sciences sociales face à l’événement,” Terrain,
no. 38 (March 2002): 5–20.
2. For recent studies, see Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier, “Une ethnog-
raphie des catastrophes est-elle possible? Coulées de boue et inondations au
Venezuela et en France,” Cahiers d’anthropologie sociale, no. 7 (2011): 77–90;
Sandrine Revet, “Penser et affronter les désastres : un panorama des recherches
en sciences sociales et des politiques internationales,” Critique internationale, no. 52
(2011): 157–173.
3. Violaine Girard and Julien Langumier, “Risques et catastrophes. De l’enquête de
terrain à la construction de l’objet,” Genèses, no. 63 (2006): 128–142.
4. Sandrine Lefranc, “La ‘juste distance’ face à la violence,” Revue internationale des
sciences sociales, no. 174 (April 2002): 505–513.
5. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992; Anthony
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
6. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 244.
7. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection
of Technical and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982.
Introduction 17
8. Eric Lepointe, “Le sociologue et les désastres,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie,

no. 90 (1991): 166. Our translation.
9. Greg Bankoff, “Cultures of Disaster, Cultures of Coping: Hazard as a Frequent
Life Experience in the Philippines, 1600–2000,” in Christof Mauch and Christian
Pfister (eds.), Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a Global
Environmental History, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009, pp. 265–284.
10. Bruno Latour, “Comment redistribuer le grand partage,” available at http://www
.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/15-GRAND-PARTAGEpdf.pdf (accessed on
February 13, 2014).
11. There has been some debate concerning the proper English translation of the
Foucaldian concept of dispositif (French). Though assemblage and apparatus have
been used in the past, a consensus seems to have emerged around “dispositif ”
in current Anglophone scientific literature. We have thus chosen to retain the
French term dispositif in the text, as neither assemblage nor apparatus fully capture
the various meanings and concepts involved in Michel Foucault’s term.
12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1. An Introduction (New York:
Random House, 1990) (first English edition, Penguin, 1984).
13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Redwood: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
14. Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirable. Refugee Camps and Humanitarian
Government, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010; Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi
(eds.), Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian
Interventions, New York: Zone Books, 2010.
15. On the importance given this question in anthropology and sociology, see
among others: Marc Abélès, Politique de la survie, Paris: Flammarion, 2006; Arjun
Appaduraï, Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006; Zygmund Bauman, Liquid Fear, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2006; Didier Bigo, “La mondialisation de l’(in)sécurité,” Cultures
et conflits, no. 58 (Summer 2005): 53–101; Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear, London,
Continuum, 2005; Frédéric Neyrat, Biopolitique des catastrophes, Paris: Musica Falsa
Editions, 2008.
16. In particular, the Seveso chemical disaster in Italy (1976) studied by Laura
Centemeri in this volume, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the United
States (1979), and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
17. Beck, Risk Society.
18. Andrew Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture, vol. 19,
no. 2 (2007): 247–271.
19. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification. Economies of Worth, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
20. Ibid.
21. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2010.
22. See Romain Bertrand’s work, in particular his discussion of the concept of “indig-
enous appropriation,” in “Politiques du moment colonial. Historicités indigènes
et rapports vernaculaires au politique en ‘situation coloniale,’ ” Questions de recher-

che, vol. 26 (October 2008), available at http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/fr/papier
/qdr?page=2 (Accessed on February 14, 2014)
23. See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience,
New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
24. Michel Agier, “Ni trop près ni trop loin. De l’implication ethnographique à
l’engagement intellectuel,” Gradhiva. Revue d’histoire et d’archives de l’anthropologie,
vol. 21 (1997): 69–76 ; Didier Fassin, “L’anthropologie, entre engagement et dis-
tanciation. Essai de sociologie des recherches en sciences sociales sur le sida en
Afrique,” in Charles Becker, Jean-Pierre Dozon, Christine Obbo, and Moriba
Touré (eds.), Vivre et penser le sida en Afrique, Paris: Karthala, 1999, pp. 41–66.
25. George Marcus’ work insists on anthropological knowledge as disinterested when
anthropologists are confronted with the new characteristics of their fields, which
are often dominated by various forms of intervention (in particular, humani-
tarian). See George Marcus, “Experts, Reporters, Witnesses: The Making of
Anthropologists in States of Emergency,” in Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi
(eds.), Contemporary States of Emergency.
26. Anthony Oliver-Smith, The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes,
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
27. “Living,” as per Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol 2. Living and
Cooking, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 (3rd ed.)
28. Didier Bigo, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality
of Unease,” Alternatives, no. 27, Special issue (2002): 63–92.
29. Jean-François Bayart, Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globali-
sation, Paris: Fayard, 2004.
30. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification. Economies of Worth.
31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vols. 1–3, trans. Steven Rendall,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Select Bibliography
Abélès, Marc, Politique de la survie, Paris: Flammarion, 2006.

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
Agier, Michel, Managing the Undesirable. Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.
———, “Ni trop près ni trop loin. De l’implication ethnographique à l’engagement
intellectual,” Gradhiva. Revue d’histoire et d’archives de l’anthropologie, vol. 21 (1997):
69–76.
Appaduraï, Arjun, Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Bankoff, Greg, “Cultures of Disaster, Cultures of Coping: Hazard as a Frequent Life
Experience in the Philippines, 1600–2000,” in Christof Mauch and Christian
Introduction 19
Pfister (eds.), Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global
Environmental History, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009, pp. 265–284.
Bauman, Zygmund, Liquid Fear, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
Bayart, Jean-François, Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalisation,
Paris: Fayard, 2004.
Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992.
Bensa Alban, and Eric Fassin, “Les sciences sociales face à l’événement,” Terrain 38
(March 2002): pp. 5–20.
Bigo, Didier, “La mondialisation de l’(in)sécurité,” Cultures et conflits, no. 58 (Summer
2005): 53–101.
———, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmntality of
Unease,” Alternatives, vol. 27, Special issue (2002): 63–92.
Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification. Economies of Worth, Princeton:
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, vols. 1–3, trans. Steven Rendall,
Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of
Technical and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Fassin, Didier, “L’anthropologie, entre engagement et distanciation. Essai de sociolo-
gie des recherches en sciences sociales sur le sida en Afrique,” in Charles Becker,
Jean-Pierre Dozon, Christine Obbo, and Moriba Touré (eds.), Vivre et penser le sida
en Afrique, Paris: Karthala, 1999, pp. 41–66.
Fassin, Didier, and Mariella Pandolfi (eds.), Contemporary States of Emergency: The
Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, New York: Zone Books, 2010.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1. An Introduction, New York: Random
House, 1990 (first English edition, Penguin, 1984).
Furedi, Frank, Politics of Fear, London: Continuum, 2005.
Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Girard, Violaine, and Julien Langumier, “Risques et catastrophes. De l’enquête de
terrain à la construction de l’objet,” Genèses, no. 63 (2006): 128–142.
Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, New
York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Lakoff, Andrew, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 2
(2007): pp. 247–271.
Latour, Bruno, “Comment redistribuer le grand partage,” available at http://www
.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/15-GRAND-PARTAGEpdf.pdf (accessed on
February 13, 2014).
Lefranc, Sandrine, “La ‘juste distance’ face à la violence,” Revue internationale des sci-
ences sociales, no. 174 (April 2002): 505–513.
Lepointe, Eric, “Le sociologue et les désastres,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie,
no. 90 (1991).
Marcus, George, “Experts, Reporters, Witnesses: The Making of Anthropologists in
States of Emergency,” in Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (eds.), Contemporary
States of Emergency.
Neyrat Frédéric, Biopolitique des catastrophes, Paris: Musica Falsa Editions, 2008.
Oliver-Smith, Anthony, The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes, Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
Rancière, Jacques, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2010.
Revet, Sandrine, “Penser et affronter les désastres: un panorama des recherches en
sciences sociales et des politiques internationales,” Critique internationale, no. 52
(2011): 157–173.
Revet, Sandrine, and Julien Langumier, “Une ethnographie des catastrophes est-elle
possible? Coulées de boue et inondations au Venezuela et en France,” Cahiers
d’anthropologie sociale, no. 7 (2011): 77–90.
PA RT 1
Anticipation, Preparedness,
and Controversies
CH A P T E R ON E
Governing by Hazard: Controlling

Mudslides and Promoting Tourism in
the Mountains above Alma-Ata
(Kazakhstan), 1966–1977
M a rc E l i e
This chapter undertakes a political history of the government by disaster.

The story takes place in a decisive moment of Soviet history, when the
governments of the republics “self-sovereignized” and appropriated for
their own purposes the resources of a rhetoric of transformation that
had since the 1920s been central to the Soviet project. In Kazakhstan,
the movement toward autonomy was ref lected in scientific and tech-
nological development and the realization of ambitious urban and envi-
ronmental planning projects, which several years earlier had been the
exclusive prerogative of Moscow. The Kazakh government was able to
exploit glacial hazards to create local assent for its protection projects and
institutionalize a purely Kazakhstani official expertise that efficiently
excluded all dissident scientific approaches, however well-reputed and
recognized they might be on the Soviet scene.
On July 15, 1973, a devastating mudslide hurtled down the valley
of Malen’kaya Almatinka, which overlooks the capital of Soviet
Kazakhstan, Alma-Ata (today’s Almaty). Originating at an altitude of
more than 3,500 meters in the glaciers of the Tuiuk-Su peak, the mud-
slide was stopped 8.5 km downhill by a hundred-meter high embank-
ment dam constructed during 1966–1972 at a point where the valley
24 Marc Elie
narrows, forming what is known as the “Medeo” Gorge. Checked in

its race to the capital, the mudslide almost entirely filled the reservoir,
threatening to submerge and destroy the dam. Over the course of two
weeks, thousands of workers and soldiers labored around the clock to
save the dam. They only just averted a major disaster. Already a monu-
ment to Soviet “big science” in the late 1960s, the Medeo Dam became
a monument to the heroism of the rescue workers of 1973, as sung by
the great Kazakh poet Zhuban Muldagaliev (1920–1988):
Only a monument
To the struggle against the wild forces of nature
Is still missing from the parks of Alma-Ata
The dam is that monument!1
An enormous territory situated between Russia, Central Asia, and

China, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan was at the time
firmly in the hands of the first secretary of the Kazakh Communist
Party, Dinmukhamed Akhmedovich Kunaev (1964–1986). He was the
dam’s patron, having fervently defended the idea of building it against
opposition from the local scientific intelligentsia. Thanks to support in
Moscow from the general secretary of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev,
and several prominent scientists, Kunaev was able to overcome the
resistance of certain specialists and force through the project for the
dam as the sole defense protecting the Kazakh capital. The imposition
of the dam and the rise to power of Kunaev took place concurrently.
These two developments put an end to the fierce public controversies
over the best protection for Alma-Ata, which had prospered in the
period of relative political pluralism in Kazakhstan that characterized
the last years of Khrushchev’s leadership.2
The political leadership of Soviet Kazakhstan sought to make 1973
the year that the “black dragon”—the mountainous hazard that had
threatened Alma-Ata since its foundation in 1854—was definitively
vanquished.3 That year put the seal on the Medeo Dam as the ultimate
solution against mudslides and as the capital’s ultimate protection. Yet
scientific uncertainty concerning the mudslides hampered attempts to
calm the controversy. Indeed, in scientific circles, 1973 was instead a
time of intense quarrels that threatened the dam’s legitimacy. What’s
more, with global warming damaging the glaciers and urban expansion
in the valleys above Alma-Ata, disastrous mudslides were to regularly
recall the limits—indeed, the negative consequences—of the efforts
implemented in the 1970s and 1980s to control them.
Governing by Hazard 25
The favorable outcome of the 1973 disaster marked a new stage

in the history of Alma-Ata and Soviet Kazakhstan: the dam, which
had been seen as sealing the valley, was now seen as opening up the
valley and its resources, particularly to the “white gold” of tourism.
The capital began to annex the mountains, mainly via the two moun-
tain rivers that crossed it, the Malen’kaya and Bol’shaya Almatinkas.
The construction of a protective network against mudslide required
the creation of infrastructure and thus facilitated the development of
tourist activity. In keeping with processes specific to the “economy of
disasters,”4 the prevention and management of torrential and glacial
hazards acted as motors for the development of mountain areas.
The story that is told here centers on the evolution of the tech-
nological and scientific controversies that impacted political decision
making. This choice was dictated by the paucity of publications and
archival sources addressing the social and environmental aspects of the
conquest of the mountains and the effort to contain natural hazards.
How is one to know what the inhabitants of Alma-Ata thought of the
mountain infrastructure projects that culminated a few cable lengths
away from the capital at an altitude of 5,000 meters? What were the
conf licts among residents and local authorities that gave rise to plans
for zoning and riverbed modification? How were the mudslides that
hurtled down the valleys in 1973, 1975, and 1977 (to only speak of the
period studied here) experienced? In its present state, the information
available for consultation in Kazakhstan does not afford sophisticated
answers to these questions. Only scattered information is to be had
regarding what the inhabitants might have thought of the steps taken
by scientists and governments to protect them or the decisions lead-
ing up to them. Indeed, what information is to be found—whether
in administrative and technical sources (Kazakh government papers,
the archives of the weather service) or the reports issued by research
institutes—has an almost inadvertent quality. We are here far from the
“living archive” celebrated by Arlette Farge.5 For the sources are char-
acterized by blatant contradiction between government and scientific
community assertions that they were acting on behalf of the people and
their total lack of interest in what these same people might think (the
secret services are an exception here but their archives are not available
for consultation). There is sufficient evidence to advance the hypoth-
esis that their plans provoked contradictory responses, sometimes very
critical ones. At the risk of exaggerating the degree to which the popu-
lation supported the state’s transformational projects, the present article
shows how, despite setbacks, Kazakhstan’s leader, Kunaev, succeeded
26 Marc Elie
in consolidating his power and imposing a protection plan centered on

the single dam he had sponsored. To do so, he relied on three tools:
an all-out propaganda campaign appealing to the old clichés of the
“victory over nature” and the technoscientific cult; the development
of Alma-Ata as a winter sports capital; and institutional reorganization
intended to create an impression of unanimity around the Medeo Dam
project while marginalizing alternative proposals and criticism among
scientists.
In the Shelter of the Dam?
The Medeo Dam gave the inhabitants of Alma-Ata a false sense of

security. Indeed, in the course of its construction, official rhetoric
imposed themes that unwittingly underestimated the parameters of the
mudslides and exaggerated the dam’s effectiveness. Nor was this a mat-
ter of pure and simple disinformation: the technocrats and engineers
responsible for the dam were themselves convinced that the giant dam
represented the optimal protection against mudslides for Alma-Ata.
They tended to allow themselves to be taken in by their own assurances
and exaggerations: Medeo, it was claimed, would protect the town for
100 or even 1,000 years.6
The first theme was that of the giant dam itself: the dam “sealed”
the valley “for eternity” and provided an absolute guarantee against
mudslides.7 The media hammered away at the idea that the other, less
massive and radical types of protective works proposed by opponents of
the dam in the first half of the 1960s did not secure against mudslides. It
discredited alternative projects by humiliating their proponents.8 The
second theme concerned the use of explosives. Indeed, the construction
process chosen for the first section of the building site consisted in pro-
voking landslides on the f lanks of the Malen’kaya Almatinka via two
giant explosions, one in October 1966 and the other in February 1967.
The media celebrated the method of directional explosions, which, it
was claimed, had allowed a 105-meter tall wall to be constructed in
one go.9 The myth of the “creative explosion” encouraged the belief
that the town was effectively and inexpensively protected as early as
1967, though this was not the case. Assurances that the town was safe
after the explosions of 1966–1967 concealed the scale of work yet to be
done in order to realize the anticipated parameters of the dam.
In the media, the politicians, scientists, and engineers responsible for
the dam insisted that the 1966–1967 explosions had had no negative
effects on the local population and surrounding structures nor resulted

in collateral damage. Only a small number of environmentalists rec-
ognized that the explosions had disfigured the Medeo Gorge, with the
explosive blasts and attendant fires, landslides, and poisoning of all life
by toxic gas entirely destroying the natural environment at the bottom
of the valley and along the f lanks of the river within a perimeter of at
least 400 meters.10 Associated with protest against the dam, the accusa-
tion of environmental destruction was suppressed at the time but resur-
faced in the late 1980s with the onset of perestroika and the revival of
movements to protect nature. A controversy regarding the ecological
consequences of building the dam was widely covered in the media: by
interrupting the winds that blew from above into the valley, the dam
could contribute to the deterioration of urban air quality. This position
was vigorously challenged by the dam’s defenders.11
Yet, despite the media’s celebration of “the largest explosion in the
history of civil engineering,” neither of the two explosions succeeded
in lifting the mass of earth and gravel that had been anticipated in
calculations. The first explosion created a 1.7-million-meter3 mound
instead of the 1.94-million-meter3 mound that had been forecast. At
this point, the “dam” was just a heap of gravel measuring 500 meters
long and 60 meters high (1,810 meters above sea level), or a little more
than half the height anticipated in the project (112 meters, 1,860 meters
above sea level). The second explosion was particularly unfortunate: it
raised the dam to just 72 meters and only contributed 950,000 m 3 of
additional material. Instead of being deposited on the summit of the
mound raised by the first explosion, as had been intended, most of the
rock projected by the blast was sent to the foot of the dam.12 Though
the force of the explosion and the precision of the blasts were to have
raised the dam in one go, a great deal of work and much heavy machin-
ery was ultimately required to raise it to 112 meters. This is the main
reason that it took so long to construct. The explosions left the builders
in an awkward position. If the dam was to be raised by 40 meters—
a Herculean task—labor, technical material, and financing would all
have to be found. Work continued at a furious pace. As we shall see,
when the 1973 disaster struck, the dam had been simplified vis-à-vis
the initial project and lacked what was seen as a crucial element. If
the mudslide of 1973 had struck in 1967, it would have destroyed the
mound at Medeo and plunged down upon Alma-Ata.
Moreover, confidence in the dam meant that other forms of protec-
tion received less attention, even though the need for them had been
acknowledged before construction began. As a result, smaller scale
28 Marc Elie
projects and alternate forms of mudslide prevention were nearly com-

pletely abandoned in the Malen’kaya Almatinka valley following the
explosions. And the planners gave no attention to the other valleys
threatening Alma-Ata’s surroundings: the Talgar, Issyk, and Kaskelen
valleys. Indeed, the dam’s construction sucked up all anti-mudslide
resources, with investment no longer available for other sectors and
projects, even smaller ones.
What became of three smaller scale works constructed in the
Malen’kaya Almatinka illustrates how Medeo monopolized resources
and attention. In 1964, with preparatory work for the Medeo explo-
sions at a standstill, army reinforcements were used to hastily construct
a dam measuring 6 meters high and 130 meters wide across the river a
little above the site known as Mynzhilki (3,100 meters). The same year,
Gidroproekt—the institute that had designed the Medeo Dam and was
theoretically responsible for a series of anti-mudslide measures—had
thrown together two other dams upstream from Medeo, one near the
Gorel’nik mountaineering base and another between Gorel’nik and
Medeo. Their metal frames were designed to channel boulders swept
along in the event of a mudslide. These three projects were notoriously
inadequate. Yet nothing was done about it: almost as soon as the explo-
sions had reverberated across the valley, projects for reconstructing the
three little dams were abandoned.13
The construction of Medeo also put an end to the preventative
operations established by the municipality in the first half of the 1960s.
Reforestation is universally recommended as a measure to limit valley
erosion and prevent landslides from supplying the material for disas-
trous mudslides in the future. Under the impetus of the first secretary
of the Alma-Ata Party, Esen Duisenov, the forest made modest prog-
ress in the basin of Malen’kaya Almatinka. Between 1955 and 1964,
just 380 hectares were planted, mainly in pine, wild apple, and apricot
trees. With the obvious aim of supplying foodstuffs, they were con-
centrated in the lower portions of the valley between 1,300 and 2,000
meters—that is, nearly entirely downhill from Medeo. Reforestation
efforts were subsequently interrupted. Duisenov also had siphons
installed in the lakes of the Tuiuk-Su glacial system. Simple and inex-
pensive but difficult to maintain, these siphons allowed the water level
of the moraine lakes to be controlled. Three 200 mm tubes, each of
which was three to four meters long, allowed water to drain from lake
no. 2, which was considered the most threatening.14 For financial rea-
sons and also because the dam fostered the illusion of absolute protec-
tion, their use was interrupted during the dam’s construction.15
The dam was supposed to be capable of containing three mudslides

equivalent in volume to that of 1921, the signal mudslide of Alma-Ata’s
short history. But this calculation was misleading: at the time, no one
knew the parameters of a mudslide on Malen’kaya Almatinka (speed,
force, volume). Would the dam suffice, would it hold? Despite the tri-
umphalist rhetoric of the authorities, science offered no guarantees on
this point. In the absence of reliable data concerning the mudslides, the
construction of a wall increased rather than diminished risk by con-
centrating the mudslide. Its large size was not a guarantee of security.
To the contrary, the larger the dam, the larger the mudslide, should
the dam be destroyed. Downhill, the town was in jeopardy, even as its
residents believed themselves protected by the dam.
Saving the Dam
Around 6 p.m. on July 15, 1973, a mudslide formed beneath the

Tuiuk-Su glacier. The summer had been very warm and followed a
particularly snowy winter. Under the inf luence of melting ice and the
internal filtration of thaw water, the moraine located under glacial lakes
no. 2 and 3 shifted. As a result, the natural dyke separating the two
lakes gave way, discharging water from the first into the second and
then from there into the river. In a few hours, the two lakes dumped
225,000 m 3 of water into the valley. The resulting mudslide first struck
the Mynzhilki dam, which was unable to withstand it; its maximum
capacity did not exceed 35,000 m 3. In five minutes, the mudslide carved
an enormous trench in the middle of the dam. Ten minutes later and
eight kilometers downhill, the mudslide struck the two metal dams
located near the Gorel’nik mountaineering base. They were swept
aside like match sticks. The mudslide bounced off the framework, and
boulders rained down on the buildings of the tourist resort, crushing
vacationers. The number of victims, which was kept secret at the time,
has still not been made public, but it is likely that there were many dead
and injured on July 15, 1973: that Sunday had been a beautiful day and
many strollers had come to the valley to take the air and forage for
medicinal plants; mountain climbers from Leningrad and Minsk made
their way up the slopes.16
Yet municipal and regional agencies were aware of the strong risk
of mudslides in the summer of 1973.17 Meteorologists had sounded the
alarm two days before the tragedy: unusually high temperatures accel-
erated the glaciers’ thaw and dangerously raised water level in the lakes.
30 Marc Elie
But in keeping with the hierarchical information system characteristic

of the USSR, the weather services did not directly inform the popula-
tion. Instead, their reports were transmitted to the party’s central com-
mittee, the council of ministers, and institutions and businesses located
in the danger zone. For some unknown reason, however, the valley
above Medeo was not evacuated despite the fact that the authorities had
adopted an evacuation plan in June. Though notice boards informed
tourists that mudslides could take place in this season, the notices were
in place all summer long. As the director of the Republic’s meteorolog-
ical agency (Kazgidromet), E. K. Fedorov, remarked in astonishment
in a letter to the Soviet government on August 15, “after receiving
information regarding the formation of a mudf low upstream, the
emergency warning system intended to alert the population . . . was not
activated.18 The reason for this failure is not clear: A technical break-
down? Indifference on the part of the authorities, persuaded that the
dam would save the town? Fear of provoking panic?
The mudslide scraped the bed in its passage and increased its supply
of sediment and boulders, which it tore from the sides and the bottom
of the valley. The valley deepened from 12 to 15 meters over the entire
distance travelled by the mudslide—and even up to 40 meters in some
places. The mud was incredibly dense: at nearly 2,400 kg by m 3, it had
the consistency of fresh concrete. At 6:15 p.m., a first, 15-meter-high
wave crashed into the reservoir formed by the Medeo Dam, the “abso-
lute weapon” (Vinogradov) standing in its way. This was to be just the
first in a series. The next day, August 16, another large wave threw
itself against the dam. The 3.8 million m3 of mud swept along by the
mudslides entered without difficulty into the 6.7 m3 container. But
this does not take the river’s water into consideration. This water nor-
mally f lowed out of a tunnel constructed at the base of the dam. The
boulders and compact mud of the mudslide immediately obstructed
it. The level of the holding basin thus began to inexorably rise: river
water accumulated above the mud deposited by the mudslide at a rate
of 400,000 m3 per day. From July 15 to July 20, the water level rose by
six meters and only eight meters remained between it and the top of the
dam. The reservoir was thus three quarters full.19 In the original plans
and sketches for the dam, an emergency draining channel located at the
top of the dam had been anticipated to drain mud and water but, for a
reason explained below, it was never constructed. According to some
specialists, this was the main cause of the dam’s distressed state.20 The
risk was huge: if the water rose above the crest of the dam or, above
all, if a new mudslide took place, the dam would be washed away. This
disastrous scenario had to be avoided at all costs: the six million m 3

of water and mud contained in the reservoir plus the five million m 3
of rock that made up the dam would then be hurled onto the Kazakh
capital ten kilometers below.
The disaster took place at the worst possible moment for Dinmukhamed
Kunaev, leader of the Kazakh Republic and the dam’s promoter: the
capital was preparing to receive an official visit from Secretary General
Leonid Brezhnev to celebrate Soviet Kazakhstan and, in particular,
the “billion poods of grain” that the Republic was to supply Moscow
that year. What’s more, the new Medeo ice sports complex, the Soviet
Union’s largest, which had been opened less than a year earlier, was
located directly beneath the dam. In February 1974, the European wom-
en’s speed skating championship was supposed to take place there. In
order to prevent a catastrophic scenario, Kunaev established a crisis cell
with its headquarters on the banks of the reservoir. Its members, who
consisted of ministers and high-ranking officials, were ordered to remain
at their post and spent the night on site.21 The Medeo sports complex was
evacuated together with homes located directly beneath the dam.22
In order to save the dam, mud had to be pumped out of the res-
ervoir. Three tubes of a diameter of 1.42 meters were laid on the left
bank where the emergency draining channel should have been con-
structed. Starting on July 20, or five days after the mudslide arrived,
powerful diesel motors began to pump mud out of the reservoir. On
July 24, the water level had already been lowered by more than five
meters. But the brand new skating rink was threatened by the f low
of muddy water and had to be excavated to protect it. Between July
26 and July 29, with the water pumping operation underway, earth-
moving machines were installed on pontoons delivered and set up
by the army in order to clear a little mud from the reservoir. These
undertakings transformed the dam into a work site on which a consid-
erable number of laborers were busy at work: the industrial ministries
of heavy industry alone mobilized 3,700 workers per day. Above all,
an unspecified number of soldiers from the Central Asian military
region, the headquarters of which were located in Kazakhstan, were
put to work on the construction site. To prevent the onset of a new
mudslide, workers installed siphons at an altitude of 3,400 meters in
order to lower the level of lake no. 2, which continued to rise danger-
ously as the glacier rapidly thawed.23
On July 18, a new danger appeared: water was filtering through the
dam.24 On July 19, the academicians Mikhail Lavrent’ev and Mikhail
Sadovskii rushed to Medeo. They had been the scientific guarantors of
32 Marc Elie
the dam and its mode of construction, explosive blasts. Their expertise
was required: would the dam hold? Lavrent’ev was confident:
nearly everyone was certain that [the dam] would hold and the
filtration was not so bad . . . After two days, we were able to quietly
go home.25
The disaster recalled the remarks of opponents of the dam, who had
warned in the early 1960s of the possibility that the dam would weaken
or even collapse due to infiltration.26 Despite the retrospective reas-
surances of the famous academician, it was decided to waterproof the
downstream shoulder with concrete in order to limit discharge.27 In
strong contrast with the condescending assurances of the great scien-
tists, an atmosphere of urgency and a spirit of collective struggle against
a massively superior enemy reigned among the workers who were
called up. They continue to feel pride not only at having participated
in the salvage operation but also in the dam as a feat of technological and
scientific prowess as well as in the sociopolitical system that successfully
designed and constructed it: “At the time, I was proud of our town,
which we had defended against the mudslide, of our republic and of
our country: it was such a powerful centralized state, capable of con-
centrating [its resources] when someone was in trouble.”28 The high
wall of the dam became a symbol of unity, of support for the regime
and its scientific and social system for controlling nature.
The Luck of Heroes: Disaster, Emergency, and Heroism
In keeping with the atmosphere of discretion—indeed, silence—that

generally surrounded disasters and accidents in the USSR, media cov-
erage of the dam salvage operations was very limited. The political
leadership clearly sought to avoid spreading panic in the population.
Thus, throughout the period that salvage work was being carried out
on the dam, the events at Medeo never made the front page of the
republic’s largest newspaper, Kazakhstanskaia Pravda (Kazakhstani
Pravda, KP). These events were first mentioned, in very general terms,
in an unsigned article that appeared in the edition of July 19, or four
days after the Medeo reservoir had been filled.29 It was not until July 22
that KP correspondents offered a more detailed account in a report pub-
lished on page four—that is, only once the situation was already firmly
under control and the level of water behind the dam was falling.30
The confrontation between the mudslide and the dam is at the center
of the journalists’ account. In order to underscore the dam’s success-
ful resistance and the valuable contribution made by individuals, they
revived the rhetoric of the struggle against natural forces. Not shying
away from hyperbole, they presented nature in a terrifying light: The
journalists speak of a mudslide “three times larger than that of 1921.” In
fact, while the mudslide was indeed enormous, the mass that descended
the Malen’kaya Almatinka in 1973 was roughly equivalent to that of
1921: 3.8 and 3.5 million m3, respectively.31 In 1921, however, the
disaster was of a much larger scale due to the fact that the mudslides
had been initiated by rainfall and devastated all of the valleys above
Alma-Ata, not just the Malen’kaya Almatinka.
Against the raging power of the mountains stood the solid shield
constructed by the hands and intelligence of Soviet man . . . The
Medeo Dam had endured a blow greater than that experienced by
any other major work of engineering in all of human history.32
The journalists (falsely) asserted that the weather services had warned
everyone of the mudslide’s arrival in time. They made no mention of
possible victims or material damage, going so far as to explicitly claim
that all mountain climbers and strollers were safe, an assertion that is
hard to square with descriptions of the mudslide. No direct mention
was made of the destruction of the Mynzhilki Dam and the Gorel’nik
mountaineering base. In keeping with the conventions of the time,
the reporters emphasized the heroism of individuals involved in the
“duel against natural forces,”33 whether they were climbers seeing to
the rescue of terrified walkers or workers busy emptying the Medeo
reservoir.34
The dam salvage efforts were reminiscent of its construction: every-
thing took place in a rush. In this respect, the site of the July 1973
dam salvage effort was not so much an exceptional case as an example
for other large construction projects to emulate. Observers endlessly
underscored several characteristics typical of “hero projects” in the
USSR. First, journalists and participants steadfastly emphasized “the
fraternal unity of the peoples of the USSR.” Engineers and scientists
travelled from across the Union to lend their Kazakh colleagues a
hand. Machines—diesel motors, pumps, and so on, accompanied by
their operators—arrived not only from other towns in Kazakhstan
but also from such Russian towns as Chelyabinsk and Voronezh.
Kazakhstan was not alone in its misfortune: “the entire Union lived
34 Marc Elie
to the beat of Alma-Ata’s suffering” (Khegai). The same insistence on

unity in adversity is to be encountered in other major projects of the
Brezhnev era: the reconstruction of Tashkent after the 1966 earth-
quake and the construction of the Baikal to Amour railway (BAM)
beginning in 1974. 35
A second characteristic of these hero projects is creative improvisa-
tion. Laboring under extreme constraints, workers, technicians, and
engineers are pressed to invent ad hoc solutions that may possibly be
put to use again in the future. They are expected to show a degree of
initiative typically denied them under normal circumstances. In the
case of Medeo, examples of improvisation were particularly striking.
The skating rink was threatened by water draining from the three
pipes. Technicians skillfully carried out an explosion to prevent water
from reaching the skating rink. As the water level diminished in the
reservoir, pine trunks torn loose by the mudslide were sucked into the
pumps, clogging pipes and machinery. A brigade invented a system
of steel nets to hold them back. The gradual retreat of the water had
another consequence: the pontoons washed up on boulders that had been
swept along by the mudslide. As a result, the machines that had been
suspended on top of them no longer reached the layer of mud. Workers
invented a way to free them. On lake no. 2, some clever engineers hung
film to slow the rate of thaw.36 The press celebrated their resourceful-
ness and cunning.
The press emphasized heroism and individual sacrifice: an exhausted
leader refused to be relieved, a truck driver made the trip between
Alma-Ata and Medeo without rest for several days running, and so on.
The diver Ivan Pashchenko sought to clear debris from the Malen’kaya
Almatinka’s outf low tunnel at the bottom of the reservoir, risking his
life for several days running by diving time and again in the mud to
find the mouth of the tunnel. In vain.37 The mountain climber Mihail
Kulemin took enormous risks with his team to rescue strollers and
walkers trapped on the high ground by the mudslide. The authori-
ties celebrated and rewarded individual undertakings but always as an
expression of a collective will: the efforts of an individual are subsumed
in those of a trio of workers, a work brigade, and, finally, the totality
of the dam salvage operation’s participants. The central committee
praised “the courage and heroism of the masses at work” on the dam.
It showered participants in a rain of medals and bonuses, most of it
received by leaders (ministers, generals, and high-ranking officials).
But the common worker was not forgotten, and received honors and
the material benefits that accompanied them. Even the lower levels
of power practiced this form of counter-gift: the Alma-Ata Party
Committee, for example, sponsored its own list of medal recipients and
prize winners.38
A final characteristic assumed a new scale under Brezhnev: the
Second World War (the “Great Patriotic War” in Russian) displaced the
Revolution and Civil War as the incarnation of heroism. No exploit,
however great, was seen as measuring up to it. The Breshnevian
leadership made the memory of the Second World War, duly cer-
emonialized and ritualized, a mainstay in the legitimation of Soviet
power and relied on veterans as a social group. 39 The vocabulary of
armed struggle was systematically employed in describing the “duel
between man and the forces of nature” and explicitly referred to the
war against the Nazi occupier. A participant recalls: “People were in
a sort of ecstasy . . . The situation was reminiscent of the war at the
front.”40 References to the battles of the Second World War often
occur in the recollections of the veterans of Medeo. For the actors
present during the dramatic days of July 1973, it was an obvious com-
parison: As a colonel called up to save the dam noted in his field
journal, “for the younger generation of soldiers, the heroic combat
against unbridled nature at Medeo was as it were a way of carrying
on the military exploits of their fathers.”41
The dam was lucky: by the time the black dragon awoke, the long
process of constructing it had mostly come to an end. By sheer luck,
the mudslide was exactly the size of the reservoir. But the dam also
possessed certain intrinsic qualities that became apparent in 1973. In
particular, it was extremely solid: the force of the explosions had not
only torn open the mountains but had also projected compacted rock
into the body of the dam in such a way as to render it denser than bull-
dozers could have done.42 Heroism is the third factor in the happy out-
come of 1973. Calls for heroism were one of the Soviet system’s “soft”
resources of mobilization. The great engineering projects depended on
heroism and sacrifice. The system only possessed sufficient momentum
and dynamism when deadlines were compressed, pressure was put on
nature, and materiel was rationed to force men to give their all. The
socialist project of the USSR could only succeed under circumstances
of extreme adversity, those imposed by nature and those dictated by the
external and internal enemies that threatened it. Defeating and subdu-
ing these enemies demanded a sacrifice. This myth survived in the
great projects of the end of the socialist era.
36 Marc Elie
Concentrating Responsibility: The Creation of

Kazglavselezashchita
The 1973 disaster allowed the Kazakh leadership to obtain a great deal
from Moscow in its effort to protect Alma-Ata. Dinmukhamed Kunaev
could count on unwavering support from his friend Leonid Brezhnev. In
the course of an official visit to Alma-Ata less than one month after the
dam was salvaged, the secretary general of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU) made no mention of the narrowly averted disas-
ter in his official statements. Nor did his hosts.43 Yet both Brezhnev and
Kunaev were deeply preoccupied by the issue of mudslide protection.
On the sidelines of the festivities, they visited the dam and contemplated
the millions of tons of sediment that caked the reservoir. According to
Aleksei Khegai, who received the high-ranking visitors atop the dam, it
was here that Kunaev and Brezhnev agreed to the creation of a Kazakh
administration totally dedicated to designing and maintaining anti-
mudslide and anti-avalanche projects for all of Kazakhstan: the General
Directorate for the Construction and Exploitation of Anti-Mudslide
Projects of the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh Republic.44 Known
under its abbreviation Kazglavselezashchita, the general directorate had
the status of a ministry and considerable human and material resources.
By way of Kazglavselezashchita, Kunaev intended to put an end to the
bureaucratic muddle that had characterized the fight against mudslides
since the early 1950s and that he himself had carefully encouraged to
serve his political designs. It now seemed to him that too many com-
peting administrations and businesses worked on the question. The
scientists who were officially in charge of the anti-mudslide effort were
divided between the Republic’s Academy of Sciences, large universities,
and the meteorological service’s scientific institute (Kazgidromet), not
to mention inf luential colleagues from Moscow and Leningrad. Those
who designed major projects were to be found either at Gidroproekt,
which had a branch in Alma-Ata, or at Giprovodkhoz, the ministry of
agriculture’s office of hydraulic design. And even more entities were
involved in the business of constructing them: the ministry of commu-
nications, the ministry of municipal construction, the ministry of geol-
ogy, the Almaataspetsstroi company, and so on. The government spent
its time resolving conf licts—often minor but sometimes more serious—
between these administrations and their services. Kazglavselezashchita
was to put an end to this chaos by becoming the sole designer and man-
ager of all civil engineering structures throughout the Republic and
the coordinator of all construction and maintenance projects. Indeed,
scientific development was the only area that continued to escape its
purview and then only for a few more years. Although this dream of
institutional unification did not immediately come true, in less than
a decade Kazglavselezashchita had indeed become the sole center of
research, coordination, design, and management, exactly as Kunaev
had conceived it in 1973.
With the support of Brezhnev, resources f looded in. In a few months,
Alma-Ata received more for the maintenance and expansion of the dam
than what the dam had cost it to construct. In mid-September 1973,
Moscow paid 15 million rubles to address the emergency, in particular
the need to clear away four million tons of sediment. Moscow subse-
quently allocated an additional 48 million rubles for 1974 to fund new
work to shore up the banks of the Malen’kaya Almatinka—ravaged by
the mudslide and denuded by erosion—and raise the height of the dam
to 150 meters. The total capacity of the reservoir would thereby dou-
ble, reaching 12 million m3. It was anticipated that new projects would
be developed to secure other valleys, particularly that of the Bol’shaya
Almatinka. But the financial resources invested do not entirely cap-
ture the scale of the effort for they do not include wages paid or the
technical material delivered in kind to the Republic: cement, steel,
wood, construction vehicles, and the like. What’s more, Moscow put
the great central ministries to work. The ministry of heavy industry
and the ministry of energy respectively managed the Medeo recon-
struction effort and the construction of electrical infrastructure and
were responsible for allocating labor and resources for these purposes.45
The Kazakh leadership had indeed attempted to establish the projects
on its own, without help from the central government.46 But it lacked
the funds and materials. The capacity of Kazakhstan to construct and
maintain prestigious civil engineering structures here reached its limits;
it had to call upon help from central institutions.
A Threat to the Dam: “Anthropic Disasters”
Kunaev strove to create unity and unanimity around his plan

for protecting Alma-Ata, with its keystone the Medeo Dam and
Kazglavselezashchita its guardian. Through close monitoring of opinion
and institutional concentration around Kazglavselezashchita, Kunaev
was able to largely achieve the desired unanimity. Following the 1973
disaster, however, controversies developed that were potentially destabi-
lizing for the monolithic consensus displayed by the political leadership.
38 Marc Elie
In early 1974, one of the leading hydrologists specializing in mudslides,

a professor at the University of Moscow named Semen Fleishman, pub-
lished two articles in major scientific journals criticizing the system of
protection in the Malen’kaya Almatinka valley. According to him, the
“anthropic factor”—errors of judgment and construction—explained
why the mudslide had taken a catastrophic turn, seriously threatening
the town in July 1973.47
Fleishman was president and member of the Commission for the
Study of Mudslides at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. An
academic and collegial organization founded in 1947, the Mudslide
Commission (Selevaia komisiia), as it was generally known, brought
together all specialists from the Soviet republics. During the debates
that took place between 1956 and 1965, the Commission and its suc-
cessive presidents, Mikhail Velikanov, Maksim Sribnyi, and Semen
Fleishman, consistently opposed the construction of the Medeo Dam.
Precisely for this reason, it was excluded from the decision-making
process regarding protection for Alma-Ata: the dam and above all its
mode of construction—directional blasts—moved forward in politi-
cal decision making according to their own dynamic. In this context,
scientists specializing in explosives—the aforementioned Lavrent’iev
and Sadovskii—occupied the leading role and the Commission’s rec-
ommendations were not taken into account. Instead of focusing on
optimal protection for the town, purely technical questions were thus
substituted concerning the best way to carry out an explosion and pre-
dict any unfavorable consequences it might have.48
According to Fleishman, the Malen’kaya Almatinka was poorly pre-
pared for the mudslide. He first of all emphasized that the engineers
should have foreseen that the tunnel intended to transport the river’s
water under the dam would be immediately clogged by mud, inexo-
rably leading to a rising water level in the reservoir.49 Above all, he
accused the little dam of Mynzhilki of having played a “fatal role”
in the formation of a very large mudslide: by temporarily blocking
the f lood of glacial water, it had allowed the water to accumulate and
greatly increased its power. Once this little dam broke, Fleishman
claimed, the river’s rate of f low increased ten times over. Downstream,
the Gorel’nik filter dam had also played a harmful role but in another
way: acting like a “trampoline,” it had propelled the mudslide along the
banks of the river, destroying the station.50
The creators of the dam had to counter this attack. In the pages of
KP, the dam’s chief engineer, G. I. Shapovalov, accused Fleishman of
“misleading the engineering community.” He showed that Fleishman

considerably underestimated the rate of f low of the water violently
poured into the river by lakes no. 2 and no. 3 on July 15: the river dis-
charged this water at a rate of 330 m 3/second and not, as Fleishman had
claimed, a rate of 30 m 3/second. Water was thus already f lowing very
fast when it reached the Mynzhilki dam and this only increased in an
“insignificant” way after the dam had been breached. The conclusion:
“The Mynzhilki dam did not play a harmful role in the formation of
the 1973 mudslide at this level.”51 But Gidroproekt and Shapovalov
were the focus of criticism among mudslide specialists, who knew that
“no dam is better than a bad dam.”52 Did the Mynzhilki Dam play a
deadly role in the formation of the 1973 mudslide? Probably not but
it was not certain. Fleishman concluded: “Finally, the 1973 Alma-Ata
mudslide obliges us to seriously consider the role of the anthropic fac-
tor in the intensification of mudslide activity.” With this sentence, the
hydrologist cast doubt on the effort of Kazakhstan’s political leadership
to protect Alma-Ata.53
Yet Fleishman did not stop there in his criticism of the measures
taken against mudslides by Kazakh leaders. In his 1978 monograph—
since become a classic academic text book for teaching the hydrology
of mudslides—he acknowledges that the dam indeed played the role
of “absolute weapon.” But he underscored the fact that other well-
known methods could have afforded the capital with less expensive
protection:
The dam . . . the first section of which cost more than 30 million
rubles, was filled to 80% of its height . . . It was necessary to imme-
diately raise it by 50 meters, which cost an additional 35 million
rubles. Thus, the total cost of the dam was more than 65 million
rubles. If the emptying of the glacial lakes, the impetus for the
1973 mudslide, had been carried out in a timely fashion, it would
have been possible to avoid [the mudslide].54
Abandoned after the explosions of 1966–1967 and only reintroduced

in the aftermath of the 1973 mudslide, prevention via monitoring of
the level of the glacial lakes was more efficient than a dam that cost
tens of millions of rubles.55 This unf lattering comparison between the
siphons of Duisenov, Alma-Ata’s mayor, and the “pyramid of Cheops”
of Kunaev, celebrated in propaganda, undermined the unanimity that
the latter hoped to construct around the dam.
40 Marc Elie
The 1977 Bol’shaya Almatinka Mudslide and

the Subjugation of Heterodox Hydrologists
In the 1960s and 1970s, as the capital expanded into at-risk valleys
and glacial thaw began to be clearly felt by contemporaries, mudslides
continued to cause serious damage. This was carefully hidden by the
authorities not only as part of the more general climate of secrecy but
also because the resources that had been invested were supposed to
guarantee that the danger of mudslides was under control, a claim end-
lessly repeated by the media.
Kazglavselezashchita had soon acquired remarkable expertise in the
design and construction of anti-mudslide dams. There were, how-
ever, difficulties to be overcome. Priority was given to the Bol’shaya
Almatinka. Running parallel to the Malaya Almatinka, the Bol’shaya
f lowed along the western f lank of the capital. Tangential to the town,
the gradient of this second river was less steep and the river was long-
considered marginal in efforts to protect against mudslides. With the
very rapid growth of Alma-Ata, however, the Bol’shaya Almatinka
soon found itself cutting through the heart of the capital. In the second
half of the 1960s, the political leadership discussed the possibility of
building a dam on the river given the southwesterly expansion of the
town in accordance with the city’s general construction plan. This con-
siderably increased the territory exposed to mudslides in the basin of
the Bol’shaya Almatinka and brought the town closer to the zone of
maximal mudslide destruction.56
In 1975, the general directorate designed a dam far downstream the
river—indeed, located in the midst of the town. Construction began
in 1977. On August 3, glacial lake no. 13, located under the Glacier
of the Soviets (at an altitude of 3,400 meters) broke its moraine and
poured into the Kumbel’ river, a tributary of the Bol’shaya Almatinka.
On August 4, a new mudslide got underway at lake no. 13. Its rate of
f low reached 10,000—11,000 m 3/s. In relative terms, the two mud-
slides were not especially large: according to estimates, all August 1977
mudslides taken together moved between 2.4 and 3.2 million m 3 of
sediment. Newly established observation and alert posts were able to
warn the population. There was nevertheless considerable damage. Not
all vehicles on the roads or walkers in the valley were able to evacuate
and some were swept away by the mudslide. A Kazglavselezashchita
employee posted to the valley, Adyk Ishanov, recounted his narrow
escape. The colleague with whom he was keeping watch, Garik, was
less lucky and was swept away.
I survived the 1977 mudslide . . . We were [Garik and I] in a vehi-

cle with some radio specialists, we were on duty [in the valley].
Of those present, Garik was killed instantly. There were four of
us . . . [pause] He got out of the car before I did, that’s why. We
were lucky. A rock struck the vehicle, ahead of the wave, it threw
us forward and the wave did not have time to swallow us.57
Thirty five years later, Ishanov still intensely remembers the tragic
night of August 3–4, 1977. For this man of few words, who likes
to insist he is only a technician, the emotion surges forth from the
interstices of a disarticulated account. He was lucky; the wave of mud
spared his life. Not so his colleague. In the space of a few seconds,
one was either snatched up by the wave, like Garik, or instead para-
doxically saved by a boulder, like Adyk. All depended on the precise
moment one left the car to scramble up the slope on all fours and get
out of the valley.
Roads, hydroelectric plants, power lines, buildings—the mudslide
stripped the valley in its path. The western neighborhoods of the town
were deprived of water for several days.58 Today, it is thought a dozen
died amid 10 million rubles worth of damage.59 At the time, however,
the authorities forbade reporting on the victims. The disaster was only
brief ly mentioned on page four of the municipal and republican press.
Under the title “A Glacial Lake Erupts,” KP attempted to show that the
situation was under control, but its objectives—to deny there had been
any damage and reassure the population—were inconsistent. In order
to give the impression that the mountains were under control, the arti-
cle specified that the “mudslide service” was monitoring the level of
lake no. 13, “observing it around the clock,” for it had “long” been
known that the lake might serve as the starting point for a disastrous
mudslide. The “heat” nevertheless got the better of all precautionary
measures: runoff from the Glacier of the Soviets constantly increased
the water level in the lake. After the moraine broke, a “10 to 12 meter”
wave of mud swept through the valley “without causing any damage.”
“Thanks to the energetic measures taken by the services of the Party
and the state, the population was evacuated from the dangerous zone
and all ended well.” The article nevertheless specified that water would
soon be restored to the town and the road at the bottom of the valley
repaired. The sensationalist fascination for natural forces (a wave of
10 to 12 meters high) was in contradiction with the assertion of total
control and absolute security. In order to reassure the population, the
article had to acknowledge damage that was perceived on a daily basis
42 Marc Elie
(water outages, damaged roads), contradicting the claim that no harm

had been done.60
This official statement of total control and the absence of damage
created favorable conditions for the development of stubborn contro-
versy regarding the role played by Kazglavselezashchita in the onset of
the August 3, 1977 mudslide. The KP article suggested that the direc-
torate was working to lower the level of the lake when the moraine
broke. And indeed, since 1974, directorate engineers had been digging
trenches and canals in the glacial moraines of the high valleys of the
Alma-Ata region to empty the lakes, where water had risen to danger-
ous levels. Given the difficult working conditions at the foot of the
glaciers and the brief window of time during which canals could be
dug each year, the engineers relied on the method of explosive blast-
ing made famous during the construction of the Medeo Dam: cleverly
placed charges dug the canal all alone, without any need for excavation
machines. Indeed, Kazglavselezashchita lacked necessary glaciologi-
cal expertise regarding the complex structure of the moraines, which
mixed ice, rock, glacial debris, and melt water.61 Nor did it take the
particularities of each glacier and moraine into account. Often, they
had a foundation of permafrost that rendered the use of explosives dan-
gerous and complicated.
Thus the suspicion with which the directorate was regarded—had
not the efforts to empty lake no. 13, of which official rhetoric boasted,
been responsible for the sudden rupture of the moraine on August 3,
1977? To this day, Kazglavselezashchita continues to defend itself
against these accusations. To do so, it has had to abandon the reassuring
rhetoric that characterized the official press in the 1970s. At the time,
the press had claimed that the behavior of the Glacier of the Soviets
was being monitored on a daily basis. But it now seems that “no one
observed . . . the processes that led to the rupture” of the moraine in
the months preceding the tragedy and “there was no data concerning
glacial-origin mudslides in the zone” of the Kumbel’ river. Explosives
were indeed used to empty lake no. 13 in 1974 and 1975 but no later:
“In 1976–1977, no improvements were made to the moraine of the
Glacier of the Soviets.”62 The image that Kazselezashchita seeks to
give is that of a total absence of oversight once the lakes had been emp-
tied in 1974–1975. The August 3 rupture, for its part, is presented by
the directorate as entirely resulting from natural processes internal to
the development of the moraine.
This version of the facts was already contradicted at the time in aca-
demic publications by some mudslide specialists among the scientists
in the mudslide department of the Kazakh Weather Service’s research

institute (KazNIGMI): in 1980, Boris Stepanov claimed that the work
carried out by Kazglavselezashchita had weakened the moraine and pro-
voked the disaster.63 The director of the department, Iurii Borisovich
Vinogradov, went further yet: the works had directly provoked the
disaster by melting the ice that made up the moraine.64 The hydrolo-
gists further claimed that directorate specialists were working on the
lake on the day of the disaster, August 3, 1977.65 Following the disaster,
the explosive procedure for emptying lakes was abandoned.
The controversy opposing weather service hydrologists and
Kazglavselezashchita engineers soon became open conf lict.66 The
political leadership supported the directorate, which staked its cred-
ibility on the issue. The year following the disaster, Vinogradov was
obliged to accept a promotion in Leningrad. The mudslide department
he had created and led, which in the space of ten years had become a
leading actor in mudslide studies in the USSR, was purged and emp-
tied of its vital forces, with its members and equipment appropriated
by Kazglavselezashchita. The directorate thus succeeded in capturing
the last duties to fall outside of its purview: scientific studies and the
coordination of mudslide research.67
Toward the Development of the Mountain Environment:

The “Economy of Disaster” and the
Promotion of Tourism
The victory over the mudslide marked a crucial stage in the develop-
ment of the valleys overlooking the Kazakh capital. The development
of touristic and sporting infrastructure allowed mountain resources
to be promoted for recreational and sporting use without ever attain-
ing the levels of demographic and economic pressure that had been
reached in the same period in the Alps. Their promotion was made
possible by the “victory over the mountain” that the construction
of the Medeo Dam had symbolized. At the same time, mountain-
top development increased resident and tourist exposure to hazard.
The transformation of the valleys to protect downstream settlements
in this way combined with touristic development of the mountains
to produce an “economy of disaster” of the type described by Mark
Carey in connection with mudslides in the Peruvian Andes: preven-
tative measures secured the mountains and cleared the way for the
promotion of tourism.
44 Marc Elie
Until the early 1970s, there had been few efforts to develop the two
valleys that rise to the south of Alma-Ata, where the Malen’kaya and
Bol’shaya Almatinkas f low. Prior to the late 1960s, the valley of the
Malen’kaya Almatinka, extending directly from the city center, only
contained a few rest houses for high-ranking officials, the Chimbulak
ski station, the Gorel’nik mountaineering base, a natural skating rink,
and two weather stations. The valley of the Bol’shaya Almatinka had
not been developed for tourism at all. It contained a series of small
hydroelectric stations. The risk of mudslide considerably slowed the
development of the tourist business. Throughout the 1960s, the munici-
pal authorities were obliged to forbid recreational and sporting activ-
ity in the mountains and, in particular, close vacation camps (pioneer
camps) between May and September, the moment of the year when
the risk of mudslide was greatest, at least if temperatures were high and
there had been significant rainfall.68 From the Issyk disaster in 1963
until the construction of the dam, the town’s party committee spent
the summer months in constant worry and issued warning and alerts to
the population. Those responsible for tourism complained that infra-
structure was underdeveloped. In 1970, P. S. Chaban of the Kazakh
Society for the Protection of Nature, the primary duty of which was
to render the mountains as accessible as possible to as many as possible,
wrote an exasperated letter to the Kazakh authorities:
The condition of workers’ rest areas in the valley of the Malen’kaya

Almatinka is unsatisfactory. First, buses only go as far as Medeo
(1500 meters altitude); beyond that point, one must travel by foot
in order to reach the most interesting places . . . Second, the slopes
are absolutely not equipped for walking and the admiration of the
landscape; there are neither trails nor paths.69
On top of all that, a conf lict over the use of mountain resources broke
out between residents of an Alma-Ata suburb and tourist organizations.
Between the Butakovka, a tributary of the Malen’kaya Almatinka, and
Medeo upstream, residents kept themselves busy growing fruits and
vegetables in their orchards and kitchen gardens. They maintained
livestock that they freely pastured along the f lanks and hills of the
valley—to the great displeasure of the organizers of touristic excur-
sions, who sought open vistas and virgin nature free of pastoral use
that was also quickly and easily accessible.70
The explosions that laid the foundations of the Medeo Dam in 1966–
1967 symbolically marked the opening up of the mountains to the
tourist trade. The development of anti-mudslide infrastructure played

a dual role in the development of the valleys of the Malen’kaya and
Bol’shaya Almatinkas. On the one hand, the extra protection allowed
tourist sites to be located in areas sheltered by the dams. On the other
hand, the construction of public engineering projects and the surveil-
lance and retrofitting of glacial lakes required that roads be constructed
in the valleys in order to transport men and material. As shown by the
enlargement of the Edel’veiss mountaineering base in 1971, these roads,
which rose as high as 3,500 meters, where the glaciers began, supplied
the main axes of touristic development in the Alma-Ata region.71
Development of the natural environment did not take place without
urban transformation or a negative impact on the inhabitants. Indeed,
although dispersed and few in number, hill settlements represented a
problem for the planners. Whether protective or recreational, the new
structures were accompanied by the destruction of houses and the relo-
cation of their residents. Of course, the giant Medeo and Bol’shaya
Almatinka dams also aimed to avoid the application of extensive zoning
across the length of the valleys: the protection offered by the dams was
precisely supposed to allow for construction in zones that would other-
wise have been off-limits for construction. Yet the construction of new
infrastructure—the dams as well as the enlargement and concreting of
river beds downstream—required that homes be relocated. And before
the structures were completed, preventive zoning was practiced. Thus,
in 1967, as the political leadership discussed the possibility of providing
mudslide protection for the Bol’shaya Almatinka, the Weather Service
carried out risk zoning in the valley. Around a hundred families were
moved to safe ground. At the same time, other valleys were affected by
zoning and relocation.72 In the Malen’kaya Almatinka, 400 individual
homes were constructed on the banks of the river in the Alma-Ata
suburbs. This was a cause of exasperation for the individuals responsible
for river zoning and development. In their view, the relocations they
had requested had not advanced fast enough, either because the families
concerned refused to leave or because there were not a sufficient number
of new accommodations available to them.73
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider a site that was essential
to the development of winter sports in Alma-Alta: the skating rink
under the Medeo Dam. The Kazakh authorities’ ambition was to put
Medeo and the Chimbulak ski station at the heart of winter sports
development in the USSR and compete with the best European ski
stations in the context of the major expansion of Alpine tourism of the
1960s and 1970s. The Medeo anti-mudslide dam symbolically marked
46 Marc Elie
human victory over untamed nature and inaugurated the conquest of

the mountain tops by the planned tourism industry.
Even before the dam had attained the capacity required to effectively
protect the lower valley of the Malen’kaya Almatinka, the Kazakh
leadership was promoting the construction of a large skating complex
to replace the old rink, which had operated from 1951 to 1970. Until
the dam was constructed, the risk of avalanche and mudslide had pre-
vented the rink from being transformed into a genuine ice stadium.74
The project, which was drafted in the immediate aftermath of the
1966–1967 explosions, was particularly ambitious: the open air skating
rink was to operate year round, with artificial ice produced between
eight and twelve months out of the year and the quality of the ice to
be maintained across the entire surface of the rink (10,500 m 2). It was
to be capable of hosting the Soviet and international championships
and competing with the best European skating rinks. The 1950s and
1960s had not been a glorious time for Soviet speed skating. At the
top of the Soviet sporting bureaucracy, there was a strong desire that
it be revived.75 In order to compete with the great nations of skat-
ing, the best infrastructure possible was necessary. Architecturally, the
project was seemingly impossible due to the risk of earthquake, ava-
lanche, and mudslide. An avalanche corridor overlooked the site of the
skating rink from Mount Mokhnataia. Specialists had calculated that
the skating rink would be buried under thousands of cubic meters of
snow in the event of avalanche. Wooden protective barriers that can
still be seen were constructed to hold back the snow and slow possible
avalanches.76
Located directly above the skating rink, the dam protected it from
mudslides. But the dam and skating rink made awkward neighbors. As
we have seen, the first project ratified by the government anticipated
digging a canal at the top of the structure on the side of the valley
where the rink was to be located. The idea behind this was simple: in
the event that the reservoir was ever completely filled—such a disaster
was anticipated once every 10,000 years—the upper canal would be
opened in order to evacuate mud and prevent the dam from being sub-
merged. The digging of this canal was an enormous construction site
in its own right: the emergency sluice was to be located on a level with
the top of the dam and dug straight from the granite of the right bank.
With a width of 20 meters, the canal was to be laid in concrete. But
in 1967 the architects and planners settled on locating the new skating
rink on the left bank of the Malen’kaya Almatinka just above the place
where the drainage canal was to be laid. In short, the skating rink could
not be constructed if the canal was dug. Astonishingly, this coincidence

did not lead to the sort of bureaucratic conf lict one might expect. Very
quickly and without encountering any opposition, the builders of the
dam gave way to the planners of the skating rink. The latter under-
scored the exorbitant cost of the canal and the likelihood that it would
not be used for thousands of years:
It is perfectly clear that in 100 or 200 years the methods for fight-
ing mudslides will be completely different and, given that the
anti-mudslide structures already constructed entirely protect the
town from the effects of mudslides for a minimum of 100 years, it
does not appear expedient in the present day to additionally erect
a drainage canal, an expensive and difficult project.77
Thus remarked I. Itter, director of the Kazakhvzryvprom explosives com-

pany, which had carried out the 1966–1967 blasts. At Kazgidroproekt,
the dam’s designers were also willing to compromise. Ultimately, the
Kazakh government decided to retain the skating rink project without
modification: it would be constructed as anticipated under the drainage
canal. The canal itself was indefinitely postponed and, ultimately, not
constructed at all. This episode illustrates the degree to which the engi-
neers were blinded by their own calculations, even though these were
based on extremely weak—in fact, entirely false—foundations. In 1973,
just six years after the blasts, a mudslide that was supposed to take place
once every 10,000 years hurtled down the slopes of the Malen’kaya
Almatinka. Entirely isolated, the dam represented a considerable dan-
ger and, as we have seen, it was necessary to pump the mud out of the
lake—that is, perform the job of the projected upper canal.
The authorities of the Republic invested considerable financial,
material, and human resources to accelerate construction of the dam
and skating rink, two particularly prestigious projects entirely in the
hands of local architects and builders. They received authorization to
declare the skating rink work site an “urgent all-Union Komsomol con-
struction site” (Vsesoiuznaia komsomol’skaia udarnaia stroika). Alongside a
1,000 or so workers, 1,300 young people belonging to the komsomol
brigades (part of the Komsomol communist youth organization) were
put to work building the structures.78 The aim was to complete the
projects in time to host international sporting events in 1974. The
project was completed before deadline: in late 1972, the media cel-
ebrated the construction of the skating rink in two years rather than the
four years that had been anticipated. The inauguration took place with
48 Marc Elie
great pomp: the figure of a billion poods of grain was written on the
ice, or the quantity of grain delivered to the Fatherland by Kazakhstan
in honor of the 50th anniversary of the USSR, symbolizing the rela-
tionship of vassalage uniting the Republic to Moscow.79
In February 1974, Medeo hosted the women’s European speed skating
championship—a small competition, it is true, but nevertheless serving
to inaugurate the “world’s fastest skating rink.” Tourist guides gushed
with superlatives: The “pearl of the mountains” was a “factory,” a place
where “international records are forged,” dethroning the best skating
rinks in the world one by one. One did not shy away from speaking of
“the largest winter sports complex in the world in the high mountains”
(1,691 m), and even of the “eighth wonder of the world.” The climatic
and technical qualities of the site were reputed to be exceptional: pure
glacial water as well as ideal temperatures, air pressure, and humid-
ity. Sheltered by the dam, Medeo conjoined the virtues of the moun-
tains and architectural achievement: technological prowess allowed for
the use of mountain resources. Medeo supplanted the skating rinks
of Davos and Inzell. The dam and skating rink complex became the
“visiting card” of Alma-Ata, which presented itself as a winter sports
capital. One day, it was thought, the Winter Olympics might be hosted
there.80 When not used for competition or training, the skating rink
was open to all: one could skate in the open there on a 30o C day. In
1973–1975, a hotel was constructed on site to host athletes.
With the construction of the dam, the republican authorities showed
their new confidence in the field of architecture. They no longer
required the help of Moscow in order to implement very ambitious
urban and architectural plans. Thus, the new general plan (General’nyi
plan) for developing the capital, launched in 1970 and brought to com-
pletion in 1978, was the first such in the history of Alma-Ata to have
been entirely imagined and designed in the Republic. The first three
general plans were issued by Muscovite and Leningrad urban planning
firms. The 1970s saw the realization of very ambitious sites, especially
of a touristic character. These were entirely conceived by the archi-
tectural firms of the Kazakh capital—in particular, Almaatagiprogor,
which had also designed the skating rink.81 The touristic and cultural
sectors were at the heart of this new Kazakh ambition.
As tourism and mountain sports developed and the population of
Alma-Ata doubled in the space of 20 years, reaching a million inhabit-
ants by the early 1980s, prestigious grand hotels came to dominate the
city center. Entirely conceived and produced in Kazakhstan, these hotels
were among the first seismically engineered structures in Alma-Ata: the
Alma-Ata Hotel (nine f loors, 1967) and, above all, “Alma-Ata’s first sky
scraper,” Hotel Kazakhstan (102 m, 1977).82 The experience gained in
the course of the directional explosions in the Medeo Gorge had allowed
Kazakh architects to make progress in the design of seismically engi-
neered buildings. In the 1960s, dwellings four stories tall or higher began
to replace low buildings: given the limits on horizontal development,
continued growth meant the town had to rise.83
In the mid-1980s, Alma-Ata tourist authorities welcomed 231,000
walkers and organized outings for 1,193,000 visitors.84 The valleys of
the Malen’kaya Almatinka and its tributaries had become one of the
main winter sports complexes in the USSR, with Chimbulak pro-
moted to the rank of Olympic training station for the Soviet downhill
ski team. Medeo accumulated more than a hundred world records in
speed skating. Ambitious projects, like the construction of a cable car
linking Chimbulak to Medeo and the reconstruction of the Gorel’nik
station, which had been abandoned following the disaster of 1973, were
impeded by the industrial and financial difficulties that aff licted the
USSR from the early 1980s onward.85 But the fact remains that the
directional explosions of 1966 and 1967 launched and made possible
this “conquest of nature,” as the hackneyed transformist rhetoric of
official brochures liked to put it. The year 1973 seemed confirmation
that humans had indeed subdued nature and could now use it as they
intended to develop a culture of recreation and physical prowess.
* * *
After the narrowly avoided disaster of 1973, the dam settled into the
geography of the town. Mythologized accounts of scientific progress,
technological victory, heroism among the rescuers of 1973, and sport-
ing achievement condensed around Medeo. Centered on the dam and,
as it were, inspired by it, the sporting and recreational heart of the
Kazakh capital was built. Entertainment and physical culture became
central to urban life and the image the capital sought to project to
the outside world: they were the realization of a certain idea of what
the late socialist town should be. As a result, the mountain under-
went a process of touristic promotion centered on (and thanks to) the
dam: Medeo is the key to the north face of the Tian Shan range.
In the vocabulary of the time, it “subdued” the wild mountain. Yet,
despite the political leadership’s efforts to bring this about, there was
never unanimity concerning the dam: how best to protect Alma-Ata
remained a question of intense controversy. While the prevention of
50 Marc Elie
mountain hazards facilitated and authorized touristic promotion, it

also increased exposure to them. In the complex world of glaciers,
prevention efforts can themselves lead to disaster.
Notes
1. D. Muldagaliev, Sel’. Poemy, trans. V. Savel’ev, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1980,

p. 140.
2. M. Elie. “Coping with the ‘Black Dragon.’ Mudf low Hazard and the Controversy
over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958–1966,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian
and Eurasian History, vol. 14, no. 2 (2013): 313–342.
3. The “black dragon” or “dragon of the mountains” are the traditional names given
to mudslides in the Tian-Shan mountains.
4. Eric Jones coined this expression in The European Miracle: Environments, Economies,
and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003, p. 23. Mark Carey also uses the expression, which he
claims to have adapted from Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism,” In the Shadow
of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010, pp. 11–12. In the present chapter, the expression “economy of disasters”
describes the historic correlation between reactions to natural disaster phenomena
and economic and environmental planning.
5. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (trans. Thomas Scott-Railton), New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
6. Figures put forward by the director of excavations, Itter, and by the mayor of
Alma-Ata, Duisenov: Central State Archives of Kazakhstan, fond R-1137, opis’
27, delo 770, list 150 (hereafter TsGAK R-1137/27/770/150); E. Duisenov,
“Selezashchitnye meropriiatiia v Zailiiskom Alatau (Respublikanskaia komissiia
po bor’be s seliami, Alma-Ata),” in H. A. Ahmedzhanov (ed.), Voprosy izucheniia
selei, Moscow: Moskovskoe otdelenie gidrometeoizdata, 1969, p. 79. The auto-
intoxication of the engineers and planners is emphasized in the case of other major
projects by K. Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus. Sowjetische
Technik- und Umweltgeschichte, 1948–1967, München, Oldenbourg, 2010, p. 561.
7. Official statement of the Kazakh government in anticipation of the second explo-
sion, February 15, 1967: TsGAK R-1137/27/769a/ 104.
8. A. Kulakov (director and screenwriter), Vzryv sozidatel’ (The Creative Explosion),
black and white documentary film, 50 minutes, Kazakhfil’m Studios, 1970; V. Ageev,
B. Masal’skii, M. Poltoranin, et al., “Zaslon protiv stikhii,” Kazakhstanskaia Pravda,
July 22, 1973, p. 4.
9. Marc Elie, “Coping with the ‘Black Dragon.’ ”
10. According to Aleksandr Berggrin, one of the staunchest opponents of the dam,
the explosions had transformed the landscape of the Medeo Gorge into a “banal
quarry”: indeed, the reservoir formed by the dam was not intended to contain
a lake, since the dam was not designed to hold water. The empty reservoir had
and still has a distressing appearance. Berggrin lamented the loss of Tian Shan
pine trees, a unique variety, which the explosions had obliterated from vast
stretches of terrain. V. Proskurin, “Don-Kikhot al-Matinskii,” Stolitsa vol. 31
(1994): 15. The two-story building located 400 meters from the impact burnt
down; E. Duisenov, Selevye potoki v zailiiskom Alatau (ed.), A. F. Litovchenko,
Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan Editions, 1971, p. 165.
11. A. Iu. Khegai, Ukroshchenie “chernogo drakona,” Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan Editions,
1998, pp. 59–60.
12. Proskurin, “Don-Kikhot al-Matinskii.”
13. T. Kh. Akhmedov and Sh. Ch. Chokin, “Selezashchitnaia plotina Medeo posle
prokhozhdeniia katastroficheskogo selia 15 iiulia 1973 g.,” in Problemy gidroen-
ergetiki i vodnogo khoziaistva, no.12, Almaty: Nauka, 1975, p. 1 10. Letter to the
People’s Oversight Committee of the Central Committee and the Council of
Ministers of the USSR: “Concerning Alma-Ata Anti-Mudslide Protection and
the Gidroproekt Projects,” December 21, 1965. State Archives of the Russian
Federation (hereafter GARF), R-5446/100/270/80–88.
14. Esen, Duysenov, “O Profilakticheskikh Meropriyatiyakh Po Bor’be S Selyami V
Rayone Lednika Tuyuksu,” ed. Kh. A. Akhmedzhanov, Voprosy Izucheniya Seley,
Trudy KazNIGMI, 33 (1969): 83–87; Esen Duysenov, Selevye Potoki V Zailiyskom
Alatau, ed. A. F. Litovchenko, Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan, 1971, p. 146.
15. E. Iafiazova, “Sila seli. Mozhet li Almaty spat’ spokoino?” (online). Available at
http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1189029000 (Accessed on October 31,
2011).
16. Khegai, Ukroshchenie “chernogo drakona,” pp. 32–33; Ageev et al.
17. Minutes of the meeting of the State Commission for Preventing Floods,
Avalanches and Mudslides, June 5, 1973. TsGAK 2017/1/1324/1–3.
18. GARF R-5446/1047/936/1.
19. Khegai, Ukroshchenie “chernogo drakona,” p. 32; Yy. B. Vinogradov, A. E. Zems,
R. V. Khonin, “Selevoi potok 15 iiulia 1973 g. na Maloi Almatinke,” in Selevye
potoki, no. 1 (1976): 60–73.
20. R. Iafiazova, Priroda selei Zailiiskogo Alatau. Problemy adaptatsii, Almaty: Ministry
of environmental protection of Kazakhstan (in Russian: Ministerstvo okhrany
okruzhayushchey sredy RK, 2007, p. 129.
21. Interview with Alexei Iur’evich Khegai, former director of Kazglavselezashchita,
May 22, 2010, Almaty.
22. Decree of the Office of the Party Committee and the Executive Committee of
the Region of Alma-Ata, “On the Extraordinary Anti-Mudslide Commission,”
July 15, 1973. Russian State Archives of Social and Political History (RGASPI)
17/141/1572/143–144.
23. Khegai, Ukroshchenie “chernogo drakona,” pp. 35, 38.
24. A. Sviridov, “Bol’sjoj sel’—1973: tridtsat’ piat’ let spustia” (online) Informatsionnyi
portal ZAKON.KZ no date. Available at http://www.zakon.kz./118339-bolsjojj
-seel-1973-tridcat-pjat-let.html (Accessed on April 1, 2010].
52 Marc Elie
25. N. A. Pritvits, V. D. Ermikov, and Z. M. Ibragimova (eds.), Vek Lavrent’eva.

Novosibirsk: Izdatel’stvo SO RAN, filial “Geo,” 2000, p. 62.
26. The water that seeped through was clear and the dam was not in the process of
liquefying (the scientists who carried out the measurements in the days of July
claimed it was suffusion). For the most part, it was leaking through the upper part
of the dam, where the body of the dam was less dense. Akhmedov and Chokin,
“Selezashchitnaia plotina Medeo.
27. Sviridov, “Bol’shoj sel’-1973.”
28. Oraz Bisenov, director of the Glavalmaatastroi construction company, cited
above.
29. “Ukroshchenie stikhii,” Kazakhstanskaia Pravda, July 19, 1973: 4.
30. Ageev, Masal’skii, Poltoranin, et al., “Zaslon protiv stikhii.”
31. Iafiazova, Priroda selei, p. 104.
32. V. Ageev, B. Masal’skii, and M. Poltoranin, “Dni i nochi Medeo,” Kazakhstanskaia
Pravda, July 25, 1973: 4
33. Ageev, Masal’skii, Poltoranin, “Dni i nochi Medeo,” p. 4.
35. Here is how Brezhnev presented the BAM project’s labor problem to his col-
leagues in the Politburo in July 1974: “The main difficulties are going to concern
the labor force. I believe that this work site should be declared a ‘work site of
the entire people’ so that the construction of the line, like the construction of
Dneproges [hydroelectric center], Magnitka [coalfield of the town of Magnitka/
Magnitogorsk], the Volga automobile factory and the reconstruction of Tashkent,
may be brought to completion by the representatives of all republics, territories
and regions.” Memorandum from L. Breshnev to the Politburo of the CC of the
CPSU. Prior to July 1, 1974. On the problem of constructing the Baikal-Amour
rail line, Vestnik arhiva prezidenta. Spetsial’noe izdanie: General’nyi sekretar’ L. I.
Brezhnev: 1964–1982, Moscow, 2006, pp. 169–170.
37. R. Sarimov, “Pregrada dlia selia,” Vokrug sveta, vol. 9 (1974): 59–63.
38. Decree of the Central Committee of the KCP and the Council of Ministers
of the Kazakh SSR, August 13, 1973, no. 423: “Results of the Realization of
the Medeu Anti-Mudslide Efforts,” APK (Arkhiv Prezidenta Kazakhstana)
708/56/46/134–144; Decree of the Office of the KCP Committee and the
Executive Committee of the Town of Alma-Ata, August 24, 1973, no. 82,
“Concerning the Presentation for Decoration by the Honorary Diploma Holders
and Diploma Holders of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR and Financial
Awards,” APK 412/54/40/56–57.
39. N. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World
War II in Russia (New York, Basic Books, 1994); B. Bonwetsch, “ ‘Ich habe an
einem vollig anderen Krieg teilgenommen’; Die Erinnerung an den ‘Großen
Vaterländischen Krieg’ in der Sowjetunion,” in H. Berding, K. Heller, and W.
Speitkamp (eds.), Krieg und Erinnerung: Fallstudien zum 19 und 20. Jahrhundert.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000, pp. 145–168.
40. Leonid Girsh, then chief of the civil defense brigade, cited in Sviridov, “Bol’shoi
sel’-1973.”
41. Khegai, Ukroshchenie “chernogo drakona,” p. 41.
42. Akhmedov and hokin, “Selezashchitnaia plotina Medeo.”
43. RGASPI 17/141/1551.
44. A. Iu. Khegai, Vremeni bystraia reka . . . , Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan Editions, 1999,
pp. 52–53.
45. Decree of the SM of the USSR, February 11, 1974 no. 106, “Measures for
Reinforcing the Large Structures Protecting the Town of Alma-Ata and Other
Localities of the Kazakh SSR against Mudslides and Avalanches,” GARF
R-5446/108/283/4550.
46. Decree of the CC of the KCP and the SM of the Kazakh SSR, September 17,
1973, “Measures for Reinforcing the Protection of the Town of Alma-Ata and
Other Localities of the Republic against Mudslides,” APK 708/56/52/141–145.
47. S. M. Fleishman, I. A. Mossakovskaia, and V. F. Perov, “Almatinskii sel’ 15 iiulia
1973g.,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, no. 2 (1974): 35–39; S. M. Fleishman,
“Inzhenernye uroki almatinskogo selia,” Gidrotekhnika i melioratsiia, no. 2 (1974):
19–22.
48. Elie, “Coping with the ‘Black Dragon.’ ”
49. S. M. Fleishman, “Uroki almatinskogo selia,” Nauka i zhizn’, no. 8 (1974): 16.
50. Fleishman, Mossakovskaia, and Perov, “Almatinskii sel’ 15 iiulia 1973g.”
51. G. I. Shapovalov, “Galopom po Evropam. Po povodu odnoi stat’i v zhurnale
‘Gidrotekhnika i melioratsiia.’ ” Kazakhstanskaia Pravda, October 9, 1974.
52. Iu. B. Vinogradov, Etiudy o selevykh potokakh (Leningrad: Gidrometizdat, 1980),
p. 132; Vinogradov, Zems, and Khonin, “Selevoi potok 15 iiulia 1973 g. na Maloi
Almatinke” explains that Gorel’nik and Mynzhilki played a negative role, even if
they in no way created the mudslide.
53. Fleishman, Mossakovskaia, and Perov, “Almatinskii sel’ 15 iiulia 1973g.”
54. S. M. Fleishman, Seli. 2nd ed., Leningrad: Gidrometizdat, 1978, p. 236.
55. Fleishman, Seli, p. 236. In fact, the cost of the dam was even higher. We have
seen that in 1973–1974 alone the Kazakh government received 63 million rubles.
It is unknown how much it received in the following years. Above all, this figure
omits the money laid out by Kazakhstan and the cost of the very extensive mate-
riel delivered in kind in the course of Soviet projects. Finally, it is to be noted that
the construction of the dam cost much more than 30 million rubles.
56. TsGAK 2017/1/1363/26–29.
57. Interview with Adyk Ishanov, September 30, 2011, Kazselezashchita post of the
Bolshaya Almatinka dam.
58. T. Baimoldaev and V. Vinokhodov, Kazselezashchita—operativnye mery do i posle
stikhii, Almaty: Bastau, 2007, pp. 53–54.
59. T. S. Stepanova, “Antropogennye seli,” Selevye potoki, vol. 12 (1992): 95.
60. “Vsplesk morennogo ozera,” Kazakhstanskaia Pravda, August 5, 1977.
61. Baimoldaev and Vinokhodov, Kazselezashchita—operativnye mery do i posle stikhii,
p. 117.
54 Marc Elie
62. Ibid., pp. 52, 54.

63. Ibid., p. 57; Iafiazova, Priroda selei, p. 133.
64. Vinogradov, Etiudy o selevykh potokakh, p. 133.
65. Stepanova, “Antropogennye seli,” p. 95.
66. Another dispute opposed KazNIGMI hydrologists and directorate engineers over
the emptying of a glacial lake in the Issyk valley. Stepanova, “Antropogennye seli.”
67. Baimoldaev and Vinokhodov, Kazelezashchita—operativnye mery do i posle stikhii,
p. 138; R. V. Khonin, “Issledovatel’ selevykh potokov Iu. B. Vinogradov,” Mednyi
vsadnik Kazakhstan, no. 1, 2004, p. 39.
68. E. Duisenov, Alma-Ata, Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan Editions, 1968, p. 91.
69. K. Sh. Alimgazinov and A. L. Krivkov (eds.), Parki i skvery goroda Almaty. 1917–
1991 gg. Sobrnik arkhivnykh dokumentov (Almaty: Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv goroda Almaty, 2008), pp. 313–315.
70. Ibid.
71. Iu. Kukushkin, “Shchit na puti selia,” Kazakhstanskaia Pravda, October 15, 1971.
72. V. Nikitin, assistant director of the Weather Service of Kazakhstan, information
concerning the progress of the weather service of Kazakhstan in the implemen-
tation of the August 2, 1963 decree of the council of ministers of Kazakhstan,
no. 617, June 15, 1967. TsGAK 2017/1/1368/68–74.
73. For example, P. F. Lavrent’ev, interim director of KazNIGMI, the research insti-
tute of the Kazakh Weather Service, to the Kazakh government, June 6, 1964.
TsGAK R-1137/27/762/85–86; V. Tret’iakov, director of construction of the
anti-mudslide protective works to E. D. Duisenov, president of the Alma-Ata
Soviet, March 18, 1964, TsGAK R-1137/27/764/3940.
74. V. Evdokimov, Ledovaia zhemchuzhina, Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan Editions, 1978,
p. 10.
75. Ibid., p. 9.
76. M. Elie, “Managing the ‘White Death’ in Cold War Soviet Union. Snow
Avalanches, Ice Science, and Winter Sport in Kazakhstan, 1960s–1980s,” pre-
sented at the conference Frost, Ice, and Snow: Cold Climate in Russian History,
German Historical Institute, Moscow, 2012.
77. Itter to Kunaev, September 26, 1967: TsGAK R-1137/25/770/150.
78. The Komsomol (Communist Youth Union) functioned among other things as an
inexpensive labor pool when workers were lacking for distant and backbreaking
projects. Contrary to the use of soldiers and prisoners, whose labor continued to
play a major role in pharaonic projects after the death of Stalin, the posting of the
young communists to construction sites was widely reported and provided mate-
rial for vast ideological campaigns. The contribution of the Komsomol was thus
foregrounded in Khrushchev’s projects to bring the virgin lands of Kazakhstan
into cultivation (1954) and the construction of the rail link between Lake Baikal
and the Amour River (BAM, 1972).
79. Evdokimov, Ledovaia zhemchuzhina, pp. 18, 27.
80. Ibid., pp. 5–6, 28, 61; G. I. Bogomolov, Gornaia zhemchuzhina, Alma-Ata:
Kazakhstan Editions, 1980; I. I. Maliar, Alma-Ata (Ocherk-putevoditel’), Alma-Ata:
Kazakhstan Editions, 1974, p. 99.
81. Istoriia Almaty v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, Almaty: Credo, 2009, p. 337.
82. Ibid., pp. 341, 342, 346.
83. Duisenov, Alma-Ata, p. 201.
84. R. N. Nurgaliev (ed.), Almaty. Entsiklopediia, Almaty: Glavnaia redaktsiia “Kazak
entsiklopediiasy,” 1996, pp. 293–294.
85. In the 1970s, the political leadership had very ambitious projects for developing
the valley of the Malen’kaya Almatinka. Cf. Duisenov, Selevye potoki v zailiiskom
Alatau pp. 174–178. Most of these could not be realized, however. The Medeo-
Chimbulak cable car was finally constructed in 2010–2011 and is now in service.
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Maloi Almatinke,” Selevye potoki, vol. 1(1976): 60–73.
CH A P T E R T WO
Monitoring Animals, Preparing Humans:

An Ethnographical Study of Avian Influenza
F r é dé r ic K e c k
What are the conditions for carrying out an ethnography of avian

inf luenza? The anthropologist who studies this phenomenon must
simultaneously follow the rules of what George Marcus has termed
“a multi-sited ethnography in/of the world system” and engage in what
Stefan Helmreich has described as “multispecies ethnography.”1 The
study of f lu viruses and of the microbiologists who hunt them does
indeed entail crossing biological (in moving from one cell or animal
species to the next) and political borders (in moving from Paris to
Geneva, Mexico City to New York, Guangzhou to Hong Kong, and
Tokyo to Phnom Penh). I have chosen to employ the ethnographic “I”
in order to gather these actors of varying sizes and ontologies, who
together constitute what I call a “world with f lu.”2 This does not mean
that this world is solely an artifact of the ethnographical study itself; in
fact, it first emerged a half century ago concomitantly with the f lu virus
surveillance networks that were set up around the world in anticipa-
tion of a return of the 1918 pandemic. Hong Kong, where I carried out
my fieldwork, had the particularity of being the place where H5N1, a
very lethal virus that moves from birds to humans, was first identified
in 1997. With the advent of H1N1 in 2009, an eventuality for which
the territory had spent the preceding 15 years preparing, Hong Kong
thus seemed to offer an excellent vantage point for taking an informed
look at the global mobilization to fight the virus. I thus studied how f lu
viruses transformed the “life world” via sociotechnological dispositifs,
60 Frédéric Keck
drawing for this purpose upon an ethnography conducted in close

proximity with the actors concerned: humans, birds, and microbes.
While the ethnographer thus plays, in Marcus’ phrase, the role
of “circumstantial activist,” he cannot content himself with simply
observing the many reconfigurations of this world at the risk of being
“complicit” with the experts who move in pursuit of viruses.3 The
pandemic caused by the H1N1 virus in 2009 and the vaccination cam-
paign with which the international health authorities responded to
it leads one to ask the following question: did the pandemic disaster
really take place or did this “world with f lu” remain virtual? As it hap-
pens, avian inf luenza blurred the usual distinctions between “risk” and
“disaster,” between knowledge and the real, to the benefit of that third
space, the virtual, in which the actors moved. The virtual in this way
had real effects. The ethnographer thus plays the role of the “sociolo-
gist of critique,”4 observing the gap between reality as it is described
by institutions and the proliferation of a life world that challenges it.
In the event, the American-origin H1N1 virus, which was at once less
severe and more contagious than predicted, confounded the pessimistic
scenarios that had been established for the Asian-origin H5N1 virus.
An ethnography faithful to its object thus leads one to track f lu viruses
while preserving the uncertainty as to whether or not they will ulti-
mately assume disastrous proportions. While it cannot be said that the
pandemic remained merely virtual (it did in fact have biological and
political effects), neither can one say that it was a “real” disaster (it did
not achieve the scale foreseen by risk management plans).5
One way to remove this difficulty is to observe the rationalities that
entered into tension at the time of avian inf luenza. By “rationality,”
I mean the collection of logical arguments that rely upon a techno-
logical dispositif to act upon what they define as a reality. Three ratio-
nalities enter into play when a virus moves from animals to humans.
Prevention consists in monitoring animals and in destroying them
when they become host to the f lu; precaution outlines a space of delib-
eration regarding external risks; preparedness leads humans to partici-
pate in simulations designed to identify points of vulnerability.6 These
rationalities have distinct genealogies that intersected with one another
in the emergence of the H5N1 virus in Hong Kong, crystallizing a
complex collection of heterogeneous fears around it. By retracing the
history of these rationalities, the ethnographer acts as an ethnologist
and anthropologist, returning to the general principles of the human
condition.
Monitoring Animals, Preparing Humans 61
It can thus be said that, while there was no pandemic disaster for
humans (to this day, there have been 300 victims of avian f lu in the
world), such a disaster did indeed take place for tens of millions of
slaughtered poultry. Avian inf luenza thus allows one to ethnographi-
cally observe what Foucault called the “threshold of modernity,” passing
from the sovereign power to “make die or let live” to a “biopower”
aiming to “make live or let die.” 7 It is indeed striking that, to fight a
human disease that has killed 300 people since 1997, humans are “made
to live” in the expectation of a pandemic that may kill 60 million
people while other humans are “let die” from neglected diseases such
as malaria, and tens of millions of poultry are “made to die.” It thus
becomes clear that some actors choose to “let animals live” by remov-
ing them from the market economy in which their diseases develop. By
subverting the “world with f lu” from within, such actors allow the eth-
nographer to escape from the fate of the “circumstantial and complicit
activist” and become a sociologist of critique. The anthropological turn
is thus not an escape toward generality but rather the necessary condi-
tion for examining critical processes in the field.
The French Food Safety Agency: From Mad Cow

Disease to Avian Inf luenza
I discovered “emerging infectious diseases” while observing expert

discussions at the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA), which was
established in 1999 following the “mad cow” crisis. In 1996, the trans-
mission to humans of Bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) made
Europeans aware of what international health authorities had known
since 1976: new infectious diseases emerge as a result of transforma-
tions in relations between humans and animals. The HIV/AIDS virus
and Ebola had thus appeared among African monkeys at the end of
the 1970s as a result of deforestation; prions were probably transmit-
ted from sheep to cows due to reliance on meat and bone meal and a
lowering of the temperature at which these recycled products were
manufactured.8 International experts thus sounded the alarm concern-
ing these “disasters caused by the crossing of species barriers.”9 While
infectious agents are continuously in a state of endless mutation, certain
mutations produce discontinuous effects when they allow these agents
to jump from one species of animal to another, since the behavior of an
infectious agent in a new species is unpredictable.
62 Frédéric Keck
In the case of BSE, this disastrous mutation took a slow and diffuse
form. Like nuclear radiation, the prion invisibly contaminates through
food and its effects only become apparent 20 years later through a sort
of chain reaction within the brain, which takes the form of a sponge. As
the behavior of this infectious agent was unknown (it was not a virus
but rather a simple protein), the principle of precaution required that
all cows suspected of being contaminated be withdrawn from the food
chain. Hence the spectacular measures recommended by AFSSA in
1999, including an embargo on British beef and slaughtering the entire
herd once a single cow tested positive for BSE.10
AFSSA experts were responsible for applying this principle of pre-
caution to other food safety questions and, in the course of their delib-
erations, I saw them address questions as diverse as GMOs, Omega-3s,
and obesity. The evaluation of “nutritional and health risks”—a notion
forged to extend the concerns resulting from the mad cow crisis to the
entire food chain11—aimed to establish the danger represented by each
new food product for consumers depending on their degree of expo-
sure. In the words of its coordinators, AFSSA was a “cocoon,” where
questions regarding new food technologies were submitted for evalu-
ation by academics and researchers from the life sciences. It was not a
“hybrid forum” in which the complaints of producers could enter into
controversy with consumer demands, but rather a site of categorization
where the frontiers between pure and impure asserted at the time of the
mad cow slaughter was reformulated.
Avian inf luenza disrupted this organization of scientific labor. In
September 2005, the United States launched a vast campaign in the
aftermath of hurricane Katrina to prepare for avian inf luenza, which
had left Asia and was at the doors of Europe. In February 2006, the
H5N1 virus was discovered at a poultry farm in the Dombes area of
France, following infection by a wild duck: the farm was put under
quarantine and the poultry slaughtered.12 AFSSA experts had to include
this new risk in their evaluation, for while the virus did not threaten
consumers—it only survived on living animals—it did pose a danger
to poultry farmers. For AFSSA, which had been created to assess food
risks “from the pitchfork to the fork,” it can be said that mad cow dis-
ease was closer to the fork and bird f lu to the pitchfork.
Yet H5N1 did not appear to be analogous to BSE as a risk. While
the risk of BSE resided in its incubation period (and therefore in the
number of infected animals that had entered the food chain), the
risk of H5N1 stemmed from its mutation mechanisms (and therefore
the number of animals among which the virus circulated through
mutations and reassortments). A benign virus suddenly became very

dangerous, leading to analogies with terrorist attacks. As Marc Savey,
a veterinarian who had been in charge of assessing prion disease, and
who was initially a member of the Dormont Committee, explained
to me:
Being a mad cow expert is like watching a film in slow motion;

when you know the beginning, you know the end. If there was a
risk in terms of public safety, that risk had already been taken. For
avian inf luenza, it’s like a classic science fiction film: you know
each amino acid but you don’t know how they will combine.
Hence the role of wildlife, where the combinations take place,
and the risk can be assessed when one knows which animals are
involved. As Avian inf luenza advances very rapidly, we must stay
very calm when people talk of virus bombs; mad cow advances
very slowly, it is very inert, and we must think more rapidly.13
In other words, mad cow was a slow risk (closer to a mistake) and
avian inf luenza a rapid risk (closer to an apocalypse). Food risk evalua-
tors shifted between these two extremes in a speed gradient.14
The rapidity with which avian inf luenza was addressed disrupted the
routine of expertise. While expert committees assessed food risks with
an eye on the accumulation of data (by appointing a working group
responsible for producing a monthly summary of the state of knowl-
edge regarding an at-risk product), avian inf luenza was entrusted to
an Emergency Collective Expertise Group that was expected to react
in real time to mutations of the virus, and enjoyed a direct line to the
agency’s leadership. Maps were shown charting the progress of the virus
from Asia to Europe, and ornithologists were invited to discussions
of animal health experts in which the risk of contamination among
migratory birds was examined.15 There, they debated the following
question: “can birds sick with f lu f ly?”
Above all, avian inf luenza led to a reorganization of animal and
human health experts within AFSSA. For veterinarians, who had until
then been in charge of monitoring farm animals under the aegis of the
Ministry of Agriculture, the response to mad cow disease was con-
stituted encroachment on their domain on the part of doctors: fol-
lowing the contaminated blood scandal, the latter wished to defend
public health, and suspected veterinarians of protecting the interests
of farmers and the agro-food industry.16 Avian inf luenza, by contrast,
provided an occasion for veterinarians to reassert their competencies in
64 Frédéric Keck
defending farmers, for the latter were in the first rank of those exposed
to the risk of H5N1. Outside of AFSSA, avian inf luenza also allowed
the Paris-based International Office of Epizootics to gain inf luence
vis-à-vis the World Health Organization (WHO), leading it to rename
itself the World Organization for Animal Health.
The world of veterinarians was itself nevertheless divided by avian
inf luenza. Some defended a classic rationality of risk prevention and
held that H5N1 was less dangerous than other endemic diseases in
Europe, such as tuberculosis and brucellosis, which imposed real eco-
nomic costs on farmers. Others thought that avian inf luenza was an
opportunity to hold farmers accountable by imposing “biosecurity”
rules that would prevent a disastrous chain reaction capable of caus-
ing a pandemic from taking place on French farms.17 This latter group
of veterinarians defended a rationality of preparedness at the level of
farmers, allying themselves with other groups that deployed this same
rationality in other social spaces. When I left for new field research in
Hong Kong, I thus sought to follow the genesis of this rationality of
preparedness at the avian level.
Hong Kong as a Health Sentinel
Studying avian inf luenza from the perspective of Hong Kong entailed
adopting a new point of view. Until then, I had only encountered
H5N1 through expert discussions in which the participants saw them-
selves as intermediaries between producers and consumers within a
national framework protected by the principle of precaution. Going
to Hong Kong afforded me a global perspective on the goods that, in
circulating the planet, spread potential epidemics. Like AFSSA, Hong
Kong was a “cocoon” in which the activities of the external world
were recast in the form of speculation regarding future threats. Inside
this cocoon, however, one could freely move from laboratory to farm,
visiting poultry markets and hospitals along the way, where the fears
of the rest of the world concerning what was happening in this little
territory were ref lected.
Since its retrocession to China in 1997, Hong Kong has taken on
the role of “health sentinel,” warning the world of the dangers that
emerge in this densely populated zone. Formerly a financial market
where goods manufactured in China passed through English law to
enter the capitalist world (a role that Shanghai has gradually come to
assume), Hong Kong exercised the freedom of expression guaranteed
it by its status as a Special Administrative Region to issue warnings

regarding the excesses of Chinese development.
This new function was largely the creation of Kennedy Shortridge,
who founded the Hong Kong University Department of Microbiology
in 1972. Trained in the Australian school of microbiology, Shortbridge
confirmed Robert Webster’s hypothesis according to which the inf lu-
enza virus mutates in an animal reservoir of aquatic birds before mov-
ing through swine—as the receptors of their respiratory tracks are
compatible with those of both aquatic birds and humans, they are con-
sidered the “intermediate carrier”—to reach humans. He claimed that
southern China is an “inf luenza epicenter” due to its intensive agricul-
tural systems in which aquatic birds, swine, and humans live in close
proximity. And, indeed, this is where the H2N2 and H3N2 inf luenza
viruses responsible for the pandemics of 1957 and 1968 emerged.18 In
the 1970s, Shortridge began to collect a large number of avian viruses
in southern China in order to identify the next pandemic virus and
produce a vaccine. When the H5N1 virus killed 5000 poultry and
8 humans in 1997, the vaccine could not be used as it was manufactured
via chicken embryos. Shortridge thus advised the director of the Health
Department, Margaret Chan, to slaughter all poultry living on the
territory. He subsequently recruited Malik Peiris and Guan Yi to set
up operations to monitor Hong Kong’s domestic and wild bird stocks.
Each of them succeeded in identifying the SARS virus, which, starting
in Hong Kong, infected 8000 people across the world in 2003, and was
transmitted from bats to humans by way of the masked civet, a rodent
highly valued in traditional Chinese medicine.19
The SARS crisis in 2003 thus served to confirm Hong Kong’s role
as health sentinel as Shortridge had conceived it in 1997.20 But it also
produced a strange disconnection between avian inf luenza and other
perceived disasters elsewhere in the world. With nurses dying after
coming into contact with their patients and virus carriers travelling
by airplane, infecting widely dispersed cities in the space of a single
day, SARS was presented as an “Asian September 11th.” The extensive
funds invested in avian inf luenza and SARS research came from the
American government’s fight against bioterrorism.21 In one of their
most cited articles, Shortridge, Peiris, and Guan skillfully appropriated
the vocabulary of preparedness for a terrorist-type disaster to justify
their efforts to monitor the birds of Hong Kong. “The studies on the
ecology of inf luenza led in Hong Kong in the 1970s, in which Hong
Kong acted as a sentinel post for inf luenza, indicated that it was possible,
for the first time, to do preparedness for f lu on the avian level.”22 The
66 Frédéric Keck
leitmotiv of international health authorities after 2003—that “nature

is the greatest bioterrorist threat”—found very concrete application in
the case of Hong Kong: in an experiment that served as a model for
the rest of the world, an entire territory was submitted to the logic of
preparedness for an avian inf luenza pandemic.
Arriving in Hong Kong at the end of this story involved changing
my point of view on avian inf luenza. While my experience of AFSSA,
informed by the mad cow crisis, led me to adopt a skeptical stance
on H5N1, in Hong Kong I found myself caught up in a complex of
fears where Asia and America entered into collision via the acceler-
ated mediation of the inf luenza virus. This fear crystallized around a
frontier that continued to be present in the discourse of Hong Kong’s
inhabitants, although it had ceased to operate politically: the frontier
separating them from China, crossed by birds and humans carrying
H5N1.
Indeed, two episodes indicated that I had myself succumbed to the
fear of a pandemic. Upon returning from a visit to the Mai Po orni-
thological reserve, located on the frontier between Hong Kong and
Shenzhen, I came down with a fever, and for an entire night I believed
that I would be placed in quarantine before awaking in perfect health
the next morning. During my first trip to Guangzhou, where I had
seen the famous wild animal markets described by the Hong Kong
experts as the source of new epidemics, I dreamed that my hotel build-
ing collapsed under a mass of animals, which then took f light at the
appearance of the radiant face of Anson Chan, one of the leaders of
Hong Kong’s Democratic Party.23 I had partaken of the prevailing dis-
course, according to which the defense of Hong Kong society involved
the fight against avian inf luenza. In so doing, I had myself become a
guardian of the health sentinel.
In contrast to the enquiry in the AFSSA, the fieldwork I carried out
in Hong Kong did not take place in the framework of the rationality
of risk. I was unable to study the expert committees that had been
established in the aftermath of SARS at the Food and Environmental
Hygiene Department’s Centre for Health Protection. These expert
committees were inf luenced by the director of the University of Hong
Kong’s Department of Microbiology, Kwok-Ying Yuen, whose activi-
ties were shrouded in mystery, and they rarely met. Rather than cit-
ing the activities of expert committees, media reports directly quoted
microbiologists, who were presented as heroes in the fight against avian
inf luenza. I had the opportunity to observe these microbiologists at
various sites in the territory where they monitored the bird population,
including farms, markets, customs posts, and ornithological reserves.

I also participated in exercises simulating the arrival at hospital of a
patient infected with avian inf luenza. These were intended to identify
“points of vulnerability” and “gaps in knowledge” in preparation for
the pandemic. I also met many individuals responsible for “contin-
gency planning” in business and administration who competed with
one another in the purchase of masks and antivirals. This was less a
matter of evaluating risk than of preparing for disaster.
Critiques of Poultry Slaughters
The anthropology of disaster shows that a multiplicity of discourses and

practices enter into competition with one another, giving meaning to
events that break the continuity of everyday life.24 As elsewhere, Hong
Kong’s preparedness dispositif for avian inf luenza came up against a
collection of practices that led many to question its relevance. The logic
of these practices, most of which were religious in nature, placed the
emergence of avian inf luenza in the context of other disasters for which
preparedness was required.
The first critique was that of the Buddhists. The slaughter of
1.5 million poultry in 1997 had remained present in the memories
of the inhabitants of Hong Kong as an act of violence that assumed
political meaning in the context of the former British colony’s han-
dover to the People’s Republic of China; each of the slaughters that
took place once H5N1 was found in the poultry stock recalled this
traumatic episode. Margaret Chan is today still known in Hong Kong,
less for her role in overseeing the WHO, to which she was elected
in 2006 with the support of China, than as the person who in 1997
told the media: “I eat chickens, you can eat them too.” In response to
her remarks, the Buddhist community, which advocates vegetarian-
ism, reactivated Buddhist thinkers’ traditional critique of ritual sacri-
fice in the celebration of dynastic succession as it had been conceived
in Confucianism.25 In 1997, the Buddhist Association of Hong Kong
held a week of prayer for the souls of the slaughtered poultry, and
its president, Master Koh Kwong, traveled to all points of the fron-
tier to spiritually purify the territory. The massive slaughter of poul-
try was generally seen by the Buddhists of Hong Kong as proof that
the consumption of meat brought bad karma. From this perspective,
the true disaster was not avian inf luenza but the eating of meat and the
organization of a meat industry.26
68 Frédéric Keck
“Ordinary” Buddhists, on the fringes of the official Hong Kong

Buddhist Association, expressed a more radical critique. They prac-
ticed the release of living animals, traditionally known in China under
the name fangsheng. They visited the markets where they bought ani-
mals, which they then set free in a nature reserve after saying prayers.
The aim of this practice was to increase the merit (gongde) of those
who freed them. It could take place alone or as part of a group, and
no Buddhist monk was needed to oversee it. On the Internet, many
sites were to be found where followers of this practice published their
photos and arranged to meet. The Hong Kong Buddhist Association
criticized this popular appropriation of the official religion, emphasiz-
ing that fangsheng means “to purify the heart,” not “release life.” Above
all, it condemned the release of birds, for ornithologists had shown that
most of the wild birds carrying H5N1 were found near the Mong Kok
bird market. These birds, it is true, had been transported, often ille-
gally, from China in small cages in which stress favored contamination
and mass bird graves were often discovered near the places where the
ceremonies took place.
I observed a group of fangsheng practitioners who met every Saturday
afternoon in Tsuen Wan to buy fish, crabs, shellfish, and frogs with
the intention of releasing them into the harbor before sharing a veg-
etarian meal. They knew that it was forbidden to free birds and had
found an available substitute in these aquatic animals. Daniel Lo, a
former insurance agent turned water recycler, organized this activity.
“I know that people think we’re crazy,” he told me. “But there is so
much suffering in this market. We cannot free all of the animals but
we can reduce a little of their suffering and increase our merit.”
A more traditional reaction was codified in the terms of the Taoist
religion. The importance of Taoism in popular religion was pointed
out to me by a Hong Kong anthropologist, Tik-Sang Liu, who had
studied the religious practices of a village of migrants whose principal
economic activity consists in raising poultry.27 “If you want to know
how the people of Hong Kong protect themselves from diseases,” he
told me, “go to the Taoist festival of Lam Tsuen.” This festival (called
jiao) takes place every ten years in a village famous for its “wishing
tree.” That year, it brought together five thousand people from the
four corners of the world, and the committee had spent five million
Hong Kong dollars to finance the organization of performances and
vegetarian meals. Under a giant bamboo canopy, actors continuously
performed Cantonese opera in order to entertain the ghosts, for whom
fruit was laid out alongside the stage, and to draw them away from the
altars devoted to Taoist divinities, to which priests said prayers on the

opposite side. A rooster’s throat was slit at the start of the festival and
its blood was poured throughout the village in order to repel aggres-
sive energies, a practice that had been forbidden due to avian inf luenza.
The Taoist festival presented itself as the inversion of the traditional
meal of the Chinese New Year, in the course of which nine meats
are consumed in the temple of the ancestors and a soup containing an
entire chicken represents the unity of the familial clan. The territorial
organization of the villages by Taoist priests, who are more sensitive
to geodesic inf luences, contests the division into family clans practiced
under the Confucian tradition of the cult of the ancestors.28 According
to the Taoists, avian inf luenza was caused by a clan-based organization
of the territory that appropriated its vital energies rather than allowing
them to regulate themselves internally.
The Taoist framework allows one to interpret popular reactions to
the measures taken against avian inf luenza, particularly in poultry
markets. While it was common for the citizens of Hong Kong to pos-
sess farmyard poultry 20 years ago, they were obliged to give up this
practice after 1997, and now must go to the market to purchase living
poultry (huoji). Living poultry is a preferred plate to offer guests for rea-
sons of both f lavor and hygiene: one can verify a bird’s state of health
before it is killed. In the market, poultry merchants are separated from
other shops by a corridor where posters remind consumers that, due
to avian inf luenza, they are not allowed to bring a living bird home
with them. After having chosen a bird, the client continues shopping
while the bird’s throat is cut and it is plucked in the rear of the shop.
Merchants are forbidden from keeping alive any poultry that remains
at the end of the day, which obliges them to sell pieces cut up the night
before alongside living birds. As a merchant of “Kamei” chicken, a spe-
cies raised in Hong Kong, that is twice as expensive as chicken from
China, told me: “We are always stressed out, it’s hard. The government
threatens to take away our permits. Some protest against the govern-
ment, some have even thrown themselves into the sea.” In Chinese,
the term xiahai designates both the act of throwing oneself into the sea
and the privatization of an activity. In fact, poultry merchants effec-
tively threw themselves into the sea in June 2009 to protest against the
reduction in the number of living chickens that could be sold, thereby
dramatizing their demand to be freed from the constraints imposed on
their activity by avian inf luenza.
While preparedness for pandemic disaster thereby mobilizes many
forms of discourse and practice involving relations between humans
70 Frédéric Keck
and nonhumans, one may wonder how to describe the action of orni-
thologists. The latter speak the scientific language of virus monitoring
but they explain avian inf luenza by reference to the excessive action of
the human species on its environment. They can thus play the role of
intermediary between globalized scientific networks and local com-
munities expressing demands in a religious-type discourse. For these
environmental defense groups, there is no need to refer to the suffer-
ing of animals or the disruption of life cycles; it is enough to show the
effect stress has upon animal diseases and to relate it to large commod-
ity f lows. This may be why the ornithologists were the most active
interlocutors in my study: while microbiologists only offered partial
information, ornithologists immediately gave me a complete presenta-
tion of the issues at stake in avian inf luenza. My work with the orni-
thologists allowed me to understand that monitoring animals is not just
one among several measures for fighting avian inf luenza in a complex
of security fears. It can also be employed as a critical tool against the
commodification of the living in the context of other environmental
mobilizations.
The Metamorphoses of Inf luenza
The twofold function of animal monitoring became clearer to me with

the emergence of a new type of pandemic inf luenza, the H1N1 virus of
2009. The 2009 pandemic could be described either as a victory for the
coordination of vigilance networks (it allowed one to observe in real
time how the new virus spread, from the infection “patient zero” to its
dilution in the global population) or instead as a failure of risk assess-
ment and management (the virus proved less dangerous than antici-
pated and, as a result, the international vaccination campaign that was
quickly launched met with resistance from the citizens concerned).29 In
the perspective that I have adopted—that of the health disasters result-
ing from the crossing of species barriers—it above all meant a new step
in my understanding of the possibilities of the inf luenza virus within
the animal reservoir and therefore new considerations concerning what
animal monitoring means for human preparedness.
The H1N1 virus that emerged in the Veracruz village of La Gloria
(Mexico) resulted from a reassortment of human viruses with swine and
bird viruses that had found a pathway to enter human cells. This village
was located near a high-intensity hog farm belonging to the American
company Smithfield, which had already been widely criticized by
environmentalist groups.30 The alarm, however, was only sounded on

April 27, 2009, when the Mexican health authorities identified a large
number of severe respiratory ailments in the country capital, most of
which subsequently proved not to be caused by H1N1.31 In the space
of a few weeks, this new virus spread across the planet, soon replac-
ing the H3N2 seasonal inf luenza, for which a vaccination campaign
had already been organized. On June 11, the WHO therefore declared
this pandemic virus, launching a new vaccine campaign. France and
Switzerland, where the largest f lu vaccine-producing pharmaceutical
companies (Sanofi-Pasteur and Novartis) are based, ordered two doses
of vaccine per person. The People’s Republic of China fabricated its
own vaccine and was the first to vaccinate its population on the occa-
sion of public rallies to celebrate the regime’s sixtieth anniversary on
October 1.
Having crossed the species barrier, this virus did not kill poultry
or swine, but it did threaten to kill nonimmunized humans. That is
why, in contrast to the H5N1 virus, it was possible to produce vaccines
by using chicken embryos. When hogs were slaughtered, notably in
Egypt, where they are raised by the Coptic Christian community, it
thus served no purpose. It has been shown, however, that the H1N1
virus is a variant of the H1N1 that caused the “Spanish inf luenza” pan-
demic of 1918, which disappeared from the human population in 1958
and passed back into swine in 1976 after having escaped from a Soviet
laboratory.32 The long history of H1N1 over the course of the twen-
tieth century, with the virus crossing back and forth between species
and continents, explains why it was less dangerous than anticipated: in
February 2010, 18,000 people died of it, fewer than the number who
die each year from seasonal inf luenza. The elderly—the main victims
of seasonal inf luenza—were less affected by H1N1 and it was above all
pregnant women and the obese who experienced a comparatively high
death rate.33
When H1N1 emerged in Mexico, I found myself in Buenos Aires
for a series of courses and conferences. “This must be for you,” I was
told by one of the people who had invited me. In fact, I had modified
my course on “biopolitics” to include this event, which had given a
new direction to global preparedness for pandemic disease. I had the
feeling that it was only in terms of the local conjuncture in which
it appeared that such an event had meaning, and I rapidly tested this
hypothesis by reading the Argentine press and discussing the matter
with students. The Argentine government had for several months been
struggling with dengue fever, an emerging disease in Latin America
72 Frédéric Keck
transmitted by an African mosquito. By firmly responding to the inf lu-

enza pandemic and in particular by stopping all f lights to Mexico, it
could respond to those who blamed it for the progress of dengue fever.
But the media rapidly denounced the apparent Peronism of the gov-
ernment’s effort, insinuating that warnings of an inf luenza epidemic
were the product of a North American plot led by the manufacturers
of Tamif lu. Online videos pointed out that Donald Rumsfeld was a
shareholder in Roche, and drew connections between the apocalyptic
discourse of the WHO and statements regarding the “war on terror-
ism.” In the end, Argentina was among those countries most heavily
affected by the H1N1 inf luenza in the course of summer 2009 and had
to suspend leisure activities and legislative elections.
Back in France, I was struck by rumors that inf luenza experts were
in a “conf lict of interest” with the pharmaceutical industry as well as
by the abandonment of the term “swine f lu,” which was used in most
other countries. France thus replayed the scenario of the mad cow dis-
ease. But since the pork farming lobby had succeeded in def lecting
accusations targeting its activities, suspicions turned toward the phar-
maceutical industry, which had until then seen the emerging infectious
diseases market as unpromising. By speaking of the “A(H1N1) f lu” and
decreeing a military-style mobilization, with health personnel ordered
to gymnasiums selected by the police, the French government showed
itself incapable of explaining to the general public the real issues at
stake in the pandemic. While citizens concerned about the conditions
under which the vaccine had been produced drew upon the principle
of precaution, the government relied upon the principle of equal access
to vaccination as it had been asserted by the National Consultative
Committee for Ethics. Pandemic contingency plans, which had been
drafted in expectation of the H5N1 virus, for which no vaccine existed,
had not anticipated that the vaccination campaign would fail. Rather
than concentrating on the work of defining which segments of the
public were first in line for receiving vaccination, the authorities soon
had to deal with the management of excessive stocks of vaccine.
When I returned to Hong Kong in late 2009, I was present for a
farcical reprisal of the SARS crisis: a Mexican man carrying the virus
had stayed in Wan Chai’s Metropark Hotel and all of the hotel’s clients
were placed under quarantine for a week. Was this because the name
of the hotel resembled that of the Hotel Metropole, where “patient
zero” from the 2003 SARS epidemic had stayed? For a week before
the hotel’s 283 guests were released without the trace of a symptom,
the people of Hong Kong were witness to their antics, as if watching a
reality TV show. The farce took a sinister turn when the first victims
of H1N1 proved to be Philippine workers, with the government pro-
posing sequestration measures that threatened to stigmatize this already
dominated population. The vaccine purchase campaign took so many
precautions that, by the time a reliable vaccine was finally available to
doctors—it was sold by Sanofi-Pasteur—the WHO had declared the
pandemic over.
This survey of the world of pandemic f lu confirms the teachings of
the anthropology of disaster: to wit, that an event only assumes meaning
in terms of the crises that preceded it, whether they be the September
11 attacks in the United States, the mad cow crisis in Europe, or the
SARS epidemic in Asia. Such crises structure the organization and
perception of the framework in which the event appears. As each of the
countries that I passed through prepared for the pandemic in keeping
with their memory of these earlier crises, the surprising behavior of
H1N1 could only be interpreted through this memory.
What seemed to me the best position—that is, the closest to what
actually happened—was occupied by a team of young microbiologists at
the University of Hong Kong. On June 11, 2009—the very day that the
WHO declared the virus a pandemic—their team published a genetic
analysis of the evolution of the H1N1 virus in the animal population.
Trained by Guan Yi, an Australian and two Indian scholars sketched
the phylogenetic trees of the virus on the basis of sequences available
from online digital databanks. They began by applying this method to
mushrooms. In 2003, they extended it to SARS and H5N1 and, finally,
H1N1 in “real time.” Their article showed that a “twin” virus of H1N1
circulating among humans had been detected on pigs in Hong Kong
in 2004 and shared seven of eight genes with the Mexican virus. The
conclusion was as follows: “Movement of live pigs between Eurasia and
North America seems to have facilitated the mixing of diverse swine
inf luenza viruses.”34 The American Department of Agriculture drew
upon this article to claim that the H1N1 virus had not passed through
American pigs but rather through Asian ones. Although they acknow-
ledged that it was difficult to verify this “hypothesis,” they advanced
a speculative “scenario” according to which a human being from Asia
introduced the virus to America and then passed it on to swine, from
whence it once again returned to humans.35 In response, the microbi-
ologists stated that their study must not lead one to blame Asian swine
in the same way that Chinese chickens had been singled out as the
source of avian inf luenza. On the contrary, the North American health
authorities were to be blamed for not having monitored animal stocks
74 Frédéric Keck
as intensively as their counterparts among the Hong Kong researchers,

for they might otherwise have identified the pandemic virus before it
emerged. The article concluded in this way: “Yet despite widespread
inf luenza surveillance in humans, the lack of systematic swine sur-
veillance allowed for the undetected persistence and evolution of this
potentially pandemic strain for many years.”
This position gave new meaning to Hong Kong’s role as a “sen-
tinel.” When Kennedy Shortridge proposed this expression, he was
using it to refer to an “epicenter” where a pandemic disaster emerges
before spreading to the rest of the world. This ref lected a “tropical
medicine” approach that detected diseases in the “densely populated”
tropics before they made their way to “developed countries.” In 2009,
Shortridge, then in retirement, had indeed sounded an alarm of this
type, declaring, “It is probably in the tropical countries more than in
the countries of the South that this virus will experience the contortions
of reassortment in the coming months.”36 But the position of Gavin
Smith and his colleagues was different: it implied that the circulation of
animals had become so intense and rapid that pandemic disaster could
break out anywhere. As a result, monitoring must be as intense and
rapid as the globalization of trade itself. Monitoring thus became a tool
of critique. Indeed, these young microbiologists were vegetarians and
very concerned about atmospheric pollution. From their perspective,
the sentinel was no longer a way of turning the disadvantages of the
tropics into an advantage. Rather, it is a critical actor in a globalized
world where humans and nonhumans circulate ever more rapidly.
Biosecurity: From Farm to Laboratory
Most of the fieldwork that I have described up to this point consisted of

brief and rapid trips. Above all, I observed microbiologists in the vari-
ous places where they monitored animals in order to see how humans
entered into (or were absent from) their vision of the “world with
f lu” and chart the various critiques that emerged vis-à-vis measures
to prepare for the f lu. The prospect of pandemic disaster allowed the
very heterogeneous places variously concerned by such a disaster to be
linked together. I will conclude by considering two longer periods of
fieldwork in which I immersed myself in places where humans live in
day-to-day contact with viruses. The experts I observed evaluated the
risk of inf luenza from the perspective of future disaster. Yet, though
constantly exposed to the threat of virus, they did not fear it.
These two places are the laboratory of Hong Kong University’s

Pasteur Centre, which hosted me as a visiting scholar for one year,
and a Yuen Long poultry farm, where I worked for one week as a
laborer. These two places are comparable, in my opinion, because they
implemented rules of biosecurity that are often mentioned by experts
as the main dispositif in the fight against avian inf luenza. Biosecurity
involves considering a farm or laboratory in the same light; that is, as
spaces characterized by the circulation of biological material capable of
transmitting infectious agents.37 Consequently, I propose to carry out
an ethnography of biosecurity, that is, a study of what it means to live
with viruses on a daily basis.38
Wang Yichuan’s farm is one of thirty poultry farms still operating in
Hong Kong. The government encourages farmers to abandon poultry
farming, which was judged excessively dangerous under a Voluntary
Surrender Act that provided compensation for farmers who agreed to
retire. On December 9, 2008, this farm was hit by the H5N1 virus,
which killed two hundred chickens. Among them, half were senti-
nel birds that had not been vaccinated in order to rapidly signal the
virus—the Chinese term is shaobingji, which literally means “whistling
soldier bird.” As this example shows, the rhetoric of the war against
viruses is very much in effect here. By virtue of their activity, farm-
ers are in the front lines of this war; they can “surrender” and retreat
but they can also rely on sentinels to detect danger. These warlike
metaphors were adopted by the media, who presented Wang Yichuan’s
operation as a “model farm” (mofang nonchang). By this, they meant that
the farmer communicated well with the government and journalists.
The term, however, is the same as that used in the People’s Republic
of China to refer to a good soldier or worker. In fact, Wang Yichuan
was the president of a poultry farmers’ union and was committed to a
policy of transparency. He readily collaborated with the Department
of Agriculture officials who killed the 70,000 poultry on his farm and
stayed in quarantine with his wife for a month in order to clean it. “Not
a single feather remains,” he proudly told me.
When I asked Wang Yichuan whether I could work on his farm,
he readily agreed. He wanted me to witness the strength of his busi-
ness and spoke to me of the Chinese expansion in Africa; he himself
possessed another farm across the border, and spent most of his time
managing these various commercial activities. I was nevertheless a little
surprised by the run-down character of the equipment on his model
farm. The poultry was crammed into a pyramid of cages in two metal
buildings aerated by large ventilators. Biosecurity tools were present
76 Frédéric Keck
but little used; a wheel dip at the entrance to the farm (to clean the
tires of vehicles as they entered and left) and foot baths (often skipped
by workers) in front of each building. Rolls of metal netting had been
purchased but not laid around the buildings, and sparrows were often
to be seen entering the farm (rumors had attributed the farm’s infec-
tion to these sparrows). Four laborers worked on the farm—two men
maintained the building, another fed and cleaned the poultry, and a
woman looked after chicks and eggs. She also vaccinated the poultry
and prepared the men’s meals.
Carting away the masses of waste produced by a poultry farm—the
counterpart of the large quantity of food that is administered to birds—
entails sharing farmers’ habits and concerns.39 While chickens are regu-
larly found dead of stress and trampled by their fellow creatures, virus
is less often a concern than the quality of their food; cockroaches had
infested the grain bags and they needed to be removed; the vaccine had
aged and had to be changed. To test their fear of contagion, I asked the
workers whether they ate poultry. The woman slaughtered the poultry
but only prepared it for the evening meal once the workers had cleaned
off. This little break was necessary so that the chicken could pass from
a living creature to food. At the end of the week, merchants came at
nightfall to pick up a thousand birds. Mr. Wang’s farm was located next
to a container warehouse on which one could read the slogan, “We
carry, we care.” This expression nicely applies to the activities of the
farm—a transit point in the circulation of living goods where they are
also cared for.
It can thus seem odd to compare a poultry farm to a laboratory in
which cells are cultivated. Yet in both cases, the avian inf luenza virus
seems to reveal vital circulations, and the threat of pandemic is brushed
aside in the interest of attention to life in its particular conditions. Under
the scientific leadership of Malik Peiris, the laboratory of the Pasteur
Centre developed cell culture methods in a way that complemented
the phylogenic techniques employed by Guan Yi at the University of
Hong Kong. On a scale running from one to four depending on the
dangerousness of the infected virus, the laboratory possesses level two
biosecurity. Indeed, living viruses are not directly injected into cells;
rather “pseudo-viruses” are fabricated by attaching a dangerous virus’
entry and exit proteins to the shell of a less dangerous one. This means
that one observes the entry and exit of the virus in the cell without
infecting it—that is, without replicating the virus’ genetic material.
As Jean Millet, currently completing a doctorate on the entry pro-
teins of the SARS coronavirus, explained, the aim of biosecurity is less
to protect the experimenter than to protect the experiment. It allows

the experimenter to ensure that the experiment can be read, that is,
it cannot be contaminated by other infectious agents. After having
reserved the time slot for two hours, the experimenter must go through
a decontamination chamber where he/she wears a smock, overalls, a
mobcap, protective glasses, and two pairs of gloves. He or she then
puts on shoe covers and crosses a line traced on the f loor in such a way
that shoes remain in contact with the decontamination chamber while
the shoe covers are only in contact with the laboratory. In the hoods,
a constant f low of air prevents the infectious agents present in the air
from penetrating the experiment. Finally, all of the material is cleaned
and a large portion of it is run through an autoclave. “I need to feel
clean,” says Jean. “You have to imagine the virus on the ground. It’s
true that a laboratory is not an ecological site, a lot is thrown away, but
we thereby gain time relative to old material that had to be washed for
long periods.”
The coronavirus was kept in a refrigerator together with the monkey
epithelial cells into which it had been injected. The use of refrigera-
tors in the laboratory allows one to slow down and synchronize the
life cycle of viruses and cells, just as is done in the case of the artificial
insemination techniques that had been established in the farms over
the course of the 1950s.40 These frozen viruses still bear the name of
the person who carried them (like Carlo Urbani, a doctor working
in Hanoi who was the first to warn the international community of
SARS and subsequently died from it). After having carried out the
infection, Jean put it under the electronic microscope to render visible
the colocalization of the virus proteins and the cell by f luorescence.
His hypothesis was that the coronavirus succeeded in appropriating
the action of the dendritic cells, which were the first to turn toward
the infectious agents to contribute their antigens to the immune sys-
tem. Jean described these cells as the organism’s sentinels. Microscope
imagery showed the manner in which the cells died after absorbing the
virus: some entered into “apoptosis,” a “clean death,” in which the cell
digests the virus as if recycling waste, while others were in “necrosis,”
with the viruses exploding them from within, thereby multiplying and
infecting other cells.
Observing the viruses’ activities in cells under the gaze of a micro-
biologist allows one to see avian inf luenza in a different light than
that provided by expert evaluations of the risk of pandemic. If viruses
are part of the cycles of living things, only transformations in the
manner in which they circulate can cause disaster for humans. In
78 Frédéric Keck
particular, the work of Malik Peiris shows that the exceptional lethal-
ity of H5N1 was due to a “cytokine storm”—that is, a disturbance
of the immune system when confronted with a virus that, because it
comes directly from birds, is too distant from the human organism.41
Biosecurity thus no longer aims to eliminate viruses as enemies but
rather to establish the appropriate distance between living things to
ensure that their interaction remains possible. One may thus employ
the term that stood out in my study of the farm. There is care in the
laboratory, that is, attention given to the particular conditions of liv-
ing things in order to allow them to reproduce while revealing their
constitutive relations.
With the term biosecurity, the anthropology of avian inf luenza
therefore finds a point of both entry and exit. At the macroscopic level,
the notion of biosecurity refers to a collection of heterogeneous sites
where preparations are made for pandemic disaster in a strange alli-
ance between the military and sanitary domains, animal medicine, and
human medicine. But it also covers practices that render visible at the
microscopic level relations between living beings. When these rela-
tions are interrupted, they can lead to disaster. Care and attention are
needed if they are to be maintained. Monitoring animals simultane-
ously involves subjecting them to security oversight under threat of
pandemic and taking care of them in the diversity of settings in which
they live. Sentinels thus appear as salient points where the possibilities
and threats of living beings are more visible. By sounding the alarm at
various levels of living things—from the cell in the laboratory to the
political territory and the farmer’s chicken—they represent particularly
interesting sites for the study of the “world with f lu.”
Notes
1. George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of

Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24 (1995): 95–117;
Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural
Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–576.
2. Frédéric Keck, Un monde grippé, Paris: Flammarion, 2010.
3. George Marcus, “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scene of
Anthropological Fieldwork,” Representations, no. 59 (Summer 1997): 85–108.
4. Keck, Un monde grippé.
5. On this point, I do not agree with Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s claim that the disaster
must be posited as real “in another possible world”: the issue is to grasp the real
effects of a virtual disaster. See Frédéric Keck, “Bergson dans la société du risque,”
in Camille Riquier and Frédéric Worms (eds.), Lectures de Bergson, Paris: PUF,
2011, pp. 164–184.
6. Andrew Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 2
(2006): 247–271, and “The Generic Biothreat, or How We Became Unprepared,”
Cultural Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 3 (2008): 399–428.
7. Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know (Lectures at the College De France
1970–1971 and Oedipal Knowledge), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, and
“Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, New York:
Picador, 2003.
8. François Moutou, La vengeance de la civette masquée. SRAS, grippe aviaire . . . D’où
viennent les nouvelles épidémies? Paris: Le Pommier, 2007.
9. Albert Osterhaus, “Catastrophes after Crossing Species Barriers,” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 356, no. 1410: 791–793.
10. Martin Hirsch et al., L’affolante histoire de la vache folle, Paris: Balland, 1996; Marc
Barbier and Céline Granjou, Métamorphoses de l’expertise. Précaution et maladies à
prion, Paris-Versailles: MSH-Quae, 2010.
11. Martin Hirsch, Ces peurs qui nous gouvernent. Sécurité sanitaire, faut-il craindre la
transparence? Paris: Albin Michel, 2002, and Cécile Lahellec, Risques et crises ali-
mentaires, Paris: Lavoisier, 2005.
12. Vanessa Manceron, “Les oiseaux de l’infortune et la géographie sanitaire: La
Dombes et la grippe aviaire,” Terrain, no. 51 (2008): 160–173.
13. Interview, February 2007. See also M. Savey, “Les leçons de la vache folle,” Esprit,
no.11 (1997): 107–120.
14. Frédéric Keck, “Risques alimentaires et catastrophes sanitaires. L’Agence fran-
çaise de sécurité sanitaire des aliments, de la vache folle à la grippe aviaire,” Esprit,
vol. 343 (2008): 36–50.
15. Frédéric Keck and Vanessa Manceron, “En suivant le virus de la grippe aviaire, de
Hong Kong à la Dombes,” in Sophie Houdart and Olivier Thiery (eds.), Humains,
non-humains. Comment repeupler les sciences sociales, Paris: La Découverte, 2011,
pp. 65–74.
16. Frédéric Keck, “Conf lits d’experts. Les zoonoses, entre santé animale et santé
publique,” Ethnologie française, vol. 39, no. 1 (2009): 79–88.
17. Frédéric Keck, “From Mad Cow Disease to Bird Flu. Transformations of Food
Safety in France,” in Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (eds.), Biosecurity
Interventions. Global Health and Security in Question, New York: SSRC-University
of Columbia Press, 2008, pp. 195–225.
18. Kennedy Shortridge and C. H. Stuart-Harris, “An Inf luenza Epicenter?” Lancet,
vol. 2 (1982): 812–813.
19. Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS, With a New
Preface on Avian Flu, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007, and Frédéric
Keck, “Une sentinelle sanitaire aux frontières du vivant. Les experts de la grippe
aviaire à Hong Kong,” Terrain, no. 54 (2010): 26–41.
20. This was also the case during the crisis of melamine-contaminated milk, which I
was on the scene to observe during my 2008–2009 stay in Hong Kong: Frédéric
Keck, “L’affaire du lait contaminé,” Perspectives chinoises, vol. 1 (2009): 96–101.
80 Frédéric Keck
21. Jeanne Guillemin, Biological Weapons. From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs
to Contemporary Bioterrorism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
22. Kennedy Shortridge, Peiris J. S. Malik, and Yi Guan, “The Next Inf luenza
Pandemic: Lessons from Hong Kong,” Journal of Applied Microbiology, vol. 94,
no. s1 (2003): 70.
23. On moments where the ethnographer is “taken” in its object, see Jeanne Favret-
Saada, Les mots, la mort, les sorts: la sorcellerie dans le bocage, Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
24. Sandrine Revet, Anthropologie d’une catastrophe. Les coulées de boue de 1999 au
Venezuela, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2007.
25. Vincent Goossaert, L’interdit du boeuf en Chine. Agriculture, éthique et sacrifice, Paris:
De Boccard, 2005.
26. I tried to vary what I called “the Buddhist critique” of avian inf luenza by study-
ing the forms it took in Japan and Cambodia, that is, the opposing geographical
extremes of East Asia; see Un monde grippé, Ch. 4.
27. T. S. Liu, “Custom, Taste and Science. Raising Chickens in the Pearl River
Delta, South China,” Anthropology & Medicine, vol. 15, no. 1 (2008): 7–18.
28. Cf. David Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the
Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
29. Antoine Flahaut, Jean-Yves Nau, A(H1N1), Journal de la pandémie, Paris: Plon,
2009.
30. Mike Davis, “Global Agribusiness, SARS and Swine Flu” Available at http//
japanfocus.org/-Mike-Davis/3134 (Accessed on June 24, 2014). Mike Davis is the
author of a book on avian inf luenza in which he extends his analysis of natural
disasters linked to the globalization of trade: The Monster at Our Door: The Global
Threat of Avian Flu, New York: Henry Holt, 2006.
31. Jon Cohen, “Out of Mexico? Scientists Ponder Swine Flu’s Origin,” Science,
no. 324 (May 8, 2009): 700–702.
32. David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci, “The Persistent
Legacy of the 1918 Inf luenza Virus,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 361,
no. 3 (2009): 225–229; Shanta M. Zimmer and Donald S. Burke, “Historical
Perspective: Emergence of Inf luenza A (H1N1) Viruses,” New England Journal of
Medicine, vol. 361, no. 3 (2009): 279–283.
33. Richard P. Wenzel and Michael B. Edmond, “Preparing for 2009 H1N1
Inf luenza,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 361, no. 20 (November 12,
2009): 1991–1993.
34. Smith, Gavin, Justin Bahl, Dhanasekaran Vijaykrishna, et al., “Origins and
Evolutionary Genomics of the 2009 Swine-Origin H1N1 Inf luenza a Epidemic,”
Nature, no. 459 ( June 25, 2009): 1125.
35. Donald McNeil, “Swine Flu May Have Come from Asia,” New York Times, June
24, 2009; “New Theory Sees Asia as Swine Flu Source,” International Herald
Tribune, June 25, 2009.
36. Declan Butler, “Swine Flu Attention Turns to the Tropics,” Nature, no. 459 (May
28, 2009): 490.
37. Steve Hinchliffe and Nick Bingham, “Mapping the Multiplicities of Biosecurity,”
in Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier (eds.), Biosecurity Interventions: Global
Health and Security in Question, New York: SSRC/Columbia University, 2008,

pp. 173–193, and C. Caduff, “Anticipations of Biosecurity,” in Lakoff and Collier
(eds.), Biosecurity Interventions, pp. 257–277.
38. This ethnographic material was discussed at greater length in “Nourrir les
virus. La biosécurité dans les fermes et les laboratoires,” Réseaux, no. 171 (2012):
21–44.
39. On the problems involved in the ethnography of animal production for consumer
purposes, see Steve Striff ler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s
Favorite Food, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, and J. Porcher, Eleveurs et
animaux, réinventer le lien, Paris: PUF/Le Monde, 2002.
40. Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 157.
41. J. S. Malik Peiris, Menno de Jong, and Yi Guan, “Avian Inf luenza Virus (H5N1):
A Threat to Human Health,” Clinical Microbiology Review, vol. 20, no. 2 (2007):
243–267.
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———, “Preparing for the Next Emerency,” Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 2 (2006):
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PA RT 2
Participation and Consultation

CH A P T E R T H R E E
Cultivating Communities after Disaster:

A Whirlwind of Generosity on
the Coasts of Sri Lanka
M a r a B e na du s i
A common idea in many studies of catastrophe is that the experience

of disaster ruptures the worldly order, causing the obliteration of every
means of making sense of human existence. According to this approach,
the traumatic fracture of catastrophe cannot be easily repaired, because
it threatens to leave people unanchored from their prospects for plan-
ning, sharing values, acting, and making history as agents present in the
world. The well-known Italian folklorist Ernesto De Martino uses the
concept of “crisis of presence” to describe this condition of displace-
ment and alarming uncertainty that human beings experience under
certain circumstances (disease, death, conf lict, and calamity in general)
when facing the potential loss of the familiar reference points that give
meaning to daily life.
As a permanent anthropological risk . . . the end of the worldly
order . . . is none other than the risk of not being here in every
possible cultural way, the loss of one’s capacity to be present affec-
tively in the world, the progressive diminution of every prospect
for operating in the world until none remain, the catastrophic
failure of every effort to build community on the basis of values.
The solemn exorcism of this fundamental risk characterizes human
culture in general, no matter what technique of exorcism—so to
speak—is used.1
88 Mara Benadusi
Many disaster studies affirm De Martino’s thesis by showing how, in

cases of overwhelming catastrophe (earthquakes, f looding, volcanic
eruptions), the incapacity to act and define one’s own history manifests
as an extreme psychological and social trauma that triggers a kind of
“downward spiral of vulnerability.” My contribution instead explores
the contrasting idea that, at least in some of these apocalyptic situ-
ations, the breakdown of everyday life actually sets the stage for an
unprecedented burst of dynamism. A climate of teeming industrious-
ness takes over in reconstruction sites when the old social conventions
can no longer be taken for granted and must be reestablished or built
anew. As Bruno Latour writes, in these contexts it is even possible to
experience the electrifying and unsettling impression that things could
turn out differently: when “we are no longer sure about what ‘we’
means,”2 what had been taken for granted and thus opaque requires
active effort to continue functioning; we have to pick up the pieces
and agree about how to move forward. Furthermore, in “contempo-
rary states of emergency”3 the interactions that occur on the stages of
catastrophe give the impression of being composed of elements that
come from different places, times, and fields of action, highlighting the
complexity of such regimes of intervention.
Both these sensations are especially strong when the disaster is so
significant in terms of media exposure that it mobilizes global civil
society in an ostentatious expression of solidarity toward the distant
and suffering “other.”4 Through such extensive media coverage,5 today
the entire globe is able to participate in the disaster, producing complex
“geographies of generosity”6 from around the world. This globalized
involvement can translate into an enormous quantity of social-material
resources channelled to the sites where the catastrophe is not only suf-
fered but also “staged and acted out.” 7 Post-tsunami Sri Lanka is exem-
plary not only for the number of victims (always difficult to estimate),8
but also for the quantity of funds allocated for reconstruction9 and the
unprecedented number of international organizations involved.10 The
recent disaster in Haiti is the only case that might be comparable.
In this chapter, I draw on multiple periods of ethnographic research
on the coasts of Sri Lanka in the wake of the 2004 tsunami11 to explore
how the catastrophe functions as a contested laboratory of social learn-
ing. Far from representing a tabula rasa in which people’s ability to
make meaning is threatened or destroyed, the Indian Ocean tsunami
was an opportunity for different technical solutions, values, and forms
of knowledge to circulate on local, national, and transnational levels.
I will show how actors involved in the reconstruction participated
Cultivating Communities after Disaster 89
in a circuit of exchange that offered new learning opportunities but

also brought with it confusion, uncertainty, and conf licts. By learning
opportunities I refer to participatory learning activities in the post-
disaster setting, such as networks of humanitarian operators exchanging
toolkits and repertoires of action through local, face-to-face meetings
or virtual discussion platforms; small groups engaged in experimen-
tal disaster risk reduction simulations, potentially linked with other
similar groups in other “at risk” zones; village committees involved in
participatory planning to design and construct new residential units;
experts working to promote resilience among the disaster victims
through standardized psychosocial toolkits. However, besides a diffuse
community-based and participatory language, such diverse learning
opportunities in post-tsunami Sri Lanka did not give rise to construc-
tive effects in terms of sharing and mutual agreements, and neither did
they produce a harmonious field of knowledge and practices. Instead
of increasing possibilities for real participation and the development of
common interests and goals, these activities often ended up damaging
the actual networking of post-disaster interventions.
My contribution builds on these initial observations to describe how
post-catastrophe community-oriented tools and technologies played a
controversial role in Sri Lanka when used to support affected popula-
tions in their efforts to learn to survive. I will show how the circulation
of Community-Based Disaster Management (CBDM) discourses and
practices created a polymorph regime of exchange among the various
actors engaged in reconstruction, from donors to final beneficiaries,
including each link of the “brokerage chain” of humanitarian aid.12 The
term polymorph refers to the fact that this regime produced neither a
shared repertoire of ideas and actions among givers and receivers, locals
and expatriates, or experts and nonexperts, nor a dialectical opposition
between these divergent poles. In contrast to both of these tendencies
(sharing or opposition), I argue that what emerged in Sri Lanka was a
“polygamy of intervention logics”: the coexistence of divergent visions,
discourses, and practices of post-disaster community design. In some
cases these ended up hybridizing each other; in other cases, they over-
lapped or even caused mutual interference, each producing its own
requirements and forms of reciprocity.
The ethnographic case I analyze demonstrates that the CBDM rhet-
orics informing tsunami reconstruction actually reveal a high degree
of contestation about what character the post-disaster community
should have. Behind a shared vocabulary borrowed from international
approaches to disaster management, there was a proliferation of divergent
90 Mara Benadusi
strategic and value-based logics that could not be easily reconciled.

I therefore conclude by substituting the romantic “community” con-
cept that is so popular in post-catastrophe rhetorics with the concept of
“polity.” Indeed, this latter concept is better suited to describe the fact
that disaster management actors have different levels of interest in the
community and that these interests are differently performed according
to political fields of situated knowledge and practices.
Issues of Scale and Ethnographic Positioning
Disasters and humanitarian interventions are challenging objects

for anthropological inquiry because they involve a methodological
conundrum in terms of scale and ethnographic positionality. In my
case, this challenge was related to the spatial, professional, and ethical
dilemma of situating myself in the multisited, multilevel, and con-
gested field of post-tsunami aid relationships. Regarding the issue
of scale so debated in contemporary anthropology when speaking of
“mobile, trans-local, trans-border . . . sociality,”13 both in my fieldwork
and in this article I have tried to detach myself from the overused
local/global dichotomy. With the help of Bruno Latour’s theory of
spatiality I strove to keep my plane of description as perfectly level as
Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.14 Rather than being situated beyond or behind
the local, decisions about post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka
were made in various equally local sites that were linked up through
traceable connections.
The dislocated dimension of the post-disaster scene forced me to
move across these multiple, equally local contexts: from Sri Lankan
national meeting rooms where humanitarian agencies collaborated
with government institutions in deciding how to manage recon-
struction programs, to local and international NGOs’ offices both in
Sri Lanka and in donor countries; from the Italian Cooperation branch
in Colombo that regulated the national f lows of financing earmarked
for the tsunami, to on-the-ground consultation arenas established to
support monitoring and evaluation missions; from the Vittoriano rooms
in Rome that hosted an exhibit about Italian interventions following
the Indian Ocean tsunami, to the affected coasts of Sri Lanka where
reconstruction projects were translated into practice. These different
contexts have taken on ethnographic consistency not because of their
scale (global/local, micro/macro, North/South), but solely as a result of
the interconnections that intersected there.
To trace these connections, I will follow a circular pathway, both

coming and going along an entire round-trip. I will begin from a trans-
national injunction by William J. Clinton in his role as United Nations
Special Envoy to the Secretary-General, outlining the key propositions
that should guide post-disaster reconstruction. I will then explore how
this action guide was applied in Sri Lanka, concentrating on the Italian
post-tsunami emergency program. Specifically, I will analyze one
of the reconstruction interventions that was promoted by the Italian
Cooperation (IC) office in the country, the so-called Mawella project.
Finally, I will close the exchange circuit generated by the Italian dona-
tions to tsunami survivors by brief ly describing the story of a peculiar
counter-gift that was sent to Italy from Sri Lanka to meet the visibility
needs of the donor country.
The circulation of knowledge is never separable from the con-
texts it moves through and its “chains of translation.”15 Many of the
issues addressed in this chapter revolve around this process of trans-
ferring forms of knowledge, which always involves their movement
through space and, simultaneously, their transformation: what con-
crete actions were used to enact visions and practices of community
design borrowed from international disaster management discourse in
the specific context of post-tsunami reconstruction? How did these
globalized ideas take root and shape in Sri Lanka? Is it possible to trace
this indigenization process while taking into account not only disaster
experiences but also the local history of such concepts from before the
tidal wave? And on the other hand, what are the counter-trajectories
linking the local level of disaster management with the transnational
sphere of humanitarian action? To address these questions, I approach
the post-disaster setting as a learning laboratory wherein divergent pro-
jections of community are brought together around a reconstruction
project. The various strategic and value-oriented logics contained in
this project tried to converge around a common idea of post-disaster
community restoration. However, despite an appearance of consen-
sus, the various disagreements and increasing controversies surrounding
the project functioned to reroute its predicted results in unpredictable
directions. What is most interesting for an ethnography of post-disaster
reconstruction is precisely this story of “re-routings and directional
shifts.”16
In his stimulating article on “aidnography,” Jeremy Gould notes that
“aid has no empirical objectivity irrespective of the position of the
observer.”17 In the months of research I carried out in Sri Lanka fol-
lowing the tidal wave, the market of consultancy roles in the disaster
92 Mara Benadusi
zones would easily have allowed me to take part as an expert. However,

I chose instead to protect my role of independent researcher as much
as possible. It was not always easy. Since the beginning of my research,
I had approached post-tsunami reconstruction by concentrating pri-
marily on the Italian emergency program. Specifically, I followed the
IC technical office staff in their efforts to coplan, supervise, and moni-
tor the reconstruction projects financed by the Italian foreign affairs
department and carried out by Italian NGOs and local partner orga-
nizations.18 In some cases, especially when problems arose in the man-
agement of individual interventions (such as the case I present here),
the trust that I gradually earned among both IC members as well as
some of their local counterparts made me the target of expectations
and requests that went beyond the independent and relatively detached
position I had assumed. What motivated these expectations was the
idea that my anthropological knowledge should be quickly and usefully
made to serve the needs of the humanitarian enterprise. The IC tech-
nical personnel, for example, asked me to help in easing the tensions
that emerged over time between direct beneficiaries and other groups
of tsunami survivors who, in contrast, represented an indirect target.
They also asked me to provide a clear and rapid picture of all the recon-
struction programs carried out in targeted districts so they could avoid
duplicating interventions or simply to coordinate at the local level. In
addition, they encouraged me to act as a spokesperson in sharing the
prevailing visions of the Italian emergency office with the beneficiary
groups. In such cases, what ended up assuring my stance as “witness”
instead of “consulting expert”19 was the incompatibility of language,
perspective, work timing, and methods rather than any refusal on my
part, motivated by the fear of unwanted collusion.
On the other hand, even though I avoided insidious “politics of
collaboration,”20 the terrain of witnessing nonetheless appeared to be
quite slippery. The “hypertrophic” context of post-tsunami Sri Lanka 21
forced me to regularly reclaim a space of legitimization in a setting so
crowded with experts, journalists, cameramen, volunteers, and political
activists, not to mention the nascent phenomenon of disaster tourism.
For months after the tidal wave, travelling across the country’s coasts
as a foreigner required a constant effort to protect myself from being
identified within this extravagant range of humanitarian characters.
The people I had the most trouble making contact with were the sur-
vivors themselves. Given their exposure to the countless encounters
with expatriates, it should not be surprising that tsunami survivors mis-
took the ethic of anthropological witnessing for yet another example of
representation enacted to meet the humanitarian industry’s needs for

visibility. As a matter of fact, the mediatic build-up campaign proved
the most effective tool for feeding the economy of international dona-
tion. During my first fieldwork in Sri Lanka, I chose to follow disaster
management practitioners rather than the final beneficiaries because of
this need to maintain a feasible ethnographic balance in an emergency
regime saturated by humanitarian consultancy mandates. In this way
I tried to escape the strategies of self-presentation as “victims” that local
actors normally employed in order to capture aid.
Building Back Better: Making Community on

the Basis of Values
The huge reconstruction campaign launched in Sri Lanka after the 2004
tsunami attracted an enterprising caravan of donor agencies, humani-
tarian organizations, and governmental bodies under the catchphrase
of “building back better.” Through its very linguistic formulation, this
slogan walks a delicate tightrope between pre-catastrophe and future
temporalities, between what came before and what is yet to come. The
need to restore the conditions of life disrupted by the disaster alongside
the will to push toward a brighter future expresses a tension that is
implicit in all post-disaster interventions.
The idea that reconstruction could become a sort of bridge leading
from emergency to development figured highly in the intentions of
those promoting such an ambiguous yet popular catchphrase.22 Two
years after the tsunami, William J. Clinton even circulated a report,23
based on the Indian Ocean tsunami experience, that outlined the ten
key propositions that should guide disaster interventions according to
the “three Bs” (Building Back Better). In the first place, there is the
community-driven approach, which is also referenced in point ten where
it is argued that disaster management operations should reinforce com-
munities, making them less vulnerable and more resilient than before.
The meanings associated with this approach invoke self-reliance, build-
ing local capacities and recognizing grassroots perspectives.24
Clinton’s ten propositions seek to establish a guide for action, reduc-
ing the adverb “better”—which is in itself both vague and subjective—
to the status of an operational guideline.25 In their various intervention
strategies, however, the numerous organizations at work in Sri Lanka
applied controversial and consistently value-laden significations to the
“Building Back Better” slogan. An analysis of the projects financed by
94 Mara Benadusi
IC in the country reveals the extent to which the enactment of con-

cepts such as community and participation produced conf licting recon-
struction logics on the ground. Instead of a coherent set of languages
and action devices, what emerged was a conf luence of divergent ideas,
practices, and methods of community design, which in reality gener-
ated snags and delays in carrying out the reconstruction. Various factors
support this argument. The emphasis on community ended up perme-
ating post-disaster discourses and practices at every level. However, the
notion of community was treated ambiguously as an end product (a new
post-disaster community) as well as a starting point to be restored (the
preexisting local community). In addition, the emphasis on commu-
nity determined not only the assumptions and ultimate ends of disas-
ter management operations, but also the means used to pursue them.
Indeed, the most popular “intervention recipe”26 in Sri Lanka rested on
community-based techniques. In order to reinforce tsunami-affected
populations and encourage a spirit of constant adaptation to crisis, post-
disaster reconstruction followed the tautological idea of (re)building
communities by instilling a sense of community participation.
The various reconstruction components of the Italian emergency
program in Sri Lanka were granted legitimacy by a set of standardized
participatory methodologies. Like numerous other donors working in
the country, IC promoted the idea of reinforcing affected communities
in order to propel them toward a “more sustainable future though the
construction of something of their own.”27 This idea could be synthe-
sized as follows: in order to encourage the emergence of new resilient
communities, the humanitarian actors tried to cultivate them as if they
were plants. Bound together by mutual engagement, these communi-
ties were imagined to be held together by a shared domain of interest
and a common repertoire of socio-material resources: working experi-
ences, technical tools, ways of addressing recurring problems, collec-
tive memories, and reconstruction histories; in short, a heterogeneous
assortment of communal practices and narratives. They were presented
as ideal “community of practice.”28 However, as Annelies Heijmans
points out, when commenting on the definition of community pro-
vided by UNISDR (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster
Reduction),29 “emphasizing shared values, community cohesion and
common interests is functional for mobilizing purposes, but [leads] to
an apolitical formulation of community problems.”30 Access to com-
mon resources is, in fact, conditioned by inequalities of power within a
society. There is a risk involved when an organ of community consul-
tation is identified or established to carry out a CBDM project: the risk
is that the community being mobilized in decision-making processes

represents the interests of only the most prominent component of the
village (such as local leaders, local elites, and their kinship networks)
and therefore contributes to reinforcing social inequalities present
before the disaster instead of reducing them.
In the case of the IC emergency program, reconstruction projects
consistently and explicitly referenced the idea that interventions must
be conducted through a community mobilization strategy, beginning
from the constitution or empowerment of so-called Community-
Based Organizations (CBOs) or Community Development Councils
(CDCs). Both CBOs and CDCs are small decision-making groups,
usually formed through elections or nomination. In post-tsunami
Sri Lanka, these grassroots organizations were called on to facilitate
relief and reconstruction operations because they were understood as
representing the needs of the entire disaster-affected community at the
local level. For example, they were appointed to manage the timing
and modalities of villagers’ own participation in the projects and their
relations with technical experts (both national and expatriate). The
post-disaster interventions funded by IC thus reproduced the “triad
between community, representation and consultation” already used by
international experts in Sri Lanka in previous development projects.31
In the view of international agencies, it was sufficient to refer to these
organs of representation in order to grant a “community-based” char-
acter to disaster management operations, as if all the members of a
hypothetical social collectivity were equally valorized and mobilized
by the grassroots organizations involved in the consultation phase. In
the words of Pradeep Jeganathan, the problem with this assumption is
not limited to the fact that “one community can have many voices, it
is also that many voices can be unarticulated”32 or silenced for politi-
cal reasons. As the post-tsunami reconstruction unfolded, the truth of
this consideration gradually became more evident to the IC personnel
in Sri Lanka.
The Italian emergency program in the country went beyond the allo-
cation of funds, the choice of NGOs and local partner organizations,
the selection of intervention zones, and the negotiations with national
and local institutions. The IC office in Colombo also treated the tsunami
program as a chance to test an emergency management style based on
a participatory logic that included its own direct monitoring over the
individual reconstruction projects. The office assumed an active role
in both the planning phase and the subsequent implementation phase,
thus moving away from coordination practices guided primarily by
96 Mara Benadusi
economic efficiency and toward a style more concerned with the effec-
tiveness and comanagement of reconstruction activities. As a result of
this more direct and close-up involvement in the lives of individual
projects, the IC office was also able to perceive problems that other-
wise would have remained confined to the grassroots level, such as, for
instance, the problematic application of community-based approaches
in various reconstruction sites. The goal of community building had
to be reached through a jumble of strong value-laden visions of what a
community after the catastrophe should be.
From an anthropological perspective, the problematic character of
“communalization”33 is particularly evident where a wide range of
humanitarian actors (from international donors, NGOs, local govern-
ments, and civil servants, to researchers or monitoring and evaluation
experts) work together to construct a new village comprised of families
that are relocated from different areas in a common far-removed site. It
is equally evident that the methods used to cultivate a “sense of belong-
ing together”34 are themselves bound up with heterogeneous and often
contradictory worldviews and value systems. This is clear even when
the methods and aims of post-disaster interventions are not described
in a way that explicitly references an objective of indoctrinating ben-
eficiaries with a particular set of principles considered instrumental
for community building. In the Mawella project presented here, how-
ever, such an intricate knot of strategic and value-laden logics was less
obvious than in complex cases of communal physical relocation from
previous residential sites. Yet, even if the goal of a new post-disaster
community was less evident, a careful ethnographic analysis reveals the
ambiguity of the communalization process, demonstrating how com-
munity design can generate processes of manipulation that are politi-
cally dense and often tendentious in their effects.
Post-emergency operations in Sri Lanka were inf luenced by pre-
existing power relations and, at the same time, strongly shaped by
the reconstruction failures (from development and armed conf licts)
that have marked the country’s history. As Robert Muggah shows,
in Sri Lanka “settlement and resettlement were . . . intimately linked
to the assertion of (strong) state control over land, political control
of minority areas in the north and east and competing ethnic nation-
alisms. Under the pretext of development, counterinsurgency, and
disaster response, the state engaged in what amounted to demographic
engineering.”35 In this sense, the tsunami represented a unique oppor-
tunity for both the government and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam) to make use of the “massive injection of foreign capital”

in order to reengineer the country’s ethnic and political composition,
each according to its own interests. Especially in comparison to the
Indonesian case, the 2004 tidal wave in Sri Lanka can be understood
as having intensified conf lict among the country’s rival sovereignties
instead of reducing it. 36 While the international community rush-
ing to the disaster sites sought to challenge existing conceptions of
national security in the name of a new alliance based on human rights
and the duty of aiding victims regardless of their ethnic and/or politi-
cal membership, conf licting forces at the national level used humani-
tarian aid to extend their own “circles of power”37: the LTTE claimed
the right to take possession of international aid directly from donors
without submitting to parliamentary control, thus assuming a position
of strategic equality with the Sri Lankan state; for its part, the govern-
ment treated the tsunami as a chance to reclaim its exclusive national
sovereignty and become the primary reconstruction force through-
out the country. Behind the seeming depoliticization effects that the
humanitarian presence in the country produced, the catastrophe in
Sri Lanka was used to augment political tensions and long-standing
conf licts up to and including the government’s last offensive against
the Tamil Tigers, which began in 2007 and ended in May 2009 with
the LTTE’s surrender.38
The Mawella case I am about to introduce is an example of the
highly politicized undertaking that followed the tsunami. The social
networks charged with providing consultation and assistance for the
project expanded beyond the traditional political leaders and local
stakeholders to involve new and diverse figures, including consul-
tants enrolled by international NGOs or other humanitarian agencies;
monitoring and evaluation experts sent by governments and donors;
personnel (both locals and expatriates) from voluntary organizations
and worldwide solidarity associations. Through their interactions with
these (old and new, national and international) actors, the populations
affected by the tidal wave ended up engaging in a task far removed
from the mere reconstruction of socio-material references that gave
meaning to everyday life before the disaster. They found themselves
participating in an ambitious and tricky political exercise shaped by
values that required renegotiation and based on social agreements that
themselves had been remade. The controversial effort that produced
this exercise is anything but obvious: “build[ing] community on the
basis of values,” to reference the opening quote by De Martino.
98 Mara Benadusi
Mawella, a Good Testing Ground
The coastal village of Mawella is located in the southern province of

Sri Lanka, in the Hambantota district. Before the tidal wave, Mawella
was comprised of three administrative units39 and occupied a f lat area
bordered by the sea in front, a lagoon behind, and hills on either side.
When the tsunami hit, many residents rushed to take refuge on the
hills, but for those caught between the sea and the lagoon, there was
no way out. Like most of the coastal villages in Sri Lanka, subsistence
was bound up with proximity to the sea and related fishing activities.
Unlike neighboring zones, however, this predominately Sinhalese and
Buddhist area had achieved a decent level of affluence before the disaster;
government support enabled significant development of fishing and
tourism sectors and lead to the growth of an economically well-off
class. After the 2005 presidential elections, the situation continued to
improve. The current president of the country, Mahinda Rajapaksa,
was born in a nearby city and this district constitutes one of his primary
electoral bases. The entire area has been enjoying a period of strong
economic growth since the Rajapaksa family has chosen this district to
receive a significant portion of national funding for development. The
new international airport and marine harbor completed by President
Rajapaksa in Hambantota thanks to Chinese funding presage massive
growth in the future.40
The restoration plan for the village of Mawella in the wake of the
tsunami involved the construction of 332 houses to replace those dam-
aged or destroyed by the tidal wave. The institution of the Buffer Zone
(BZ)41 in this area, like elsewhere in the country, forced the human-
itarian networks and local institutions to direct their efforts inland,
toward new plots made available by the government far from the coast.
The majority of the tsunami survivors were first sorted into evacu-
ation camps and then enrolled in displacement projects. However,
a certain number of families in Mawella, like in other affected vil-
lages, were able to avoid forced relocation to the new sites that the
government designated for the reconstruction. Villagers who owned
land outside of the BZ were able to rebuild on their own lots on the
hills surrounding Mawella. In partnership with an Italian NGO called
CIPSI (Coordinamento di Iniziative Popolari di Solidarietá Internazionale or
Coordinated People’s Initiatives of International Solidarity),42 the local
NGO PRDA (People’s Rural Development Association)43 engaged 27
of these families in an auto-construction project financed by fund-
ing from the Italian government and decentralized cooperation.44
The project involved operational management by the local NGO and

periodic visits by CIPSI but without the ongoing presence of foreign
personnel on site. This strategy was linked to an awareness campaign
launched by CIPSI in Italy dating from the 1980s “to help in over-
coming the approach of sending expatriates envisioned as the exclusive
managers of the projects, in order to remove the ties of cultural depen-
dence between North and South.”45
As formulated by the Italian NGO in charge of the project, the gen-
eral objective behind this intervention was “to make the community
of Mawella economically self-sufficient, to rebuild the community
both materially and socially, and to restore dignity to the popula-
tion affected by the tsunami.” The Mawella project was not essentially
different in the way it was written than other similar interventions
financed by IC in Sri Lanka; more or less the same language was
used, referring to the CBDM approach as “one of the pillars of the
project methodology.” As in many other cases, the local organiza-
tion PRDA investigated the economic development needs of the area
using a participatory rural appraisal technique,46 with results that satis-
fied the donor. Furthermore, as is usually the case with development
activities carried out in the country, the beneficiaries were connected
to humanitarian agencies through their CBO. Over the course of
the project, the CBO underwent a process of institutional reinforce-
ment coordinated by the PRDA. In addition, they received collective
training in building materials and techniques. The main difference
between Mawella and other Italian post-tsunami interventions lay in
the beneficiaries it targeted; rather than relocating a group of families
to a new residential unit outside the coastal BZ, it was mainly aimed
at supporting a minority of tsunami survivors in building new houses
on their own land. Only a small number of relatively wealthy families
who already owned a property were eligible to receive this cash grant
for home reconstruction. The project was less ambitious than a con-
ventional post-disaster scheme and followed a less systemic logic. Its
underlying assumptions did not include the objective of building a
completely new, autonomous, and united settlement.
This aspect makes the Mawella example a good testing ground for
assessing some of my initial premises. Even in this home owner-driven
project without a strong emphasis on community-building, an ethno-
graphic lens reveals the presence of divergent worldviews and value sys-
tems operating in the background and projecting conf licting ideas about
what a post-disaster community should be. These multiple visions rose
to the surface to jeopardize the decision-making mechanisms especially
100 Mara Benadusi
at moments of conf licts, tensions, or misunderstandings between the

different actors involved at both local and international levels.
In the field of development anthropology, Olivier De Sardan sug-
gested a useful distinction between “strategic logics” and “represen-
tational logics”:47 whereas the former have both a political and an
economic character, the latter belong to a symbolic dimension and are
more implicit and unintentional. When these logics diverge, whether
at the applied or the symbolic level, practical and conceptual misun-
derstandings emerge and give rise to unforeseen results. The Mawella
project was comprised of different strategic and representational logics
that ended up causing mutual interference. For its first few months of
existence, an appearance of consensus had characterized the project.
Among the multiple interventions financed by IC in the country, this
one had produced some of the best outcomes in terms of timely com-
pletion and construction quality. However, during the course of the
first visit by a team of Italian experts sent by the IC office to moni-
tor the project,48 this apparent consensus gave way to a tangle of con-
troversial ideas regarding its goals and expected results. The debate
that brought these ideas into confrontation with each other essentially
revolved around the relationship among disaster, development, and
social change.
Helping the Poor or Reinforcing the Rich?
To the eyes of the experts working at the IC office in Colombo (as

well as the team in charge of monitoring the project), the 27 split-level
residences that were sprouting up on the hills surrounding Mawella
almost resembled small villas. They refracted an image of wealth and
social privilege that necessitated a ref lection on the (heretofore implicit)
criteria used to allocate resources in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. The IC
staff was highly aware of this issue due to their periodic participation
in roundtable discussions among the numerous donors in the coun-
try, where the topic of the intimate relationship between catastrophe,
development, and social change was debated.49
The disaster management campaign in Sri Lanka triggered a heated
discussion among international donors and humanitarian agencies
about what kind of opportunity the tsunami represented: should it be
used as a propulsive mechanism to foster poverty reduction policies and
transform the structures generating underdevelopment in the country?
Should they intervene in the local system of socioeconomic stratification
in favor of greater equality among social classes, castes, and ethnic

groups? Or should they instead seek to protect to the greatest possible
extent the traditional power relations based on caste, income, gender,
and ethnicity, thus facilitating a return to normalcy after the catas-
trophe? Preexisting conf licts among the country’s main ethnic groups
contributed to making these questions even thornier and pressing, not
to mention the controversies ignited during the 2005 presidential elec-
tions by the parties’ efforts to play off the issue of aid for tsunami victims
in their electoral campaigns. Faced with the overt interference between
nationalistic propaganda at the governmental level, political pressures
at the local level, and urgent dictates connected with the humanitar-
ian emergency mandate, the social networks involved in the Mawella
project were forced to renegotiate the meaning of their own disaster
management strategy.
The on-site monitoring functioned as an occasion to reevaluate—
while the Mawella project was still in progress—how well its objec-
tives, expected results, and the activities carried out up to that point
adhered both to local needs and to the visions prevailing among the
international community in Sri Lanka. The first problem the expert
team faced was beneficiary selection, which did not seem to follow
the logic of vulnerability implicit in the post-tsunami reconstruction
program. This logic essentially states that, in order to empower local
communities and lower the risk of future disasters, it is necessary to
begin post-catastrophe interventions by concentrating on the social
sectors considered most vulnerable, the ones that face more difficulty
in surviving adversity. The project coordinator, a Sri Lankan woman
employed by the PRDA and with close ties to government institutions,
herself acknowledged that beneficiary selection had not been carried
out correctly. Two families were even untraceable, leaving their resi-
dences incomplete and deserted; and the engineer hired by the NGO
to supervise the work did not seem to be aware of their absence until
the Italian experts arrived on site. In addition, the reconstruction of
the other houses had not followed the agreed-upon criteria. The size in
particular was much larger than initially outlined. Because the benefi-
ciaries could count on personal economic resources above and beyond
those provided by the donor, they had opted for more ambitious archi-
tectural designs.
The staff of IC’s office in Sri Lanka organized a series of meetings
in consultation with both contact people in the Italian NGO and their
local counterparts for the project. In these meetings, the participants
made an effort to understand whether the project’s logic could still be
102 Mara Benadusi
considered relevant, given the actual on-the-ground conditions. From

what I observed during these meetings, the various actors involved
were prompted to ref lect on a question that had (until that moment)
been only implicit: could the small portion of the Mawella village up
there on the hills act as an “engine of development” and help other
disaster survivors? Could these already privileged families stimulate the
empowerment process of the truly vulnerable groups in the area? The
Sri Lankan director of the local NGO was the main supporter of this
vision of a community empowered by assistance to the most productive
sectors rather than the weakest. The Italian staff at the IC office made
an effort to follow the same logic. They were sensitive to the concern
already widespread among the international donors in Sri Lanka that
an excessively populist strategy might hamper the spontaneous recov-
ery of economic activities rather than promoting it, and so produce
further ruptures and imbalances. The assumed neutrality implicit in
the monitoring exercise supported this vision. The project could still
be considered relevant on a technical level if it was evaluated only in
terms of the emergency program’s foundational priority—that of help-
ing the families affected by the tidal wave regardless of their respective
socioeconomic backgrounds.
This vision, however, conf licted with the more solidarity-oriented
framework of other IC consultants, according to which disaster man-
agement should give priority to the sectors of the targeted population
considered most vulnerable. Some IC office personnel continued to
hold onto the idea that, in order to remake community after catastro-
phe, the weakest sectors must be helped first. It was mainly the young-
est consultants who supported this vision. The head of the emergency
program, a charismatic man with extensive experience working for IC,
was instead more open to revisiting this solidarity-oriented logic that
was dominant also among Italian NGOs in the country.
These fell into two main categories, ref lecting the overall character
and spirit of the Italian non-governmental sector:50 organizations fol-
lowing a secular, left-oriented tradition and those more closely linked
to the Catholic voluntary sector. The logics of intervention embodied
by these two groups, however, were fundamentally similar in regard to
the targeted question: the leftist NGOs prioritized helping more vul-
nerable sectors, in keeping with an ideal of solidarity toward the most
needy and poorest segments of society, while the Catholic-derived
NGOs shared the same vision but based on the value of Christian
charity toward the underprivileged. From both these perspectives, the
Mawella project seemed to represent a distortion of CBDM.
A Free Gift Makes no Friends: The Politicization of

Tsunami Aid
The controversies surrounding the project were further complicated by

an additional factor: there was a widespread fear among the Italian per-
sonnel working at the IC office that the Mawella intervention might
be instrumentally used to consolidate the electoral power of the rul-
ing party in the area. They were troubled by the fact that the local
project coordinator simultaneously occupied two strategic positions at
the national level: one role in the governmental institution manag-
ing the post-tsunami reconstruction (TAFREN51) and a second one
in the electoral campaign of Sri Lanka’s future president. Posters for
candidate Mahinda Rajapaksa (United People’s Freedom Alliance—
UPFA—candidate) were even put up on the exterior walls of several
houses, alongside the usual sign identifying the donor. It was in the
interests of Rajapaksa’s political coalition to turn the villas on the hills
of Mawella into an ostentatious symbol of the national reconstruction,
and the project thus seemed to be at risk of getting caught up in local
logics of party clientelism.
This political strategy might be aimed at two specific objectives: to
defend government-controlled areas against oppositional forces com-
ing from rival political actors, and at the same time, to consolidate a
hegemonic idea of the Sri Lankan state as a highly centralized nation
dominated by a Sinhala and Buddhist elite. This impression was rein-
forced by the first reports on the outcomes of ongoing post-tsunami
reconstruction one year after the tidal wave. These reports signalled
a disproportionately significant amount of aid directed to Sinhalese-
majority districts in the southern province, especially in Hambantota.
At the local level, in contrast, there was a growing atmosphere of dis-
content among the most vulnerable groups who had been forced to
relocate as a result of the regulations associated with the BZ. Having
been obliged to abandon their original houses, these families felt that
the government had unjustly deprived them of their goods and means
of subsistence. At the same time, they saw that investments in coastal
tourism were multiplying. During an interview, a local fisherman
declared that “what the government is trying to do is remove us from
our places by using its new 100 meter limit [on building near the coast].
They are going to push us up to three to ten kilometres from the
ocean. How can we go on fishing from such a distance away from the
beach?”52 Furthermore, they had been complaining about the differen-
tial treatment being given to the beneficiaries of the 27 houses, thanks
104 Mara Benadusi
to their strong political affiliations. These fishermen felt robbed of an

opportunity for economic emancipation and denunciated the misap-
propriation of aid by local patrons, a criticism that added further weight
to fears of political instrumentalism.
The discussions that embroiled the IC office in Colombo under
these circumstances revealed the inherently paradoxical character of
the rhetorics implicit in post-tsunami reconstruction. Cast in the chari-
table and philanthropic idiom of disinterested solidarity, the emergency
response in the wake of the tsunami was supposed to follow the prin-
ciples of neutrality and impartiality typical of humanitarian assistance.
However, what actually unfolded in Sri Lanka was almost a sort of
potlatch, such as in a ceremonial festival where gifts are bestowed on the
guests and property is destroyed by its owner in a show of wealth that
the others later attempt to surpass. In short, post-tsunami Sri Lanka
gave rise to a show of “competitive humanitarianism.”53 On one hand,
the competition involved different social sectors in Western countries
in an ostentatious race to give; on the other hand, it produced a massive
spectacle of damage in the affected areas as a local strategy to attract
and capture aid in response to the quantifying and technocentric logic
of the humanitarian industry. Furthermore, the representational strate-
gies of media and fund-raising agencies reinforced those affected by
the tsunami as “pure victims” and “passive aid recipients.”54 And yet
the actual social life of disaster management interventions provided a
less watered-down image of existing power relations between donors
and beneficiaries. Exactly like in the Mawella case, several post-disaster
relief and reconstruction projects carried out in the country were con-
sidered at risk of generating a process of commodifying humanitarian
aid. Gifts were at risk of being treated like commodities in a circuit of
clientelistic exchange between clients and disingenuous patrons, but
the clientelistic rationale emerged as much from above as from below.55
Despite the community-based, egalitarian, and participatory rheto-
rics circulating in the disaster management campaign, the trajectories
through which the reconstruction projects were enacted seemed to be
caught up with preexisting and strongly embedded political dynamics.
In its passage through each link of the brokerage chain that connects the
donor to the final beneficiaries, the “social life of the gift”56 revealed
the disquieting and controversial way the victims used the ongoing
regime of catastrophe to guarantee themselves a portion of the tsunami
“golden wave.”57
Faced with complaints and concerns surfacing from below, the IC
staff involved in the Mawella project could not help but wonder what
resources the survivors were using to cope with post-tsunami opera-

tions and what strategies they were enacting to control and manipu-
late the aid. They began to question if the local NGO in charge of
the project should continue to enjoy such autonomy in overseeing the
reconstruction. With the support of the monitoring team leader, the IC
office pushed for CISPI to become more involved in the project (rather
than continuing to work exclusively through their local counterpart,
as they had been) in order to avoid the risk of excessively politicizing
the intervention. However, it was never seriously considered that the
project might be interrupted or delayed as a result of its problematic-
ness. The young IC consultant tasked with accompanying the monitor-
ing mission tried to suggest a radical solution, but she was silenced by
the practical concerns of program accounting and the less disillusioned
perspective of other staff members. The heated and denunciatory tones
of the first evaluation report written by this young consultant were
subdued when the monitoring coordinator produced a technical refor-
mulation of the document. Despite this wariness, however, the PRDA
project manager wrote a letter of complaint to IC seeking to simultane-
ously defend her own work and criticize the donor’s excessive interfer-
ence and the resulting atmosphere of mistrust.
Serving the Temple or the Community at large?

The Buddhist Sangha and Civil Society
In addition to its housing component and various livelihood activi-

ties, the project’s expected results also included the construction of a
community center to serve the village. This center was a chance to
assess the multiplying effect of the intervention on the community as
a whole and how well the intervention was able to achieve its goals of
social redistribution. It therefore represented a further point of tension
for the actors involved in the decision-making process. Besides fulfill-
ing the cultural and gathering functions of the previous community
structures damaged by the tsunami, this center was also intended to
serve as a refuge and evacuation point in case of future disasters. Several
months after the project began, however, the construction work was
still delayed. The land for the building had been located and the foun-
dation poured, but there was still disagreement about two fundamental
questions: who would own the center, and how would it be managed?
Various options were suggested during the course of the on-site
monitoring mission and other meetings that took place in Colombo.
106 Mara Benadusi
From the perspective of the IC experts, the community center was the
only project outcome that could express the community-based logic
implicit in the post-tsunami emergency program. Making the man-
agement of the center as participatory and inclusive as possible was a
challenge that had to be met. Otherwise, the project would have risked
failure in its underlying premise that in a relatively privileged area such
as Mawella, a dynamic and propulsive group of eminent people could
take on responsibility for the community and its prospects for recov-
ery, thus circumventing the logic of vulnerability in beneficiary selec-
tion. This proposition appeared to be disintegrating in the face of the
numerous uncertainties and controversies surrounding the center.
Since the building ground was adjacent to a temple and owned by
the Buddhist clergy, the CBO in charge of the project had identified
the devotees’ committee as the most appropriate organization to man-
age the structure. During the monitoring mission, however, the local
PRDA coordinator proposed that the provincial council (that is to
say, the local government of the southern province) should take on
this role to assure the future sustainability of the center. This latter
option was also supported by the monitoring experts and IC office
staff. The reasons put forward in favor of the proposal illustrate the
always-unpredictable hybridization, overlap, and articulation between
and among northern and southern actors, as well as expert and nonex-
pert knowledge on the disaster scene.
Among Sri Lankan Buddhists, especially in small villages, the entity
in charge of organizing activities linked to temple life is the so-called
D āyaka Sabh āva, a small donors’ committee comprised of particularly
active devotees.58 The members of this committee help the monks
organize religious festivals and collaborate in preparing the spiritual
activities that mark ordinary life, including the entire ceremonial sys-
tem associated with dana or alms-giving to the monastic community,
which in Sinhala is called sangha. This local lay organization constitutes
an inf luential voice in relations between the monks and the rest of the
faithful, and is usually comprised of figures who enjoy prominence
by virtue of wealth or authoritativeness. If they deem it necessary,
the D āyaka Sabh āva can even dismiss or replace temple monks whose
behavior is considered improper or harmful to the community.
There was a significant reason why the IC staff and monitoring team
were worried about the possibility of the donors’ committee being
given responsibility for managing the community center: from a secu-
lar perspective of separating the sacred and mundane, the interests of
local civil society could not possibly align with the well-being of the
devotee community. In the words of the monitoring team coordinator,

“seeing funds destined for people in need deviated toward local reli-
gious oligarchies” seemed like an undue appropriation of humanitarian
aid. Moreover, as a governmental cooperation office, it was essential
that IC engage in dialogue with Sri Lankan institutions and coordinate
with local authorities. The task of guaranteeing future sustainability for
the structure and the redistribution of project’s benefits at a community
level was supposed to fall to institutional governmental entities such as
the provincial council, not religious organizations.
Among the Italian experts, the image of community that enjoyed
most widespread support was a secular civil society capable of pro-
moting mutual aid and social solidarity from the grassroots, but with
support from the institutional sector; giving to the temple was not the
same as giving to the community, and in order to give to the commu-
nity it made more sense to rely on public institutions. However, there
were two unexamined assumptions underlying this idea—first, that
the provincial council, being an institutional entity at the decentral-
ized level, would guarantee the most socioeconomically inclusive and
participatory possible use for the community center; and second, that
relations between the monastic community and the temple committee
were necessarily untethered from the larger social interests.
Although the option championed by the PRDA coordinator was
popular with the Italian experts, on closer examination it is clear that
this was not a case of effective synergy among either intentions or stra-
tegic logics. Given their more superficial understanding of the con-
text, it was easy for the Italians to mistake the provincial council for
the governmental entity more closely aligned with the village’s needs;
on the other hand, given her role in the governmental apparatus, the
local coordinator knew very well that Sri Lankan provincial institu-
tions act across a relatively wide territorial area and that their finan-
cial and decision-making autonomy is powerfully constrained by the
political demands of the central government. Established in 1987 to
devolve elements of the state’s executive and legislative power, the pro-
vincial council scheme has evolved within a political and constitutional
context that continues to constrain its effective operation. The main
obstacle to the system has been the central government’s reluctance to
give up its powerfully centralized character and the way it continues to
intervene in the areas under provincial councils’ jurisdiction.59
In addition, the fact that the project coordinator supported the presi-
dential campaign of Mahinda Rajapaksa suggested that she was per-
fectly well aware of another detail that had escaped the notice of the
108 Mara Benadusi
Italian experts—the fact that, starting in 2004, the UPFA held a major-
ity of Southern Province seats; an electoral result that was subsequently
reproduced in the 2009 provincial elections. Both of these factors sig-
nalled the presence of a divergent strategic drive within the project.
From the local coordinator’s perspective, helping the local commu-
nity meant tying them directly to the power represented by the rul-
ing party; in order to serve the tsunami survivors, it was necessary to
strengthen the nation.
This issue was collectively discussed at a general meeting in Mawella
attended by the local project staff, the monitoring team, CBO mem-
bers, some donors’ committee representatives, and the temple monk.
At this meeting, the Italian experts tried to sound out the possibility
of the monk acting as a spokesperson to draw the project beneficiaries
toward greater social responsibility in relation to the most vulnerable
groups. Two standpoints came into tension in this case: the Buddhist
precept of a lay society that takes care of all the clergy’s material needs
as an expression of dana (in the sense of generalized gift-giving 60); and
the value-based framework of the Italian staff, which may have been
unintentional but was nonetheless incorporated into their actions. The
Italian personnel were bewildered by the idea that the monk could be
an emanation of the community itself, someone who depends on the
generosity of the faithful and at the same time completely embodies
the community’s spiritual and material wealth, rather than an authority
and primarily religious figure charged with reminding the community
of their charitable obligations toward the less fortunate. The fact that
the project’s only result in terms of overall community empowerment
would take the form of reinforcing local religious power was just as
bewildering for them.61
If they were to return to the center today, the Italian staff would
find the structure completely enveloped in the daily life of the temple.
Besides the room originally designed as an IT lab, where the computers
still sitting within their plastic packaging reveal a functionality more
potential than real, the building is mainly used to host elderly monks.
The central room on the first f loor has been designated as their private
residence and the entire meeting hall on the second f loor is periodically
used for spiritual and community meetings, adapted when needed to
host visiting monks in the small cells constructed within. The Buddhist
robes with their orange and dark red tones hang out to dry in the
exterior hallway that leads to the building, almost as if signalling the
inevitable appropriation of a space that was made to serve the temple in
order to serve the community.62
The Italian Guarantors’ Mission in Sri Lanka:

Gifts and Counter-gifts
With such a brutal impact (during those Christmas days we all remem-
ber so well) in a destination renowned for Western tourism, the Indian
Ocean tsunami generated a large reaction at international level. As in
other European countries, the donations raised from among private
citizens in Italy significantly surpassed the amount of governmental
funds allocated for the emergency.63 This aspect exacerbated existing
tensions among the institutions charged with administering disaster
aid. While government money (totalling 15 million Euros assigned
to the Italian Foreign Affairs Department) were earmarked for the IC
technical office established in Colombo, the remaining 46 million or
more Euros that had been collected through telephone donations and
other private contributions were given to the Italian Civil Protection
Department directed by Guido Bertolaso. This contributed to a heated
climate of interinstitutional competition, with powerful repercussions
on both the disaster zones and within the two Italian administrative
bodies.
The national media further ignited this climate by unleashing one
controversy after another about how many construction sites were
opened and closed, how many houses were completed, hospitals
repaired, schools donated, and boats returned to the sea, not to men-
tion the countless debates surrounding how rapidly and transparently
the funds were being spent by the two departments. In addition, the
Italian NGOs in Sri Lanka found themselves in the unusual position
of having to respond not only to the expectations of the Italian gov-
ernment, but also to the pressure exerted by numerous private donors
with a sense of ownership over the aid activities. As Roderick Stirrat
observed,64 competitiveness in post-tsunami Sri Lanka was measured
more in terms of how and where to spend the most money in the least
amount of time rather than how to obtain the money in the first place.
This is why the aesthetic and rhetoric of the humanitarian gifting
were expressed through a multitude of ceremonies of entrustment and
inauguration that served to emphasize the moment of handing over
the gift.65
The tension between the Foreign Affairs and Civil Protection
Departments in Italy peaked during a three-day mission that parliamen-
tarians Giuliano Amato and Emma Bonino conducted in Sri Lanka one
year after the tsunami as representatives of the guarantor committee
nominated by a prime ministerial decree at the beginning of 2005.66
110 Mara Benadusi
This brief visit was intended to ensure transparency in managing the

aid and thereby validate the usefulness of the Italians’ humanitarian
campaign in Sri Lanka. In reality, it ended in a clash between Amato
and the local Italian ambassador. In front of Majid, the Sri Lankan
minister for reconstruction, Amato stated that “I don’t wish to anger
our friends at Farnesina or provoke a diplomatic incident. With all
due respect for our diplomats, Civil Protection is better than Italian
Cooperation under the Department of Foreign Affairs; it is capable of
raising a great deal of money and trust.” A few hours later, while wait-
ing for the plane that would take them back to Colombo, the Italian
ambassador replied: “Isn’t Italy united? Unlike Civil Protection, perhaps
we at Cooperation lack visibility. See how many of them there are?
[pointing out for the journalist the 15-odd people gathered around
Bertolaso] They seem more competent, but I know it’s not true—they
are more talk than action.”67
A few months later, two exhibits opened in Rome within a few days
of each other, each associated with twin initiatives launched simul-
taneously in Colombo. The Civil Protection Department displayed
80 drawings by Sri Lankan children about the tsunami in one of the
chambers of Parliament, while in the Vittoriano complex, an exhibit
titled “Solidarietà e Sviluppo” (Solidarity and Development) displayed
the work IC was committed to carrying out throughout the world.
A substantial part of the exhibit was dedicated to reconstruction projects
financed by the Foreign Affairs Department in Sri Lanka. The ruins
of a boat destroyed by the tidal wave towered in the center of the
room. And where had the pirogue come from? Mawella. During one
of the monitoring team’s on-site visits, the boat had been generously
donated by the project beneficiaries to the IC office, who had explicitly
requested it. As in other coastal villages struck by the tidal wave, the
wooden hull had been lying for months among other disaster detritus
in the area alongside the road, characterizing the local tsunami museums
that served to both commemorate the catastrophe and capture addi-
tional aid. The boat did not fit in the container assigned to carry it to
Italy, so before being transported to Colombo and from there to Rome
it was bludgeoned to reduce it to more manageable dimensions. The
blows delivered to this curious return gift, chosen and packaged to
meet the donor institution’s need for visibility, seem to remind us—in
warning—of what Mary Douglas wrote in the introduction to her
essay about Mauss’ gift: “Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue
we know that it wounds.”68
Polity of Practices: Beyond the Communitarian

Orthodoxy
The case of Mawella allows me to draw some conclusions from my

initial premises. First, local, national, and international actors respond
to disasters by engaging in a collective effort that corresponds only
superficially to the “getting back home” slogan used in so many post-
catastrophe campaigns. In reality, this enormous effort often takes the
form of an imaginative and constructive enterprise inevitably guaran-
teed to produce change, and bring together actors who differ in both
their values and their strategic logics. If we want to make progress in
understanding the disaster scene, it is not useful to explain cases like
Mawella by invoking the problem of reciprocal misunderstanding or
misrecognition between “us” and “them.” The effort “to build com-
munity on the basis of values” that underlies disaster management
interventions is neither unidirectional nor univocal. Disasters are not
the sole province of what we commonly call the “international com-
munity,” as if it were a compact group motivated by shared impera-
tives and guided by identical technical expertise. Equal if not more
effort and heterogeneity can also be identified in what is frequently
labelled the “local community” involved in reconstruction operations
following catastrophes.
As the volume editors remind us in their introduction, it would be
misleading to think of the disaster situation as a faceoff between two
groups or, alternatively, to envision it as a sharing context in which
multiple actors—locals and expatriates, donors and those who have
suffered from a disaster—collectively construct a homogeneous com-
munity of practice. The actors who encounter each other in the wake
of the catastrophe do not constitute a community. It is more useful to
think about them as social networks characterized by a high degree
of internal heterogeneity. Difference and homogeneity develop not
only among the “expatriates” and the “locals” taken individually, but
also transversally through the two groups. Depending on the circum-
stances and the strategies at play, various forms of coalition or antago-
nism can develop. Whether they are operating here or there, whether
they are made up of technicians or nonexperts, we are dealing with
highly stratified networks with considerable power differentials. It is
thus inevitable that these networks give rise to disaster management
operations that are highly controversial and contested, with outcomes
that continue to defy expectations.
112 Mara Benadusi
This is why I have proposed an analysis of a particular disaster scene,

approaching it as an arena of social forces that tend to reciprocally mold
each other. Even when the aims of a post-catastrophe intervention are
agreed upon at a formal level, in reality the “project community”—if
we want to name it such—is always subject to powerful collisions due
to the multiple strategic and representational visions that come into
play. No matter how we want to approach the issue, we must always
remember that the actors who weave the threads of disaster manage-
ment interventions are molding the past, the present, and the future.
They are giving concrete form—that is to say, reality—to their idea
of what a post-disaster community should be. All of them, even the
most disadvantaged, seek to translate their visions into practice, thus
participating in an ideal invention of the envisioned future society.
This may occur both here and there, in turn forcing us as researchers to
continually move in both directions, within and outside of the specific
disaster site.
The emphasis on community and community-based approaches
in post-catastrophe reconstruction programs leaves its stamp on
the intrinsic aims of disaster management operations. As is true for
other naturalized categories such as empowerment and participation,
community risks becoming an implicit, taken-for-granted value in
post-disaster discourses and practices. In this I agree with Pradeep
Jeganathan’s assertion69 that, in order to understand the image of a
community capable of participating in the consultation process that is
so central to CBDM logics, we need to investigate how particular nar-
ratives are put into practice in their specific context of use, which—as
we saw in the Mawella case—is always shaped by historic processes
and embedded power relations. To pursue an “archaeology” of the
concept of community in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, our analysis must
go beyond humanitarian rhetorics in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
We must also trace the forms that discourses about community took
before the disaster, giving shape to local history.70 Only such an analysis
can help us understand the extent to which the tsunami represented
a unique opportunity for the country to use already-tested commu-
nalization mechanisms to strengthen the sociopolitical geography of
the Sinhalese nation.71 In responding to the damage produced by the
tidal wave, the international community found itself participating in a
political process deeply tied up with the hegemonic reproduction of a
preexisting social order, a fact that is very revealing about the nature
of the highly politicized and projective undertakings that follow a
catastrophe.
Two main factors explain why community-based approaches as the

more or less explicit instruments informing reconstruction can run
the risk of becoming inconsistent and f limsy when translated to local
contexts: first, the jumble of incoherent perspectival visions that are
often unintentionally incorporated into post-catastrophe operations;
and second, the swarm of social networks all working to define the
highly diverse repertoires of tools, methodologies, and discourses that
guide attempts to build community in the disaster zones. Especially in
cases as mass mediated and congested as the 2004 tsunami, the parties
involved in the interventions often fail to find common ground around
the collection of more or less specialized jargon, conceptual artifacts,
and methodologies to be used for reconstruction. This is why these
elements become the object of controversy on the ground and raise
the possibility of opposing visions, tensions, and conf licts within—or
among—the various actors involved.
These conclusions give us the opportunity to critically examine the
community-based approach that is implicit in current disaster manage-
ment interventions. This approach holds that people learn resilience
more easily, effectively, and productively when they participate in a
common field of action and reinforce their identities through a com-
munal, practice-based enterprise. The community-based approach pos-
its that survivors’ empowerment is more significant when they become
participants in learning exercises characterized by mutual engagement
and a shared domain of interests. Participation in a community of prac-
tice is seen to stimulate stronger motivations in the group, and therefore
guarantee a greater orientation toward resilience in the case of future
disasters. However, the Sri Lankan case of post-tsunami reconstruc-
tion through CBDM techniques reveals the dangers of an excessively
romantic image of both the community concept itself and the social
engineering methods it inspires. Experiences of CBDM represent are-
nas of confrontation and contestation rather than sites of commonality,
consensus, and sharing. The assumedly common repertoire of material
and symbolic resources in CBDM is imbued with marked inequalities
of power and produces asymmetrical participation. This is also true of
the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that act not so much within
each group of participants as at the boundaries between groups, trig-
gering complex social legitimization dynamics.
These considerations lead me to suggest that the overloaded, exces-
sively evocative and insidious concept of community used in the
CBDM approaches be replaced with a term more in line with ethno-
graphic findings: that of polity. The term polity72 has the advantage of
114 Mara Benadusi
designating a set of relations that continually develop in two ways—

the first is the effort to acquire new people and values (or exclude
them) from a social network in order to reinforce identity-based pro-
cesses; the second is the attempt to define a “package” of methods
and instructions for use that function to regulate social relations and
actions. In the CBDM project I described in this chapter, an arena of
confrontation is set into motion on both of these fronts, which opens
these learning fields to continuous controversy on practical and sym-
bolic levels.
The term polity has the additional advantage of revealing the fact
that the actual bases of participation are inherently political in that they
are always subject to discussion and contention. Disaster management
approaches aimed at cultivating more resilient and safer communities
must take into account the fact that post-catastrophe interventions rep-
resent a kind of political field better defined by the term polity than
community. Any effort of depoliticization aimed at mitigating the
conf lictual and contradictory aspects of community building in disas-
ter situations is guaranteed to play down the elements of negotiation,
deliberation, and dispute that characterize, as De Martino would say,
post-catastrophe “attempts at exorcism.”
Notes
1. E. De Martino, La fine del mondo: contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, Torino:
Einaudi, 2002.
2. B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 6.
3. M. Pandolfi and D. Fassin (eds.), Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of
Military and Humanitarian Interventions, New York: Zone Books, 2010.
4. L. Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge
Cultural Social Studies, 1999.
5. J. Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media, Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing,
2010.
6. N. Clark, “Disaster and Generosity,” in Special Edition: The Indian Ocean Tsunami:
Geographical Commentaries One Year On, the Geographical Journal, vol. 171, no. 4
(2005): 384–386. See also: B. Korf, “Commentary on the Special Section on the
Indian Ocean Tsunami Disasters, Generosity and the Other,” The Geographical
Journal, vol. 172, no. 3 (2006): 245–247.
7. For more details regarding the catastrophe as social drama, see M. Benadusi, “The
Politics of Catastrophe. Coping with ‘Humanitarianism’ in Post-Tsunami Sri
Lanka,” in F. Attinà (ed.), The Politics and Policies of Relief, Aid and Reconstruction.
Contrasting Approaches to Disasters and Emergencies, Houndmills, Basingstoke,

Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 151–172.
8. The 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka killed approximately 37,000 people and a further
420,000 victims were evacuated.
9. Following the tidal wave, approximately 2 billion, 200 million US dollars were
spent in Sri Lanka in the first year alone. To understand the selective nature of
fund-raising in cases of disaster, it is sufficient to note that, while an average of
7,000 US dollars total was distributed for each person in the countries struck by
the Indian Ocean tsunami, only 3 US dollars per head was spent after the f loods
in Bangladesh and Mozambique (according to the online report by the Tsunami
Evaluation Commission).
10. More than 150 international NGOs were involved in the reconstruction and
rehabilitation process in Sri Lanka, alongside over 1,000 local entities working
with hundreds of grassroots organizations that were especially created to respond
to the emergency.
11. My first periods of fieldwork in Sri Lanka were carried out in 2005 and 2006.
Subsequent fieldwork periods were carried out in 2010 and 2013.
12. D. Lewis and D. Mosse (eds.), Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography
of Aid Agencies, Bloomfield: Kumarian Books, 2006.
13. J. Gould, “Introducing Aidnography,” in J. Gould and H. S. Marcussen (eds.),
Ethnographies of Aid. Exploring Development Texts and Encounters, Roskilde:
International Development Studies, 2004, p. 10.
14. Latour, p. 176.
15. B. Czarniawska and G. Sevon (eds.), Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices
Travel in the Global Economy (Advances In Organization Studies), Malmö: Sweden,
Liber & Copenhagen Business School Press, 2005.
16. J. -P. Olivier De Sardan, Anthropologie et développement. Essai en socio-anthropologie
du changement social, Paris: Editions Karthala, 1995.
17. Gould, p. 6.
18. Funded by the Italian Foreign Affairs Department, the tsunami emergency pro-
gram that the Italian Cooperation office oversaw had a budget of over 15 million
Euros. It was carried out by 15 Italian NGOs, three United Nations agencies
(FAO, UN-HABITAT, and WFP), and multiple local counterparts and nonprofit
religious organizations that rushed to the disaster site to express their solidarity.
19. G. E. Marcus, “Experts, Reporters, Witnesses: The Making of Anthropologists
in States of Emergency,” in M. Pandolfi and D. Fassin (eds.), pp. 357–378.
20. M. Pandolfi, “Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of
the Postcommunist Balkan Territories,” in M.-J. Good et al. (eds), Postcolonial
Disorders, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 158–161.
21. M. Benadusi, “On the Crest of the Tidal Wave: Adrift in Post-Tsunami Sri
Lanka,” in M. Benadusi et al. (eds), Disasters, Development and Humanitarian Aid.
New Challenges for Anthropology, Rimini: Guaraldi, 2011, pp. 67–86.
22. A clarification is necessary in relation to this point: in case of emergency, the
ideas of Do it Better and Do it Together (implicit also in development projects) are
116 Mara Benadusi
joined by the imperative of Do it Quickly, that is, within the preestablished time
limits set by the logics of humanitarian intervention. At least on the level of for-
mal intentions, the emergency is intended to quickly grant autonomy to the local
systems receiving aid and thereby release them from external interference as soon
as possible. In this sense, the post-emergency phase even ends up being seen as a
kind of “tugboat” that should pilot the local communities toward the less rapid
temporality of planned change activities.
23. W. J. Clinton, Lessons Learned from Tsunami Recovery: Key Propositions for Building
Back Better, United Nation Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami
Recovery, New York: United Nation, 2006.
24. As Annelies Heijmans clearly shows, starting from the late 1990s the community-
based approach gradually gained international popularity as “an alternative to
top-down approaches in disaster management.” Nonetheless, behind the seem-
ingly uniform language with which the CBDM is promoted in international
policy spheres (up to the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015), a plethora of
different local and national traditions emerge, and these traditions may potentially
diverge from each other in both aims and execution modes. See A. Heijmans,
“The Social Life of Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction,” Aon Benfield
UCL Hazard Research Centre, Disaster Studies Working Paper 20, February
2009, pp. 2–3.
25. J. Kennedy et al., “The Meaning of ‘Build Back Better’: Evidence from Post-
Tsunami Aceh and Sri Lanka,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management,
vol. 16, no. 1 (2008): 24–36; J. Kennedy et al., “Disaster Mitigation Lessons from
‘Build Back Better’ following the 26 December 2004 Tsunami,” in J. Feyen, K.
Shannon, and M. Neville (eds.), Water and Urban Development Paradigms, London:
Taylor & Francis Group, 2009.
26. T. L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” The
American Historical Review, vol. 90, no. 2 (1985): 339–361.
27. Quoted from the documentary film produced by Italian Cooperation in Sri
Lanka, Building Back Better: Ricostruire Meglio. Programma Emergenza Tsunami. Gli
interventi della Cooperazione Italiana in Sri Lanka, 2005–2006.
28. For a guide to the community of practice approach, see J. Lave and E. Wenger,
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991. The two authors argue that knowledge is implicitly
and “situationally” incorporated into the practices of communities made up of
participants who share experiences, visions, languages, narratives, and material
and immaterial artifacts. In later publications, Wenger argues that cultivating
a community of practice involves caring for a series of fundamental elements,
including legitimating and rewarding participation; negotiating the strategic
context; harmonize and valorize the collective experiences; providing support,
planning for evolution; promoting a dialogue between internal and external
perspectives; and creating a common rhythm. See E. Wenger et al., Cultivating
Communities of Practice. A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 2002.
29. Community is defined as “A social group which has a number of things in com-
mon such as shared experience, locality, culture, heritage and social interests.”
See UNISDR, Living with Risk: A Global Review of Disaster Reduction Initiatives,
Geneva: United Nations Inter-Agency Secretariat of the International Strategy
for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR), 2004, p. 177.
30. Heijmans, p. 24.
31. P. Jeganathan, “ ‘Communities’ West and East: Post-Tsunami Development Aid in
Sri Lanka’s Deep South East,” in M. de Alwis and E. -L. Hedman (eds.), Tsunami
in a Time of War: Aid, Activism & Reconstruction in Sri Lanka & Aceh, Colombo:
ICES, 2009, pp. 59–82.
32. Jeganathan, p. 63.
33. J. Brow, “Notes on Community, Hegemony and the Uses of the Past,”
Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1 (1990): 1.
34. M. Weber, Economy and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978,
p. 40.
35. R. Muggah, Relocation Failures in Sri Lanka. A Short History of Internal Displacement
and Resettlement, London & New York: Zed Books, 2008, p. 68.
36. For a comparative analysis of post-tsunami responses in Sri Lanka and
Indonesia/Aceh, see De Alwis and Hedman; J. Hyndman, “Siting Conf lict
and Peace in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia,” Norvegian Journal
Geography, vol. 63, no. 1 (2009): 89–96; P. Bauman, M. Ayalew and G. Paul,
“Beyond Disaster: A Comparative Analysis of Tsunami Interventions in Sri
Lanka and Indonesia/Aceh,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, vol. 3, no. 3
(2007): 6–21.
37. N. Wickramasinghe, Civil Society in Sri Lanka: New Circles of Power, New Delhi,
London, and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001. Wickramasinghe explores
the various ways in which new international forces—especially multilateral
financial agencies, humanitarian relief organizations, and northern NGOs—were
challenging and contesting the state conception of security in Sri Lanka. These
new circles of power were already playing a substantial role long before the 2004
tsunami, not only in reorganizing the political economy of the country, but also
in integrating it into a new transnational and ideological order.
38. Benadusi, 2011, pp. 67–86.
39. The population of the three administrative units reached a total of 532 families
or approximately 2,000 inhabitants. 67 people were killed by the tidal wave; in
addition, there were dozens of wounded and 10 people missing. The damage was
calculated as including 155 houses destroyed and 166 damaged; 54 boats lost and
93 seriously impaired; 11 trawl nets, 1 fish storage warehouse, and 4 transport
trucks, as well as 1 school, 2 community centers, and 12 businesses rendered
unusable.
40. For more details regarding the use of tsunami aid in the Hambantota district, see
M. Benadusi, “The Two-Faced Janus of Disaster Management: Still Vulnerable
yet already Resilient,” South East Asia Research, special issue “Life after Collective
Death: Part 2,” vol. 21, no. 3 (2013): 419–438.
118 Mara Benadusi
41. The official reason for the reinforcement of the BZ policy in Sri Lanka after the
tsunami was to prevent future natural disasters. A few weeks after the December
2004 tidal wave, then-president Chandrika Kumaratunga declared that the popu-
lation hit by the tsunami would not be allowed to rebuild their houses on the
coast itself. Shortly after, she published an announcement in local newspapers
to define the protected area within which rebuilding would be prohibited. The
area extended 100 meters from the sea in the southern and western districts and
200 meters in the northeastern zones, which sustained the most damage from
the tsunami. See Benadusi, pp. 67–86; J. Hyndman, “The Securitization of Fear
in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
vol. 97, no. 2 (2007): 361–372; J. Hyndman, “The Geopolitics of Pre- and Post-
Tsunami Aid to Sri Lanka,” in M. de Alwis and E-L. Hedman (eds.), Tsunami
in a Time of War. Aid & Reconstruction in Sri Lanka & Ace, Colombo: ICES, 2009,
pp. 29–58.
42. CIPSI is a national Italian network that brings together 48 NGOs and associa-
tions operating in the international solidarity and cooperation sector. Starting in
1992, long before the tsunami, CIPSI had begun collaborating with a local NGO
in Sri Lanka (People’s Rural Development Association—PRDA), concentrating
in particular on the Gampaha and Puttalam districts in the western part of the
country.
43. The PRDA is a nonprofit, NGO incorporated in 1989 under the Sri Lankan
Companies Act. It is governed by a board of directors made up of represen-
tatives of NGOs, grassroots organizations, national business, and professional
communities who give their time and expertise on a voluntary basis. PRDA’s
mission focuses on “enhancing the economic and social well-being of the rural
poor and particularly the women in Sri Lanka and building their institutional
capacities” (from the organization Web site: http://www.prdasrilanka.org/about
.htm). All PRDA interventions at the community level are planned and imple-
mented through community-based organizations (CBOs), which are responsible
for various activities, including mobilizing membership and managing a demo-
cratic governance structure; strengthening solidarity among groups; identifying
community needs through micro-level participatory planning; and formulating
participatory village development plans.
44. Major funding came from the Italian Regions of Lombardia and Emilia Romagna;
additional funds originated in the Italian provinces of Ferrara and Biella and the
Piceno area in Italy.
45. From the organization Web site: http://www.cipsi.it.
46. Originating in the 1980s, the Participatory Rural Appraisal methodology has been
used mainly by NGOs and, currently, by development agencies as well because it
is faster to carry out than traditional fieldwork. This approach aims to incorporate
the rural population’s knowledge and opinions into the planning and management
of developmental projects and programs.
47. De Sardan.
48. As a result of a request by the on-site IC office, an expert was sent from Italy to
coordinate the monitoring team. One or more Italian experts from the Colombo
office accompanied the coordinator on his rounds in order to receive on-the-job

training in monitoring techniques.
49. As several authors have pointed out since the early 1980s, an understanding of
the link between catastrophe, development, and social change begins from the
recognition that there are deeper historical and political reasons, beyond purely
technical considerations, that explain the recurrence of so-called natural disas-
ters in contexts that are particularly socioeconomically vulnerable. According
to this interpretation, in order to effect true prevention, the disaster should be
used as a motor for social change and a chance to modify inequalities and rela-
tionships between the state and society. For more details, see: P. O’Keefe et al.,
“Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters,” Nature, vol. 260 (1976):
566–567; F. Cuny, Disasters and Development, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983; A. Wijkman and L. Timberlake, Natural Disasters: Acts of God or
Acts of Man? London: Earthscan, 1984; M. Anderson and P. Woodrow, Rising
from the Ashes. Strategies in Times of Disaster, Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1989.
50. S. Marelli, ONG: una storia da raccontare. Dal volontariato alle multinazionali della
solidarietà, Roma: Carocci, 2011.
51. Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation.
52. In some cases, discontent in relation to the BZ and misuse of tsunami aid gave
rise to actual protest and popular unrest, such as the instances that broke out in
the southern coast of the country thanks to the activity of the Peraliya 100 Meter
Tsunami Refugees Organization. For further details, see M. de Alwis, “A Double
Wounding? Aid and Activism in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka,” in M. de Alwis, E.-L.
Hedman (eds.), Tsunami in a Time of War. Aid & Reconstruction in Sri Lanka & Ace,
Colombo: ICES, 2009, pp. 121–138.
53. R. L. Stirrat, “Competitive Humanitarianism: Relief and the Tsunami in Sri
Lanka,” Anthropology Today, vol. 22, no. 5 (2006): 11–16.
54. B. Korf, “Antinomies of Generosity. Moral Geographies and Post-Tsunami Aid
in Southeast Asia,” Geoforum, vol. 38, no. 1 (2007): 366–378.
55. B. Korf et al., “The Gift of Disaster: The Commodification of Good Intentions
in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka,” Disaster, vol. 34, no. 1 (2010): 60–77.
56. R. L. Stirrat and H. Henkel, “The Development Gift: The Problem of Reciprocity
in the NGO World,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, vol. 554, no. 1 (1997): 66–80.
57. The phrase ran diya dahara, which means “golden water wave” was a popular
expression in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and also appropriate given the sudden
rain of wealth that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. See also M. R.
Gamburd, The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
58. In the volume Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka, Richard
Francis Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere attribute the formation of the
donors’ committee in Sri Lanka to a sort of “protestant Buddhism” that, the
authors argue, has its roots in the encounter between Sinhalese society and
English colonial power in the second half of the 1900s. See: R. F. Gombrich and
120 Mara Benadusi
G. Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka, Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 234.
59. The Provincial Councils Act was mainly intended as a “measure to redress the
imbalance in the relationship between the different ethnic groups in the country”
(N. Tiruchelvam, “Devolution and the Elusive Quest for Peace in Sri Lanka,”
in R. I. Rotberg (ed.), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation,
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999, p. 194). See also W. D.
Lakshman and C. A. Tisdell (eds.), Sri Lanka’s Development since Independence:
Socio-Economic Perspectives and Analyses, New York: Nova Science Publishers,
2000; N. Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested
Identities, London: Hurst Publishers, 2006.
60. I. Strenski, “On Generalized Exchange and the Domestication of the Sangha,”
Man, vol. 18, no. 3 (1983): 463–477.
61. Regarding the bewilderment of international NGOs in relation to the way
Buddhist clergy and temple committees tended to divert tsunami funds toward
the building or rebuilding of temples rather than more obvious poverty allevia-
tion strategies for tsunami survivors, Kate Krosby’s explanations provide some
further points of consideration. On one side, in the eyes of devotees, religious
buildings represent the palace of the emperor whose glorious reign will usher in
the future Buddha; on the other side, the temple’s success is viewed as “a result of
its meritorious work in assisting the displaced” during the first emergency phase.
“It is possible that the increasing activity, prestige and sense of purpose of those
temples providing such assistance” was “a further reason for the prioritization of
temple building in the quest to recover from a calamitous period.” K. Crosby,
“Kamma, Social Collapse or Geophysics? Interpretations of Suffering among
Sri Lankan Buddhists in the Immediate Aftermath of the 2004 Asian Tsunami,”
Contemporary Buddhism, vol. 9, no. 1 (2008): 53–76.
62. Although it was not visible in the Mawella case, there was a trend in other Sri
Lankan villages, when the monks were perceived as instrumentally involved
in the humanitarian network, for the faithful to become disaffected from the
temples and settle instead for other, less institutionalized places of worship.
See C. Holgersson Ivarsson, The Give and Take of Disaster Aid: Social and Moral
Transformation in the Wake of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka, PhD thesis, University of
Gothenburg, School of Global Studies, 2013.
63. Lettera22, Geopolitica dello tsunami. Solidarietà e strategie nella catastrofe che ha sconvolto
l’Asia, Milano: O Barra O Edizioni, 2005.
64. Stirrat, pp. 11–16.
65. F. Udan and D. Hilhorst, “Everyday Practices of Humanitarian Aid: Tsunami
Response in Sri Lanka,” Development in Practice, vol. 16, no. 3–4 (2006):
292–302.
66. The guarantor’s mission to Sri Lanka included Professor Andrea Monorchio, in
addition to Amato and Bonino. The other two committee members, Senator
Giulio Andreotti and Parliamentarian Napolitano, did not take part in the
mission.
67. Both statements were reported by the Corriere della Sera newspaper December 29,
2005.
68. M. Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London:
Routledge, 2001, p. IX.
69. Jeganathan, pp. 80–81.
70. The idealized image of a community that had undergone a material and moral
renewal through participation in auto-reconstruction programs had already
assumed a technical expression in the rhetoric of the humanitarian industry
long before the tsunami. The Sri Lankan government’s massive housing pro-
grams starting in the mid-1980s were propagandized according to a dominant
nationalistic propaganda and commonly used by national and local politicians to
strengthen their electoral power bases. Some of the weaknesses behind the CBDM
approach used in post-tsunami Sri Lanka have been already present in these more
than two decades of local history. See J. Brow, Demons and Development: The
Struggle for Community in a Sri Lankan Village, Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 1996; M. Woost, “Developing a Nation of Villages: Rural Community
as State Formation in Sri Lanka,” Critique of Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 1 (1994):
77–95; M. Woost, “Alternative Vocabularies of Development?—‘Community’
and ‘Participation’ in Development Discourse in Sri Lanka,” in R. Grillo and
R. L. Stirrat (eds.), Discourses of Development, London: Berg, 1997, pp. 229–253.
71. Alwis and Hedman; J. Uyangoda, Tsunami and the Politics of Humanitarian Emergency
in Sri Lanka, Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2009.
72. Traditionally the terms politics, policy, and polity are used in political sciences to dis-
tinguish between three spheres of the political realm: the first refers to the dynam-
ics produced by various parties in their efforts to take power, the second refers
to procedural actions put in place to manage the state; and the last refers to the
definition of identity at the boundaries of community. Educational anthropologist
Hervé Varenne explicitly speaks of a “polity of practice” to warn against possible
communitarianist tendencies implicit in the idea of community of practice. To
this end, he identifies two main factors: the relational character of these social
systems of learning and therefore their strong connection to public confronta-
tion and discussion; and the fact that these practices essentially feed on differences,
which are just as important in communities of practice as agreement and sharing. See
H. Varenne, “Difficult Collective Deliberations. Anthropological Notes toward a
Theory of Education,” Teachers College Record, vol. 109, no. 7 (2007): 1559–1588.
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CH A P T E R FOU R
A Critical Look at the “Risk Culture”:

France’s “Plan Rhône”
Ju l i e n L a ngu m i e r
The “risk culture,” an expression that has enjoyed much success in

both academic and management circles, has been the source of some
confusion when one considers relations between the authorities and
local populations in the context of natural hazard prevention policy.
Rather than retrace this category’s journey from the world of scholar-
ship to that of public action, the methodological approach I have cho-
sen here begins with local uses of the expression in order to examine
the issues it puts into play. On-the-ground observation of f lood risk
management in the Rhône valley reveals discrepancies between the
intentions associated with the discourse of the risk culture—which pro-
motes exchange and consultation between experts and laymen, decision
makers, and residents—and its conditions of discursive enunciation,
which are characterized by a marked asymmetry between author (insti-
tutional actors) and audience (the population). To better understand
this discrepancy and grasp the issues involved in it, it is therefore use-
ful to consider the implementation and consequences of this discourse
by closely observing interactions between managers and populations
for whom the risk culture constitutes an a priori frame of reference.
In such circumstances, the investigative methodology must allow the
investigator access to both institutional actors and the population by
way of ethnographic immersion.
Such social omnipresence poses a methodological problem, for
acceptance by one group may often result in exclusion by another. In
128 Julien Langumier
seeking to respond to this issue, I have drawn upon my experience.

After completing a doctorate in ethnology1 I took a post as operational
engineer, in charge of overseeing f lood prevention policy projects on
the Rhône. I was in this way able to observe public action from within.
Much like the “covert” form of participant observation practiced by
researchers who take a job in the organization they wish to study with-
out revealing their intentions,2 the question of access to the field arises
less for an individual who is already present in it as an actor. Given the
investigator’s fully legitimate presence, the obstacles that usually stand
in the way of those from outside the administration seem to disappear.
Rather than misleading the multiple gatekeepers who control access to
the field, the investigator may thus consolidate a research posture that,
in the everyday course of affairs, allows him or her to gather original
empirical data exceeding the scope of individual testimony as well as
open fields of inquiry that may be difficult to discern from the outside.
These two stances lead to the articulation of complementary fields: on
the one hand, “participant observation”3 of consultation dispositifs; on
the other, remote supervision of monographic studies of the territories
where local mobilization develops. By adopting multiple observation
points, it is possible to set the manner in which the consultation dis-
positif is understood in the context of an analysis of the local dynamics
taking place outside of it.
Since 2005, regular meetings have been held in the framework of
Plan Rhône. Known as “Territorial Consultation Committees,” these
meetings bring together hundreds of people, including residents, man-
agers, association members, elected officials, and representatives of the
state. Organized on behalf of the population by institutional leaders,
these arenas are interesting sites for observing the discourse of the risk
culture in action. In particular, a close analysis of consultation leadership
methods reveals how managers apprehend the local population—that
is, the manner in which the latter are represented by the former. Access
to the heart of the operational sphere constitutes a privileged position
for observing public policy in the making, a “view from below”4 that
simultaneously allows one to follow the genesis of the dispositif, get a
behind-the-scenes look at preparations, and participate in all meetings.
In particular, my participation in this dispositif allowed me to observe
how the consultation was conducted as well as follow the evolution of
its rules. Initially structured as a post-disaster consultation, the meet-
ings subsequently took the form of a more classic consultation centered
on hydraulic infrastructure projects. Yet an analysis of the consultation
dispositif must be complemented by an examination of what takes place
A Critical Look at the “Risk Culture” 129
on the consultation’s sidelines or beyond its confines. For the manner in

which some actors interact significantly changes as soon as they are no
longer in the midst of the consultation or subject to the rules of conduct
specific to the dispositif.
My role as an official representative nevertheless prevented me from
conducting participant observation among the population beyond the
cooperation meetings. To make up for this handicap, I chose to expand
my field of research by supervising student monographs on the devel-
opment of local mobilization dynamics in response to institutional
projects. One such project concerned “the optimization of f loodplain
expansion,” a matter bitterly debated in the consultation meetings. It
consisted a local modification of the dumping thresholds that deter-
mine when agricultural plains are to be inundated in order to facilitate
the downstream f low of f loodwater and guarantee the protection of
towns. This type of field is particularly interesting since the authori-
ties were impinging upon local arrangements that were the product of
historic consensus regarding the exposure of each territory to f lood-
ing. On account of the large-scale local mobilizations to which the
project gave rise, students under my supervision prepared two mono-
graphs in the framework of a master’s program. Jessica Gentric’s study
of Barthelasse Island, which is located opposite Avignon, took place
in a sector that was promised better protection by the project. Local
inhabitants and farmers, however, continued to judge it inadequate.5
Marie Anckière’s study of the plain of Piolenc and Mornas focused on
plans to inundate this vast agricultural plain in the event of significant
f looding.6 These monographs take stock of the social configuration in
which local mobilizations are constructed. In particular, they address
the tensions between the old native farmers of the area and newer peri-
urban inhabitants, as well as between territories in which protection
was to be increased and those that would have to accept more water
in the name of solidarity. These monographs significantly contribute
to our understanding of the forms of participation associated with the
consultation dispositif, something that observation of the meetings
alone does not allow one to grasp.
The History of the Rhône’s Domestication
Up to the f lood of 1840, f lood relief efforts along the Rhône were
organized locally, with the state only intervening a posteriori, mainly
in the form of financial assistance. Following disastrous f looding in
1856, Emperor Napoleon III pioneered the “compassionate journey,”

personally traveling to the site of destruction in order to show sup-
port and deliver first aid. Widely reported in the press of the time, the
story was accompanied by many details and illustrations. These new
forms of disaster mediatization thus mixed real-time coverage of the
event via dispatches with a personal publicity campaign on the part
of the head of state, who in this way became directly involved in the
event.7 Napoleon III further claimed that it was the state’s role to be the
bearer of national solidarity, using the occasion to introduce a pioneer-
ing f lood prevention policy.8 Rhône planning thus tended to provide
additional agricultural land for f lood expansion, in order to strengthen
protection of towns. According to Bernard Picon and Paul Allard,9 the
birth of the protective state was marked by a new development policy
based on the technological and scientific skills of Ponts et Chaussées
engineers, which had allowed them to master nature.
At the start of the twentieth century, the Rhône was seen in a new
light, thanks to its hydroelectric potential. In 1933, the electrical indus-
try, the Compagnie des Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée,
Rhône valley authorities, and the Seine administrative district (dépar-
tement) created the Compagnie nationale du Rhône (CNR) to act as their
agent. After the war, waves of nationalization changed the CNR’s
shareholding structure and it became a major public actor in the devel-
opment of the territory of the Rhône corridor. The principle of three-
fold development that was implemented along the river provided for
the construction of hydroelectric dams as well as a navigable chan-
nel and irrigation networks for agriculture. In the nineteenth century,
the “river god”10 had structured human activity, as attested to by the
development of agriculture on silt-laden soil. In the twentieth century,
an effort was launched “to domesticate that which had hitherto been
left to the caprice of nature and time (in its dual meteorological and
historic meaning),” as Michel Marié has underscored in connection
with the Canal de Provence.11 In a context marked by state intervention-
ism and voluntarism, the modernist and technicist ideal guided efforts
to profoundly modify the bed of the Rhône until the late 1970s,12
with a significant impact on the liability of some riverside territories
to f looding.
Following the f loods of 1993 and 1994 in the Camargue, the
December 2003 f lood breached a number of dykes downstream, par-
ticularly affecting the city of Arles and the towns of the Rhône delta.
According to Bernard Picon, this resulted in new awareness of the ter-
ritory’s vulnerability after several decades without a major event and
many efforts to protect the natural character of the Camargue without

regard to the river’s violence: “The representation of the delta, for-
merly presented as a natural environment threatened by human risks,
abruptly shifted to that of a human environment threatened by natu-
ral risks.”13 Further upstream, between Lake Geneva and the suburbs of
Lyon, where the total conversion of the river to hydroelectric produc-
tion had promised an end to f looding, the f lood of 1990 also proved a
revelation. Here, the memory of the f loods had been eclipsed, not by
a naturalist representation of the river, but rather by the conjunction
of a modernist perspective and all-powerful technology, which was
seen as having successfully subdued the Rhone. From 1990 to 2003,
f loods revealed themselves to be occurrences that disrupted develop-
ment paradigms, modernist and naturalist alike, upstream and down-
stream the river.
Following each f lood, social anger expressed itself via the creation
of victims’ organizations whose stance tended to take an increas-
ingly “general” form, over and beyond mere local demands.14 Firmly
implanted at the local level and, from 2003, given structure by the
Rhône Resident Confederation, these organizations turned against the
CNR and the state with support from local politicians, calling into
question the justice of the geography of the f loods. The river thus rep-
resents a geographic frontier along which conf licts between urban and
rural dwellers, small and large landowners are structured around a form
of temporally negotiated solidarity. With each new disaster upstream or
downstream, right bank or left bank, this solidarity is called into ques-
tion. In this context, the state, the regional governments, and the CNR
proposed the creation of Plan Rhône, a partnership intended, among
other things, “to organize local solidarities”15 by attempting to appear
as the guarantor of a degree of fairness.
Consultation: Public Stances and Private Negotiations
In France, natural risk prevention policy is characterized by three types

of intervention: first, recourse to engineering in the construction of
protective works to prepare for natural hazards; next, reduction of ter-
ritorial vulnerability by limiting the exposure of new assets via regula-
tory action or reduction of existing issues; finally, promotion of the risk
culture among all concerned actors and populations. In contrast to the
first two actions, which are explicitly called for at the level of operational
planning (projects, plans, regulation, development plans, and so on),
the third type of intervention is often the object of nested definitions

that always propose the same level of generality without specifying the
nature of the action to be taken. The risk culture must thus allow “all
to be given the resources necessary for being actors when confronted
with risk,” contribute to “better living in areas exposed to f looding,”
and encourage a “shared awareness of risk.”16 Given the fuzziness of
this definition, the risk culture appears as a meta-level objective to
which all initiatives contribute. Thus, when projects to protect against
natural hazards or reduce vulnerability fail to meet their objectives,
they no less contribute, by default, to “promoting the risk culture.”
Within an environmental public policy, the risk culture thus appears a
tautologically defined field of action consisting of anything that does
not fit into more well-structured technical fields. Despite this absence
of definition, the undeniable success enjoyed by the expression in the
field of management partly results from its ability to euphemistically
capture the issues involved in relations between the authorities and the
population: the recognition and even sharing of the legitimate exper-
tise of technical managers, followed by consent—nay, support—for
public risk prevention decisions.17 From this point of view, the Rhône
Territorial Cooperation Committees (TCC) appear as a dispositif that
gives material form to this specific relationship between institutional
leaders and the population into action.
At the methodological level, one must take care not to be taken
in by consultations exhibiting a structure predicated on two already
existing entities: managers, on the one hand, and the population, on
the other. The material organization of the meetings reinforces this
impression of apparent dichotomy by separating the audience from
the rostrum, the participants from the speakers. Consultations are thus
prepared by the institutional actors with an eye to this division. And
by anticipating it, they tend to reinforce it, thereby setting the stage for
confrontation. In the interests of simplicity of writing, my account of
the meetings is based on this simplified categorization of the actors. It
should be underscored in advance, however, that the members of the
audience are not representative of the population, some components
of which do not attend these meetings. What’s more, they cannot be
reduced to a set of type-figures consisting of the inhabitant, the farmer,
the economic actor, the local politician, the associational representa-
tive, the political leader, and so on. In fact, their trajectories and roles
at the local level always combine several traits. On the rostrum, the
succession of institutional actors also does not merge into the generic
figure of the technical manager. Many bodies are represented by state
or community agents, technicians or political and administrative lead-

ers. Despite these simplifications—which incidentally help preserve
the anonymity of my sources—observation of the bodies involved in
the Plan Rhône consultations remains relevant to the analysis of the
relations that are forged there between managers and the population
in the name of the risk culture.
Leading the Consultation, Defining the Population’s Role

In response to the disastrous f loods of December 2003, the Territorial
Consultation Committee was initially conceived as a place where f lood
victims could find an outlet to express themselves after the model of
group talk therapy. The session leader hired for this purpose by Plan
Rhône was a practicing psychoanalyst who sought to secure recogni-
tion for the participants as witnesses of an experience independent of
any reference to their social identities. To prevent them from “frustrat-
ing” the need for expression supposedly revealed by audience members’
questions, institutional leaders were told to remain silent. The session
leader defined the dispositif in this way:
The aim of giving the f loor to the actors is to allow each of

them to express “his claim” and exist in the debate. The social
tie only exists via “the demand” implicitly present behind each
“statement.” One may quote Jacques Lacan in L’Étourdit: “What
one says remains forgotten behind what is heard in what is said,”
which is to say that the act of saying is essential to human exis-
tence independently of the meaning of what is said but that the act
of “saying” is not conscious or perceived. At the level of speaking,
the effect of the “response to the demand” is to reduce the desire
of the “existential demand” to a need to be satisfied and there-
fore constitutes a closing of the exchange and an obstacle to the
actors’ involvement or to their autonomy when confronted with
risk. This hypothesis contrasts with other theories of consultation,
which offer to move the actors from an expression of the demand
to an expression of a need to establish negotiation. The existential
dimension of speech—that is, independently of any reference to
its rational content—is by contrast what allows participants in the
TCC to change their attitudes by becoming “actors” in the under-
taking and no longer just spectators. When it is made in person,
the immediate technical response to this speech keeps everyone
in the position of spectator: “I have my questions, you have your
answers.” Moreover, it quickly stops those among the audience

who are afraid to say what they think from speaking. A technical
response to interventions that appear precise and rational, which is
legitimately desired by technical actors, thus here serves to “satisfy
a demand” and provokes . . . dissatisfaction!18
The regular preparation of meetings constitutes a significant workload

that mobilizes the Plan Rhône team around the session leader. Tension,
it is true, is always palpable in these confrontations, during which tech-
nicians are criticized by the representatives of associations, elected
officials, and residents. Behind the scenes, the preparation results in a
hybridization of technical action and administrative discourse on con-
tact with the psycho-communicator—that is, the session leader—who
seeks to relegate divisive issues (such as the regulation of urbanization
in areas prone to f looding) to the background in favor of more con-
sensual projects that promise better protection against f loods. In order
to gain control over the technical sphere and establish legitimacy, the
session leader uses a systematic strategy to dramatize the confronta-
tion with the population by denying any competence to managers in
the area. At the rostrum, the consultation consists in promoting audi-
ence comments by constantly reformulating these “testimonies” and
“unique experiences.” This form of “mediation” attempts to limit the
impact of questions and euphemize criticism by erasing the sociologi-
cal identities of the interlocutors. All remarks are thereby placed on an
equal footing.
The January 2007 meeting held in Nîmes had hardly begun

when a man rose to speak: “The consultation is a façade. You
don’t listen to us!” The session leader asked him to respect the
protocol of the opening speeches, promising to allow him an
opportunity to speak afterward. Following the first technical
presentation concerning ongoing projects, elected officials were
quick to take the f loor to complain of their abandonment by the
state, the complexity of studies and the slow progress of the work
being undertaken. A representative from the Rhône Resident
Confederation spoke: “Enough with your studies! What are
we waiting for to start work? Nothing is being done!” “We
do hear your demand, you expect concrete results, action on
the ground. Thank you for your statement,” responded the ses-
sion leader. The second presentation addressed the regulation of
construction in f lood prone areas via the development of f lood
risk prevention plans [Plans de prévention des risques d’inondation,

or PPRI]. The reaction was to denounce the “freezing of con-
struction” in the territories: “The state has behaved irresponsibly
with regards to construction permits. And what about history?
Before, farmers settled here but now we can’t grant permits to
the sons and grandsons of farmers following in their footsteps.
What can we do in our villages?” an elected official asked. As
a minimal response, the session leader reminded the public that
the meeting was only the beginning of discussions between the
state and the population and that these were to continue at the
local level on a case-by-case basis.19
The session leader’s instruction to not respond to questions—to “listen”

and “answer later” in order to “let people say what they have to say”—
had the effect of reducing audience interventions to stories, partici-
pants to witnesses, and the consultation process to an arena dedicated
to allowing institutional leaders to hear the victims out. In a way analo-
gous to the medico-psychological emergency units set up on disaster
sites,20 the authorities attempted to show that they took the pathos of the
victimized population into account, that they recognized the victims
by dedicating a space for them to express themselves. Their effort to
“listen” consequently implied that the fact of speaking is more impor-
tant than what is said. By assigning less importance to the content of
audience members’ remarks, this approach tended to steer clear of dis-
cussions regarding possibilities for future public action. The inhabitants
were encouraged to share the local memory they supposedly possessed
(which, it was said, must be expressed in the form of testimony in order
to be recognized).21 This mise-en-scène put the inhabitants in the posi-
tion of spokesmen of past disasters. The memory of these disasters, it
was claimed, vouched for the reality of the danger and the need to take
measures to prevent it. Yet, there was no explicit statement of the man-
ner in which institutions chose to respond to the disaster, as if the most
important thing were to demonstrate the fact that the authorities had
been mobilized. Faced with the managers’ silence, the meetings rapidly
degenerated into a “dialogue of the deaf.” This method thus quickly
reached its limits as the disaster receded into the past and the project
implementation period began.
Public authorities and the institutional representatives of the state
subsequently led the consultation. To respond to thoughtful questions
from the audience—as opposed to questions that were understood as
revealing a collective need to be heard out—they relied upon their
technical administration and respective policy stances. As one elected

regional official put it:
You have challenged or called into question the very meaning

of consultation and you are right to do so. We will not tell you:
“We’re doing consultation, it’s great!” Objectively, if consultation
isn’t followed up by action, it serves no purpose. So you have
called us out and we must respond and perhaps we’ll put some
pressure on certain issues . . . But, in questioning us, you’ve said:
“You understand us, you listen to us, but you don’t back it up.”
Behind this, there’s a twofold issue, that of time. Administrative
time is always longer than real time and that’s not acceptable when
you’re at risk. We could enumerate the list of everything that’s
already been done in the few short years since the last f loods, in
2003. But the question of time would still be of great concern and
you do a good job raising it. You have trouble listening to what
you consider to be “hair-splitting” but at the same time these are
issues that require examination by experts.
In contrast to the first form of session leadership, which encouraged

hearing out local victims, the managers here sought to win a hearing
for themselves in order to ensure that their audience might understand
the technical, financial, and administrative difficulties specific to mov-
ing forward with projects. The consultation was thus conceived of as
addressing an “ideal inhabitant”22 who would share the objectives of
public policy and support expert discourse. In practice, this figure is
rarely encountered in the f lesh, a source of disappointment for those
who organized the consultation. Rather than a place where the man-
agers encounter respect for technical knowledge and regulatory pro-
cedures, they see the consultation as a forum for particular interests to
“let off steam” through the voice of a “politically engaged” farmer, an
owner of f lood-prone land “concerned for his heirs,” an elected official
behaving in “demagogic fashion in the run-up to municipal elections.”
This more direct type of confrontation gradually results in a certain
weariness among managers, who become convinced they are con-
tributing via the consultation forum to the existence and importance
of associations that refuse to budge from their positions and remain
impervious to the progress made by projects.
Finally, once the projects had taken more specific form, the devel-
opment of the consultation dispositif was once again outsourced. The
new session leader took a more journalistic approach, encouraging the
audience to debate the most sensitive and controversial subjects with

institutional leaders. He did not hesitate to call upon decision mak-
ers to explain how exchanges with the population were taken into
consideration:
Just one question . . . Many of the associations that are present

today and have expressed themselves feel like they’ve not been
listened to: do you have the impression that, among the in-prin-
ciple decisions that have been made, some have been inf luenced
by the comments made by associations? To put it plainly, have
any policy orientations been modified by the contributions from
associations?23
This method of session leadership ref lected an intentional effort to

rebalance relations between managers and residents by attempting to
reorient interaction in the forums of consultation. Yet the consulta-
tion’s instigators were soon reproaching the session leader, who they
believed had adopted the role of association advocate, for not being
“impartial.” Discussion in this way turned to the form of consultation
itself. This time, the managers directly challenged the session leader,
as in the following exchange, during which he attempted to cut short
a sharp exchange between an associational representative and an insti-
tutional leader:
Session leader: Excuse me. I am leading this workshop.

Manager: Please do so impartially then.
Session leader: I haven’t been impartial? You let me lead the
workshop. Someone asks a question. Two of you answer. Which
means a 20-minute answer to a single question. We are here to
work together to find a way to improve the situation. If that’s
your position then let’s immediately move on to the second pre-
sentation since we won’t get anywhere this way. I will let you
speak and then we’ll move on to something else. I’m not going
to waste my time being attacked on top of everything else.
Manager: Excuse me, I wasn’t attacking you. I asked to speak,
I have the right to express myself.
Session leader: You told me I’m biased.
Manager: That’s correct. And I ask you to be impartial. There
was a presentation, questions were asked about the presentation.
Criticisms were made. I’m sorry, but I’ve just put myself in an
awkward position. Why?
Session leader: I’m stopping. I’m leaving.

Manager: Ok, stop then.
Session leader: We’re not going to take someone and beat him
up for 15 minutes.
Manager: We are accused of not engaging in consultation, par-
ticularly with residents. I can show you the number of hours
we’ve spent in my engineer’s office with the present association
showing them our files, discussing issues with them regarding
each project. Today, they dare claim that we’re not taking part
in consultation, that we don’t make any effort in that regard.
I don’t agree.
Session leader: Yes, well, it’s true that it’s not worth continuing
with that association.
Manager: Please let me speak. I would like to say that, as far
as consultation is concerned, our doors are open. I say that to
everyone and I’ve said it before. We have met with residents
and other associations. We have met with professional groups,
dykes organizations leaders who have come to get information.
We have consulted on projects. Why are you a session leader if
you don’t like it? What kind of behavior is this?24
The decision to encourage debate between managers and residents

collided with the impossibility of conducting a consultation intended
as a deliberative arena for purposes of collective decision making. In
response to the above altercation, the sponsor of the Plan Rhône con-
sultation reiterated the limits of the exercise:
Since the beginning—and I think that it was on this point that

things were ambiguous—some speak about information and com-
munication and others speak about consultation, which isn’t the
same thing at all. I’m going to advance a hypothesis, without try-
ing to preempt the discussion. It’s not possible to conduct real time
consultation within the TCC. What I’m asking you to believe it’s
that, when we record everything said in the TCC and after we’ve
returned home with the memory of what was said and knowing
how we tried to respond . . . It must not be imagined that consul-
tation physically takes place in a meeting, that you ask a ques-
tion and the person in front of you immediately answers it. It
doesn’t work that way. The decision-making process is complex.
Technical responses are complex. There is thus study and work
to be done. By contrast, it’s true that one of the questions that’s
regularly raised is that, at least, when all is said and done, one
might know what took place in reaching a given result.25
Inhabitants and local actors do not think of their participation or
reaction to public policy solely in terms of the risk culture as a norm
expected by managers and revealed by successive consultation leader-
ship methods: the foregrounding of disaster victim testimony, unimag-
inative exercises to promote the sharing of expertise, and an emphasis
on debate in the aim of manufacturing consent for preventative action.
The participants saw their contribution to the consultation in the
context of a dynamic of mobilization in defense of their interests—
indeed, of their vision of the river, which often went beyond purely
local considerations. This discrepancy led to criticism of the consulta-
tion dispositif itself, whatever the manner in which it was run. As one
association leader remarked:
It’s the sixth TCC that I’ve participated in and I’m very disap-
pointed. I have the impression that we’re going in circles. Some
things make progress but we waste so much time with all these
brilliant presentations, we don’t care about them. We sustain all
this damage, it happens with every f lood. It’s not up to us to man-
age them. We came here to hear what’s going to be done. We
want proposals. We want work, not hot air.26
This challenge to the exercise of consultation in turn calls for con-
tinuous efforts on the part of its instigators to redefine the deliberative
forum, a fact that accounts for the successive transformations of the
dispositif. Yet, despite these adjustments, the consultation does not free
itself from the actors’ game, with expertise and reason remaining on
the side of institutional representatives and emotion the preserve of
residents. Each party continues to intervene in keeping with its prerog-
atives and the social conventions. In reaction to the position adopted by
institutional actors, who defend their studies, expertise, and projects,
inhabitants and associational representatives are assigned a reactive and
recalcitrant stance. Adopting a virulent and passionate tone, contrasting
strongly with the self-control and neutrality displayed by the managers,
they call into question the relevance of studies, the cogency of regula-
tion, and, finally, the general interest as it is defined by “technocrats.”
In this sense, despite the intentions championed by the consultation,
the dispositif implemented on the Rhône tends to confirm and rein-
force these divisions, systematically resulting in confrontation between
experts and laymen.
Adjourning for the Buffet: In the Shadow of Official Confrontations

After every meeting, however turbulent, the organizers are often sur-
prised by the warm exchanges with participants—the very same people
who, in the midst of the consultation, had violently criticized them.
The buffet thus constitutes a site of exchange where all are free to
take liberties with the discourses and declarations that are publically
expected of them, thereby showing some understanding of the role
in which the interlocutors find themselves. As one association leader
furtively remarked, “We give you a hard time but it was good, these
meetings are good, we must continue to have them. We know that
everything doesn’t depend on you.” For their part, some institutional
leaders attempt to explain the complexity of the issues facing them
without resorting to oratorical precautions, sometimes communicating
things more explicitly than is possible from the rostrum. Thanks to the
buffet, discussions between the rostrum and the audience continue in
another format, one free of “the official effect”27 imposed on all public
exercises conducted under the aegis of the state and the regional gov-
ernments. The buffet allows one to resume private exchanges, adopting
a confidential tone to express a discourse that is tailored to a specific
interlocutor rather than the entire audience.
The attention given to this off-stage gathering also allows one to
set the confrontation between the rostrum and the audience in the
context of the relative social proximity of consultation participants and
institutional actors. Those present show an interest in the theme of this
type of meeting, which may often be explained by reference to their
earlier professional careers and availability as retired people, which
allows them to fully participate in the associative mobilization. After
the associational representatives, farmers comprise the largest active
professional group to make themselves heard at these meetings. They
share a perfect empirical grasp of the field with experts in hydraulics,
by virtue of having observed each f lood, the f low of water during
significant rainfalls, the maintenance of dams and irrigation systems,
and so on. Around the buffet, the wealth of discussions encountered
among institutional actors and participants is to be explained in terms
of this sociological proximity and shared expertise, whether it consists
of practical knowledge relating to the activity of farming or hydraulic
studies and modeling.
While dissatisfaction with the dispositif is broadly shared, the meetings
have continued unbroken for several years. The fact that so many still
participate in them is no doubt explained by the fact that they regularly
provide a platform for reaffirming the respective roles of all parties:

while the authorities define legitimate technical expertise and the gen-
eral interest as well as determine which figures will be authorized to
participate, civil society as an oppositional force contests these three pre-
rogatives. Many joke that the persistence of the Territorial Consultation
Committees and the high rates of attendance they enjoy can be attrib-
uted to the buffet. Yet this witticism echoes my argument regarding the
importance of the buffet. Its appeal resides, not in what one eats and
drinks there, but in the exchanges that take place between actors, which
also shed light on the success and longevity of consultation.
Finally, the issues are not exclusively limited to spaces of consulta-
tion that combine oratorical effects on the podium to assert principled
stances with greater complicity and proximity at the buffet, the site of
negotiation. Consultation meeting participants must also supply those
absent from the consultation with an account of what they said and pos-
sibly what they obtained. Such ex post facto developments exceed the
scope of my observations of the Territorial Consultation Committees.
Yet they are important for understanding the actors’ forms of participa-
tion relative to what is at stake beyond the confines of the dispositif and,
indeed, beyond the subject of Rhône f looding—mainly, issues of local
policy and the inf luence of associations. Indeed, the arena of consultation
reveals relations of power between local representative authorities—the
elected officials of the municipalities—and associational mobilizations.
The latter are not homogenous but rather organized into three broad
groups on the Rhône: residents, farmers, and environmentalists. The
subjects discussed at the consultation meetings in the framework of
Plan Rhône sometimes serve as a pretext for confrontations or alliances
between these various actors. Under pressure from resident associations,
which often have large memberships, a fact that raises the stakes of the
meetings, local politicians are often induced to take the f loor. This can
be seen in the following exchange regarding a controversy over reliance
on academic expertise and hydraulic modeling to explain empirical
observations concerning the extent of f looding:
Resident association: It is clear that this report was not solely
written by the academic whose name appears on it: the use
of “one” allows this report to say whatever suits the experts
without giving any objective thought to the local reality.
A counter-report was prepared by the resident association in
2009 but was not taken into account in the publication of the
final document.
Area mayor: The residents have noticed an inconsistency between

the high water levels they have observed and those selected as
standard f low rates. In this context, it is difficult to imagine
that modeling can take these discrepancies into account with-
out revealing increased f looding in the plain.
Resident association: Today, resident representatives are offi-
cially requesting a meeting with the state administration to
more particularly examine our sector as well as its exposure to
hydraulic hazards and vulnerability to f looding.28
In response to the prominent place occupied by resident associations in

the meetings, environmentalists sometimes seek to cut short discussion
in order to remind the audience of the conservationist objectives asso-
ciated with river management. Their occasional efforts can provoke
an angry response from residents, who denounce what they see as the
defense of protected species at the expense of “the human species”:
Resident association: The reed bed at the conf luence [of the
river] is a central problem for our sector. The sediment that has
accumulated there prevents f loodwaters from draining from
the Rhône. Protection of this zone under Natura 2000 today
prevents any action from being taken on the gravel banks. How
is the preservation of nature to be reconciled with efforts to
reduce the hazards for residents? It seems that nature has now
been given priority.
Environmental association: One cannot extrapolate the gen-
eral behavior of the Rhône from a specific case observed on the
river, particularly in regards to sediment management. These
are complex processes and the effect of the actions under con-
sideration must be understood at the level of the river and from
the perspective of upstream-downstream solidarity. I would
like to reiterate that, in contrast to the f lood-prone plains of
the Rhône, there have been victims along some tributaries!
Resident association: That’s a scandalous thing to say! Shame
on you! [The participant stood and threatened to strike the
environmental association representative with a cane. Chaos
ensued and the meeting was broken off ].
These episodes illustrate how relations that have been established

between actors outside the dispositif enter into the arena of consul-
tation. To better understand the stance adopted by participants over
the course of the meetings—not just toward the managers but also
among themselves—observation of them must be followed up with
ethnographic studies capable of accounting for mobilization dynam-
ics that fall within the scope of specific social configurations. At the
methodological level, some actors appear under another light thanks
to open-ended one-on-one interviews. This contrasts with the arenas
of consultation, where the format reinforces the violence of the par-
ticipants’ remarks and where the act of speaking becomes a kind of
performance. In the interviews, demands are thus expressed in a more
contextualized manner from the perspective of a biographical trajec-
tory that often ref lects a territory’s history. Carrying out monographic
studies allows one to gather statements free of the inf luence of the
consultation’s performative aspect and also better understand relations
between local actors outside of this dispositif.
The Role Played by Social Configurations in Local Mobilizations

Among the development projects sponsored by Plan Rhône, the pro-
posed “optimization of f lood plains system management” provided for
modifying the spillway setting of ten agricultural plains located between
Montélimar and Arles in order to facilitate the transit of f loodwater
downstream. This provoked a significant reaction. Over time, it is true,
the Rhône’s development has produced some very uneven results: some
lowland areas, such as Barthelasse Island, were deliberately left prone to
f looding (including in the event of small, frequent f loods) while oth-
ers, such as the Piolenc-Mornas plain, were spared the f looding of the
Rhône thanks to hydroelectric dams that redrew the river bed for pur-
poses of energy production. The optimization of the f lood plains system
plan considered proposals for modestly raising the dykes of Barthelasse
Island as well as implementing a spillway on the hydroelectric dam that
would allow f loodwater to expand in the plain. The result would be a
more even distribution of f loodwaters: Barthelasse Island would expe-
rience less frequent f looding while the Piolenc Mornas plain would be
inundated in the event of a rare, major f lood. In contrast to the gross
distortions presented during the consultation meetings—typical of the
binary opposition between the population and the authorities—the
monographs sought to cast light on local support for or in opposition
to the Plan Rhône development plan. To do so, they examined these
responses in the light of social configurations that were marked by
the deliberate inundation of certain agricultural plains to the profit of
towns or other low-lying agricultural areas.
Inundating Fields to Protect Towns: Conflicting Solidarity between

Residents of Avignon and Barthelasse
The city of Avignon, which was for many decades a papal state inde-
pendent of the Kingdom of France, was delimited to the west by a f luc-
tuating frontier that corresponded to the bed of the Rhône, defined as
“all temporarily inundated land.” The Kingdom of France extended
to the foot of Avignon’s ramparts. When rising water inundated the
city’s lower districts, royal tax collectors came by boat to collect money
due to the Crown. In the course of the French Revolution, the town
of Avignon and the County of Venaissin were incorporated into
the Republic. However, Barthelasse Island belonged to the town of
Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, located across the river from Avignon, for at
the time an old branch of the Rhône supplied the frontier. After the
great f lood of 1856, Barthelasse Island was joined with Avignon on
account of the shifting riverbed. The administrative division of this
territory therefore followed the river’s movements on the basis of geo-
graphic frontiers that were ceaselessly redrawn by f loods. As a result,
Barthelasse Island became a neighborhood of the city of Avignon and
several urban public amenities were established there. Barthelasse nev-
ertheless remained an enclave, with the island’s inhabitants affirming
their identity as islanders and seeing themselves first and foremost as
Bartelassiens and only secondarily as Avignonnais. They recalled that the
old bridge of Avignon was washed away by the Rhône in 1669. In the
aftermath of this f lood, the river could only be crossed by ferryboat. In
1806, however, a new wooden structure was built, to be replaced by a
suspension bridge in 1843. Today, geographic isolation is interpreted in
terms of the differences of lifestyle that separate the rural inhabitants of
the island from the city-dwellers of Avignon.
Thanks to the silt deposited by the f loods, agriculture benefits
from the agronomical richness of the alluvial soil. “There are perhaps
three meters of silt,” explained one farmer. “This is very fertile land.
It is alluvial land so this is the best land there is for farming.” Another
Barthelasse farmer noted that, in today’s era, characterized by the use of
manure and other fertilizers, “the agronomical contribution of a f lood is
insignificant.” Historically, however, the agricultural value of the island
was enhanced by its exposure to f looding. A grain-based polyculture
requiring large areas for cultivation developed on the island to meet
the demand of the nearby town. In the late nineteenth century, market
gardening and wine growing developed, thanks to Avignon residents’
kitchen gardens. At the time, submerging the vines was the only remedy
for fighting against the phylloxera then ravaging many vineyards in

Provence and Languedoc. Eventually, a cooperative wine cellar was
opened, evidence of the prosperity that was assured by the large-scale
production of mediocre wine until the 1970s. The subsequent crisis in
wine production led to a vast campaign to uproot vines, with young
farmers replanting their fields with new crops depending on market
price f luctuations. In contrast to Avignon and despite its proximity to
the city center, Barthelasse Island saw little by way of urbanization, the
result of regulatory constraints relating to the river’s f looding:
These are people who started with little gardens because Barthelasse
Island is a paradise relative to Avignon. And little by little, as it
were, they constructed a cabin on Saturdays and Sundays, even-
tually spending their weekends there. And later, they received
authorizations and exemptions to construct. And that’s why
there are urbanized sectors today. Well, at first it wasn’t official,
it was unplanned. And little by little, it received the authority’s
blessing.29
Until the 2000s, restrictions on urban development allowed the island

to retain its agricultural identity by encouraging farmers to join together
and exclusively granting them construction permits. This reinforced
social ties among Bathelassiens and the “islander” mentality, thereby
contributing to the creation of an island agricultural enclave that today
forms the city of Avignon’s “green lung.” The inhabitants are mainly
farmers whose families have resided on the island for three or four gen-
erations. As the island’s former schoolteacher explained, “There are a
lot of old families, there’s what one might call an islander mentality.”
For older Barthelassiens, the shared experience of f looding contributes
to newcomers’ integration into the islander identity. In this way, the
distinction between town and country dwellers is redrawn in terms of
the difference between those who “know what it is” and those who
have yet to experience it. As a leader of the dyke and trench organiza-
tion explains:
There are houses on Barthelasse with new owners. So today we

find ourselves in a much more delicate situation because the new
owners don’t realize what “a Rhône” is.30 Before, you went to the
Rhône, you kept an eye out as soon as the storm hit. That’s part of
the tradition in the rural world, but not in that of town dwellers
living in a rural area. They don’t have this culture. It’s difficult
to give it to them. So those who have gone through two or three

f loods, they have it. They’re like the farmers, they’ve been marked
by the island.31
Here, the memory of the f loods is inseparable from the agricultural

world. For the island’s inhabitants, it refers to an ordeal that confirms
their rootedness in the territory and membership of local society. The
affirmation of insularity ref lects relations between town and coun-
try that center on a form of territorial solidarity set in motion by the
f loods. Barthelasse Island’s dykes only protect it against small f loods,
allowing larger f loods to inundate the island. By continuing to allow
Barthelasse Island to be f looded, this arrangement reduces pressure
on the opposite bank and thereby contributes to protecting the city
of Avignon. “We know perfectly well that protecting Barthelasse can
only come at the expense of the city of Avignon,” explains an elected
official. “But the protection of the urbanized part cannot be called into
question. It’s fundamental and not up for negotiation.” The fact that
they are f looded for the benefit of the citizens of Avignon is a matter
to which the inhabitants of Barthelasse Island frequently return. As one
inhabitant explained, “All towns are more or less protected, which is
logical but . . . it’s to the detriment of the countryside. And that’s not so
logical.” A leader of the dyke organization similarly stated, “We under-
stand they want to inundate the rural expansion fields but it mustn’t be
done just anytime, without any regard for the cost.” In this context,
inhabitants of Barthelasse Island denounce, not the fact that the island
is f lood-prone or that the town is protected at their expense, but rather
the failure of Avignon’s residents to show gratitude for their “sacrifice”
and the lack of compensation from the authorities. Flood management
constitutes a strong bond between the farmers of Barthelasse Island and
the city-dwellers of Avignon. As one resident of the island remarked:
The residents of Avignon protect themselves. So in protect-

ing themselves, well, the water comes to us. And all of the resi-
dents of Avignon are happy that the water comes here. They’re
the ones who come take photos of us in the water! Very nice of
them . . . That’s why, on the other hand . . . no, the rest of the time,
we’re not very happy when we see them come here.32
Fieldwork accounts for the complexity of relations between rural

islanders and the urban residents of Avignon, which play out in the
sacrifice of the former for the benefit of the latter. Since the nineteenth
century, state administrations have overseen the raising of the dykes.

Since the twentieth century, the construction of hydroelectric facili-
ties has observed the same principle of limited f lood protection for the
island. In contrast to other territories, which benefit from significant
protections, the island’s inhabitants thus very often find themselves
inundated. As one farmer explained:
In the framework of territorial planning, the state did away with

some expansion fields and kept others. From that moment on, the
state of affairs changed: one can’t speak of natural f loodplains—
there had been natural f loodplains but the state closed them. They
wanted to protect towns so they took away the f loodplains. No
more than 20 percent of plains remain liable to f looding and
these 20 percent must assume all f loodwater storage from the
Rhône . . . So there is no longer any equality.33
Hydroelectric facilities, it is true, have removed some areas from f lood-

ing, at the same time rendering the role played by f lood expansion areas
permanent, as in the case of Barthelasse Island. The Plan Rhône project
therefore aims to allow for better (but still very moderate) protection in
order to ensure that the island may continue to be inundated as neces-
sary. The inhabitants and farmers oppose this minimalist choice, which
they continue to see as unjust. The memory of past f loods and the suf-
fering of the inhabitants who lived through them are thus called upon
as evidence of the historic continuity of planning choices that have
perpetuated Barthelasse Island’s status as a f lood plain. The island’s
inhabitants and farmers readily respond to institutional efforts to create
a risk culture, so much so that the island’s population is seen as a model
in this domain. However, this quasi-antiquarian collection and recog-
nition of these “good practices” tend to obscure the islanders’ demands,
which mobilize the memory of f looding as a political resource.
Confronting the Project to Flood the Piolenc-Mornas Plain:

Farmers and Periurban Residents
Further upstream, on the right bank of the Rhône, the Piolenc-Mornas
plain is a vast agricultural zone that was regularly f looded by the over-
f lowing river. In 1974, the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône constructed
facilities to exploit the river’s hydroelectric potential, erecting unsink-
able dykes along the banks. In contrast to Barthelasse Island, which
under Plan Rhône was to be provided better protection by raising the
level of existing dykes, the project under consideration for the Piolenc-
Mornas plain would repurpose this old f lood plain to allow for better
storage in order to reduce downstream f looding. This was in keeping
with a principle of solidarity as well as a naturalist paradigm reminiscent
of what Sophie Bonin has observed in regards to the Loire, “The Loire
is now also being developed from an ecological point of view . . . the
acquisition of riverside land in order to do nothing with it has become
a form of development.”34 As soon as they were launched, the very first
studies seeking to define the possibilities for once again inundating the
plain in the event of major f looding of the Rhône (via a spillway on
CNR dykes) gave rise to local mobilizations.
North of Orange, the Rhône corridor tightens into a narrow valley,
described as a “gulley” or “strangulation point” (estrangulado), ref lecting
the juxtaposition of transport networks and large-scale infrastructure in
the Piolenc-Mornas plain. A new population has taken up residence in the
towns of Piolenc and Mornas, the direct consequence of the infrastruc-
ture and industry that has been created in the region (in particular, the
Bollène and Marcoule nuclear complexes). These development dynamics
have contributed to the transformation of the rural plain into what is
known as “modern” countryside. In the 1990s, the construction of the
TGV (high-speed train) required the establishment of a gravel quarry
alongside the Rhône. Following its construction, the town of Piolenc
converted the building site into an industrial zone and planned numerous
projects: the creation of a river port, enlargement of the existing wind
turbine park, the production of photovoltaic energy, and developing the
lake as a canoe-kayak Olympic training site. The town’s modernizing
ambitions were not unanimously supported by farmers, who lamented the
loss of arable land. A Piolenc politician testified to the hybrid character—
at once urban and rural—of local policy, as shown by the presence of
“old families” alongside nonfarmers on the town council:
As in many towns, the problem is that there aren’t any more farm-
ers. The problem is that we don’t represent much of a population
but we do represent all that [he gestures towards the plain]. You
have a mayor who is a farmer but you have another list on which
there are no farmers that ran against the mayor! Honestly, a rural
commune of 2000 inhabitants, because we do know the land, we
know how things work.35
With the arrival of a new population come to dig the CNR’s Donzère-
Mondragon canal—and, later, to work at the Bollène and Marcoule
nuclear sites, where company towns were erected to house them—

longstanding inhabitants of the village assert that it has become a
“bedroom community.” The new inhabitants are fond of hearing the
stories told by the natives, which often consist in discussions of old and
now-vanished agricultural activities and evoke their familiarity with
the frequent f looding that preceded CNR development. More than
30 years on, these old-timers readily refer to the “coups du Rhône”
(“Rhône strikes”) when “the Rhône was full” and “we took a drink,”
“we drowned.” While some farms still show traces of the great f lood
of May 31, 1856, most residents mention the f loods they lived through
in November 1935 and November 1951. Some produce old photo-
graphs to show what no longer happens today. The old farms remained
habitable during the f loods, as bedrooms, kitchen, and main rooms
were all located on the second f loor of structures; “We expected it
before, everything was raised.” A refuge for the animals, known as the
“récati,” was also built in case of f looding. In order to move about dur-
ing f loods, each farm had a boat that was around six meters long. The
farmers I met have all kept their boats. They are attached to them and
proudly show them to visitors as an object of curiosity that speaks of a
bygone era but also offers protection should the Rhône return. As one
old farming couple from Mornas explained:
Him: The boat, ah yes, I still have it.

Her: Yes, because it was down below, you had put it on iron
girders. But when Georges moved in, we had to move it. And
we weren’t going to throw this boat away, no! He put it in the
hay loft! So they all helped raise his boat!
Him: With the pallet forks. But the door was too narrow, well,
there were my sons. But I said “no, I’m keeping it!”
Marie Anckiere: You didn’t want to give it up!
Him: Oh, it’s waiting. It’s waiting for the Rhône!36
Recalling these memories and the continuity of particular ways of liv-

ing expresses the old residents’ sense of belonging to the plain, the
original identity of which ref lects the f lood-prone past that preceded
development. While the population has doubled since the early 1970s,
transmission of these stories from native to newcomer is part of the
process, whereby the place’s history is learned.
In a context marked by decentralization and the rise of environ-
mental concerns as well as a local level dynamic focused on the plain’s
modernization, the construction of the Mediterranean high speed line
(ligne grande vitesse, or LGV) from 1996 to 2001 gave rise to unprec-
edented mobilization. In responding to the f looding projected by Plan
Rhône, the residents of Mornas and Piolenc referred to this episode.
The technical monopoly enjoyed by major state bodies was called into
question in favor of consultation and territorial governance, an area in
which many urban transplants who had come “to live in the country”
became involved. Profiting from the plain’s narrowness, the farmers
“paralyzed France” by simultaneously blocking the A7 highway, trunk
road 7, and the railway. Today, it is generally agreed that this “Gallic
style” mobilization did not result in the expected compensations. In
parallel with the farmer’s mobilization, an association for the protection
and defense of the plain, created in 1990 by new residents of Mornas,
mobilized to preserve local living conditions. As one of the association’s
founders explained:
First we protect ourselves, next we defend ourselves if attacked.

It’s the life we’ve chosen! We are very happy that we’ve fallen in
love with this way of life and it’s true that we show our claws to
protect it! We want something that is fair for everyone. Simply
put: What we don’t want for us, we don’t want for others. So find
another solution.37
Unlike the farmers, the members of the association claim to have

“won” the mobilization against the TGV, preventing expansion to six
lines and winning compensation and noise pollution barriers. The new
inhabitants thus began to eclipse the farmers, who defended their land
and their practices, under threat from real estate pressure and develop-
ment projects alike. Local reactions to the proposed f looding of the
plain must be examined from the point of view of this long, conf lict-
ridden history between the general interest and local interests. One
must also take account of the mobilization of new types of resident
whose discourse cannot be reduced to the defense of agricultural inter-
ests. Piolenc and Mornas politicians thus developed a discourse in order
to justify their opposition to once again inundating the area. After hav-
ing demanded greater certainty regarding the technical effectiveness of
what was seen as a risky project, a Mornas politician called into question
the coherence of state action:
We took measures to prevent continued f looding of this plain but

now we’re going to make it liable to f looding all over again! So
for a time, we let construction proceed, we let some agricultural
production take place given the absence of water from the Rhône.
That’s why, for the second time, I’m against this.38
Alongside these arguments against the project, politicians were already

discussing the trade-offs and compensations that should be demanded:
There are two options in regards to the f looding project. Either

we act like Gauls—that is, we say: “we’re opposed, we’re opposed,
we’ll resist to the bitter end, we’ll block the roads with steam
shovels, we’ll conduct a sit in, etc.”—or we say “we’re in favor but
it’s up to you to buy up all of the houses, all of the businesses, all
of the farms that will say ‘no, but with the Rhône f looding, I can’t
continue here.’ ” So buy them up and let them move somewhere
elsewhere.39
The f looding of the Piolenc-Mornas plain is in the interest of many

downriver towns. As a result, the two towns found themselves entirely
alone in their opposition to the Plan Rhône managers. Yet they were
also in a position to negotiate in order to remove obstacles to the plan.
As in the consultation meetings, the construction of local mobilization
joined polarization of the conf lict and a quest for compensation by
way of negotiation. In much the same fashion as the farmers’ blockade
operations discussed above, the former was publically represented via
the affirmation of positions of principle and efforts to play upon major
divisions between managers and local actors. The latter took place in
the framework of discussions characterized by a degree of proximity
between actors and the setting aside of previous public stances. Despite
the fact that the projected f looding tended to recall past f looding, nei-
ther the defenders of agricultural interests nor those seeking to preserve
living conditions called upon its memory to support their arguments or
inf luence negotiations. The memory of past f looding was nevertheless
invoked by older residents and taken up by new ones in imagining the
history of the territory on which they had taken up residence. If this
memory was passed over in silence, it was because it tended to mini-
mize the harm that would be suffered by the locality relative to the
river’s history and so did not serve the purposes of their negotiation and
compensation strategies.
At the local level, a different version of the argument from solidarity
boasted of by Plan Rhône’s partners is to be heard. In Piolenc, elected
officials stress that they are “already in solidarity with lots of things.”40
In the plain, the project’s general philosophy is in some ways ref lected
in the empathy expressed for disaster victims by old farmers familiar

with the Rhône’s f looding: “When there are f loods and there is water
everywhere, we feel sorry for them because we know what it’s like!
We say ‘the poor people, it’s not over for them.’ ” But the inhabitants
more readily wonder about the inundation project’s beneficiaries and
those who are sacrificed to advance it: “They want to do that in order
to preserve Avignon. Instead of the water going to Avignon, it would
come here.” “They talk about f looding us to save others.” By identify-
ing Avignon as the foremost beneficiary, solidarity is interpreted as the
countryside’s latest sacrifice for the good of the city—a sacrifice that
must be compensated. The inhabitants reinterpret the project in the
light of the true beneficiaries of inundation: “Because multinationals
are coming to Avignon with their money and they can do what they
like!” Some refer more particularly to the creation of a hotel complex at
the conf luence of the Durance and the Rhône. The global approach to
the river promoted by the managers thus gives way to the designation
of the project’s beneficiaries in an attempt to obtain compensation from
them or the authorities.
The development project was generally legitimated by reference to
“upstream/downstream, right bank/left bank solidarity.” At the local
level, by contrast—on Barthelasse Island and in the Piolenc-Mornas
plain—this form of solidarity was declined in order to identify the
project’s specific beneficiaries. Solidarity was not rejected as such but
rather evaluated from the perspective of the “justice” (or injustice) of
planned development—that is, in terms of the sacrifice of farmers and
periurban residents for the benefit of “greater” interests. In this sym-
bolic economy of the f loods’ meaning, the figure of the beneficiary is
decisive to understanding the population’s agreement or refusal. The
inhabitants of the f lood-prone planes identified with potential victims
farther downstream and thus showed some understanding of the stakes
involved in the development project. The denunciation of the role
played downstream by economic considerations did not allow for this
type of identification and lead to a categorical refusal to sacrifice one-
self for the benefit of those who are dissimilar: businesses with respect
to residents, city-dwellers with respect to farmers.
Conclusion
To conclude, the two monographic studies conducted on Barthelasse

Island and the Piolenc-Mornas plain benefit from comparison with my
analysis of the Territorial Consultation Committees and the discourse

of the risk culture. By first attending to consultation dispositifs and the
manner in which consultation was by turns conducted, I was able to
show the forms of participation expected of the population by manag-
ers: testimony regarding one’s experience of f looding, understanding
technico-administrative approaches, and profiting from a multiplicity
of viewpoints to engage in debate, though without participating in the
decision-making arena. Implemented over the course of the meetings,
these three injunctions are a concrete manifestation of the more general
discourse of the risk culture, itself an invitation to citizens to partici-
pate in public efforts to prevent natural hazards and, indeed, collectively
mobilize to meet potential disasters.
In the case of the first injunction, which urges the population to
express itself or testify, ethnographic studies clearly show that the
memory of a f lood-prone territory cannot be mobilized without a
solid understanding of present-day issues. On Barthelasse Island, the
memory of the Rhône’s f loods thus presents itself as soon as one takes
up the issue of relations between the island and the City of the Popes.
On the Piolenc-Mornas plain, by contrast, the memory of past f loods
did not figure in the mobilization against Plan Rhône. This should not
be taken for an indication that, having been spared f looding for the past
50 years, the area’s inhabitants had forgotten it. Nor should it be under-
stood as suggesting that their regular exposure to f looding explains
the role assigned to memory by the inhabitants of Barthelasse Island.
In both cases, past f loods constitute reference points in the identity
discourse of the territory and its inhabitants. Present-day development
issues thus have an impact on how the memory of f loods is expressed, a
memory that cannot be reduced to a resource capable of systematically
legitimating public prevention policies.
The second injunction tends to ensure that the expertise possessed
by public authorities is recognized as legitimate and somewhat exclu-
sive in the guidance of decision making. The monographs account for
the dense history mobilized by the inhabitants in the manner in which
they address f lood management. Over the course of the analysis, the
long history of hydraulic development—often stretching back more
than a century—is presented as a key element in the legitimation of
contemporary choices. To this day, local actors thus continue to speak
of the significant consequences attendant upon postwar modifications
to the bed of the Rhône for purposes of hydroelectric exploitation. As
a result of these changes, some places, including the Piolenc-Mornas
plain, found themselves in the position of “winners.” But the situation
of other places, such as Barthelasse Island, did not change at all. The
inhabitants of these latter places consequently saw themselves as “losers.”
Yet the Plan Rhône partnership systematically avoided the question of
the fairness and justice of past development choices, seeking instead to
legitimate its projects solely on the basis of technical studies addressing
the present situation without reference to the past and in a way that a
priori excludes all discussion.
Finally, though it may appear generous, the third injunction—to
encourage debate—often obscures the reality of the decision-making
process, which of course remains the prerogative of the public authori-
ties. As a result, the invitation to publically defend one’s point of view
in keeping with a deliberative ideal relegates power struggles, com-
peting interests, and mobilization forces to the background, though
it is these that really determine what decision is taken and shape the
development project. My field studies clearly show the limits of the
clash of viewpoints, with each party using the same words to express his
or herself but without sharing common definitions. When the actors
of Plan Rhône speak of “upstream/downstream, left bank/right bank
solidarity,” they are implicitly referring to the defense of the general
interest at the scale of the river. For the inhabitants of Piolenc-Mornas
and Barthelasse Island, by contrast, solidarity vis-à-vis the f loods is first
and foremost a matter of the project’s winners and losers—that is, the
sacrifice of the agricultural plains in the interest of protecting Avignon.
Although the principle of solidarity is not itself called into question,
local actors are quick to position themselves in regards to the compen-
sations that are to be sought rather than the intrinsic relevance of the
development principle guiding the project.
On reading of these discrepancies between the risk culture and local
mobilizations, one has the impression that the former, while admit-
tedly normative, is above all fictive. The risk culture is supposed to
designate a uniform consciousness, equally shared by all inhabitants,
frozen in time and without roots in a territory—a memory without
identity, a form of knowledge deprived of strategic content, a dead lan-
guage incapable of expressing relations between the parties concerned.
By increasing the number of available viewpoints, by contrast, obser-
vation takes note of the complex strategies established by local actors.
These play upon polarization and confrontation with managers but also
the actors’ ability to pragmatically conduct negotiations. As soon as
issues of representation become less acute, managers are for their part
also capable of stepping out of the role expected of them by the dis-
course of the risk culture. Ultimately, the material assembled here—in
particular, my observations of interaction around the buffet following

consultation meetings and the ethnographic studies conducted beyond
the confines of representational effects—leads to recognition of the
stakes involved in the manufacture of consensus concerning exposure
to Rhône f looding. Territorial solidarities between the most protected
and the most inundated and the attendant demands for compensation
are part and parcel of social configurations that participate in the assess-
ment of the justice of development projects.
Notes
1. Julien Langumier, Survivre à l’inondation. Pour une ethnologie de la catastrophe, Lyon:

Presses de l’ENS-LSH, 2008.
2. By contrast, new methodological questions arise concerning the interests and con-
straints of this ambivalent stance. For the researcher, is it possible to simultane-
ously occupy the roles of actor and investigator? In regards to the work’s academic
reception, what type of objectivization is at play in the assembly and analysis of
empirical data? In regards to the institutional sphere, to what degree is it capable
of understanding and approbation faced with the development of an independent
research? The hidden researcher, torn over the conditions of his “coming out,”
is thus especially confronted with the rediscovery of “the dimension of moral
and practical knowledge” proper to his activity, which is “intended to define and
resolve social problems and support the formation of judgment in public action,”
Valérie Amiraux and Daniel Céfaï, “Les risques du métier. Partie 2,” Cultures et
Conflits, vol. 47 (2002): 15–48, v. p. 13. Daniel Céfaï and Valérie Amiraux observe
that research conditions have today changed since it is no longer just the conditions
of access to the field that present a problem but also the moment of expertise and
the work’s reception. Confronted with these obstacles, accounting for the inves-
tigator’s problematic engagements and his or her ethical and political dilemmas
henceforth constitutes an imperative ref lexive exercise.
3. B. Soulé, “Observation participante ou partipation observante? Usages et justifi-
cations de la notion de participation observante en sciences sociales,” Recherches
qualitatives, vol. 27 (2007): 127–140.
4. Marc Abélès, Anthropologie de l’État, Paris, Armand Colin, 1990.
5. J. Gentric and Julien Langumier, “Inondations des villes, inondations des champs.
Norme et territoire dans la prévention des inondations sur l’île de la Barthelasse
(Avignon),” Nature sciences et sociétés, vol. 17, no. 3 (2009): 257–265.
6. M. Anckière and J. Langumier, “La remise en eau de la plaine de Piolenc-Mornas
face à la constitution d’une culture locale de l’arrangement,” VertigO, vol. 9, no. 1
(May 2009).
7. A. Méjean, “Utilisation politique d’une catastrophe: le voyage de Napoléon III
en Provence durant la grande crue de 1856,” Revue historique, vol. 295 (1996):
133–155.
8. In the letter of Plombières ( July 19, 1856), Napoleon III set out a general program
of f lood defense and launched a policy of prevention intended to ensure security
for all French people.
9. B. Picon and P. Allard (eds.), Gestion du risque inondation et changement social dans
le delta du Rhône. Les “catastrophes” de 1856 et 1993–1994, Paris: Éditions Quae,
2006.
10. See the historical work by the engineer and polytechnicien Gilbert Tournier, Rhône,
Dieu conquis, Paris: Plon, 1952.
11. M. Marié, “Pour une anthropologie des grands ouvrages. Le canal de Provence,”
Annales de la recherche urbaine, vol. 21 (1984): 5–34.
12. Between Switzerland and the Mediterranean, there are 19 hydroelectric works,
330 kilometers of navigable channel, 44,000 f lood-protected hectares, and 120,000
irrigated hectares.
13. B. Picon, L’espace et le temps en Camargue, Arles: Actes Sud, 2008, p. 241.
14. J. Lolive, “La montée en généralité pour sortir du Nimby. La mobilisation asso-
ciative contre le TGV Méditerranée,” Politix, vol. 10, no. 39 (1997): 109–130.
15. Plan Rhône, un projet de développement durable, Lyon: DIREN Rhône-Alpes, 2005,
p. 18.
16. The quotes are taken from several guidelines of the natural risk prevention of
French public policy for the last ten years, see: Circular of July, 3, 2007, relative to
the public consultation in the implementation of the f lood risk prevention plan;
circular of May, 12, 2011, relative to the selection and evaluation of projects for
f lood prevention.
17. The risk culture, it is true, has been extensively appropriated by managers in the
form of a discourse recommending that the population adopt “good” behav-
ior in times of crisis and maintain the memory of historic disasters. According
to François Duchêne and Christelle Morel-Journel, managers hold a position
that overlooks the population they seek to educate. To speak of the risk cul-
ture is to “implicitly hypothesize that it is possible to generate ex abrupto such a
‘culture’ and almost instrumentally master the diffusion of ‘objective’ informa-
tion within a population” (F. Duchêne and C. Morel-Journel, De la culture du
r isque. Paroles riveraines à propos de deux cours d’eau périurbains, La Tour d’Aigues:
Éditions de l’Aube, 2004, p. 11). For institutional leaders, what’s more, the risk
culture consists of making each inhabitant aware of the danger by maintaining
the memory of past disasters. Sharing this memory amongst the entire popula-
tion is meant to favor the “social acceptance” of prevention measures and the
constraints imposed, in particular, on the urbanization of exposed spaces. It also
allows one to transfer certain responsibilities vis-à-vis the next disaster from
managers (whose technological resources have their limits) to the inhabitants,
who, by possessing such a culture, recognize the risks that are being run and are
encouraged to prepare for them.
18. Bilan et perspective des CTC sur le Rhône. Rapport conclusif des trois CTC Rhône aval,
Rhône moyen, Rhône amont de février 2005 à février 2007 pour la DIREN de Bassin,
2007, p. 6.
19. Extract from field notes.
20. J. Langumier, “Soutien psychologique et culture du risque: deux réponses insti-

tutionnelles contraires face aux émotions de la catastrophe,” pp. 320–349 in
F. Hernandez, H. Marche, and S. Lézé (eds.), Le langage social des émotions. Études
sur les rapports au corps et à la santé, Paris: Anthropos-Economica, 2008.
21. The organization of the consultation dispositif is reminiscent of politics of the
government of bodies examined by Dominique Memmi in the cases of pro-
creation and death. The conformity of biographical narratives to the legitimate
account expected by experts participates in a “government by speech” that
“extensively delegates to subjects the work of supervising their behavior” via a
process of normative interiorization that depends on the practice of biographical
narrative (D. Memmi, “Administer une matière sensible. Conduites raisonnables
et pédagogie par corps autour de la naissance et de la mort,” pp. 135–155 in D.
Fassin and D. Memmi (ed.), Le gouvernemnt des corps, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des
Hautes études en sciences sociales, 2004, p. 136). This consists in a “process by
which social agents interiorize the discourse of the state rather than be subjected
to it in the form of legal sanctions imposed upon deviant practices . . . The policing
of the body gives way to a policing of narrative” (D. Memmi, “Vers une confes-
sion laïque? La nouvelle administration étatique des corps,” Revue française de sci-
ence politique, vol. 50, no.1 (2000): 3–19, v. p. 15).
22. E. Martinais (ed.), Ouvrir la concertation sur les risques industriels. La constitution du
CLIC de Feyzin (69). Report for the Ministry of Ecology, Energy and Sustainable
Development and the Sea (Risk, Decision, Territory program), Paris, 2007. In
their research devoted to the establishment of the CLIC consultation dispositif for
industrial risks, Emmanuel Martinais and his coauthors also note discrepancies
between the figure of the “resident”—an object of fantasy among the traditional
actors of industrial risk prevention—and the reality of the meetings. But in the
context of an “invisible risk” hanging over the territory, where the last major
accident occurred in the distant past, the difficulty was more a matter of finding
residents in leadership roles within a somewhat representative associational struc-
ture. In the case of the Rhône, which had been marked by the f loods of 2003, the
figure of the “ideal” resident changed as the result of a context of consultation
characterized by massive attendance and violent participation on the part of the
population. Yet it continued to express the technicians’ disappointment in their
efforts to contribute to technical democracy.
23. Field notes, J. Langumier, December 20, 2010, Tarascon.
26. Field notes, J. Langumier, November 28, 2012, Valence.
27. P. Bourdieu, Sur l’Etat. Cours au Collège de France 1989–1992, Paris: Raisons d’Agir/
Seuil, 2012, p. 87. In his courses given at the Collège de France, Pierre Bourdieu
examined the issues involved in public expression: “Speaking in public, doing
something in public is to behave in a way that is visible and conspicuous, if not
ostentatious, without hiding anything, without any behind the scenes . . . Whence
the fundamental relation between the public, the official and theatricality: private
acts are invisible, they are behind the scenes, back shop acts; by contrast, the
public takes place in view of everyone, before a universal audience in which one
cannot pick and choose or say as an aside: ‘I’m speaking to you privately’; it is
immediately heard by everyone . . . One cannot pick and choose among the audi-
ence and this universal audience has the result that official remarks are omnibus
remarks, intended for each person and everyone and no one.” (p. 86)
28. Field notes, J. Langumier, November 28, 2012, Valence.
29. Interview, in J. Gentric and J. Langumier, “Inondations des villes, inondations des
champs.”
30. The indigenous expression “a Rhône” ref lects the personification of the river
when in f lood. Some inhabitants recount episodes of f looding as if the Rhône
had made a surprise visit.
31. Interview, in J. Gentric and J. Langumier, “Inondations des villes, inondations
des champs.”
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. S. Bonin, “La Loire-milieu, outil du développement durable,” in N. Blanc and
S. Bonin (eds.), Grands barrages et habitants, Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences
de l’homme, Éditions Quæ, 2008, p. 281.
35. Interview, in M. Anckière and J. Langumier, “La remise en eau de la plaine de
Piolenc-Mornas face à la constitution d’une culture locale de l’arrangement.”
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Interview with a farmer in Piolenc, see ibid.
40. In reference to the collection of infrastructural installations that cut across the
plain.
Select Bibliography
Abélès, Marc, Anthropologie de l’État, Paris: Armand Colin, 1990.

Allard, Paul, Bernard Picon, Cécilia Claeys-Mekdade, and Stéphanie Killian (eds.),
Gestion du risque inondation et changement social dans le delta du Rhône. Les “catastrophes”
de 1856 et 1993–1994, Paris: Éditions Quae, 2006.
Amiraux, Valérie, and Daniel Céfaï, “Les risques du métier. Partie 2,” Cultures et
Conflits, vol. 47 (2002): 15–48.
Blanc, Nathalie, and Sophie Bonin (eds.), Grands barrages et habitants, Paris: Éditions de
la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme/Éditions Quæ, 2008.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Sur l’Etat. Cours au Collège de France 1989–1992, Paris: Raisons
d’Agir/Seuil, 2012.
Duchêne, François, and Christelle Morel-Journel, De la culture du risque. Paroles riv-
eraines à propos de deux cours d’eau périurbains, La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube,
2004.
Fassin, Didier, and Dominique Memmi (eds.), Le gouvernement des corps, Paris: Editions
de l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2004.
Gentric, Jessica, and Julien Langumier, “Inondations des villes, inondations des
champs. Norme et territoire dans la prévention des inondations sur l’île de la
Barthelasse (Avignon),” Nature sciences et societies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2009): 257–265.
Hernandez, Fabrice, Hélène Marche, and Samuel Lézé (eds.), Le langage social des
émotions. Études sur les rapports au corps et à la santé, Paris: Anthropos-Economica,
2008.
Langumier, Julien, Survivre à l’inondation. Pour une ethnologie de la catastrophe, Lyon:
Presses de l’ENS-LSH, 2008.
Lolive, Jacques, “La montée en généralité pour sortir du Nimby. La mobilisation
associative contre le TGV Méditerranée,” Politix, vol. 10, no. 39 (1997): 109–130.
Marié, Michel, “Pour une anthropologie des grands ouvrages. Le canal de Provence,”
Annales de la recherche urbaine, vol. 21 (1984): 5–34.
Méjean, Annie, “Utilisation politique d’une catastrophe: le voyage de Napoléon III
en Provence durant la grande crue de 1856,” Revue historique, vol. 295 (1996):
133–155.
Memmi, Dominique, “Vers une confession laïque? La nouvelle administration étatique
des corps,” Revue française de science politique, vol. 50, no. 1 (2000): 3–19.
Picon, Bernard, L’espace et le temps en Camargue, Arles: Actes Sud, 2008.
Soulé, Bastien, “Observation participante ou partipation observante? Usages et justi-
fications de la notion de participation observante en sciences sociales,” Recherches
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Tournier, Gilbert, Rhône, Dieu conquis, Paris: Plon, 1952.
PA RT 3
Issues of Memory
CH A P T E R F I V E
Memory and Methodology: Translocal and

Transtemporal Fieldwork in Post-Disaster
Santa Fe (Argentina)
Su s a n n Ba e z Ul l be rg
Disasters are critical and many times unexpected events that produce
intense processes of meaning-making in society.1 How and why did the
worst happen? Who is responsible? These are among the questions that
those involved make efforts to answer. This makes disasters “good to
think with” for social scientists, but how do we go about studying them
in contexts of upheaval and loss? Disasters as disruptive events bring
existing social and material relations to the fore, and they forge cul-
tural, political, and economic processes of continuity and change. The
field of disaster studies is growing quickly within and across different
social science subjects. Such expansion makes it seem important to criti-
cally and ref lexively discuss how qualitative methods shape the field of
inquiry as much as the result of the study by way of the ethnographer’s
own presence in the field. Drawing on my own experiences from carry-
ing out translocal and transtemporal fieldwork in the city of Santa Fe
in the northeast of Argentina between the years 2004–2011, this chap-
ter discusses how the ethnographic fieldwork by its nature, more than
merely being a tool of social inquiry, forges the field of study and opens
up for empirical conclusions and theoretical insights. While this is not
an exclusive feature of disaster anthropology, but rather of anthropol-
ogy in general and other disciplines in which ethnographic methods
are applied, the particular conditions of the disaster or post-disaster
context seem to make ethnographic methods particularly useful.
164 Susann Baez Ullberg
Exploring the Traces of Disaster in Santa Fe
My study is an ethnographic exploration in what I call an urban

memoryscape.2 Drawing on anthropological and sociological theories,
it aims at understanding how disasters are socially remembered and
forgotten in an urban context. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna
Hoffman have emphasized the processual character of disasters (1999).
While those affected by the catastrophe (i.e., those who we as anthro-
pologists try to understand) most often categorize disasters as extraor-
dinary events, there is an analytical point in approaching such events as
processes situated in particular historical, economic, political, and social
contexts. When disasters are recurrent, such as in the case of Santa Fe
where disastrous f looding is a historical problem, the processual nature
of such events becomes even more salient. My study delves into how
different people in this half-a-million city remember the recurrent
disastrous river f looding that affects the city since the time of its foun-
dation in colonial times (sixteenth century). It aims to understand how
memory and oblivion is related to local f lood coping practices as well
as emergency management policies. The question of the role played by
prior experience in the way recurrent disasters are dealt with is a key
aspect to consider when speaking of risk, vulnerability, and resilience
in disasters. This is where memory comes into the picture. Memory
is taken to be a meaning-making process forged by past experiences
but negotiated in the present in light of future horizons, which can be
applied both to individual and collective remembering (and forgetting).
This chapter seeks to understand how memories from past f loods are
socially organized in both time and space in different urban contexts, as
well as in organizational or institutional settings. I argue that the f lood
memoryscape ultimately shape local f lood coping practices as much as
f lood management policies in Santa Fe because it normalizes the disas-
ter and naturalizes the f looded subject, that is, those people within the
community who are “always” f looded.3
The City of Santa Fe
Santa Fe was founded at the shores of the Paraná River in 1573.

Incessant conf licts with indigenous communities and recurrent f lood-
ing prompted its move 80 km south in the mid-1600s to its current
location between the Paraná River and the Salado River. Historical
chronicles depict the town as a small and sleepy colonial city for
Memory and Methodology 165
centuries until it began to grow in the late 1800s. During this time,
mass immigration to Argentina as well as regional agricultural expan-
sion took place. The harbor in Santa Fe came to play a significant role
in this process. Immigration from Europe to the country, as well as
the internal migration that occurred in the first half of the twentieth
century made the population in Santa Fe grow from 10,000 (1869) to
169,000 (1947). At the turn of the twenty-first century, the city has
roughly 400,000 inhabitants.4
This community is constituted by a relatively small elite (which usu-
ally lives on the northeast side of town), a large middle class in all its
nuances (who usually live in the center and in the central part of town),
but also a widespread poor sector5 in the city’s western and southern
outskirts as well as on the suburban islands right east of the city. Santa
Fe is spatially and socially organized in blocks by way of the typical
urban Spanish American morphology, the gridiron, constituting differ-
ent social spaces, that is, los barrios (the neighborhoods). Streets, bridges,
railway lines, and f lood embankments constitute the spatial and social
borders between these spaces, which operate as identity markers and
are reproduced through various practices and narratives. One of my
first informants in Santa Fe was Nora, a middle-aged and middle-
class woman with a background as a political activist who had been
imprisoned during much of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983).
When, during the reconnaissance trip in 2004, I accounted for my
plans to settle in one of the neighborhoods that were f looded in 2003,
she objected to the idea that I would reside with the “West Side Nig-
Nogs” (los Negros del Oeste) and was quick to point out all dangers and
risks to me as a blond, European woman. She was not talking about
the risk of f looding but rather those of assault and disease in the district
generally referred to as the West Side (el Oeste). Taxi and food deliv-
ery do not drive all the way to the “Far West,” while police pick-ups
constantly patrol the dirt roads in the western districts. The eastern
districts are dominated by wealthy villas with well-kept lush gardens
along the paved, clean streets. This area is framed by several kilometer-
long lighted boardwalk overlooking the Setúbal Lagoon, a lake that
contributes to the Santa Fe River, which in turn ends up in the Paraná
River. The smaller Salado River on the west side of the city f lows hid-
den behind the several kilometers long f lood embankment that runs
from north to south. During the hot summer months, Santafesinos
sunbathe on the artificial beaches on the shores of the Setúbal Lagoon
on the east side of the town, but very few people would swim in the
Salado River in the West Side district. The central part of the city
includes the historic center from the 1600s located on the city’s high-
est ground in the southern parts of the city. This is close to where the
harbor that was built in 1905 and recently converted to the city’s most
modern and most popular shopping mall is on the southeast side, and
also where the state institutional buildings are located. Santa Fe is the
provincial capital city, which is why all governmental agencies have
their headquarters in the town. Given the size of the city, its municipal
administration is also of considerable size, and a large number of inhab-
itants are white collars either in the provincial or the municipal public
administrations.6 Santa Fe business district stretches out in the center
of town from south to north. In 2006, the service and the trade sector
employed 25 percent of the city’s workforce.7
The community in Santa Fe has struggled with the problems of
f looding ever since the city was founded. After moving the town to a
less vulnerable place in the mid-seventeenth century, the normal cycles
of f looding again became a severe problem as the population grew and
urban expansion took place, from the late nineteenth century onward.
This, in combination with increasing poverty rates from the 1970s,
has only increased social vulnerability in the community. The people
most vulnerable to f loods (and other calamities) live in the lowland and
f lood-prone areas of the city, in the West Side and on the suburban
islands on the east side. Recent gentrification on these latter suburban
islands, however, makes the city’s middle classes—which have their
weekend residences here—subject to f lood risk as well.
The city is currently surrounded by river f lood embankments that
were built in stages since the 1930s. When these were extended in the
mid-1990s, additional water pumps that can pump f loodwater back to
the river were also installed. Yet the problem of f looding continues to
be the main environmental risk in the city of Santa Fe. After the 2003
disaster, the municipal government has engaged in several projects of
disaster risk reduction, principally focused on f luvial f looding, which
eventually merited the municipality with the prestigious 2011 UN
Sasakawa Award for disaster risk reduction.8
Research Design and the Making of a Translocal and

Transtemporal Field
At the stage of planning for this research project, I identified many pos-
sible locations in Argentina.9 A village in the northern Litoral region,
a small town on the Argentine pampas or an urban neighborhood in a
city where f luvial f looding is a recurrent problem seemed well limited

enough for a first-time ethnographic fieldworker like me.10 My initial
idea was pretty much that of a conventional ethnographic fieldwork:
a long-term period of social immersion in one particular setting, from
which I would produce a fairly holistic account of how social memory
worked in this community. Even if this methodological model—often
called the Malinowskian or the classical fieldwork—is based more on a
legend than on facts11 and the notions of both “holism” and “[ethno-
graphic] field” have been subject to critique throughout since the ref lex-
ive turn in anthropology,12 it seems to stand strong in the imaginary of
contemporary students in social anthropology, at least judging by my
own reasoning. At the same time, there is no doubt that other types of
fieldwork are indeed increasingly common,13 most notably those that
include several different sites. This kind of fieldwork is characterized
by the ethnographer’s mobility as s/he moves between multiple locali-
ties that together constitute the ethnographic field, essentially “several
fields in one.”14 Perhaps this mode of fieldwork is more common than
what is thought. It has been observed that even the founding father of
the ethnographic fieldwork, Malinowski himself, carried out a field-
work in many different locations rather than in one single place when
he followed the Kula ring of the Trobriands. This raises some doubts
about the actual novelty of contemporary f ieldworks.15 Yet, what is
indeed new is at least the label of this type, calling them multisited,16
multilocal,17 or translocal.18
Eventually, I came to choose the city of Santa Fe for my (“single-
sited”) fieldwork. This choice was initially not motivated by any par-
ticular interest in urban disasters but rather the historical conditions of
this particular community with so many disastrous f loods throughout
time. What finally made me make up my mind was—a new f lood! I had
just enrolled in the PhD program at Stockholm University when “the
worst f lood in living memory,” as the Santafesinos themselves often
call this disaster, occurred in Santa Fe. On April 29, 2003, the Salado
River f looded large parts of the city, mainly on the West Side; 23 people
perished as a direct consequence of the f lood and another hundred peo-
ple indirectly. One-third of the population, some 130,000 people, was
evacuated for weeks and months, some even for years. The human and
material losses were enormous and widespread, thus the interpretation
of the worst f lood ever. Yet there was something about these reactions
that intrigued me, namely that the f lood was largely described as a com-
plete surprise. I asked myself how this could be the case in a community
where f loods were supposedly part of history. Indeed, because of these
reactions, this urban community seemed like a very appropriate setting

in which to explore the question of experience, memory, and oblivion of
disaster outlined in my project description. So it was. I did a reconnais-
sance trip to Santa Fe in July 2004. In 2005 I carried out what Helena
Wulff19 has called “yoyo-field work,” commuting weekly between the
city of Santa Fe and my (Argentinian) home some 700 kilometers from
there. Finally, I did three months of additional fieldwork in the city
during the period 2008–2009, and returned brief ly in 2011. During this
entire period and beyond, I have monitored the field and communicated
with interlocutors through electronic mass and social media.
The long-term inquiry has been one of the hallmarks of anthropo-
logical research. Time is seen as key to enabling the ethnographer to
grasp the complexities of social life in a particular field and achieve an
understanding of the “native’s point of view.” The “classical” fieldwork
model referred to above has generally implied a period of one to two
years of sustained and intensive empirical work, most notably connected
to doctoral studies.20 In anthropology there has been a distinction made
between the “dual-synchronic study,” by which is meant a comparative
study of two ethnographic presents, and the “diachronic study,” which
is the continuous study of events over time. The first type includes
so-called re-studies that a number of anthropologists have subsequently
undertaken by returning many years later to their earlier field sites. The
latter is what Howell and Talle call “multitemporal fieldwork,” defin-
ing this as the “many returns to the same place across the years, but not
necessarily in a systematic chronological pattern.”21 The ethnographer’s
return to the field over a long period of time enables not only the
development of profound ethnographic knowledge, but also a different
understanding of continuity and change. However, the multitemporal
fieldwork, in contrast to the re-study, “gives rise to a more processual
understanding—a description through time—in which one [the ethnog-
rapher] is enabled to witness the many events that provoke change or
resistance to change.22
I argue that my repeated returns to Santa Fe city over the years con-
stitute such a description through time, even if the period of time in
which I have undertaken this fieldwork is far from the decades of long-
term research that some contributors to Howell and Talle’s volume have
been able to accrue. In line with the reasoning around multisitedness,
multilocality, and translocality, I shall nevertheless use the term tran-
stemporal fieldwork instead, because I consider that it better conveys
the interrelatedness of different events across the passing of time, and
especially because it deals with remembering.
Exploring an Urban Memoryscape
Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist, who allegedly coined the

term “collective memory” a century ago, emphasized the heterogene-
ity inherent in social memory, meaning that there are as many col-
lective memories of an event as there are social groups all together.23
His observation was applicable to my urban field as became clear to
me quite early on in the fieldwork. Through conversations and archi-
val work I soon realized that while disastrous f loods were indeed part
of the history of the city of Santa Fe, these recurrent critical events
affected in principle only certain sectors of the population with regu-
larity, namely the poor people living in the urban outskirts. Yet vir-
tually everybody I had talked to had one or more f lood memories,
irrespective of experience (direct or indirect), of class, gender, and age.
Some historical f loods in Santa Fe were well remembered and in many
different social contexts in the city, while other similarly catastrophic
f loods that I could read about in the archives appeared forgotten. Those
f loods that were widely remembered were also publicly commemorated
through public rituals, monuments, and narratives such as the recent
2003 f lood, but also that of 1905. Others had left a strong spatio-sym-
bolic imprint by their material absence, such as the 1983 f lood that top-
pled the city’s old suspension bridge and likewise the major icon of the
city skyline. The “forgotten” disasters to begin with never appeared as
singular disasters in a chronologically structured public memory; rather
most people would say that peripheral areas and marginal residents
were “always f looded.” Yet in these particular (and “always f looded”)
social contexts, their “forgotten” disasters were not only singularized
chronologically but also vividly remembered, most notably by those
who had personal experiences of these disasters, but also across genera-
tions. Place, landscape, and spatial organization were an important part
of how these people would remember these particular past disasters
that were publicly “forgotten.” Everyday practices were simultaneously
practices of remembering. The people settled on the “wrong” side of
the f lood embankments because of livelihood opportunities (fishing,
cattle raising, or garbage recycling) were constantly reminded about
the associated risks of living outside the embankments given that their
economic practices were intimately connected to the climatic cycles
that produce f looding and drought. Everyday interaction with govern-
mental institutions and NGOs for social assistance was also reminiscent
to governmental practices of f looding evacuation and emergency relief.
Spatial memory was ubiquitous in these urban outskirts. Fishermen and
cattle herders circulate daily in f lood prone areas by boat, horse, and
foot, associating places with particular past f loods, even places that no
longer exist because past f loods have washed them away.
I could probably have chosen to limit (and deepen) my study to the
neighborhood where I lived in 2005, or chosen to follow the unprec-
edented protest movement and memory work that took place in the
city in the wake of la Inundación (the 2003 f lood). I could also have
carried out participant observation within local bureaucracy in order
to explore further the processes of institutional memory. Yet, instead
of choosing one of these sites I chose them all. As new doors of eth-
nographic opportunity opened in the field in the course of fieldwork,
I chose to follow new threads in this web of memories similar to an
improvising mode.24 I became a translocal ethnographer, meaning
I mobilized between many different urban contexts or locations within
the same urban field.
I devoted most of my time in Santa Fe to carry out participant obser-
vation, essentially sharing the memories with my interlocutors. This was done
in many ways: through interviewing as much as through casual conver-
sations with interlocutors belonging to various social categories25 who
lived in different areas of the city. I accompanied my interlocutors in
their daily activities that took place around the city, thus mobilizing in
their social space, for example, that of a row man or that of a municipal
inspector of f lood embankments. I hang out in the lower-middle-class
neighborhood on the southwest side where I lived (especially in the
siesta, evenings, and weekends when people were at home) but also in
other middle-class neighborhoods in the northwestern parts of the city
where other informants lived. I regularly visited four poverty-stricken
neighborhoods located in the most geographically exposed districts of
the city, where people lived in vulnerable conditions. I met people in
these different urban and suburban worlds through the network I had
established and also by contacting local institutions (schools, primary
care health centers and social services, FM radio stations and social
NGOs, and neighborhood associations), by visiting public places (f lea
market and plazas), and events (neighborhood feasts, anniversary cer-
emonies, political meetings, exhibition openings).
I carried out participant observation in the many activities enacted
by the local protest movement that emerged in the wake of the
latter disaster. The formal name of the movement was the Asamblea
Permanente de Afectados por la Inundación (Permanent Assembly of
People Affected by the Flood), although the activists simply called
themselves los inundados (the f looded people), considering themselves
as victims both of the f lood and of governmental negligence. In this

context, they can initially be categorized as a cluster of “emergent citi-
zen groups” commonly described in the disaster sociology literature.26
In Santa Fe, these groups helping others fairly quickly transformed
into a local protest movement by claiming justice and compensation
for the damages from the 2003 f lood, turning themselves from disaster
victims into political subjects. Their activities consisted of meetings
and press conferences but also very much about public demonstrations
and commemorative rituals in different public spaces; not only in the
streets and in the squares but also in local mass media. Besides the
fact that they were acting publicly—which made access to them fairly
easy—I could join their meetings and the like because several of them
were in fact my neighbors in the lower-middle-class district where I
lived in 2005. Many of the inundados activists also considered that the
fact that I was a scholar from abroad could help their cause, at least at
a symbolical level. Taken together, this made them allow my presence
during their meetings.
My ethnographic research also led me to governmental agencies,
both in the municipal and provincial public administrations. My ambi-
tion was to carry out further participant observation in this context,
but the issue of access was rather complicated and bureaucratic. Thus
I had to limit myself to interviewing senior and junior officials in the
municipal and provincial administrations. I also had the opportunity
to accompany some of these municipal employees as they mobilized
outside their offices. I was invited to join the staff of the Municipal
Department of Water Pump Stations when they carried out inspec-
tions of the conditions of the f lood embankments and of the water
pumps. I also joined the staff at the Municipal Department of Social
Development for the inauguration of the new housing compound in
the northern extreme of the town that was built for 30 relocated families
whose dwellings had disappeared during the 2003 f lood.
I spent time exploring provincial archives (two provincial archives and
one newspaper archive), and starting 2006, this archival work was facil-
itated by the online release of the archives that had been d igitalized.27
I gathered all kinds of documents, books, movies, a rtwork, recorded
music, and other things that, taken together, constitute the local f lood
memoryscape. I “mapped” the places that throughout the fieldwork
proved to shape and be shaped by people’s f lood memories. In order
to do this I walked the city extensively, both together with interlocu-
tors guiding me as well as on my own, observing and talking to new
people I would meet. Overall I was very mobile and moved frequently
from one urban locality to another, either walking or by bus, taxi, and
rowboat, and even being regularly transported on motorcycle. In the
midst of the fieldwork in 2005, I got unexpected but very valuable
help from two assistants, both advanced students in social anthropol-
ogy at the University of Rosario. Eugenia and Alicia wanted to prac-
tice fieldwork for their own research projects. Both were also keen
on creating their own sense of the 2003 f lood that had not affected
them directly but still constituted something of a chock to these young
Santafesinos as well as to many other people in the city. In sum, poly-
morphous engagement28 and mobility between many fields in one
made my fieldwork in Santa Fe eminently translocal.
In have chosen to reproduce an excerpt from my field notes dating
April 28, 2005,29 as an example and illustration of what a translocal
fieldwork may look like.
Thursday April 4, 2005, City of Santa Fe

10:00: The Casa de Derechos Humanos30 (CCDDHH) was
located in the center of the city in a small functional style house
of the 1950s. I walked the ten and something blocks there from
my home in the Roma district on the southwest side. Today the
third and updated edition of their “Report of the Number of Fatal
Victims and the Consequences of the 2003 Flood” was to be pre-
sented during a press conference. When I arrived, the headquar-
ters was full of people, including journalists from the local press,
several inundados activists, and others, seemingly curious indi-
viduals, in contrast to the everyday silence in these offices. The
activists from the group of the “Black Tent” were there, as well
as those of La Marcha de las Antorchas, but they all kept in the
background. Curiously enough all these groups were divided yet
fighting together in the inundados protest movement.
The house where the CCDDHH headquarters is located is a
common two-storey building where they carry out various activi-
ties related to human rights (normally that of Las Madres de Plaza
de Mayo and HIJOS31 but now also the cause of the 2003 f lood
victims). The members of the CCDDHH gave several interviews
to the journalists and they all talked with the press. After that they
held a small press conference, during which they presented their
report and distributed it to all the people present. I helped them
put the loose printouts into “booklets” and to distribute them to
the journalists and others present. The event took about an hour,
after which they [the members of the CCDDHH] were all very
happy with the attention it had received, and continued to talk
about it long after the journalists and the other people from the
Inundados movement had left. I had to rush off for my interview
at the House of Government.
11:30: Interview with José Bernhardt at the Emergency
Secretariat, Provincial Government at the Casa Gris. The
House of Government is a magnificent early-twentieth-century-
style palace called the Casa Gris located at the main square, the
Plaza de 25 de Mayo, only some 15 blocks from the CCDDHH.
The office of the Emergency Secretariat is located on the second
f loor. Bernhardt’s secretary gave me a very warm welcome and
showed me into his office. This was as ostentatious as the rest of
the building. It had several windows overlooking the main plaza
and I wondered whether Secretary Bernhardt used to watch the
protests and demonstrations against his government that are held
down there at the square. There was a large photo of the governor
on the wall, as well as maps of the province of Santa Fe. Other
maps were laid out on a side desk.
Jose Bernhardt was a retired Lt. Col. I estimated him to be
around 60 years old. He seemed well trained and looked healthy,
indeed “militarily” with his short-cut gray hair and impeccable
(civil) clothing. A waiter (!) came in to the office with a tray in
his hands and brought us coffee. I passed Bernhardt my card and
he gave me his. We began the interview, when I realized that the
batteries of my MP3 recorder were finished and therefore I had
to take notes. Such unexpected circumstance is part of fieldwork,
often complicating the task of data collection and recording, forc-
ing the ethnographer to improvise.32
Bernhardt told me that he had been appointed to this position
in December 2003, when the Emergency Secretariat was in fact
created following the experiences from the 2003 f lood. The sec-
retariat was in charge of the policy for the Civil Defence (DDCC)
throughout the province of Santa Fe (not only the city capital).
He was proud of how well this was organized in the province
in this area: “Just as every other civilized country in the world,”
he noted. In matters of disaster management, the province was
divided into two areas: the southern and the northern areas. The
city of Santa Fe belongs to the northern area. This division was
due to the risk assessment for each area. In the southern area, there
was a greater risk of human-induced disasters (being more densely

populated, having several ports and many industries). The petro-
chemical industries in the harbor of San Lorenzo (Rosario) also
had their own contingency plans. In the north, natural hazards
were more common (weather storms, drought, f loods, fires, etc).
Bernhardt said:
“The DDCC works according to the conventional phases of
disaster pre-emergency, emergency, and post-emergency. There
are four levels of emergency: local, regional, national, and inter-
national levels. There is a provincial bill that will transform the
‘Civil Defence’ into ‘Civil Protection.’ ”
“In the case of a contingency, a Civil Defence Board is imme-
diately put into function. This board includes representatives from
the governor’s cabinet and from all ministries, as well as from the
armed forces and the gendarmerie. A similar board is constituted
at the municipal level, including representatives from the mayor’s
cabinet and from the different municipal departments. Civil actors
are also included here. The Provincial Board decides if there is a
need to form a crisis cabinet for strategic decision making. It is the
Civil Defence Board that assesses the needs of the community in
a state of emergency.”
“In the region, and in particular in the City of Santa Fe, there
are ‘chronic f lood victims’ and those who are ‘acute f lood victims.’
The first are the islanders [living on the east side islands] and the
West Side residents who are always f looded. The latter are the
2003 f lood victims who are not used to this. That’s why they are
complaining and making claims. The ‘chronic ones’ are used to
this and know how to handle it.”
“In 1905 there was a big f lood. The entire city center was cov-
ered with f loodwater . . . The hardest thing in this area of work is
to raise awareness about the risks of the f loods. People insist on
living in risky places such as outside the river embankments.”
Well into the interview, Bernhardt proposed we should leave the
titles and instead get on first-name terms.33 He shortly after apolo-
gized that we had to finish the interview but he wanted to arrange
for me to meet other people. He made a couple of calls on his cell
phone and immediately arranged appointments for interviews with
me with people at the Directorate of Civil Defence, at the Ministry
of Social Development, at the Ministry of Water Affairs, and at the
Ministry of Health. He also promised to put me in contact with
representatives from the armed forces and the gendarmerie, who
were actively engaged in case of f loods or other major disasters,

should I be interested. I enthusiastically accepted, of course!
He ended our meeting remarking (without me asking) that not
only is the state responsible in a crisis but also the individual citi-
zen. As a case in point, he mentioned the 2004 fire at the disco-
theque Cromañon in Buenos Aires.34 Bernhardt argued that in the
post-disaster phase of this case, there were parents who claimed
that the authorities did not control the clubs that let minors in,
instead of controlling their children themselves. As he told me
this, he never mentioned the inundados protest movement in the
city of Santa Fe and their claims on the government after the 2003
f lood. Yet I felt that he wanted to state a subtle analogy, since he
seemed to be aware that I was also doing participant observation
among the inundados activists.
He followed me to the door and invited me to contact him
again if I had any further questions. I thanked him for his time
and promised to do so. Back in the street, I headed for the café in
the corner of the plaza to have a quick lunch before I rushed to
the improvised interview he had just set up for me with the social
worker at the Civil Defence Directorate.
13:30: Interview with Mariana, social worker, Directorate
of the Civil Defence of the Province of Santa Fe (DDCC).
Mariana received me in her small office that she shared with two
other colleagues. The DDCC was located only a few blocks behind
the House of Government, in an old 1920s building with high ceil-
ings and gray walls, rather typical of Argentine public administra-
tion. She had her desk at the back with an old computer standing
on it. She offered me a jar of coffee and asked me a few questions
about what I was up to. I brief ly explained what my research was
about. The DDCC director, whom I had interviewed some weeks
earlier, passed by and recognized me from that interview. I now
realized that Mariana was one of the participants in the course
“Living with Risk” that was held by the local university and that I
had attended a couple of classes. She may have recognized me, but
if she did, she didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
Mariana told me that during the 2003 f lood, she was in charge
of an evacuation center close to her home. This center was the
sports and social club of the Technological University, located on
the northeast side in the Guadalupe district. She had approached
the place just after the f looding had occurred and simply “got in
charge” [of the evacuation center], given that the first few days
there were quite chaotic. There were between 1,500–1,600 evac-
uees kept there for up to three months. They kept a record of
all personal information of the evacuees. They were attended by
doctors in the center. There was a “wardrobe” that distributed
clothes that had been donated to the evacuees. Mariana organized
“self-help workshops” for the evacuees so that they would not be
passive in the center.
She continued, “After three months 30 families were still evacu-
ated in the center and I had to move them to another center. Sure,
they didn’t want to leave the Guadalupe neighborhood . . . You
can imagine: these [poor] people had been living in a really nice
neighborhood for several months and were comfortable, but hey,
the club had to get back to work!”
“In these [evacuation] centers all kinds of things happened: [we]
had to correct people [to behave properly] . . . one woman suddenly
moved in with her two daughters in the site of an unknown guy,
and I had to talk her out of there.”
Mariana asked me if I had heard about that lady who had thrown
herself from the suspension bridge the day before? “Well, I can tell
you a lot about her! She always made a mess, it’s not the first time
you would see her. That woman is crazy and always makes scan-
dals. She had received a lot of help [for her problems] already.”
Mariana went on, “I arranged like ‘boxes’ for them [the evacu-
ees].” She showed me the photos of the “boxes” on her computer.
They looked like small sheds made of cardboard. Mariana said,
“But they were bad [quality], they weren’t constructed accord-
ingly.” When I asked her why they were bad, she said, “Well,
because of the material they [volunteers from the Technological
University] used. Since it rained all the time the roof of the club
leaked and thus the roof of the sheds also got wet . . . everything
was wet, and well, that’s not the way to do it, but well, I did what I
could do. It’s the way it is. As far as I know, it was always the same
with f lood victims in this city. Well, you know, they always want
more and more [help, stuff ],” she ended.
Mariana then asked me more about what I was doing, who I
had met, and interviewed. I tried to explain to her but I felt she
didn’t really understand much of what I told her or that she really
cared. After approximately half-an-hour, she told me she had to
leave because she also worked in the municipality, and she was
late. We left the building together and I took the bus home.
16:00: 2003 Flood Memorial Act in Recreo. I took the bus

to the village of Recreo, a couple of miles north of the city of
Santa Fe. After a 30-minute bus ride, I got off on the main road
and walked toward the main (and only?) square. When I arrived,
I saw that there were a few people gathered, standing on the side-
walk and in the plaza, observing the preparations for the memo-
rial act. The organizers seemed to consist of about five people.
I recognized one of the women from the assembly held by Los
Inundados last week, who seemed to lead the work here. They
were standing on the side of the square opposite to the municipal
building. They had installed a sound system and were playing
the song “The Flooder” (El Inundador) again and again, as well as
other songs produced after the 2003 f lood. I recognized that of
the cumbia orchestra Palmera and that of Yuli (a musician from
this village). A couple of women were making hot chocolate in a
huge pan and serving buns to the people who were arriving. The
people who came gathered in small groups of neighbors. There
were many women, children, and elderly in the square. A fewer
number of men stood a bit aside, leaning against their cars on
the sidewalk. People were moving slowly. My friend Nilda, who
lived in Recreo, arrived. I had called her home before I left Santa
Fe and talked to Pablo. He had sent their son Nahuel to the school
where Nilda worked to let her know I would be in the square.
She greeted me and stayed by my side. She seemed clearly reluc-
tant to join the crowd and she didn’t greet anybody else there.
She said that if I hadn’t been there she probably wouldn’t have
come at all.
The young woman who seemed to be the principal organizer
had a handkerchief around her head. She suddenly took the micro-
phone and gave everybody present a warm welcome, remarking
that the act would soon begin. She clarified that this day [April
28] was a very sad one because it was the day Recreo was f looded
[in 2003] and that they [she and her fellow organizers] therefore
wanted to accomplish this act of commemoration. She began to
name all the firms and shopkeepers that had supported the event
by donating money and so on. Most people applauded as they
heard the names of the shopkeepers being mentioned. The woman
also made clear that they were waiting for the people from the
Black Tent group [from the Los Inundados movement] from the
city of Santa Fe. Meanwhile, she said, the microphone was open
to anyone who wanted to say something. An old man grabbed the
microphone and said that he broke his arm in the f lood and while
he wasn’t asking for anything, he wanted to know who would
assume the responsibility for the disaster. After him, a woman
in her 50s (according to Nilda she was the owner of a betting
shop in Recreo) began to talk about the money the municipality
had received to rebuild damaged infrastructure—she now won-
dered what happened to that money!? A middle-aged man took
the microphone and prompted the community to “join the strug-
gle” in order to “get things done,” and then he left. I wondered
whether he was referring to more compensation or what he could
actually be referring to.
The woman organizer of the event then took the microphone
back and suddenly burst out in a public accusation of her fellow
Recreínos. She accused them of showing very little solidarity with
this cause and with those neighbors who had been affected by the
disaster. Since nobody had moved a finger during the f lood, she
had assumed that nobody would in fact show up in this commem-
oration act either. Thus, she said she was surprised to see so many
people there. In any case, she was fed up with her community
and said that fortunately she was moving to [the city of ] Santa Fe
the following week. As she spoke, her voice cracked and went in
falsetto. She was very upset as she said she was very disappointed
with the sense of community in the village. Nilda told me she did
not even know who that young woman was, but that in her view
it seemed that the whole event was “political” [meaning it was a
partisan cooption of the commemoration, in this case enacted by
the Peronists35] judging from the people present.
While some other people talked in the microphone, another
small group of organizers served hot chocolate and buns. They
mainly offered the children but some adults also approached to
have some chocolate. Most people listened to the speakers, and
then chatted and commented on the discourses, occasionally
applauding, while they drank and ate.
Meanwhile the people from Los Inundados/Santa Fe had
arrived. There was Susana, Silvia, Emilio, Laura, and Horacio.
They joined the discussion. Some of them talked in the micro-
phone and they listened to what the people of Recreo had to say.
In the square there was a group of three or four indigenous
(Mocoví) women with children. They stood apart from the crowd.
Later, at Nilda’s home, chatting with her and Nahuel [he’s their
eldest son], Nilda told him who was there and also mentioned that
“the people from the Mocoví neighborhood were there.” He then

replied ironically “Oh yes, well, they will of course be there,” by
which he meant that they always claim things [instead of achiev-
ing things themselves]. Nilda and Nahuel also talked about a guy
who had been standing against a car on the sidewalk with his
“cronies.” Nilda explained to me that this guy was a real criminal
of all kinds, being a pimp, a drug dealer, and even a murderer!
According to Nilda and Nahuel, he was organizing a political
party himself. His daughter was a pupil of Nilda’s—that was how
she knew. Then they talked about other people who participated
in the event whom I couldn’t remember or identify.
As we left the plaza, Adriana, one of the inundados activists,
arrived. I introduced her and Nilda to each other. The young
woman organizer came up to us and told Adriana that she was
surprised and pleased by the number of people who had attended.
Then Nilda reacted and said rather aggressively to her that the
memorial act had not been properly advertised for in the village. It
could be that many people in the community had not been aware
about it. To Nilda’s remark the young woman replied by repeating
what she had said on the microphone about the lack of solidarity
in the village. Nilda then became really upset and said that the
teachers [in Recreo] had worked really hard during the disaster
and that people would say so many stupid things [such as that no
one had lifted a finger]. The young woman did not reply, and both
Adriana and I felt that we had better end this tense conversation.
Thus, we all left. I followed Nilda to her place and stayed there for
a couple of hours and had dinner with them before heading back
to Santa Fe by bus.
22:00: The Black Tent in the Plaza de Mayo, city of Santa
Fe: Assembly planning the commemoration act and quarrel.
I got off the bus from Recreo in downtown Santa Fe and walked
the ten blocks to the main square, Plaza de Mayo. It was already
dark when I arrived. The Black Tent (indeed a gray igloo-type tent
with a black cloth on the top) had been set up under a tree on one of
the sidewalks of the plaza near the House of Government. Several of
the inundados activists were already gathered there, including some
of those who had been in Recreo in the afternoon (Lucia, Horacio,
and their two kids, Laura, Adriana, Patricia, Andrés, Luis, Teresa,
Emilio, old Carlos, the guy from the movement “Clase Combativa,”
as well as the journalists Jesica, Ignacio and Leandro).
Ignacio, the journalist, started the meeting by explaining to the

activists what the video they had produced and what they would
screen during the commemoration act as of tomorrow was basi-
cally a follow up on some of the fates of the victims from the 2003
disaster whom they had already portrayed in their previous docu-
mentary called “Inundados.” Everyone present listened to Ignacio
and nodded as if they agreed with this.
When he and his colleagues left the meeting, the “real” meeting
of the Permanent Assembly of People Affected by the Flood began.
There were also a couple of young men present who broadcasted
a FM radio program and wanted to make a special program about
the anniversary and the commemoration the following Sunday.
The Assembly needed to agree about the final version of the
public statement that was to be read aloud during the commemo-
ration act. Andrés, Patricia, and Teresa from the CCDDHH had
been editing the different proposals the last week, including that
written by Luis, which was a very long piece. Teresa began to read
out this version of the statement. When she reached the part in the
statement that said “Will you again vote for them [those corrupt
politicians]?” (referring to the upcoming elections), a formulation
made by Luis, some members of the Assembly had objections to
this part and a discussion began. I hadn’t paid much attention
to the discussion at first and when I tried to catch up in order to
understand what the quarrel was about, Adriana explained to me
in a low voice what the problem was: She told me that half of the
Assembly felt that focusing the message of the statement only on
the vote as a political tool (as expressed in the sentence in regard)
would disregard the political work as a daily process. Such a plea,
Adriana continued, would frame it as if people needed to worry
about politics (and the political responsibility of the 2003 f lood)
only when voting every four years. Given that the sentence in
question was that of Luis, he became rather upset. Those mem-
bers of the Assembly opposing to it insisted that it needed to be
reformulated or removed, and finally it was decided to vote on the
matter. Luis’ proposed sentence lost voting and it was decided to
remove it from the statement. He then grabbed his red and black
Colon soccer club bag, got up, and left the square without a word,
clearly offended. As the other members of the Assembly saw him
leave, some of them defended him and said they understood his
reaction. Others then exclaimed that he had to respect the deci-
sion of the majority and others agreed saying that they didn’t agree
with his sentence and then why would they have to accept such a
statement only because it was his?
The inundados activists then continued to discuss the program
of the commemoration act and the statement to be read out. The
young man from the Chalet FM radio station (who was the same
guy that Germán had introduced to me the day we went there to
see Rafael Amor perform back in the Chalet neighborhood) said
he would bring the loudspeakers in order to set up a “public radio
station,” which would be broadcasting from the square on the
next day. Laura and Lucia announced that they would sleepover
in the tent that same night in order to vigil the tent and to be
in the square by daybreak the day of the commemoration. The
meeting then began to dissolve and only a few people stayed and
chitchatted.
Unraveling Translocal and Transtemporal Observations
As can be appreciated from these ethnographic field notes, the translo-

cal methodology renders visible particular features of this particular
context that would likely not have been observed through a single-
sited study. The mobility of my translocal fieldwork, and the transtem-
porality that characterized it, not only allowed me to understand how
the memories of the disastrous f loods in Santa Fe were embedded in
everyday life and urban relations, but it also made possible to unveil the
tensions involved in this particular post-disaster setting.
Moving between different localities within this community allowed
me to reveal in a holistic manner the heterogeneity of this particular
disaster memoryscape. The institutional viewpoint, represented here
by the Emergency Secretary Bernhardt and the Civil Defence ser-
vant Mariana, would remember these recurrent disasters as a problem
of social behavior, and for them and their institutions to correct, for
example, by forcing residents away from f lood-prone areas and teach-
ing citizens about their moral obligations in matters of risk reduction,
or by implementing certain cohabitation standards for the evacuees
in the evacuations centers and setting the victims’ expectations about
relief “right.” Those affected by the 2003 disaster, on the other hand,
would recall this f lood as yet another instance of political negligence
and corruption, and frame it as a problem of justice and human rights.
The different and multiple contradictory stances within these local
settings also illustrate that different people have different interests,
identities, and experiences when and after disasters occur, which also
forge different memories, something that adds to the knowledge of the
post-disaster “communitas” dynamics.36 This is illustrated in the above
field notes on the commemoration event of the 2003 f lood in Recreo,
where participation and identification with this particular framing was
not equal within this community. Many Recreo residents remained
at the margins of the event and it was even contested by other f lood
victims such as by my interlocutor Nilda. Similarly, preparations for
the commemorative event in the main square of the city of Santa Fe
were telling about this when different voices and ways of framing this
disaster were contested among the people belonging to the same protest
movement. In addition to this, many other similar and different f lood
memories would be revealed to me as my translocal and transtemporal
fieldwork evolved.37
The nature of this fieldwork allowed me to observe how different
and sometimes contradicting f lood memories were socially, spatially,
and temporally connected, and thereby constituted a particular hetero-
geneous memoryscape. Constructing my ethnographic field translo-
cally and transtemporally allowed me to discover these connections,
such as the commemorative practices enacted by the Inundados move-
ment when many of the participants went from the city of Santa Fe to
Recreo to support those who were organizing the event in this small
town, or when I discovered that Mariana (from the Civil Defence
office) and I had attended the same course on risk and vulnerability
at the local university. Another example of such relations in the above
field notes is Secretary Bernhardt’s analogous comment in passing on
the discotheque fire victims’ movement in Buenos Aires to that of the
Inundados in Santa Fe, articulating not only his own stance with, and
knowledge about, that of the victims, but also connecting the memo-
ries of two completely different Argentine disasters. In addition, he also
situated me as the ethnographer within this particular memoryscape,
by letting me understand that he knew that I was also doing fieldwork
with them.
Concluding Notes on the Merits of Translocal and

Transtemporal Fieldwork in an Urban
Disaster Memoryscape
The practice of ethnographic fieldwork has been compared with that of

making jazz music, in that both are improvisatory.38 The nature of this
methodology is what makes anthropology (and other sciences applying

it) particularly apt to make empirical findings and ground theoretical
insights. I argue that the way my fieldwork took shape in a translocal
mode brought me crucial empirical and analytical insights that I would
not have gained having carried out a single-sited fieldwork in the clas-
sical fashion. My mobility made it possible to see the relations between
the different localities within the field over time, making visible the
commonalities and contradictions between different urban memories
and their relation to oblivion in this particular memoryscape. The syn-
chronic mode of “being in several places at once” made this possible. In
a ref lexive vein, it also made visible my varying and different positions
as a (white/European/female/middle-class/in my thirties) researcher in
different social contexts and how this affected not only the rapport with
my interlocutors and our communication, but sometimes the interac-
tive process of remembering.
My translocal and transtemporal fieldwork brought me insights not
only about the conditions of urbanity in itself but also about the dynam-
ics of urban disasters. The nature of an urban memoryscape as a phe-
nomenon is by and large shaped by the diversity and complexity of a
city. In a milieu where you cannot possibly share your personal or col-
lective experiences with everyone, the social memoryscape will be het-
erogeneous and diverse. Even large and critical events such as disasters
will be remembered differently along divides of class, gender, age, pro-
fession, and other social and cultural lines. Different events, people, and
places will be remembered by some and forgotten by others. Sometimes
memories around the same event will be in contradiction, while others
will constitute unquestioned truths about the past, or doxa in Bourdieu’s
sense.39 How and why some particular memories will dominate the
memoryscape by being massively and publicly remembered will be a
matter of power and position of those remembering in a hierarchical
transitional structure such as that which characterize the urban world.
I argue that I can arrive at this conclusion precisely because during the
inquiry I transited many different fields within the field.
Ethnographic methods in general are useful tools for social sciences
to study how disasters affect society, how people make meaning out
of tragedy, and how they organize to cope with future crises, because
they can reveal embedded meanings and intrinsic tensions in a hetero-
geneous social field. As I have tried to argue here, the translocal model
of ethnographic fieldwork seems particularly apt to explore people’s
experiences of disaster in complex and heterogeneous environments.
The multisited/multilocal/translocal field of inquiry is composed along
the axes of people, things, plots, or other paths. This kind of fieldwork
is conceptualized in contrast to the conventional single-sited fieldwork,
that is, ethnographic studies that take place in one single locality and
allegedly exploring local phenomena. The translocal field has most
notably become associated to deal with global phenomena, of social
and cultural phenomena that take place “here, there and everywhere”40
in a world system and in diffuse time spaces.41 Yet I also hold that “less
global” settings, perhaps in particular urban contexts characterized by
diversity and complexity, can also constitute translocal fields. In this
vein, the translocal fieldwork seems particularly relevant to the study of
post-disaster contexts precisely because of the emergence of multiple,
coexisting, and many times contradictory identities, interests, meanings,
and practices in a setting where the worst has happened.
Notes
1. The writing of this article has been generously supported by the Centre for Crisis
Management Research and Training (CRISMART) and the Centre for Natural
Disaster Science (CNDS), both in Sweden. I am very grateful to the participants
in the conference of the Swedish Federation of Social Anthropologists (SANT)
in Lund in 2010 for their comments on a first draft of this piece. It has also ben-
efited from the comments from the participants in the conference “Disasters and
Risks: From Empiricism to Criticism” arranged at CERI-EHESS in Paris that
same year. I am also indebted to the editors’ careful reviews and constructive sug-
gestions, which have greatly improved the text. Any omissions or shortcomings
remaining are entirely my own responsibility.
2. S. Ullberg, Watermarks: Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina, Stockholm:
Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2013.
3. S. Ullberg “Disaster Memoryscapes: How Social Relations Shape Community
Remembering of Catastrophe,” Anthropology News, October 2010; S. Ullberg
“Los Inundados in Santa Fe, Argentina, and the Politics of Disaster Memory,” in
B. Wisner, J. C. Gaillard, and I. Kelman (eds.), Handbook of Hazards and Disaster
Risk Reduction, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 53–54; Ullberg, Watermarks.
4. The 2001 national census registered 489,505 inhabitants in the Department la
Capital, which is the metropolitan area of the city of Santa Fe (see IPEC-INDEC,
Población total por Censos Nacionales según departamento: Provincia Santa Fe, Instituto
Provincial de Estadística y Censos (IPEC)-Instituto Nacional de Estadística y
Censos [INDEC], 2001). Almost one decade later, 525,093 inhabitants were reg-
istered (INDEC, Población total por Censos Nacionales según departamento: Provincia
Santa Fe, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos [INDEC], 2010).
5. In 2005, 36.9 percent of the population in the city of Santa Fe lived in poverty
and 18.1 percent in absolute poverty (CERIDE-CONICET, Documento base de
análisis territorial de la Ciudad de Santa Fe, Centro Regional de Investigación y

Desarrollo [CERIDE]—Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y
Técnicas [CONICET] in collaboration with the Municipality of the city of Santa
Fe and the Argentine Ministry of Work, Employment and Social Security, May
2006, p. 34). According to official statistics, the poverty rates have decreased sub-
stantially since 2002 and the post-financial crisis in Argentina when there was a
poverty rate in the city of Santa Fe of 63.7 percent and the rate of absolute poverty
33.8 percent (Ibid.).
6. In 2005, 25 percent of the city’s workforce was employed in the municipal and
provincial public sector. This rate includes the entire range from officials and
policemen to teachers, nurses and dustmen (CERIDE-CONICET, p. 18).
7. CERIDE-CONICET, p. 18.
8. See http://www.unisdr.org/we/campaign/sasakawa/2011 (Accessed on May 15,
2014)
9. Indeed, many places in the world would have been suitable for this study.
Argentina was, for many personal and professional reasons that I shall not explore
here, the country of my choice however.
10. The study I refer to throughout this chapter is my doctoral dissertation and even if
I had accomplished minor fieldworks prior to this for my bachelors’ and masters’
thesis in the years 1997 and 2000 respectively, I consider myself a novice before
the fieldwork in Santa Fe.
11. J. P. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in M. Melhuus, J. P. Mitchell, and H. Wulff (eds.),
Ethnographic Practice in the Present, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010,
pp. 1–15.
12. G. E. Marcus and J. Clifford (eds.), Writing Culture, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986; A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Anthropological Locations:
Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997; G. Marcus Ethnography through Thick and Thin, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998; V. Amit, “Introduction: Constructing the Field,” in V. Amit
(ed.), Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World,
Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 1–18.
13. U. Hannerz “Introduktion: när fältet blir translokalt,” in U. Hannerz (ed.), Flera
fält i ett—Socialantropologer om translokala fältstudier, Stockholm: Carlssons, 2001,
pp. 13.
14. Ibid.
15. U. Björklund, “Att studera en diaspora. Den armeniska förskingringen som
fält,” in U. Hannerz (ed.), Flera fält i ett—Socialantropologer om translokala fält-
studier, Stockholm: Carlssons, 2001, p. 105; U. Hannerz, “Being There . . . and
There . . . and There! Ref lections on Multi-site Ethnography,” Ethnography, vol. 4,
no. 2 (2003): 202.
16. G. E. Marcus, “Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World
System,” in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986, pp. 165–193; G. E. Marcus, “Imagining
the Whole: Ethnography’s Contemporary Efforts To Situate Itself,” Critique of
Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1989): 7–30; G. E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the
World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of

Anthropology, no. 24, 1995, pp. 95–117.
17. Hannerz, “Being There.”
18. Hannerz, “Introduktion”; C. Garsten “Ethnography at the Interface: ‘Corporate
Social Responsibility’ as an Anthropological Field of Enquiry,” in M. Melhuus,
J. P. Mitchell, and H. Wulff (eds.) Ethnographic Practice in the Present, New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 56–68; U. Röschenthaler, “An Ethnography
of Associations? Translocal Research in the Cross River Region,” in M. Melhuus,
J. P. Mitchell, and H. Wulff (eds.), Ethnographic Practice in the Present, New York
and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 121–134.
19. H. Wulff, “Yo-yo Fieldwork: Mobility and Time in a Multi-local Study of Dance
in Ireland,” Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, no. 11 (2002): 117–136.
20. S. Howell and A. Talle, Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Re-search and Contemporary
Anthropology, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011, p. 7.
21. Ibid., p. 3.
22. Ibid., p. 12. Italics in original.
23. M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1992 [1941, 1952].
24. Hannerz, “Introduktion,” p. 18; A. Henning, “ ‘Det finns ingen sol i Sverige’:
Nätverk kring solenergin,” in U. Hannerz (ed.), Flera fält i ett: socialantropologer
om translokala fältstudier, Stockholm: Carlssons Bokförlag, 2001, pp. 134–162;
A. Cerwonka and L. Malkki, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in
Ethnographic Fieldwork, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
25. The differentiation was principally made in terms of class, gender, and age, but
also in terms of profession. A dozen clerks in municipal and provincial public
administrations who worked with issues related to f lood and disaster management
were interviewed in total.
26. E. Quarantelli and R. Dynes, “Response to Social Crisis and Disaster,” Annual
Review of Sociology, vol. 3 (1977): 23–49; D. M. Neal, “Blame Assignment in a
Diffuse Disaster Situation: A Case Example of the Role of an Emergent Citizen
Group,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, no. 2 (1984): 251–266;
R. Stallings and E. Quarantelli, “Emergent Citizen Groups and Emergency
Management,” Public Administration Review, no. 45 (Special Issue) (1985): 93–100.
27. Archivo General de la Provincia de Santa Fe. Available online at http://www
.santafe-conicet.gov.ar/sipar (Accessed on May 15, 2014)
28. H. Gusterson, “Studying up Revisited,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review,
vol. 20, no. 1 (1997): 114–119.
29. For the purposes of making this ethnography more available to the reader, I have
here added some footnotes that I hope clarify.
30. The CCDDHH (House of Human Rights) is a local NGO in the city of Santa
Fe advocating for human rights in the city and the province. The CCDDHH is
closely connected to the local branch of the renowned Argentine human rights’
organization Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
31. HIJOS is an Argentine human rights’ organization founded in 1995 to reveal
the fate of those political activists and their families that “disappeared” during
the military dictatorship (1976–1983). Its acronym stands for Hijos e Hijas por la
Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (sons and daughters for identity and
justice against oblivion and silence).
32. Cf. Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality
in Ethnographic Fieldwork, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
33. In Argentina, this means refer to each other by “vos” (“you” in second person
singular) instead of the more formal “usted” (“you” in second person plural).
34. This disaster occurred at a concert of the local rock band called “Callejeros”
in the discotheque Cromañón on the night of December 30, 2004. A hundred
and ninety-four mostly young people died and more than a thousand people
were injured. Survivors and family of the deceased organized to claim political
and judicial responsibilities. As a consequence, the then mayor of Buenos Aires,
Aníbal Ibarra, was removed. In 2009 the producer of the concert and the man-
ager of the band were sentenced to prison for their responsibility in the tragedy.
For an anthropological analysis of this case, see Zenobi, 2011.
35. The Justicialist Party is the largest political party in Argentina founded in 1947
by the late General Domingo Perón. Given the strong imprint of Perón, the party
and its followers quickly came to be called Peronistas.
36. A. Barton, Communities in Disaster: A Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations,
Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969; A. Oliver-Smith, The Martyred City:
Death and Rebirth in the Andes, Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New
Mexico Press. 1986; A. Oliver-Smith and S. Hoffman (eds.), The Angry Earth:
Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, London, New York: Routledge, 1999; S. Revet,
Anthropologie d’une catastrophe. Les coulées de boue de 1999 au Venezuela, Paris: Presses
de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2007; J. Langumier, Survivre à l’inondation: Pour une eth-
nologie de la catastrophe, Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2008.
37. Ullberg, Watermarks.
38. A. Cerwonka and L. Malkki, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in
Ethnographic Fieldwork, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
39. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977 [1972].
40. Garsten “Ethnography at the Interface,” p. 58, Hannerz, “Being There,” 229–244.
41. G. E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-
Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24 (1995): 96.
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CH A P T E R SI X
Investigating the “Discrete Memory” of

the Seveso Disaster in Italy
L au r a C e n t e m e r i
In this text, I bring a long-term perspective to bear on an industrial

accident that resulted in the contamination of an inhabited territory.
Going beyond the immediate temporality of the event itself, I seek to
recount the manner in which a disaster persists, is diluted, and trans-
formed in the life of the affected community. I also question the link
often drawn in the literature between the experience of disaster and the
emergence of a “local risk culture.”1 From a ref lexive point of view,
finally, I seek to shed light upon and discuss some of the difficulties
and tensions involved in research that above all aims to understand how
a population responds to the radical disruption of its relationship to a
territory.
The present study does not focus on the need to intervene or efforts to
define good practices, which are frequently emphasized in research into
post-disaster situations. Rather, I investigate the limits of framing mat-
ters in terms of risk in order to capture the complexity of the “personal
troubles” that emerge in the aftermath of harm to the “dwelled-in”
environment.2 This requires an effort of distanciation vis-à-vis the
imperatives of the disciplinary field of risk studies, which often privi-
leges the “applied” dimension while leaving implicit the normative
content of its guiding framework. By taking into account “dwelling”
as a “familiar regime of engagement,” one may better grasp the costs
of framing environmental problems as risks, understood in terms of
192 Laura Centemeri
the detachment from familiar modes of engaging with the environ-

ment that is required of inhabitants.3 And by recognizing goods that
are anchored in the sphere of proximity, one may better understand the
difficulties and hesitations that emerge when “personal troubles” are
transformed into “public issues.”4
My discussion focuses on the case of the Seveso disaster.5 I brief ly
review the chronology of this accident as well as the most striking
aspects of the resulting health crisis. Along the way, I examine the
conf licts that emerged locally in terms of the differing interpretations
offered of the accident and the damage it caused the environment—
interpretations based on various “justifications” and “regimes of
engagement.”6 Finally, I consider the ways in which, to this day, traces
of the event remain publically recognizable and also, at times, notably
absent.
The Persistence and Absence of the Seveso Disaster
Seveso is a small town of 20,000 inhabitants located roughly 20 km

from Milan in the province of Brianza, an historically Catholic ter-
ritory with an economic organization centered on woodworking
for furniture production.7 After the Second World War, the large-
scale chemical industry established itself alongside small, family-run
businesses.
On July 10, 1976, one of the reactors of the ICMESA (Industrie
Chimiche Meda Società Azionaria, a chemical factory)—run by the
Givaudan corporation on behalf of the Swiss multinational Hofmann-La
Roche—released a toxic cloud that caused dioxin contamination on
the towns of Seveso, Meda, Desio, and Cesano Maderno.8 Strange as it
may seem, the explosion went more or less unnoticed by the inhabit-
ants of adjacent neighborhoods, who were used to gas leaks. The fac-
tory had existed since 1945 and its relationship to the territory had
always been marked by a series of accidental pollutions. While requir-
ing intervention on the part of the relevant inspection authorities, there
had never been a genuine effort to secure the facilities.9 There fol-
lowed a “week of silence,” during which Roche technicians sought to
prevent the “desectorialization of the crisis”10 by endeavoring to keep
the accident within the bounds of a technical problem without broader
consequences. The crisis was mainly set off by the appearance of a skin
disease, chloracne, among a growing number of children living in the
neighborhood of the factory.11
Seveso Disaster in Italy 193
Field analyses by experts from the region of Lombardy confirmed

that the accident had resulted in a dioxin leak, opening the prospect
of a possible health and environmental disaster. At the time, how-
ever, little was known concerning the toxic action of this molecule
and their analyses were thus marked by a high degree of uncertainty.
Laboratory toxicological testing had demonstrated the extreme toxic-
ity of dioxin, though its effects varied significantly from one species to
the next. Moreover, prior to the accident, studies of dioxin poisoning
had mainly focused on cases identified by industrial medicine of high
contamination among adult men; its effects on human beings were
thus still poorly understood. Nothing was yet known of dioxin’s effects
on women, children, or the environment.12 This situation of “radical
uncertainty” led some scientists to anticipate disastrous scenarios and
others to play down the risk.13 Despite this uncertainty, however, the
disastrous scenario immediately made the front page of the national
and international press, thereby contributing to the decision to evacu-
ate the contaminated zone.
On July 26, 213 inhabitants of Seveso and Meda were evacuated by
the army following a decision on the part of the Lombardy regional
authorities responsible for managing the health crisis. Over the course
of the following days, other residents were obliged to leave their
homes. Altogether, 736 people were evacuated, 200 of whom would
never return to their homes, which were destroyed in the course of
decontamination operations. The evacuation went hand-in-hand with
the delimitation of the contaminated territory, which was divided up
into “risk zones.” The most seriously contaminated zone, Zone A
(108 hectares), was evacuated and delimited with barbed wire. The
army was responsible for policing this frontier, which was located in
the heart of Seveso. In Zone B (269 hectares, more than 4600 inhab-
itants), an expert commission judged the high levels of dioxin present
there to be tolerable on condition that the inhabitants observed very
strict rules of conduct, which drastically disrupted their day-to-day
lives. In order to limit contact with polluted earth, for example, chil-
dren living in Zone B were required to leave their homes and neigh-
borhood during the day for day care centers located elsewhere, only
returning in the evening. The Zone of Respect14 (1430 hectares and
31,800 inhabitants) was not significantly contaminated: nevertheless,
rules of conduct were established, including a prohibition on culti-
vating the land. A special commission defined the risk zones using
available data on the extent of contamination as well as consider-
ations concerning the social feasibility of massive evacuations.15 Their
194 Laura Centemeri
decision left no room for participation by citizens or representatives

of the affected towns.16
Suspecting the risk of dioxin’s teratogenic effects, the authorities
requested that the inhabitants of Seveso “abstain from procreation.”
But it was the decision to exceptionally grant women from the con-
taminated zone the right to therapeutic abortion that sparked the most
intense conf lict and forever marked the course of the crisis. This deci-
sion was all the more controversial given that it clashed with the region’s
strong Catholic sensibilities and appeared in the midst of a national
struggle in support of a law recognizing the right to abortion (passed in
1978). The protagonists of this debate instrumentally seized upon the
case of the “women of Seveso.”17 Between fall 1976 and spring 1977, 42
therapeutic and 4 spontaneous abortions were recorded among women
in the contaminated zone.
In October 1976, decontamination operations began. In the midst of
protests from the population, the regional government proposed con-
structing an incinerator in Zone A to burn contaminated waste. The
inhabitants of Seveso opposed this project: incineration would only
create new risks and would forever change the landscape of the town,
adding permanent disfigurement to the damage that dioxin had already
done the environment. After a series of demonstrations and gestures
of protest on the part of the inhabitants (including the reoccupation
of Zone A), the regional government project was abandoned in favor
of a plan to bury waste in Zone A in special waste dumps produced
according to standards for storing nuclear waste. In response to popular
pressure, the authorities decided to transform the surface of the waste
dumps into an urban forest via an experimental reforestation program
that would reproduce a type of forest traditionally found in the region:
this was the first step in the creation of what is today known as the
“Seveso and Meda Oak Forest” park.
In June 1977, a special office was established to manage efforts to
bring about a return to normalcy: alongside decontamination and
health checks, these actions sought to promote the resumption of local
economic activity, which had seriously suffered from the accident. The
fear of possible contamination, for example, sometimes led buyers in
Italy and abroad to refuse furniture manufactured in Seveso. Farmers
were also harmed: all activity ceased at the region’s 61 farms and 80,000
head of cattle were slaughtered as a preventative measure. The office
ceased its activities in 1986, three years after the end of decontamination
operations.
In the meantime, starting in 1978, the population of Seveso resumed

its natural growth rate. This followed a drop in births in 1977. No
significant variation was recorded in the rate of mortality. Concerns
nevertheless persisted of possible long-term effects.
In regards to known damage—chloracne, the destruction of homes
and businesses, dead animals—the multinational Roche corporation
created a “Damage Evaluation and Compensation Center” in February
1977 to directly negotiate compensation with danneggiati (“people who
had suffered damages”) in the form of private party transactions. These
negotiations, carried out in Milan in offices chosen by the firm and at
its own pace, excluded third parties: victims’ collectives, journalists,
association activists, and so on. As a result, there was neither public
debate nor a clear, publically verifiable definition of the conventions
determining the monetary equivalents for various losses. This gave rise
to rumors concerning the amount received by people who had suffered
damages, causing a serious rift in the affected community. People who
had suffered damages were denounced by those who refused (or did
not have access to) the transaction with Roche as having individually
profited from collective misfortune.
Roche also compensated the affected towns, the region, and the
Italian state, in every case by way of extrajudicial transactions. At the
time, no legal framework existed to oblige Roche to pay for the damages
caused by ICMESA. It is to be noted, however, that these compensa-
tions were paid without the Swiss multinational ever recognizing its
responsibility for the accident.
In 1983, a criminal trial began for the ICMESA accident. In 1986,
it resulted in sentences (less than two years in prison) for two technical
managers charged with “involuntary damage.” Once the criminal trial
had ended, civil proceedings got under way on the initiative of two
committees of “people damaged by dioxin” (danneggiati dalla diossina).
The committees consisted of a thousand or so members and demanded
recognition for the harm they had suffered as a result of the accident.
Reactions were mixed within Seveso’s population: the monetization
of harm was central to the committees’ efforts, and the memory of the
conf licts to which this had given rise in the immediate aftermath of the
disaster was still fresh. Moreover, the type of actions they undertook
(with a delegation consisting of the committees’ founders and limited
involvement on the part of the plaintiffs themselves) did not inspire
broad solidarity in support of the cause of compensation. These legal
actions ended with all charges dismissed in 2007.
196 Laura Centemeri
In terms of health monitoring, studies were conducted beginning

in 1996 on the inhabitants of the various contamination zones using
data for the period 1976–1991. These identified an increased risk for
various types of cancer, such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an elevated
incidence of cases of diabetes and pulmonary and cardiovascular
pathologies—that is, a broad and varied range of effects.18 From the
point of view of standard epidemiology, this data suffers from an exces-
sively small data set relative to the reference population. It has thus
been impossible to establish clear causal relationships, which explains
why the Seveso disaster is officially considered a victimless disaster.19
Nevertheless, the Seveso studies contributed to a 1997 decision on the
part of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s to classify
dioxin as a “human carcinogen.”20
The public opening of the Oak Forest on July 10, 1996—the twen-
tieth anniversary of the accident—was an important sign of Seveso’s
return to normalcy. The park’s inauguration was contested by the envi-
ronmentalists from the local Legambiente Circle,21 which denounced
the purely formal nature of this act, which fell short of genuinely
restoring this place to the population. According to the activists, such a
restoration would require work on the memory of the accident. They
denounced as dangerous the desire to forget the disaster. In 2002, this
same group thus launched a project, the “Memory Bridge,” to create a
“Memory Path” in the Oak Forest, together with an archival collection
devoted to the disaster. The Memory Path project provided for the pro-
duction of information panels narrating the relationship between the
park and the accident. These were to be disseminated throughout the
park and collectively produced with the participation of the affected
town. In May 2004, the Memory Path was officially inaugurated. In
2005, the park was even recognized as a “natural park” by the region
of Lombardy! Though an important sign of a desire for normalcy, it
nevertheless raised questions.
Alongside its local impact, the ICMESA disaster quickly became a
symbol in the struggle to regulate industrial risk in the European space.
This was due to the Seveso Directive (1982), which contributed to
the process that in 1986 led the European Union to assert its political
responsibility in the area of environmental protection.22 In discussions
of the terrible steps by which contemporary societies were transformed
into “societies of risk,” what’s more, the name of Seveso is frequently
cited alongside the place names of other major technological disasters
(such as Minamata, Bhopal, Chernobyl).23
The Local Construction of Seveso’s Exemplarity:

A Conf lict of Cultures?
In contrast to the international publicity surrounding the accident,

what immediately struck me upon my first trip to Seveso in June 2002
was the total absence of any material trace of the disaster’s memory.
I was initially outraged by this absence, a reaction that allowed me
to understand my own normative stance. I reacted in similar fashion
after discovering that no public movement had arisen to address the
long-term health risks of dioxin. While not as disastrous as had been
feared in the immediate aftermath of the accident, these health risks
are nevertheless real and constitute a potential public health problem,
albeit one that is not openly discussed. Moreover, the dioxin episode
revealed a potential problem of chronic pollution in the region of
Seveso, resulting from the operations of large chemical manufacturing
facilities. Yet these environmental health concerns had never emerged
as a cause.
My research thus turned toward understanding this twofold absence
(“outrageous,” in my eyes). To do so, I sought to move beyond inter-
pretive shortcuts that would account for this absence by reference to the
supposed apathy, irrationality, domination, or fatalism of the population
affected by the disaster. In the course of my investigation, I accompa-
nied the work of the local group of Legambiente Circle environmental-
ists. Like me, they were outraged by the absence of a collective memory
of the disaster and were committed to contesting the “repression” of
the accident, its effects, and implications. Their efforts, which led to the
creation of the Memory Path, demonstrated the impossibility of simul-
taneously commemorating the accident and retaining a trace of the
event in terms of vigilance toward still-present risks.
I was a receptionist at Seveso city hall when the dioxin thing hap-
pened. People called in desperation, terrorized. All these doubts
about their health. They’re still there.
I wanted to say something. What have we come here to com-
memorate? There’s nothing to commemorate, there’s a problem to
be solved. In the forest, there’s a problem to be solved. This buried
waste, it’s a problem to be solved. We made a commitment to do
this when we demanded the burial and we must honor it. How
can you deal with this heritage? It’s not so much a matter of com-
memoration as a question of action.
198 Laura Centemeri
I was in charge of the team responsible for putting down con-

taminated animals. I can tell you we saw the dioxin. It was like a
shiny veil on the animals’ skin.
I’m a member of the farmers’ association. The dioxin was a
slaughter of the innocents, all these animals that we killed. I par-
ticipated in the decontamination operations. I had to sign a docu-
ment stating that I accepted the risks of doing so. Those of us
who worked on decontamination aren’t dead. I’m not saying that
dioxin isn’t dangerous, I’m saying that we were lucky.
We were told all sorts of things. We understood that we had to
decide for ourselves. All of the artisans from Seveso were mobi-
lized (from Seveso, I emphasize, not from Meda). For young peo-
ple, the lesson to be drawn from this is that one must not accept
everything that comes from above. We fought against the incin-
erator and the incinerator isn’t there. In any case, the waste had to
be sent to Switzerland!
I was born in 1980. I studied chemistry and I found the name of
Seveso mentioned everywhere. But it seems to me that all is well,
my family is fine.
I believe it’s important to commemorate the fight against the
incinerator. What we’ve experienced and observed is that politi-
cians try to profit from every situation. I of course understand these
strategies, which can be justified but also harm us. That’s why one
must always think for oneself to understand these strategies.
I’m a Legambiente regional official. I agree that one must think
for oneself but only after having tried to understand and having
listened to the experts. I don’t like these remarks about politicians
always profiting from situations. Seveso was an industrial accident
relating to globalization. It was a laboratory for understanding the
general dynamics of today. You suffered from that. Seveso was
useful but you’ve paid with your health.
The preceding remarks are drawn from a May 13, 2004, debate orga-
nized by the Legambiente Circle of Seveso in the auditorium of the De
Gasperi Street school (at the time of the crisis, the site of an emergency
medical analysis laboratory established by the authorities). On that eve-
ning, the Circle officially unveiled the Oak Forest Memory Path. The
comments made there nicely illustrate the variety of public reactions
that are provoked in Seveso by efforts to revisit the ICMESA accident.
On the one hand, there is the memory of the terror that gripped the
town immediately following the dioxin contamination. On the other,
there are the claims that, despite it all, “we’re not dead,” “all is well,”
“we were lucky,” suggesting that the significance of the event is widely
seen as having been exaggerated. On the one hand, political “strate-
gies” for profiting from the situation are condemned, while pride is
voiced at “having decided for ourselves.” Roche, meanwhile, which is
never directly named or mentioned, is given a marginal role in respon-
sibility for the disaster. On the other, it is agreed that the responsibili-
ties entailed by these decisions—and, in particular, the choice to bury
contaminated waste under the Oak Forest—must be recognized and
accepted
Two elements intersect in these reactions: a feeling of isolation con-
fronted with adversity, particularly experienced in relations with the
institutions responsible for managing the crisis; suspicion and refusal
of externally imposed interpretive frameworks that generalize the
scientific or political significance of the Seveso dioxin event. These
testify to a difficulty in relating the anchored and embodied experi-
ence of the disaster to efforts to share it from the perspective of broader
solidarities.
In order to understand this difficulty, one must reconsider the man-
ner in which the dioxin crisis was managed by the public authorities
as well as the mobilization to which it gave rise. In examining con-
temporaneous documents and testimony, it becomes clear that, from
the very start of the crisis, the response of the regional authorities was
guided by technocratic decision making. This excluded the disaster
victim population from any possibility of intervening in the definition
of management measures. In the absence of clarity on the real contours
of the crisis, institutional statements vacillated between reassuring for-
mulae and dramatic decisions, such as that to evacuate the site. Locked
into what was considered an irrational stance, the public authorities did
not consider the population capable of understanding the complexity of
this exceptional situation.24
Among the inhabitants concerned, the manner in which the evacua-
tion of Zone A was decided gave rise to a feeling of impotence vis-à-vis
the institutions. The evacuation was decided upon behind closed doors
by a commission of experts and was imposed without explanation of
the real considerations guiding the delimitation of these risk zones:
Medical bigwigs, university professors, scientists and politicians

closed themselves in a room. No one was allowed to disturb
them . . . Finally, the door opened at 1:45 PM. “We will be tak-
ing measures but we must first discuss them with the prefect
200 Laura Centemeri
and local administrators,” said Rivolta [the Region’s Director of

Health Policy]. And, at 5 PM, in the Seveso city hall, the Prefect
and Director of Health Policy arrived with the die already cast.
Embarrassed, Domenico Amari [the Prefect] began to speak: “179
people must leave their homes in the next 24 hours. Their homes
are in an excessively polluted zone.”25
The “dioxin risk” was occasionally called upon to delegitimize the

voice of inhabitants. As a result, they felt at the mercy of considerations
that escaped them, provoking a feeling of anxiety vis-à-vis the future
awaiting them, a future over which they felt they no longer had any
control:
The day of the evacuation, I was there, with the evacuees. In

agreement with the others—my brother, our friends—we decided
to participate in this departure, in order to see what awaited us in
the future. Other people we knew had already had to leave their
homes, their work, the things dear to them (affetti), their personal
things. We wanted to make sense of the situation and participate
in the terrible situation these people were going through by giv-
ing them our moral support by being physically there for their
departure. I remember several of us were present that morning for
this sad departure.26
For the inhabitants of Seveso, the decision to evacuate dramatically

underscored the real possibility that their town would disappear as a
result of dioxin pollution:
I was on vacation on July 10. My husband worked at the hospital

in Mariano [a little town near Seveso] and every night he joined
us at the vacation house. A few days after July 10, he arrived and
told us to not eat the salad he had brought us. There were children
at the hospital with a skin disease, chloracne. We sought to inform
ourselves, we watched TV. I was with two girlfriends. Watching
the TV, we had the impression that the town had been destroyed,
that it was a situation to which we could never return. But later,
listening to our husbands who travelled back and forth to the
town, we decided to return to Seveso to see what had happened
for ourselves. What we saw on TV was horrible, absolutely horrible.
We returned and we realized that the image on TV was one-
sided. Even if obviously something very serious was happening.
But on TV you had the impression of total devastation. There was

an exacerbation of the polemical aspects, perhaps just because this
sort of accident is usually played down. We felt as if we had been
caught up in a whirlpool that amplified everything that happened
to us but it was amplified in the service of causes that weren’t ours.
For you, it’s your life, your village, your family, your people. So
you need to know what’s really happening.27
This desire to know “what’s really happening” contrasts with what

is denounced as an “exacerbation” of the situation for the purpose
of advancing particular “causes.” This refers to the activities of the
Scientific Technical Popular Committee (STPC) created in Seveso
after the accident on the initiative of Democratic Medicine (Medicina
Democratica). This movement, which was created at the time and is still
active today, promoted meetings between workers, citizens, scientists,
and intellectuals to develop a new form of shared expertise concerning
the health of workers and industrialized territories.
The damage done by dioxin was described by the STPC as “dam-
age to health caused by the capitalist system of production”: the public
authorities were held to be complicit in a “crime of capitalism” against
health and the environment.28 From the perspective of a social cri-
tique of capitalism, the case of Seveso was seen as exemplifying capital-
ist exploitation. By its exemplarity, it thus contributed to the general
cause of class struggle. Support for this cause required the inhabitants of
Seveso to exist in public space as victims of an irreparable harm, some-
thing of which they absolutely had to be made aware.
The field of mobilization in this way came to focus on the existence,
severity, and construction of scientific evidence of harm, which sci-
entists working for the political authorities might conceal. Hence the
importance assumed by counterexpertise activities, which are based on
a conception of the production of knowledge in the area of environ-
mental health that integrates the experience of those affected. In this
framework, however, the aim was to prove the reality of harm: uncer-
tainty surrounding the dioxin risk was thus treated in a way that accen-
tuated indications that the harm inf licted was irreversible. Uncertainty,
in this way, was seen as the (temporary) lack of evidence for an already
established harm.
This model of action won little support among the population.
Exclusively focused on decrying the damage done and its severity, it
seemed to ignore the inhabitants’ need to preserve their ties to the
territory understood as a good to be protected. Taking this need into
202 Laura Centemeri
account would require exploring the compatibility between the uncer-

tainty of harm and a return to normalcy in this territory.
Drawing upon scientific uncertainty concerning the severity of
the consequences of contamination, local committees were created to
demand that the public authorities take the need to preserve the ties
to the local community into account in crafting their response to the
crisis. The groups that were thus mobilized led to the creation of the
Assistance and Coordination Office. This organization was run by
volunteers and formally recognized by the Archbishop of Milan as the
expression of Catholic initiatives in the contaminated territory. The
Church’s recognition was important. As we have seen, social, political,
and economic life in the region of Seveso has long been marked by a
tradition of local action and mobilization on the part of the Catholic
Church, making it a central actor in local dynamics.
These groups above all mobilized around the question of evacuees
relocated to hotels in the suburbs of Milan. A network was organized
to allow these families to return to live in Seveso. Owners were asked
to make all apartments free for rent available for use by the evacuees. In
the meantime, activities were organized for children:
I remember that, from July 1976 to spring 1977, we very often

went to the hotel of Assago [a town south of Milan] to visit people
who had been evacuated so that they weren’t left alone. Two or
three of us would go at a time to spend time with these people. We
thought that, were we in their place, we wouldn’t have wanted to
be isolated, left alone. I remember that two issues were involved
in our solidarity: trying to find people who could rent apartments
to help bring the Seveso evacuees home so as to put an end to the
artificial life they were leading in these hotels, where people who
had never lived together were obliged to live an absurd—because
not chosen by them—communal life. The other thing was to look
after children since the ban on playing in Zone B was serious for
it represented a real risk. For that, we said we were available to
look after the children as they played, draw with them, sing with
them. They came to these centers in the morning and left in the
evening.29
Though more familiar with the most pressing concerns of the inhabit-
ants directly affected by the accident, these groups also sought to assert
the exemplarity of the Seveso experience in the public sphere. The
Comunione e Liberazione (CL) movement, in particular, was at the
forefront of those voicing this demand.30 In the name of the principle

of subsidiarity, the movement petitioned the public authorities to rec-
ognize the affected town’s ability to actively contribute to the response
to the crisis. This demand for subsidiarity was justified as guaranteeing
respect for the cultural specificity of the affected community. More
particularly, these groups asserted that the relationship to the territory
was an expression of a specific “local culture.” Rooted in Catholicism,
its particular values were said to be threatened, not only by the damage
to the environment, but also by the considerations driving interven-
tion by the public authorities, who gave little attention to the threat of
uprooting. While the health risks associated with dioxin contamina-
tion jeopardized the existence of Seveso, the intervention of public
actors would, these groups asserted, result in another type of threat. In
its response to the crisis, the state was said to be taking advantage of this
exceptional situation to impose forms of organization on social life that
neglected or scorned local culture. The decision to authorize therapeu-
tic abortion for pregnant women in the contaminated zone (within the
space of the first trimester) due to dioxin’s suspected teratogenic effects
was therefore condemned as an example of public intervention that, on
the pretext of health, in fact aimed at a form of cultural colonization. It
was this specific expression of dioxin’s harmful effects—that is, the risk
of neonatal deformity—that allowed what had been a sociotechnical
controversy regarding the health risks of dioxin and the best ways of
managing it to be transformed into a conf lict over values.
The conf lict over abortion was just an extreme expression of the
conf lict between two ways of describing the damage to the environ-
ment that took place in Seveso. While the left-wing mobilization pre-
sented dioxin pollution as a crime, the Catholic mobilization saw it as
an “ordeal” through which the “Christian community” of Seveso had
to pass while at the same time remaining united and thereby demon-
strating its common values. Among these values was attachment to the
territory in the sense of attachment to a community of neighbors. This
attachment, it was claimed, was the public manifestation of a sense of
belonging that deserved respect and recognition.31 Left-wing activists,
for their part, saw this local culture as a collection of dispositions that
prevented detachment from relations of proximity and thereby pre-
cluded awareness of the injustice that had been inf licted.32
What one sees here is a dynamic centered on the promotion of the
attachment to the local community and its environment that takes the
form of a shared cultural identity (promoted by the Catholic mobiliza-
tion). This shared identity, in its turn, is denounced by the left-wing
204 Laura Centemeri
mobilization as conf licting with a civic frame of understanding of the

crisis in terms of global socioeconomic injustice. These two critical
movements, which occupied the space of debate by monopolizing it,
made it difficult to recognize the specificity of the harm dioxin caused
the dwelled-in environment.
Each of these two visions simplified a situation in which the complex
consequences of damage to a dwelled-in environment are neglected.
What was lacking was a capacity—on the part of those taking action—
to recognize the specificity of the personal troubles caused by contami-
nation and the need to create the conditions in which they might be
recognized and a place made for them in public debate.
The Personal Troubles of Contamination and

the Continued Difficulty of Expressing
Them in Public
The failure to draw a connection between the ICMESA event as it

was experienced by inhabitants and its more general significance as an
exemplary case of environmental damage was closely linked to the way
in which this exemplarity was constructed by the actors who mobilized
in support of victims.
In the case of the left-wing mobilization, the lack of familiarity with
the territory and its inhabitants created distance, an inability to draw
upon shared vocabulary and reference points to express and describe the
harm that had been done. In the case of the Catholic mobilization, such
familiarity was not lacking. But considering the goods of proximity as
the expression of a shared culture and “Christian community” crushed
other ways of living-together in Seveso. In both cases, what was lack-
ing was a discussion that recognized and took account of the harm
inf licted upon the environment as harm to the dwelled-in territory.
The complex nature of this type of damage is revealed in the con-
tradictory manner in which the disaster is to this day present in the life
of Seveso and its inhabitants. A stated desire to look to the future and
stop talking about dioxin comes up against the fact that the disaster left
indelible traces in both individual lives and that of the community. This
is particularly obvious in the case of the observable traces it left in the
urban fabric, such as the Oak Forest. A process of restoration guided by
a desire to forget collided with the fact that present-day Seveso cannot
avoid a return to the disaster. But how should the disaster be revisited
and what is one to say about it? As we shall see, these are questions with
which the actors on the ground are directly confronted. Throughout

my research, I also had to face these questions.
I came to Seveso with the idea of exploring processes for repair-
ing environmental damage and, more particularly, controversies over
the health effects of dioxin. But I was immediately faced with a dis-
crepancy between the reality on the ground and the “ideal” situation
of victim mobilization in “hybrid forums.”33 I thus sought to explain
this discrepancy. During my first visits to Seveso, the town’s inhabit-
ants denied the scale of the health consequences brought about by the
accident.
It was only after I had gradually become familiar with the territory
and its actors that some individuals spoke to me of ongoing personal
troubles relating to the experience of contamination, including health
problems. At the same time, they confided in me regarding the
d ifficulty—or, rather, the impossibility—of publicly discussing them.
Initially, the inhabitants saw me as “the sociologist” (or “the journalist”)
and remarks were made indicating that my observation was a source of
discomfort. These remarks always related to their memory of the pub-
licity surrounding the disaster. Gradually, however, my presence gave
rise to fewer and fewer reactions. Constructing relations of trust took
time. To win their trust, I first had to demonstrate my own attachment
to the territory. This involved long visits to significant places in the
town, participation in various gatherings, and acting as a volunteer in
the Memory Bridge project. This requirement of attachment ref lected
the fact that the community had a troubled relationship with scientists
in the past, marked by a feeling of exploitation—that is, a feeling that
Seveso inhabitants had always been treated as “guinea pigs.”
Once my presence had become familiar, my conversations with the
inhabitants—and not just moments of formal interview—gradually
became friendlier. In the course of these, my interlocutors revealed the
existence of tensions and contradictions that are excluded from public
discussion. This, for example, is what happened with Max F., an activ-
ist of the Legambiente Circle and director of the Memory Bridge project.
Among the activities he promoted in the framework of this project
were organized walks in the Oak Forest for the region’s elementary
and high school students. Invited to participate in one of these walks,
I found myself an involuntary witness to a peculiar episode. A pregnant
young woman—a teacher and native of Seveso—was accompanying a
group of eight- to ten-year olds who had come to visit the park. Upon
arriving at the entry to the park, she said that she wanted to remain
outside. As the children went ahead with other teachers, the woman
206 Laura Centemeri
explained to Max that she could not understand her own reaction but
could not bring herself to enter. She was afraid, she said, but not that
the park was contaminated and dangerous for her health. Rather, what
frightened her was the fact that, underneath the artificial mounds that
one could see and which concealed the contaminated waste, there were
houses that had been torn down during the decontamination as well as
dead animals. “It’s like a cemetery,” she explained. In discussing this
episode with me later in the morning, Max told me that many people
in Seveso have complicated and ambivalent feelings about the park. For
some inhabitants, it is their homes that are buried under the soil. He
then pointed to where his parents’ home could be found. It was located
in the Zone of Respect but very close to the ICMESA facilities that had
been destroyed and buried in the park. Max had been born six years
before the accident with a congenital handicap (phocomelia). He told
me that he knew that ICMESA was at the time already polluting the
territory with toxic waste from its production of trichlorophenol. He
had seen it referred to in official documents. His handicap may have
had a link to industrial pollution by the factory. Nevertheless, his par-
ents had decided not to bring a lawsuit against ICMESA even though
they knew that his case might have been widely reported after the acci-
dent, thereby resulting in significant compensation. He explained that
his parents had preferred to give him the “normal life” of a “normal
child” rather than that of a “media phenomenon.” This is what hap-
pened, he told me, to two little girls—sisters—from Seveso who had
been very severely affected by chloracne. Images of their disfigured
faces were shown around the world. He added that he was grateful to
his parents for this “courageous choice,” which allowed him to have
the same childhood as other children of his age.
In these friendly conversations, people told me about the way in
which the accident had profoundly changed—indeed, marked—their
lives, the costs they thought they had paid, their ever-present doubts
and fears. At the same time, alongside this awareness of the harm that
had been inf licted, they spoke of their hesitation, their reluctance to
publicly express this awareness, implicitly asking me to recognize its
legitimacy. Frequently, they justified this hesitation by reference to their
distrust of the institutions that were supposed to guarantee that these
experiences were converted into a “public problem.” But they also jus-
tified them by reference to their fear of once again finding themselves
locked into the status of victims. In the experience of the inhabitants
of Seveso, this status was marked by voicelessness, powerlessness, and
stigmatization.
Luisa S., an inhabitant of Seveso who runs a recreational center

for the elderly on behalf of city hall, thus recounted how, while on
vacation with her family at a place on the Adriatic Sea in the years
immediately following the accident, the hotel’s owner asked her to not
tell the other guests they came from Seveso. “It was like we had the
plague!” she remarked. Luisa also recounted her experience of being
seven months pregnant at the time of the contamination. She spoke of
how her fears led her to “shut herself in” at home and not participate
in meetings because “[she] didn’t want to know” and “people only
argued with one another.” She was able to share these fears with her
husband only. He subsequently died of cancer and she suspects it was
related to dioxin exposure. As a member of two Seveso committees,
Luisa submitted a request for compensation. Her request, however,
was denied. She stated that she is convinced her husband’s death was
caused by dioxin. At the same time, she explicitly told me that she did
not want to talk about the request for compensation because it is “too
personal.”
Another inhabitant of Seveso, Giuliana B., explained her reaction to
living in the Zone of Respect and the difficulty of constantly living in
a state of vigilance and distrust vis-à-vis the world around her:
We were really afraid when we were told what it was. It felt like
there was something in the air. It was all, “I won’t touch this,
I won’t touch that.” You didn’t put anything outside anymore—
for example, the laundry. It was a bizarre feeling. I remember that
very well. If you say: “I have a headache, my stomach hurts,” it’s
a reality. Here, it was something invisible, impalpable, that could
strike at any moment. I still have that feeling inside me. And I
know that maybe one day something will happen to me, we know
things have happened to other people . . . I doubt that we’ll be told
it’s because of dioxin. Later, this talk of dioxin was put aside. We
knew it was there. But we began to tell ourselves: “you have to
live.” Que sera, sera. We’ve always had check-ups, we’ve always had
blood work. At a certain point, you have to live, so you live.34
She also spoke of how the contamination meant giving up the idea of
having a second child. Other women spoke of concerns during their
pregnancies in the years following the accident and how peace gradu-
ally returned after the first healthy children were born.
Though they acknowledge that they were affected by the disaster,
these people claim that their priority was to return to and preserve a
208 Laura Centemeri
normal life for themselves and their loved ones. This was not a matter
of denying or repressing the severity of what happened but rather of
refusing to allow the experience of the disaster to completely define
their relations with the world around them.
To this day, the extreme publicity that accompanied the disaster thus
seems to represent an obstacle for the affected population in conceiv-
ing of a possible balance between preserving a normal life and publicly
condemning the environmental and health problems from which they
have suffered.
As the quoted extract of my interview with Giuliana suggests, the
vigilant attitude in regards to health risks manifested itself via the del-
egation of medical expertise, mainly to generalist doctors working in
the territory. It was up to them to indicate whether something was
wrong. Many inhabitants had their blood tested on a regular basis and
participated in follow-up studies concerning the effects of contamina-
tion. But despite a show of distrust toward the authorities, who might
be led to conceal certain worrisome matters, there was no desire to
become involved—whether individually or as part of an association—
in questioning the manner in which health data was produced in Seveso
or to get a better idea of the severity of the situation. This data resulted
from research conducted by epidemiologists who were not in contact
with the territory. Rather, they employed a laboratory-based molecular
approach that has been criticized by some experts. The resultant data
was published in international scientific journals without being shared
with the affected population. What the rich epidemiological literature
made of the case of Seveso is almost completely unknown by the town’s
inhabitants.35
The search for normalcy as a good (for oneself, one’s loved ones,
one’s town) therefore seems incompatible with forms of mobilization
capable of converting the still very present “personal troubles” caused
by dioxin into a “public cause,” whether relating to public health or
to recognition and compensation for the moral harm suffered. This is
one of the most striking aspects of the ICMESA disaster: an incompat-
ibility developed between the status of inhabitant of Seveso and the
possibility of publicly denouncing the damages suffered according to
a logic of “civic worth.”36 Even when a demand for compensation was
presented via membership in a committee, as in the case of Luisa, such
participation was considered a matter of individual choice. Luisa thus
explained her membership by reference to her friendship with the com-
mittee’s founder, a generalist practitioner who came to Seveso after the
accident. The committee was seen as guaranteeing the aggregation of
interests that must nevertheless remain individual. It was thus set up as a

collection of individuals rather than as a “circumstantial group” capable
of converting the demand for compensation into a search for justice.37
The absence of a structured dioxin victim entity therefore does not
ref lect a fatalistic attitude toward risk on the part of the population or
repression of that same risk. Rather, it is the product of the combined
action of several factors, among them the manner in which the authori-
ties and mobilized actors managed radical uncertainty concerning the
effects of dioxin at the time of the crisis. All parties took a reductionist
approach to this uncertainty, presenting it variously as a risk that could
only be assessed by experts, an already established harm requiring fur-
ther investigation (left-wing activists) or a political manipulation to
be condemned (Catholic activists). What all of these ways of treating
uncertainty had in common was to limit and even exclude the voices
of those affected together with their concerns in defining the response
to contamination. It is this experience of powerlessness and voiceless-
ness that came to “haunt” the town’s inhabitants.38 Every time Seveso
made the headlines, the fear returned that one would be deprived of the
possibility of having a say in one’s own future.
The violence inherent in this reductionist approach to uncertainty
is clearly in evidence in the cases of pregnant women faced with the
possibility of abortion.
Such was the case of the Catholic activist Isa F., whose child was
among the first “dioxin children” born in 1977. Recalling the mobili-
zation in favor of therapeutic abortion, she remarked:
I remember the groups of so-called feminists who came to Seveso

carrying signs that read “either monster or abortion,” with draw-
ings of pregnant women with monsters in their bellies. But I don’t
remember any of them returning to tell us they were happy
our children had been born in good health. They should have
returned to tell me they were happy for me. That was very hard.
Above all, there were women who were pushed . . . How to put
it . . . I knew people who were a little manipulated . . . The strong
ones resisted.39
Isa’s remarks ref lect a judgment frequently encountered in Seveso con-

cerning women who had recourse to abortion in the aftermath of the
contamination. It is a judgment in terms of moral strength and weak-
ness and helps explain the absence of these women from the debate over
the harms of dioxin, their silence.
210 Laura Centemeri
As in the case of pregnant women facing a decision as to whether or

not to abort, there was also a failure to take the family life of evacuees
affected by these situations into account. In both cases, the worries
and concerns of the town’s inhabitants were exposed to the crushing
light of the generalizing categories required of public debate. With
the world of the familiar under threat from environmental disaster,
the local community and its members gradually grew recalcitrant to
any attempt to generalize on the basis of the ICMESA event. This
recalcitrance was ref lected in local criticism of the decision to name
the European Directive on the Control of Major Accident Hazards
the “Seveso Directive.”40 It was also ref lected in the desire shown by
local administrators throughout the 1980s and 1990s to put the disaster
behind them. This tendency notwithstanding, a group of activists from
the Seveso Legambiente Circle succeeded in their efforts to impose
the issue of memorializing the health crisis on the local scene, choos-
ing for this purpose the emblematic site of the Oak Forest. To better
grasp the relationship between the issue of commemoration and the
impossibility of publicly discussing the personal troubles resulting from
dioxin pollution, it is important to consider the conditions that allowed
these activists to impose their project upon the town. For this purpose,
a brief digression is necessary.
The Compromises of “Discrete Memory”
The Legambiente Circle of Seveso was founded by three young left-

wing activists (Laura B., Gabriele G., and Marzio M.) initiated into
the world of activism via participation in the activities of the STPC.
When this mobilization failed, they immersed themselves in other
political experiments far from Seveso. Marzio, for example, worked
for the International Civil Service on local development projects in
Latin America and Africa. Laura participated in the feminist experi-
ment launched by Milan’s “Libreria delle Donne.”41 There, she met
Gemma B., a philosopher, and Angela A., a mathematics teacher, with
whom she started to discuss the peculiar situation of the lack of memory
of the Seveso disaster.
Despite their differences, these experiences all placed an emphasis
on the importance of developing practices at the local level as part
of political activism. This accompanied a broader ref lection seeking
to open left-wing activist circles up to discussion concerning what
should be considered as political action. Beyond the usual repertoires
of mobilization and protest, political activism was expressed through

practices anchored in the territory. For the environmentalist move-
ment, in particular, this was to prove fruitful, allowing it to also con-
ceive of the environment as a dwelled-in territory to which people are
attached.
It is important to note that, in the context of the political ecology
of the 1970s, taking the issue of territorial attachment seriously was
seen as suspect due to the “bourgeois character” of the conservation-
ist movement, which had traditionally been concerned with territorial
issues.42 In Seveso, STPC activists thus found themselves deprived of
a vocabulary for understanding and integrating demands on the part
of the affected population that their ties to the territory be taken into
account in the response to the dioxin crisis.
Italian feminist thought—in particular, the idea of “basic politics”43 —
as well as developments within Italy’s environmentalist culture (espe-
cially that part of it was inf luenced by the work of Alex Langer)
contributed to a new understanding and original political expression of
the issue of environmental attachment.44 Far from being seen as a type
of closure, the personal feeling of attachment was seen as the first step
toward constructing broader forms of responsibility.
Seveso activists directly participated in these experiences and
emerged from them with a shared political project: to critique the local
desire to forget the ICMESA accident. Their first step was thus to
move back to Seveso and put down roots in the local reality. As they
did so—particularly after the creation of a local Legambiente Circle in
1990—they honed and revised their political project.
Initially, the Circle struggled to get the people of Seveso involved
in its activities. In 1992, the opportunity for a different relationship to
social life emerged. That year, one of the Circle’s members, Damiano D.,
wrote the mayor of Seveso to seek authorization to “take care” of
the “Fosso del Ronchetto,” a piece of fallow land that had become
a dump.
The mayor’s assistant for environmental policy decided to call a meet-
ing of the environmentalist associations present in Seveso (Legambiente
and WWF) to suggest a formal agreement: the mayor’s office would
finance the work necessary for transforming the grove into a “natural
oasis” and the associations would carry out the project.
The “Fosso” episode represents an important moment in the process
by which Circle activists took root in the local community. The work
of maintaining the grove became the occasion for meeting and collabo-
rating with people who would otherwise never have participated in the
212 Laura Centemeri
Circle’s activities. At the same time, it represented a shift to a relation-

ship of collaboration with the local administration. Other initiatives
seeking to recuperate abandoned natural places in Seveso were carried
out by activists with the support of local institutions.
Direct action to promote Seveso’s natural heritage was only one of
the ways in which the activists of the Circle sought to fit into Seveso’s
collective life. Another was direct involvement in local politics. In
1998, the Circle thus participated in the creation of a citizen list that
won the municipal election.
Appointed assistant to the mayor for environmentalist policy, Marzio
decided to give city hall’s support to the realization of the Legambiente
Circle’s Memory Bridge project. This project consisted of two initia-
tives: the creation of an archive to collect documents relating to the
disaster and the realization of the Memory Path, a “significant path
across the territory and polluted places,” by “writing and producing
information panels to be located within the Oak Forest.”45
At this time, the Circle counted on the participation of young mem-
bers in its activities. Though they did not share the founders’ politi-
cal past, their interest in the environment had led these young people
to form ties with Legambiente. Natives of the Seveso region, they
were children at the time of the accident. Responsibility for following
through with the Memory Bridge project was delegated to these mem-
bers and, in particular, Max F., who had studied history at the univer-
sity and written a master’s thesis on the ICMESA disaster. Significantly,
it was up to Max to coordinate the Memory Bridge project, for he came
from the world of Catholic associations, where he continued to play an
active part. He thus helped mediate between two worlds (environmen-
talist activism and the parish) that were traditionally far removed from
one another in Seveso.
Another important decision made by promoters of the Memory
Bridge project was to conceive of the work of writing the panels to be
placed in the Oak Forest as a community effort. The activists believed
that it was only by way of participation that the panels would be recog-
nized as genuine artifacts of collective memory. Two positions, how-
ever, emerged in the Circle regarding this demand for participation.
For Marzio, in his dual role as elected official and activist, participation
in the process of writing the panels had to be an occasion for the cre-
ation of a local consensus around the idea of the disaster’s experience as
an “opportunity for change.” This change should impact the relation-
ship to the territory, be guided by objectives of sustainability, and be
supported and promoted by the town.
For Angela, Gemma, and Laura, participation was necessary because

the work of writing could provide an opportunity for shedding light
on the conf licts to which the disaster had given rise in the local com-
munity. In their view, this would further the objective of allowing the
personal troubles associated with dioxin—effects on health, abortions,
environmental damage—to be discussed in public. The panel writing
process thus had to be guided by experts in “community psychology,”
and understood as a therapeutic process.
The project developed by the three psychologists with whom the
activists ultimately decided to collaborate provided for the creation of
a “committee of guarantors,” a handful of individuals chosen for their
“sensibility, role, availability and public recognition” to act as “repre-
sentatives” of the local community.46 Not without some difficulty, the
committee was created.47 Between December 2002 and June 2003, it
met five times, each time under the psychologists’ supervision.
The efforts made by the latter to use work on the panels as a tool to
shed light on the “emotive dimension of the disaster” was opposed by a
majority of the committee on the grounds that one should avoid reopen-
ing old conf licts and “unhealed wounds.”48 The committee wondered
whether it was legitimate for it to actively promote such an effort to
revisit the accident, the consequences of which might prove difficult to
manage. In response to this concern for legitimacy, it reached an agree-
ment to proceed with the writing of a “discreet memory,” one that
would not “force people to speak about what they want to forget.”49
This need for “discretion” did not so much ref lect a desire to forget
as a need for tact given the persistence of unmended damage. Yet, in
the absence of a collective desire to construct the conditions of their
recognition, this damage permanently retains the status of a “personal
trouble”—that is, of a reality that cannot be discussed in public.
In the committee’s internal debate, the idea of the disaster as an
event constituting “an opportunity for change” therefore received
approval from a majority of members. As it was developed, this idea
took the form of a presentation of the disaster as an event that revealed
the strength of the local community in the face of adversity. Among the
activists, the work of writing the panels resulted in some dissatisfaction
due to the abandonment of any effort to discuss unrepaired damage.
The possibility of transforming a stigmatizing accident that had
been inf licted upon the community into an “opportunity for change”
entailed accepting the idea that some of its consequences would
not serve in the construction of a collective cause. For the activists
of Legambiente, this meant in particular giving up on the effort to
214 Laura Centemeri
construct an environmental health movement in the territory. The

opposition and resistance with which this framework was confronted
emptied it of all possibility for action.
Yet a trace of the event remained in this discrete memory of the
ICMESA disaster. The lesson drawn from the “drama of the unknown”
that was dioxin allowed it to be put to the service of a vision of Seveso
as a “sustainable” town.50 In this way, it seems to sketch the contours of
a learning process that may (or may not) result in new forms of collec-
tive action and institutional innovation. These may allow the personal
troubles caused by harm to the dwelled-in environment to be addressed
in a different fashion.51
Notes
1. On the concept of the “risk culture,” see the introduction to this volume.
2. On the notion of “dwelling” as a familiar regime of engagement with one’s envi-
rons, see M. Breviglieri, “L’horizon du ne plus habiter et l’absence du maintien
de soi en public,” in D. Cefaï, I. Joseph (eds.), L’héritage du pragmatisme. Conflits
d’urbanité et épreuves de civisme, La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions De l’Aube, 2002,
pp. 319–336; A. Berque, Écoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains, Paris:
Belin, 2000. On the concept of “trouble” in its relationship to “dwelling,” see
M. Breviglieri and D. Trom, “Troubles et tensions en milieu urbain. Les épreuves
citadines et habitantes de la ville,” in D. Cefaï and D. Pasquier (eds.), Les sens du
public: publics politiques et médiatiques, Paris: PUF, 2003, pp. 399–416.
3. The reference here is to the concept of “engagement” as it has been developed
by Laurent Thévenot: L’action au pluriel. Sociologie des régimes d’engagement, Paris:
La Découverte, 2006. On the process of loss of familiarity required by framing
an issue in terms of risk, see O. Borraz, Les politiques du risque, Paris: Presses de
Sciences Po, 2008.
4. The distinction between “personal troubles” and “problems” (in the sense of a
public issue) was put forward by C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1954. This distinction represents a classic way of distin-
guishing between what is capable of publically appearing as a problem and what
is condemned to remain in the private sphere.
5. My reconstruction of the case is based on data collected in the course of doc-
toral research between June 2002 and June 2004. See the subsequently published
book, L. Centemeri, Ritorno a Seveso. Il danno ambientale, il suo riconoscimento, la
sua riparazione, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006. For a synthesis in French of my
research, see L. Centemeri, “Retour à Seveso. La complexité morale et politique
du dommage à l’environnement,” Annales HSS, vol. 66, no. 1 (2011): 213–240.
6. On the relationship between justification and public action, see L. Boltanski and
L. Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006.
7. Until the late 1980s, the political map of Italy was organized around two ter-
ritorially well-defined “cultures”: Catholic associationism in the “white zones,”
which were politically affiliated with the Christian Democrats (DC), and the
solidarity network associationism of the worker’s movement in the “red zones,”
which were affiliated with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). See I. Diamati,
Mappa dell’Italia politica, Bologne: Il Mulino, 2009. On the economy of “industrial
districts” in Italy, see A. Bagnasco, Tre Italie. La problematica territoriale dello sviluppo
italiano, Bologne: Il Mulino, 1977.
8. The toxic cloud was released following an uncontrolled exothermic reaction in
the reactor, which was designed to produce trichlorophenol, an intermediary
chemical product used in the production of herbicides and fungicides and which
is also used in making hexachlorophene, an antibacterial substance.
9. The failure to respect security norms was proven by studies conducted by the
parliamentary investigative commission, which was called upon to clarify the
issue of responsibility for the disaster. See Relazione conclusiva della Commissione
Parlamentare di inchiesta sulla fuga di sostanze tossiche avvenuta il 10 luglio 1976 nello
stabilimento ICMESA e sui rischi potenziali per la salute e per l’ambiente derivanti da
attività industriali, Atti parlamentari, VII legislatura, doc. XXIII, no. 6, 1978.
10. M. Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques, Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1986,
pp. 39–40.
11. See M. Fratter, Memorie da sotto il bosco, Milan: Auditorium, 2006, pp. 21–25.
12. P. Mocarelli, “Seveso: A Teaching Story,” Chemosphere, vol. 43 (2001): 391–402.
13. On the difference between risk and uncertainty, see F. H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty
and Profit, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. On uncertainty and
scientific knowledge, see M. Callon, P. Lascoumes, and Y. Barthe, Acting in An
Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy, Cambridge, MA and London:
MIT Press, 2009, Chap. 1.
14. “Zona di rispetto” in Italian.
15. L. Conti, Visto da Seveso. L’evento staordinario e l’ordinaria amministrazione, Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1977, pp. 44–45.
16. F. Rocca, I giorni della diossina, Milan: Centro studi “A. Grandi,” 1980, p. 99.
17. M. Ferrara, Le donne di Seveso, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1977.
18. P. A. Bertazzi, D. Consonni, S. Bachetti, M. Rubagotti, A. Baccarelli, C. Zocchetti,
and A. C. Pesatori, “Health Effects of Dioxin Exposure: A 20-Year Mortality
Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 153, no. 11 (2001): 1031–1044.
For a more recent study, see also D. Consonmi, A. C. Pesatori, C. Zocchetti,
R. Sindaco, L. Cavalieri D’Oro, M. Rubagotti, and P. A. Bertazzi, “Mortality in
a Population Exposed to Dioxin after the Seveso, Italy, Accident in 1976: 25 Years
of Follow-Up,” American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 167 (2008): 847–858.
19. “There were no fatalities following the accident,” claimed Stavros Dimas, the
European Commissioner for the Environment, while commemorating the
thirtieth anniversary of the accident in 2006. See Seveso: The Lessons from the Last
30 Years, Brussels: European Parliament, October 11, 2006, SPEECH/06/588.
20. K. Steenland, P. A. Bertazzi, A. Maccarelli, and M. Kogevinas, “Dioxin
Revisited: Developments since the 1997 IARC Classification of Dioxin as a
216 Laura Centemeri
Human Carcinogen,” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 112, no. 13 (2004):

1265–1268. The IARC, based in Lyon, is a UN institution under the aegis of the
World Health Organization.
21. Legambiente is one of Italy’s largest environmentalist groups. Created in 1980,
the association is more directly linked than any other to the heritage of political
ecology: in 2000, it had 115,000 members distributed among 20 regional groups
and 1,000 local groups, known as “circles.” See D. Della Porta and M. Diani,
Movimenti senza protesta? L’ambientalismo in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004,
p. 105.
22. The “Seveso” Directive (82/501/EEC) on the control of major accident hazards
was adopted in 1982. On the process that led from the disaster to the Directive,
see B. De Marchi, “Seveso: From Pollution to Regulation,” International Journal of
Environment and Pollution, vol. 7, no. 4 (1997): 526–537.
23. See U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992, and
C. Larrère and R. Larrère, Du bon usage de la nature. Pour une philosophie de
l’environnement, Paris: Alto/Aubier, 1997.
24. On the presumption of irrationality as the basis for risk communication in
the 1970s, see B. Fischoff, “Risk Perception and Communication Unplugged:
Twenty Years of Process,” Risk Analysis, vol. 15, no. 2 (1995): 137–145.
25. G. Cerruti, “Cento giorni alla diossina,” in AA. VV., Icmesa. Une rapina di salute,
di lavoro e di territorio, Milan: Mazzotta, 1976, p. 10.
26. Interview with Natalina P., an inhabitant of Seveso at the time of the accident,
November 2003.
27. Interview with Isa F., an inhabitant of Seveso at the time of the accident, October
2003.
28. G. A. Maccacaro, “Seveso un crimine di pace,” Sapere, vol. 796 (1976): 1–6.
29. Interview with Isa F., an inhabitant of Seveso at the time of the accident, October
2003.
30. “Comunione e Liberazione” is a Catholic church movement active in Italy since
the 1950–1960s. It has a particularly strong presence in Lombardy. CL’s action is
inspired by a “Christianism of doing” that is accompanied by a critique of the
welfare state. On the fundamentalist aspects of this movement, see D. Zadra,
“Comunione e Liberazione: A Fundamentalist Idea of Power,” in M. E. Marty
and R. S. Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic Character of
Movements, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 124–148.
31. Rocca, p. 24.
32. L. Conti, Una lepre con la faccia da bambina, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978, p. 10.
33. On the concept of the hybrid forum, see Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe.
34. Interview with Giuliana B., an inhabitant of Seveso at the time of the accident,
November 2003.
35. L. Centemeri, “What Kind of Knowledge is needed about Toxicant-Related
Health Issues? Some Lessons Drawn from the Seveso Dioxin Case,” in S. Boudia
and N. Jas (eds.), Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World, New York,
Oxford: Berghahn, 2014.
36. Boltanski and Thévenot.
37. On the concept of “circumstantial group,” see J.-P. Vilain and C. Lemieux,
“La mobilisation des victimes d’accident collectifs. Vers la notion de ‘groupe cir-
constanciel,’ ” Politix, vol. 11, no. 44 (1998): 135–160.
38. I am here referring to the category of “haunting” (hantise) as it has been devel-
oped in the work of Joan Stavo-Debauge, “Le concept de ‘hantise’: de Derrida à
Ricœur (et retour),” Etudes Ricoeuriennes, vol. 3, no. 2 (2012): 128–148. Haunting
indicates a past harm that threatens to happen again, and therefore a past that is
not past. It accentuates vigilance but can also blind one to the present.
39. Interview with Isa F. an inhabitant of Seveso at the time of the accident, October
2003.
40. For a discussion of the discomfort this caused, see A. Morra’s article, “Il mar-
chio di Seveso,” Corriere della Sera, February 23, 2002. The feeling of exploi-
tation was denounced in several articles that I was able to find in the local
press.
41. The “Libreria delle Donne” is a feminist cultural center organized around a
library and was formed in 1975 on the initiative of a group of students, teachers,
intellectuals, and artists.
42. M. Diani, Isole nell’arcipelago. Il movimento ecologista in Italia, Bologne, Il Mulino,
1988, pp. 73–74.
43. The “basic politics” (politica prima) can be summarized as the idea that political
action is above all that which responds to shared problems by way of practical
involvement in the construction of possible solutions. See “E’ accaduto non per
caso,” Sottosopra, January 1996. Sottosopra is the periodical of the Libreria delle
Donne.
44. Alexander (Alex) Langer (1946–1995), a pacifist and environmentalist, was
among the founders of the Italian Green Party. On his thought and the idea of
“ecological conversion,” see A. Langer, “Giustizia, pace, salvaguardia del creato,”
Equilibri, vol. 9, no. 3 (2005): 627–634.
45. Extract of the Memory Bridge project proposal (2002).
46. S. Carbone, A. Carbone, and M. Cellini, “Proposta per la raccolta e la valoriz-
zazione della memoria emotiva a complemento della realizzazione dei pannelli
commemorativi per il Bosco delle Querce nell’ambito del progetto “Il ponte della
memoria,” Seveso, unpublished working paper, 2002.
47. The committee was made up of nine members (all from Seveso): a representative
of the Legambiente Circle; the owner of a newspaper stand; a retired literature
teacher; the director of a center for the elderly; a doctor representing the Catholic
movement Comunione e liberazione; the director of the Seveso Italian mountain-
climbing club; a university professor; and two inhabitants of Seveso, actively
involved in the organisation of local sport and cultural events.
48. Michele S., committee member, committee meeting (December 2002).
49. Franco T., committee member, committee meeting (December 2002).
50. This is how Luisa M., a member of the guarantors committee involved in writing
the panels, defined it.
51. The recent mobilizations (2010–2011) to protect the Oak Forest against a pro-
jected highway (the “Pedemontana”)—according to the plans, the highway
218 Laura Centemeri
would pass near the park—can be understood in this light. The prospect of
excavating parkland in order to lay foundations for the project revived the ques-
tion of the harm done to health by dioxin. The possibility that the dioxin still
present in the soil might be dispersed, thereby causing a health risk, is an argu-
ment employed by the local opposition (led by the Legambiente Circle) to this
infrastructural project.
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Postscript: Thinking (by way of) Disaster
Nic ol a s D odi e r
Today, social scientific research into disaster takes three forms. At the
international level, what is known as disaster studies has emerged as a
distinct domain.1 Work on disaster has also gained a foothold in the
relatively well-organized, if very broad, framework of research into
risk.2 Finally, a great deal of research, some of which is of signifi-
cant importance, has been carried out in piecemeal fashion from the
point of view of a tremendously varied number of approaches. These
include social anthropology (Hiroshima),3 the anthropology of biology
(Chernobyl),4 anthropological work on “social suffering” (Bhopal),5 sci-
ence studies (Bhopal again),6 the socio-anthropology of death (a series
of collective accidents in France in the twentieth century),7 economic
sociology (the Amoco Cadiz oil spill in Brittany and the Exxon Valdez
spill in Alaska),8 the sociology of public problems (asbestos pollution
in France),9 the sociology of social movements and trade union action
(Minamata),10 and management science (Montana’s Mann Gulch forest
fire).11 The field of disaster research thus appears at once a specialized
and rather well-demarcated domain, and a potential but still excessively
fragmentary locus of major trends in the social sciences.
This field of investigation has much to recommend it. First, the study
of disaster allows one to address one of the most central aspects of social
life: the role played by references to the requirements of collective secu-
rity in the construction of societies and the form these requirements
take. Thanks to the accumulation of specific case studies, particularly
since the 1950s, the study of disaster also allows one to discern the
gradual elaboration of vast spaces of comparison among widely differ-
ing societies. A sort of anthropological and sociological jurisprudence
222 Nicolas Dodier
of disaster has already begun to take form and might be developed

further. Finally, the study of disaster presents significant topical interest
from the point of view of a number of global transformations.
Four developments in particular are at issue. First, the twenti-
eth century was marked by two disasters that, due to their scale and
the conditions in which they took place, have been elevated to the
rank of universally significant disasters for humanity: the extermina-
tion of European Jewry during the Second World War and the drop-
ping of nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945. Research into disaster has been driven by a number of develop-
ments that, taken together, supply the backdrop to much recent work:
the increasing sophistication with which the very notion of disaster is
approached, efforts to situate these two events vis-à-vis other disas-
ters, the adoption of a critical stance regarding the universal signifi-
cance of these events, and the often fraught nature of controversies
in this domain. These developments have led to increasingly complex
research into disaster as well as broadened its scope and demonstrated
its necessity.12 Second, and in an entirely different way, the growing
likelihood of major technological disaster since the 1980s has thor-
oughly reoriented research in this domain. Technological disasters of
course existed well before the 1980s. But the sheer scale of potential
destruction and the vast stretches of time that would be required to
come to terms with it (sometimes several generations) have created an
unprecedented situation.13 Third, the distribution of powers in regards
to questions of collective security became entangled, especially after
the turn of the century, with the intersection of two, partly contradic-
tory developments. The extension of participatory systems enlarged
opportunities for citizen initiatives even as state powers were strength-
ened to confront new threats (e.g., following the 2001 attacks upon the
World Trade Center). Grasping the reality and effects of this twofold
development is at the heart of contemporary research. Finally, the new
questions that are raised by the proliferation of transnational dispositifs
for dealing with disaster should be mentioned. Here, too, new tools
of investigation are required as more or less unprecedented fields are
opened up for investigation.14
The difficulties involved in disaster research must not be dismissed.
The first obstacle: the conceptual framework surrounding the notion
of disaster has been developed in piecemeal fashion. Anthony Oliver-
Smith15 rightly suggests that this fragmentary state of affairs is neces-
sary. Rather than seeking a single definition of the notion of disaster,
we should instead seek to increase our ref lexivity vis-à-vis this diversity
Postscript: Thinking (by way of) Disaster 223
and take advantage of the zones of overlap between the various uses
of the notion. The second obstacle: each disaster is highly distinctive.
The tension between efforts to respect the particularities of each case
and the need to establish equivalencies affects many social scientific
domains, it is true. While methods exist for overcoming this tension,16
it is especially salient in the present case. All disasters are characterized
by a particularly high degree of complexity. Each case requires long
study and is rife with singularities, both of which are impediments
to the accumulation of knowledge. The third obstacle: the most rele-
vant spaces for comparing disaster tend to make a travesty of the usual
frontiers between academic disciplines, obliging the scholar to juggle
between heterogeneous sectors of the social sciences.
In such a context, a classic method of proceeding is to organize a
book around a limited series of carefully chosen disasters.17 Even as it
participates in this tradition, Governing Disasters: Beyond Risk Culture
formulates proposals that are particularly interesting for renewing
approaches. In this postscript, I consider this original aspect of the pres-
ent work, attempt to specify the historical background out of which it
proceeds and indicate the notions of disaster that are employed in the
authors’ research. In so doing, my aim is to formulate several prospects
for future research along the lines set out in this book.
A Dispositifs-Based Approach
One may distinguish between two major ways of addressing disaster.

The first is anchored in a social order problematic. It consists in study-
ing, on the basis of the notion of disaster, situations that are distinctive
to the degree that they have forcefully disrupted the course of things in
the specific sense that the destructive phenomena accompanying them
threaten the social order itself. Scholars profit from the fact that, in
such moments, humans must brutally return to the foundations of life
in society.18 It is human bodies or the entities to which humans are
attached (plants, animals, landscapes) that are generally concerned by
this destruction. The destruction can prove heterogeneous, combin-
ing biological, chemical, and physical aspects. In this general prob-
lematic, the crucial fact is that the social order has been fundamentally
affected.19 A characteristic of the state of affairs associated with disaster
is its departure from a situation that is judged to be, by contrast, normal
(even if this latter situation may itself be an object of critique and in
no way stable). Ever since disaster studies first emerged, this language of
224 Nicolas Dodier
order has proven central to the manner in which the phenomenon is

addressed. The nature of the damage done to the social order can itself
be described in various terms. It may consist of situations in which
one’s “ability to ascribe meaning” has been undermined,20 situations
in which rituals, monuments, and commemorative ceremonies serve to
combat the threat represented by “collective death” for “social ties and
the social and political order”21 and situations in which, in response to
threats to collective security, an exceptional political order—a “regime
of exception”—is established.22
It is within this general problematic that the main areas of conten-
tion driving the construction and evolution of disaster studies are to
be found. Scholars either attend to the situations brought about by
the action of an agent external to society, as tended to be the case in
the early period, or on the contrary take into consideration the fact
that the characteristics of the society itself, which are at the origin of
its “vulnerabilities,” play a role in the disaster’s emergence.23 Either
one takes the threat to be objectively grounded and capable of being
understood as such by the social scientist or, on the contrary, the social
scientist examines the manner in which the identification of a state of
affairs as disaster contributes to “defining reality” for the actors.24
A second way of approaching disaster is rooted in a risk-based prob-
lematic.25 In this framework, disasters lose, at least initially, some of
their specificity. It is events that are seen, in the same way as others, as
the realization of risks or dangers. Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier
introduce Governing Disasters from the point of view of this problem-
atic, stating their opposition to approaches that are conceived in terms
of “risk culture.” In contrast to what they see as the excessive homog-
enization of cultural approaches to risk—the inf luential book by Mary
Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky26 is here a central reference—Revet and
Langumier encourage us to recognize the fundamental heterogeneity
of the resources that allow individuals and groups to assess risks and
position themselves relative to them.
The research presented in Governing Disasters is not the first to pro-
pose an alternative to cultural approaches in the study of disaster.
Especially in France, the desire to take the dynamic specific to sys-
tems of actors into account,27 the broad inf luence exercised by Michel
Dobry’s analytical framework,28 and developments in pragmatic soci-
ology in the area of risk 29 have, among other developments, supplied
a solid alternative approach. But where Revet and Langumier’s text
reveals itself to be original is in constructing an approach based on the
study of dispositifs of government. In using the notion of “dispositif,”
Michel Foucault emphasized the heterogeneity of the components that

must be together conceived in order to discern the entire phenomenal
economy that allows a power to exert itself.30 Today, the Foucauldian
approach is widely employed in work on “surveillance dispositifs.”31
It is more rarely called upon in discussions of disaster. In his work on
asbestos, Emmanuel Henry nevertheless uses it in an interesting way, 32
emphasizing, in particular, “dispositifs de publicisation”—that is, dis-
positifs that contribute to selecting and giving form to a state of affairs
as a “public problem.”33 The notion of dispositif employed by Revet
and Langumier does not take this Foucauldian path. Above all, they use
the notion of dispositif to emphasize the fact that, when they must deal
with a disaster or come to perceive what is happening as such, actors
find themselves confronted with already established, preexisting tools.
To speak of a dispositif is to single out a collection of tools intended
to realize a certain objective (disaster forecasting, citizen participation,
commemoration, and so on). The interaction between dispositifs and
actors is at the heart of this set of questions. These tools place signifi-
cant constraints upon the actors, who are obliged to come to terms with
them. But they also create possibilities for action. In this framework,
the actors are ultimately given a free hand to criticize these dispositifs,
resist them, or attempt to change them. While the use of the notion of
dispositif in the Foucauldian approach underscores the integration of
phenomena at a rather global level, the avenue proposed by Revet and
Langumier emphasizes the piecemeal character of the dispositif that
may be called upon to address a given disaster and the need, in all cases,
to study how the actors come to terms with each of them. Whereas for
Foucault everyday practices and tactics are part of the dispositif, for
Revet and Langumier they refer to that upon which actors depend in
order to position themselves vis-à-vis the dispositifs.
In comparison with the dispositifs, this level of practice reveals a
second source of heterogeneity that further accentuates the move away
from the cultural approach. Indeed, practices are supposed to exhibit
significant variations depending on the figures with which the actors
identify (as victims, experts, mediators, donors, etc.). Variations may
also be observed within each category (among the victims, among the
mediators, etc.). Finally, in keeping with a schema developed by prag-
matic sociology, the framework of analysis adopted in this book takes
account of the fact that each of the actors within a given category
may change their “regime of engagement.”34 In this framework, there
is nothing remarkable about the fact that experts or scholars them-
selves may develop significantly divergent ways of understanding risk
226 Nicolas Dodier
or a given catastrophe. The specialized approach to catastrophe is not

accorded greater homogeneity or coherence than other approaches.
This book thus seeks—in rather radical fashion, given the state of the
literature—to take into consideration the very fragmentary state of the
logics that preside over the government of a given disaster. One must
not be misled by the term “governing.” It refers to the fact of being
actively confronted with disaster, not the individual or collective abil-
ity to integrate the disaster into a general economy. If the Foucauldian
connotation of a government “by disaster” is not completely absent,
this is because it serves, in a very f lexible way, to underscore the fact
that the dispositifs that address disaster possess sufficient specificity to
constitute a field of study in their own right.
Dispositifs at Several Scales
In its own way, each chapter offers some version of this anthropol-
ogy of dispositifs. Two broad areas of research may be distinguished,
according to the level of globality that is adopted and the site where
forms of coherence are identified. Alongside the variety of approaches
they offer, the wide-ranging contributions to this volume give a first
glimpse of the main directions in which this field of research might
be developed. On the one hand are to be found those approaches that
see it as possible to reconstruct the global level at which the various
dispositifs are organized among themselves. This might be the closest
to a Foucauldian approach. Marc Elie’s chapter on the mudslides that
devastated the Kazakh town of Alma-Ata in the 1960s and 1970s is an
example of this. In the framework of a “political history of disaster,”
the author points out that, at a given moment, a risk and disaster policy
existed that supplied the Soviet government as well as all of the actors
concerned with most of the resources that were deployed to respond
to the disaster before, during, and after it took place. Elie presents the
various facets of this policy: a “transformist” rhetoric based on science
and technology; the elimination of dissident voices among experts;
the drastic limitation of opportunities for expressing contrary points
of view; and, in an allusion to the Great Patriotic War waged by the
Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, the celebration of the heroism of
those who participated in this struggle, particularly workers (either in
the emergency projects that allowed disaster to be avoided or in the
clever measures employed to allow one to successfully intervene in the
very midst of the crisis).
Frédéric Keck’s chapter on the emergence and spread, at the trans-

national level, of several f lu viruses over the course of the 1990s and
2000s also locates the unit of analysis at the global level formed by the
conjunction of several dispositifs of government and the critique to
which they gave rise. The new world that has emerged around disaster
thus articulates three “rationalities.” Each is defined as a form of logical
reasoning around a technological dispositif. And all are aimed at prepar-
ing humans for the possibility of disaster (in this case, biological disaster
in the form of f lu viruses). The rationality of prevention consists in
monitoring animals and destroying them in the event that they become
hosts to an inf luenza outbreak. The rationality of precaution constructs
spaces of deliberation around risk. The rationality of preparedness (in
the strict sense of the term) consists in organizing human participation
in disaster simulations in order to identify points of vulnerability. The
whole formed by the interlacing of these three rationalities is in marked
contrast with the global regime described by Marc Elie in connection
with the Soviet state. One of the major contributions of this book is
to present these alongside one another. The state power that secretly
enforced the homogeneity of a world of experts mobilized to confront
disaster in Alma-Ata in the 1960s and 1970s is contrasted with the case
of Hong Kong, where disagreements among a collection of authori-
ties in the 2000s were reported in the media. A “semantics of histori-
cal time” (to borrow an expression from Koselleck) in which disaster
avoidance is yet another step in the long-term domination of natural
forces is contrasted with a world in which the possibility of a disaster
of unprecedented contours and unknown scale belongs to the neces-
sary horizon of possibilities. The figure of the typical hero of disaster
in the Soviet regime (the worker who, by virtue of his skill and com-
mitment, succeeds in dominating the forces of nature in an emergency)
is contrasted with the hero of the world of preparedness (the sentinel
of new viruses, capable of communicating with state and international
agencies as well as the media).
The second area of research considers the dispositif in much more
piecemeal fashion, generally starting with one of them. This research
describes in detail the various components of the dispositif and empha-
sizes the space of points of view and practices formed by the totality
of actors involved in the catastrophe. This is what Mara Benadusi and
Julien Langumier attempt to do in regards to dispositifs of participa-
tion and Laura Centemeri and Susann Baez Ullberg attempt in regards
to dispositifs of commemoration. Here, the full relevance of describing
the dispositifs in detail is to be seen. For example, consider how the
228 Nicolas Dodier
place occupied by psychological tools in dispositifs of participation is

understood. In the framework of his study of the dispositif of consulta-
tion that was established in France in 2003 in response to the f looding
of the Rhône valley, Julien Langumier emphasizes the work carried
out by the Lacanian psychiatric counselor who intervened in the dis-
positif. This effort at counseling sought to render possible speech that,
it was supposed, would express a profound, existential-type need on
the part of the inhabitants. But, as Langumier notes, by triangulat-
ing statements at this level of the needs, such efforts tend to erase
the significance of certain critiques associated with public expression.
In the framework of her study of the practices of commemoration
established following the 1976 dioxin spill in Seveso, Laura Centemeri
reveals a similar use by psychologists of dispositifs of participation
(which consist in encouraging a certain form of public expression),
albeit in a significantly different context of reception corresponding
to distinct conceptions of participation. As in the preceding case, these
psychologists hoped that the inhabitants would be able to express the
“emotive” dimension of the disaster by revisiting the conf licts and
personal troubles provoked in the local community by dioxin pollu-
tion (health consequences, abortions, compensation) via the writing
on panels running along a “bridge of memory.” According to these
psychologists, the inhabitants’ participation in this commemoration
was therefore a matter of “therapeutic” interest. This conception of
the bridge of memory offended activists of the Legambiente Circle,
the driving force behind the project, due to the inappropriate way in
which it was likely to revisit the personal troubles associated with this
case of pollution. They thus preferred to privilege a “discreet mem-
ory,” tactfully setting aside personal troubles as a reality that was “not
to be publically discussed.”
The work on the space of practices allows one to grasp the twofold
dimension of each dispositif as a factor of convergence among the
actors (by rendering possible the construction of a common set of
practices based on concrete tools) and a source of conf lict between
them (by revealing disagreements regarding the manner in which the
dispositif is conceived). Finally, by observing the actors’ practices in
the various spheres of their existence, one may grasp the limits of each
dispositif and the resources that the actors find in other dispositifs for
dealing with disaster. Julien Langumier thus endeavors to jointly con-
ceive of two distinct settings: consultation meetings and scenes of local
mobilization. He shows what is wrought in a differentiated fashion (at
once by administrators and inhabitants) within each of these settings.
In consultation meetings, administrators express their expectations in

terms of the “culture of risk” while some inhabitants—in particu-
lar, those involved in associations—adopt confrontational positions,
theatrically enacting the role of civil society confronting the politi-
cal authorities. In settings of local mobilization, administrators aban-
don their rigid stance regarding the culture of risk and engage with
other actors in the complex negotiations that lead to the involvement
of other dispositifs—for example, those governing compensation.35
Laura Centemeri emphasizes how, among the inhabitants of the zones
affected by the Seveso explosion, a form of engagement anchored
in the sphere of the familiar, which takes the “personal troubles” of
each individual into consideration, must be clearly distinguished from
another form of engagement vis-à-vis disaster: that which establishes
it as a “public problem.” Above, we saw how such attention to the
issue of personal troubles plays upon the manner in which one reacts
to, for example, psychologists’ projects in connection with dispositifs
of commemoration. This distinction between personal troubles and
public problems also reveals rarely objectivized fault lines among the
activist collectives that go into action in response to disasters. Groups
that privilege “problems” and wield the “typical categories of the gen-
erality required by the public problem” (in the case of Seveso, one
simultaneously encounters anticapitalist activist associations, Catholic
groups, and feminist movements) find themselves in conf lict with
activist associations that, starting at the “local” level of political action,
advance in public discussions all of the demands that result from work
on personal troubles (as in the case of the Legambiente Circle and the
specific form of ecology that inspires it).
The Relevance of a New Critical Effort
This framework of understanding is in keeping with the major his-

torical transformations affecting the treatment of disaster. Of these,
two are of particular relevance, corresponding to two shifts in the
social sciences and the role they assign themselves. In this connec-
tion, one may speak of a new generation of risk and disaster research.
The first shift concerns the participation of populations concerned by
disaster. Starting in the 1970s, work undertaken from the perspec-
tive of a problematic of risk sought to react to the excessive isolation
exhibited by institutions specializing in risk management. Disaster
research regularly criticized the practice of confidentiality and the lack
230 Nicolas Dodier
of information available to victims.36 By contrast, the work brought

together in this edited volume aims to study, from within, a social
world in which dispositifs of participation are de facto established,
with an impact that one may now try to grasp. This is obviously the
case of the two chapters brought together in the section, “Participation
and Consultation”: Julien Langumier’s study of dispositifs of “consul-
tation” relating to the Rhône valley f looding and Mara Benadusi’s
study of the community-based approaches at the heart of the humani-
tarian interventions that were developed in a transnational framework
and implemented in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.
But it is also the case of the two chapters devoted to memory. The
ceremonies commemorating the 2003 Santa Fe f loods in Argentina,
discussed by SusannBaez Ullberg in her contribution, were moments
in which the inhabitants were invited to publicly express their opin-
ions with regards to the manner in which the disaster was handled.
And, as Laura Centemeri shows, the “memory bridge” constructed
in Seveso (Italy) following the 1976 dioxin spill possesses a compo-
nent that celebrates in very particular fashion the participation of the
inhabitants concerned (see above). The importance assumed by these
participative dispositifs and the new willingness on the part of the
social sciences to describe them in distantiated form supplies a second
motivation for the critique of the notion of risk culture. Indeed, pre-
supposing the existence of “local risk cultures” (or “disaster cultures”)
and seeking to draw upon them is a characteristic of participative dis-
positifs of risk and disaster management. The homogenized, natural-
ized, stabilized character of these cultures is among the targets of the
new research. More generally, a detailed critique of the new participa-
tive dispositifs is at the heart of this volume. For the authors, it is not
a matter of returning to more authoritarian systems. Nor is it a mat-
ter of globally criticizing a participative-style mode of government.
Rather, in the era of participatory disaster management, it is a matter
of pointing out tensions of a new type: the risk of reproducing, by
way of participation, earlier hegemonies (Benadusi); the inoperative
character of the notion of “community” (as it is today constructed in
the context of community-based disaster management) and proposals
for replacing it with that of “polity,” which is much more sensitive to
the inevitable existence of incompatible visions of the community to
be reconstructed (idem); discrepancies between the culture of risk and
the nature of local mobilizations (Langumier); the erasure of critique
by some psychological dispositifs (idem); the sterile reproduction of
the mise-en-scène of confrontation between public authorities and
the authorized figures of participation (idem); the failure to take the

anchored experience of disaster into account in everyday dispositifs of
participation (Centemeri).
The second shift concerns the manner in which the specialized
knowledge involved in the government of disaster is elaborated. A
central target of the critique practiced by the previous generation of
research into risk was the existence of a world of experts who, thanks
to its isolation, could lay claim to supposedly homogenous and con-
sensual scientific knowledge, albeit at the price of an intense effort
to silence, hide, or minimize controversy. The present-day dispositifs
for governing disaster studied in this book are of a different nature.
They much more openly exhibit the variety of stances taken by scien-
tists and the controversies dividing them. They underscore the need
for “sentinels” who must be open to heterogeneous forms of know-
ledge in order to anticipate disaster. This is a world marked by the
development of “vigilance policies” in the sense of Chateauraynaud
and Torny37 as well as by the “biosecurity interventions”38 that are
partly substituted for “cost-benefit” methods of calculation based on
extensive data sets. In what regards these transformations, the book
once again takes a stance that is simultaneously critical and interested.
Frédéric Keck’s text is a good example of this. Keck explicitly states his
concern regarding new forms of “security fear” that may be encour-
aged by disaster preparedness dispositifs. At the same time, he shows
an interest in the emergence of a new type of “critical actor” made
possible by these dispositifs, one who, thanks to the manner in which
he comes to grips with them while rapidly circulating within the new
networks of vigilance, is capable of reviving in concrete terms the
critique of global-scale social phenomena (the commodification of
the living, environmental degradation). He thus offers two visions of
the sentinels and the effects they produce. It is very interesting to com-
pare Frédéric Keck and Marc Elie’s texts in this respect. Despite the
very strong specificities associated with the Soviet exercise of power,
one finds in Elie’s text the main lines of the relationship to scientific
and specialized knowledge that some present-day dispositifs of disaster
preparedness tend to render obsolete. This relationship is very close to
the “modernist” vision of the world 39 or “first modernity.”40 Today,
however, the scholar looks upon this mode of government from a dis-
tance. He or she no longer seeks to criticize it from within but rather,
with the benefit of historical hindsight, rediscover and therefore better
understand the more specific forms it could take and the manner in
which it could be practiced.
232 Nicolas Dodier
The Tropes of Disaster
One might think that the notion of disaster is itself somewhat diluted
by an approach that sees it as one among several objects of risk and
danger management policy. Yet there is nothing to this: in various
ways, the texts brought together in the present volume all recognize
the specificity of disaster.
Within the risk-based approach itself, on the one hand, disaster is
distinguished from other risks as an exceptional risk in virtue of the scale
of destruction it entails. Recognition of this leads disaster to be quali-
tatively decoupled from other risks. This takes place in four ways, all
of which are to be found in the present volume. In the first case, a risk
considered to be exceptional is met with political mobilization at the
highest levels of the state. This is how the mudslides that threatened the
town of Alma-Ata in the 1960s and 1970s were handled (Marc Elie).
Here, one is in proximity to the phenomenon of decoupling studied by
Claude Gilbert41 and the type of affirmation of political power that
is associated with him in connection with the regime of exception. The
affirmation of state authority here corresponds to the notion of disaster.
In the second case, the notion of disaster indicates a major failure rela-
tive to more ordinary risks and thus calls into question earlier dispositifs
of risk management. Disaster is here the occasion, not for high-level
political mobilization, but rather for necessary policy invention. This was
the case of the “repeated” f loods in the Rhône valley, which justified
the establishment of a new risk policy based on dispositifs of consulta-
tion ( Julien Langumier). In the third case, while disaster always appears
as a large-scale event, it is above all an unprecedented one. For this
reason, disaster resists anticipation on the basis of spaces of calculation
that depend on earlier series of incidents or accidents. In this respect, it
supposes new types of dispositifs of anticipation. This is what Frédéric
Keck points out. Risk is no longer managed via extrapolation from
data sets but rather on the basis of a critical examination of earlier crises.
What Keck thus shows is the malleability of this case-based reason-
ing and its sensitivity to the local frameworks within which events are
assigned meaning. A good example of this can be found in the compar-
ison of the frameworks that molded perceptions of the 2009 emergence
of the H1N1 virus in Buenos Aires, France, and Hong Kong.
On the other hand, several texts evince the reappearance of a prob-
lematic of the social order as the central outlook of the notion of disas-
ter. In these texts, the social sciences’ proclivity for situations in which
a community’s future is at stake resurfaces. Here, too, several cases may
be distinguished. The disaster can be addressed as an event that, having

threatened the community’s future, calls for collective commemoration
on the part of the entire community (Centemeri, Ullberg). Alternately,
it can be approached as a situation in which the very scale of destruction
raises the question of the community’s reconstruction. The principal
appeal of disaster as an object of study thus resides in the fact that, with
reconstruction at issue, the actors are led to explicitly formulate their
visions of the community. Disaster is thus seen as a moment for express-
ing political projects at the level of the entire community (Benadusi,
Centemeri). Lastly, disaster can be seen as a situation of radical innova-
tion. Rather than only observing its destructive aspect, one thus sees
the recombination of all relations in a positive light. The moment of
disaster is an “explosion of dynamisms,” a particular type of ferment
and effervescence. This aspect of disaster precisely stems from uncer-
tainty concerning the nature of the collectives to which reference is
to be made and the effort required on the part of the actors to gather
up the heterogeneous fragments of various places and periods. Public
donations only intensify this process, for a time supporting reconstruc-
tion projects and encouraging their proliferation (Benadusi).
Making Room for Other Dispositifs?
The originality of the program sketched by Governing Disasters thus

stems from three factors: 1) its reliance upon an anthropology of dis-
positifs attentive to the multiple ways in which the actors concerned
take part in them; 2) its effort to take account of two major develop-
ments (the development of dispositifs of participation and the rise of
dispositifs of disaster preparedness that depend on the efforts of sentinels);
and 3) its recourse to a risk-based approach that is alert to the specific
nature and diversity of questions raised concerning the social order in
connection with the notion of disaster.
This perspective may be expanded in two main directions: in regards
to the nature of the dispositifs studied and the major categories of disas-
ter examined. Concerning the first point, this book wisely concentrates
on three categories of dispositifs, thereby laying the groundwork for
useful comparisons between each of them. At the same time, however,
it clears the way for conceiving of other dispositifs in the same manner.
This is the case, in particular, of three dispositifs that are occasion-
ally mentioned in various contexts throughout this volume and are
today central to the government of disaster. The first of these dispositifs
234 Nicolas Dodier
consists of trials, which have evolved in significant ways. Particularly

in the American tort system, trials increasingly seek not to resolve a
problem of corrective justice at the individual level but rather to “ques-
tion” and construct a policy of risk at the collective level. These “great
trials” are increasingly giving shape to disasters via the law.42 Moreover,
the involvement of victims has increased. This is evidence of the new
order that has been created within legal systems by the reorganization
and enlargement of dispositifs of participation and the new tensions
that have thereby resulted.43
Compensation is yet another dispositif that today plays a central role
in the government of disaster. The problematic of compensations is
frequently encountered in the cases discussed in this volume. As we
know from research more directly addressing this issue, the question
of compensation in case of disaster raises a broad array of issues and
gives rise to intense controversy.44 Situations of disaster can be simul-
taneously treated as risks like any others (via insurance procedures)
and contribute to the invention of specific systems (via compensation
funds). While it is analytically useful to distinguish judicial from com-
pensation dispositifs, the government of disaster centers precisely upon
efforts to articulate these two types of dispositif, both from the point
of view of the bodies responsible for overseeing them and from that
of victims. This articulation must not only be conceived for intrajudi-
cial reasons (in the sense that victim compensation is a question to be
dealt with by the courts). It is a central question for the social sciences
because the alternative between the two main paths for dealing with
disaster (punishing the guilty versus victim compensation, holding a
trial versus recourse to insurance techniques) is at the origin of major
tensions between the various actors concerned by disaster.45
Disaster, finally, is increasingly a domain of scientific evaluation pro-
tocols. Due to their very scale, disasters have regularly served as occa-
sions for implementing research that, particularly given its quantitative
nature, may contribute new knowledge far surpassing the event itself.46
Moreover, there is growing scientific knowledge regarding situations
of disaster in their own right (in psychiatry, pharmacology, medicine,
and so on). This knowledge needs validation; it requires the establish-
ment of a particular type of protocol.47 Finally, interventions in the
context of disaster themselves prove increasingly subject to evaluation
protocols linked to the management requirements that today guide the
work of nongovernmental organizations.48 On these various fronts—
trials, compensation, evaluation protocols—the perspective opened up
by Revet and Langumier seems particularly useful.
“Major Categories” of Disaster?
As we have seen, research into disaster has significantly benefited from

the comparative perspectives opened up by systematic study of col-
lections of cases. At the same time, the domain appears immense and
therefore requires that the parameters of comparison be specified. Until
now, two main strategies have been implemented. The first consists
of developing a concept that very explicitly defines a limited field of
study within the set of disasters in order to concentrate all attention on
this field. This, for example, is the strategy that has been adopted by
Patrick Lagadec in his work on “major technological catastrophes”49 as
well as by Claude Gilbert in relation to “extreme situations”50 and Peter
Schuck concerning “mass toxic torts”51 (the case of Herbicide Orange
[HO]). A second strategy consists in working from a very broad notion
of disaster or even remaining pragmatically open to rather diverse
notions. In this way, the range of empirical cases available for study
potentially remains very broad. It is in this way that the field of disas-
ter studies has been defined; it is also the strategy adopted by Gaelle
Clavandier with regards to the notion of “collective death.”52 And it is,
finally, the approach that has been taken by Governing Disaster. In this
second strategy, the field is defined in practice. Indeed, the field is so
vast that research tends to de facto focus on a single, major category of
disaster. Technological and natural disasters are thus privileged in the
three examples I just cited, even though the approach they adopt might
logically be applied to a broader domain to include terrorist attacks,
military action, and genocide.
Whether theoretical or practical, these delimitations of the param-
eters of comparison serve a useful purpose. They have allowed the
range of possible variations to be restricted in order to render them
more workable. That said, given the now substantial number of stud-
ies that take this approach, it may henceforth be possible and useful to
resume the work of comparison on new foundations. Bracketing the
infinite variety of possible comparisons, one may schematically identify
three major categories of disaster that have regularly received sepa-
rate treatment in the scholarship. First, there are “technological and
natural” disasters, which tend to be addressed within disaster studies
or by works on risk management. Next, there are disasters pertaining
to warfare and military activities, which tend to be addressed from
the point of view of considerations of war itself or the army. Finally,
there is political violence in the context of a disaster, an area that has
been dominated by work belonging to the “social suffering” school
236 Nicolas Dodier
of anthropological research,53 and, more recently, victim mobilization

studies.54 This compartmentalization is at once reasonable and restric-
tive. Reasonable, because it is clear that one does not in the same way
“govern” f loods, large-scale bombing, or genocide. In addition, there
is some wisdom to be found in starting with parameters of comparison
that do not immediately plunge one into overwhelming heterogene-
ity. Such compartmentalization is restrictive because we have yet to
sufficiently determine the decisive areas in which major differences
between disasters are established.
What is thus at issue is to more closely conceive the major categories
of disaster alongside one another. Once again, the dispositif approach
has much to offer in this connection, for it reveals new possibilities of
comparison. It allows one, for example, to freshly revisit the distinction
between technological and natural disaster. Henceforth, the work nec-
essary to move beyond the obvious fact of great divides has been done
and one may now jointly conceive of these two categories. The fact
that problems of human responsibility arise in all cases has been noted
by scholars. They know that human activity is always a factor in natural
disasters and that there is always a question of human responsibility.
One may on this basis reexplore the comparison between technological
and natural disaster. For example, the manner in which repertoires of
attribution are mobilized in each case may be reevaluated.
The distinction between military and civilian disasters may also be
more carefully conceived. Take, for example, the “regime of excep-
tion.” An important result of work on civilian disaster has been to
show that the regime of exception as it has been conceived has great
difficulty coming to grips with the decentralized complexity of rela-
tions between actors that prevail in the management of a disaster. At
the same time, the ability of the state to assert itself in such a context
is a major issue (and is seen as such by the actors).55 What happens in
the case of a military disaster or in wartime? The actors are already in
an exceptional situation. Is disaster then handled according to already
established dispositifs? Or can the situation become yet more exceptional,
with its escalation raising problems of its own?
Or take the example of compensations. Postwar systems of com-
pensation (if one takes war itself to be a “disaster”) obey specific logics
not encountered in civilian disasters: there is a “winner” and a “loser”;
among the victims, “military” and “civilian” victims have a different
status and so on. Yet one also finds similar dispositifs. Some of the
controversies concerning the nature of compensations are very similar.
The actors themselves demand that parallels be made (or differences
underscored) between the two regimes of compensation.56 Starting

from the concrete issue of compensation, therefore, an entire field
becomes apparent, one in which the major categories of “soldier” and
“civilian,” “situation of war” and “situation of peace” may be clarified
by way of systematic comparison.
By bringing together case studies and putting them into perspective,
Governing Disasters therefore represents an additional contribution to
the large collective effort undertaken by the social sciences to accu-
mulate precise data concerning situations of disaster and profit from
an anthropological or comparative sociological approach. But it does
not stop there. Within the framework of an original anthropology of
dispositifs, it outlines the prospects for renewing our understanding of
what the study of disaster has to offer. Along the way, it supplies the
tools needed to discern, beyond the major categories in terms of which
disaster has hitherto been conceived, the framework of a broader hori-
zon of comparison informed by the juxtapositions it renders possible.
Notes
1. Claude Gilbert, Le pouvoir en situation extrême. Catastrophes et politique, Paris,

L’Harmattan, 1992; Sandrine Revet, Anthropologie d’une catastrophe. Les coulées de
boues en 1999 au Venezuela, Paris, Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2007, and “Penser
et affronter les désastres: un panorama des recherches en sciences sociales et des
politiques internationales,” Critique internationale, no. 52 (2011), pp. 157–173.
2. Jean-Louis Fabiani and Jacques Theys (eds.), La société vulnérable: évaluer et maîtriser
les risques, Paris: Presses de l’Ecole normale supérieure, 1987; Olivier Borraz, Les
politiques du risque, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008.
3. Maya Todeschini, “Illegitimate Sufferers: A-Bomb Victims, Medical Sciences,
and the Government,” Daedalus, vol. 128, no. 2 (1999): 67–100.
4. Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.
5. Veena Das, “Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing: The Bhopal Case,” in Veena Das
(ed.), Critical Events. An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 137–174.
6. Sheila Jasanoff, “The Bhopal Disaster and the Right to Know,” Social Science and
Medicine, vol. 27, no. 10 (1988): 1113–1123.
7. Gaëlle Clavandier, La mort collective. Pour une sociologie des catastrophes, Paris: CNRS
Editions, 2004.
8. Marion Fourcade, “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of
‘Nature,’ ” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 116, no. 60 (2011): 1721–1777.
9. Emmanuel Henry, Amiante, un scandale improbable. Sociologie d’un problème public,
Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007.
238 Nicolas Dodier
10. Paul Jobin, Maladies industrielles et renouveau syndical au Japon, Paris: Editions de
l’EHESS, 2006.
11. Karl Weick, “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch
Disaster,” Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4 (1993): 628–652.
12. On the debates and controversies over the status of the Shoah, see, for example,
Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance,
Paris: La Découverte 1997, and Danny Trom, La promesse et l’obstacle. La gauche
radicale et le problème juif, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 2007; one will find an example
of the importance played by discussions of Hiroshima in philosophical work,
particularly in the 1950s, in Hannah Arendt, Condition de l’homme moderne, Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1983 (1st ed., 1958).
13. Patrick Lagadec, La civilisation du risque. Catastrophes technologiques et responsabilité
sociale, Paris: Seuil, 1981, and Etats d’urgence. Défaillances technologiques et déstabilisa-
tion sociale, Paris: Seuil, 1988.
14. Revet, Anthropologie d’une catastrophe; Nicolas Dodier, “Contributions de
Médecins Sans Frontières aux transformations de la médecine trans-nationale,”
in Jean-Hervé. Bradol and Claudine Vidal (eds.), Innovations médicales en situa-
tion humanitaire. Le travail de Médecins Sans Frontières, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009,
pp. 172–193.
15. Anthony Oliver-Smith, “What is a Disaster? Anthropological Perspectives on
a Persistent Question,” in Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman (eds.),
The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, New York and London:
16. Charles Ragin and Howard Becker (eds.), What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations
of Social Inquiry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
17. Lagadec, La civilisation du risque and Etats d’urgence; Gilbert, Le pouvoir en situation
extrême; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman (eds.), The Angry Earth; Susanna Hoffman
and Anthony Oliver Smith (eds.), Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of
Disaster, Oxford and Santa Fe: James Currey School of American Research, 2002;
Clavandier, La mort collective.
18. “All human social and cultural situations come to the observer’s eye well-
established and deeply rooted in time and custom. Disaster, however, draws a
researcher as close to basic elements of culture and society as ever found. Disasters
take a people back to fundamentals. In their turmoil, disassembly, and reorgani-
zation, they expose essential rules of action, bare bones of behavior, the roots of
institutions, and the basic framework of organizations. They dissolve superf lu-
ous embellishment and dismantle unfounded or casual alliance” (Hoffman and
Oliver-Smith, “Anthropology and the Angry Earth: An Overview,” in Oliver-
Smith and Hoffman (eds.), The Angry Earth, pp. 1–16.
19. In this attention to the social order, which was fundamental to the earliest devel-
opment of disaster studies (1950–1960), one finds preoccupations very similar to
those which, in the same years, were at the origin of the sociology and anthropol-
ogy of illness. Illness is also seen in these works—at a more individual level than
disaster, it is true, and in a perhaps less destructive way—as a threat to the social
order. Through the study of illness, a better understanding of the social order
as well as ways to preserve it (or return to it) was therefore at the heart of the
social sciences of the time. See Nicolas Dodier, “Ordre, force, pluralité. Articuler
description et critique autour des questions médicales,” in Pascale Haag and Cyril
Lemieux, Faire des sciences sociales. Tome 1: Critiquer, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS,
pp. 317–342, on the place of the “language of order” in the study of medical ques-
tions in the social sciences.
20. Weick, “The Collapse of Sensemaking Organizations.”
21. Clavandier, La mort collective.
22. Gilbert, Le pouvoir en situation extrême.
23. On this alternative, see Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, Anthropology and the Angry
Earth as well as Revet, “Penser et affronter les désastres.”
24. On these two options, see Gilbert, Le pouvoir en situation extrême.
25. Fabiani and Theys (eds.), La société vulnérable.
26. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers,
28. Michel Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques: la dynamique des mobilisations intersecto-
rielles, Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1986.
29. Francis Chateauraynaud and Didier Torny, Les sombres précurseurs: une sociologie
pragmatique de l’alerte et du risque, Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales,
1999.
30. See the definition of a “dispositif ” as a “thoroughly heterogenous ensemble con-
sisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philan-
thropic propositions—in short: the said as much as the unsaid.” Michel Foucault,
“The Confession of the Flesh” (1977) interview, in Power/Knowledge Selected
Interviews and Other Writings (ed.), Colin Gordon, 1980, pp. 194–228.
31. Fabien Jobard and Dominique Linhardt, “The Check and the Guardianship: A
Comparison of Surveillance at an Airport and a Housing-Estate Area in the Paris
Outskirts,” in Mathieu Def lem (ed.), Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control
and Beyond, Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2008, pp. 75–100.
32. Emmanuel, Amiante, un scandale improbable.
33. In fact, the notion of system employed by Emmanuel Henry joins an acknow-
ledgment of the “configuration of actors” mobilized around a problem (in
Norbert Elias’ sense) to its usual Foucauldian use. The dispositif “can be defined
as the permanent interaction between one or more problematizations of a prob-
lem and the configuration of actors who seek to impose it or are constrained to
intervene due to the form given the problem” (op. cit., p. 73). As Emmanuel
Henry remarks in regards to asbestos, when the problem began to emerge, it was
not addressed on the basis of a heavily institutionalized dispositif (in Foucault’s
sense), but rather on the basis of the generally less well-defined logics of the
actors, something that at the same time shows certain limits of the notion as
Michel Foucault constructed it.
34. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans.
Catherine Porter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
240 Nicolas Dodier
35. For the broader deployment of an approach of the same type, see Julien
Langumier’s book on the catastrophic f looding in 1999 of the village of Cuxac
d’Aude (Survivre à l’inondation. Pour une ethnologie de la catastrophe, Lyon: ENS
Editions, 2008).
36. Lagadec, La civilisation du risque, on the pollution of Seveso; Jasanoff, “The Bhopal
Disaster,” on the 1984 pollution in Bhopal, India; Gregory Button, Disaster
Culture: Knowledge and Uncertainty in the Wake of Human Environmental Catastrophe,
Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2010, on the ecological disaster wrought by the
1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.
37. Chateauraynaud and Torny, Les sombres précurseurs.
38. Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “The Problem of Securing Health,”
in Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier (eds.), Biosecurity Interventions: Global
Health and Security in Question, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008,
pp. 7–32.
39. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique,
Paris: La Découverte, 1991.
40. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society. Towards A New Modernity, London: Sage Publication,
1992.
41. Gilbert, Le Pouvoir en situation extrême.
42. Cf. Peter Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts, Cambridge,
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986, on agent orange, a defoli-
ant used during the Vietnam War. As Peter Schuck indicates, trials in the United
States over asbestos and the exposure of pregnant women to diethylstilbestrol also
played a significant role in clearing the way for these new trials.
43. J. Barbot and N. Dodier, “De la douleur au droit. Ethnographie des plaidoiries
lors de l’audience pénale du procès de l’hormone de croissance contaminée,” in
D. Cefaï, M. Berger, and C. Gayet-Viaud (eds.), Du civil au politique. Ethnographies
du vivre ensemble, Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 289–322.
44. Petryna, Life Exposed, on Chernobyl; Yannick Barthe, “Cause politique et ‘poli-
tique des causes.’ La mobilisation des vétérans des essais nucléaires français,”
Politix, no. 3 (2010): 77–102, on nuclear tests; Das, “Suffering, Legitimacy and
Healing,” on Bhopal; Fourcade, “Cents and Sensibility,” on Amoco-Cadiz and
Exxon Valdez; Todeschini, “Illegitimate Sufferers,” on Hiroshima.
45. Jobin, Maladies industrielles., on industrial pollution scandals in Japan; Stéphane
Latté and Richard Rechtman, “Enquête sur les usages sociaux du traumatisme à
la suite de l’accident de l’usine AZF à Toulouse,” Politix, no. 1 (2006): 159–184, on
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vol. 81 (2010): 84–113, on the stance taken by victim associations in the tragedy
of contaminated growth hormone in France.
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radiation in Hiroshima, as objects of science.
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tion de victime, Paris: Flammarion, 2007, on post-traumatic stress disorder; Dodier,
“Contributions de Médecins Sans Frontières,” on the clinical trials carried out in

the framework of humanitarian interventions.
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51. Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial.
52. Clavandier, La mort collective.
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versitaires de Rennes, 2009.
56. Damien de Blic, “De la Fédération des mutilés du travail à la Fédération nationale
des accidentés du travail et des handicapés. Une longue mobilisation pour une
‘juste et légitime réparation’ des accidents du travail et des maladies profession-
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Daniel Cefaï, Mathieu Berger, and Carole Gayet-Viaud (eds.), Du civil au politique.
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———, “Violence et démocratie dans un collectif de victimes. Les rigueurs de
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rans des essais nucléaires français,” Politix, no. 3 (2010): 77–102
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242 Nicolas Dodier
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Das, Veena, “Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing: The Bhopal Case,” in Veena Das
(ed.), Critical Events. An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 137–174.
Das, Veena, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela
Reynolds (eds.), Remaking a World. Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001.
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———, “Ordre, force, pluralité. Articuler description et critique autour des ques-
tions médicales,” in Faire des sciences sociales. Tome 1: Critiquer, Paris: Editions de
l’EHESS, 2012.
Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of
Technical and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
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risques, Paris: Presses de l’Ecole normale supérieure, 1987.
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de victime, Paris: Flammarion, 2007.
Foucault, Michel, “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits, T.II., Paris: Gallimard,
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‘Nature,’ ” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 116, no. 6 (2011): 1721–1777.
Gilbert, Claude, Le pouvoir en situation extrême. Catastrophes et politique, Paris:
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Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007.
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An Overview,” in Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman (eds.), The Angry
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1999, pp. 1–16.
——— (eds.), Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, Oxford and Santa
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veraine. Sur deux types idéaux de surveillance,” S. Leman-Langlois (ed.), Sphères
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l’EHESS, 2006.
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———, La civilisation du risque. Catastrophes technologiques et responsabilité sociale, Paris:
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matisme à la suite de l’accident de l’usine AZF à Toulouse,” Politix, no. 73 (2006):
159–184.
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Histoire. Introduction,” Raisons politiques, no. 30 (2008): 5–20.
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CON T R I BU TOR S
Editors
Julien Langumier is a social anthropologist, independent researcher,

and a practitioner in the prevention public policy since 2006. Mainly
in the field of natural hazards and f loods, he works on the social expe-
rience of disasters and risks. From his thesis, he published: Survivre à
l’inondation. Pour une ethnologie de la catastrophe (ENS, 2008). From his
participation to the French prevention policy, he published several
articles about the interactions between inhabitants and institutional
stakeholders. He is the cofounder of the ARCRA: Anthropological
association for research on disasters and risks.
Sandrine Revet works on political, cultural, and social dynamics of
natural disasters. She holds a PhD in anthropology (2006) from the
Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine (University of Paris
3—Sorbonne Nouvelle) on Venezuelian f loods of 1999, published as
Anthropologie d’une catastrophe (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2007).
Sandrine joined CERI in February 2009. Cofounder of the Association
pour la recherche sur les catastrophes et les risques en anthropologie
(ARCRA), she is a member of the editorial boards of Critique interna-
tionale, Cahiers des Amériques latines, Papeles del CEIC (Universidad del
Pais Vasco, Bilbao) and Disaster Prevention and Management.
Contributors
Mara Benadusi is an anthropologist working at the Department of

Political and Social Sciences of the Catania University in Italy. She
has extensively conducted research in Sri Lanka during the recon-
struction phase that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She is
246 Contributors
currently part of the EC-funded ReSHAPE Program, which involves

researchers and professionals concerned with the EU response capabili-
ties toward natural disasters, humanitarian crises, and systemic risks.
In 2013 she received the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship by the Natural
Hazards Center (University of Colorado, Boulder) for her commitment
to disaster research. Her work focuses on the political and educational
aspects of post-catastrophe interventions, including how individuals
and social groups learn to protect themselves in disasters. She coed-
ited Disasters, Development and Humanitarian Aid. New Challenges for
Anthropology (Guaraldi, 2011).
Laura Centemeri is a sociologist, CNRS research fellow at the
Laboratoire méditéranéen de sociologie (Aix-Marseille Université/
CNRS). Her work focuses on damage to the environment (acknow-
ledgment and compensation), and the environment as part of decision-
making processes (tools, critiques, mobilizations). Her recent publications
include 2014, “What Kind of Knowledge is needed about Toxicant-
Related Health Issues? Some Lessons Drawn from the Seveso Dioxin
Case,” in S. Boudia and N. Jas (eds.), Powerless Science? The Making of the
Toxic World in the Twentieth Century, Oxford and New York: Berghahn
Books.
Nicolas Dodier is a sociologist, director for research at INSERM and
at EHESS at the Institut Marcel-Mauss (EHESS/CNRS). His research
has focused on risk, technique, work, and medicine, while aiming to
build the tools for a “pragmatic” sociology. His publications include
Les hommes et les machines (Métailié, 1995), Leçons politiques de l’épidémie
de sida (Editions de l’EHESS, 2003); with Janine Barbot, “Repenser la
place des victimes au procès pénal. Le répertoire normatif des juristes
en France et aux Etats-Unis,” Revue française de science politique vol. 64,
no. 3 (2014): 407–433. His current research interests include compensa-
tions that follow accidents and situations of violence.
Marc Elie is a historian. He completed his PhD from EHESS in
France in 2007, in which he explored the liberation, return, and reha-
bilitation of Gulag prisoners after Stalin’s death in 1953 as well as on
disasters in the Soviet Union. His current research also focuses on
the interplay between agricultural development and weather and cli-
matic extreme events in the steppes regions of the Soviet Union and
Kazakhstan, in particular in the twentieth century. His recent publica-
tions include “Coping with the ‘Black Dragon.’ Mudf low Hazard and
the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958–1966,”
Contributors 247
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 14, no. 2 (2013):
313–342.
Frédéric Keck is an anthropologist, research fellow at the CNRS in
Paris. He works as a member of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique
et Morale, an interdisciplinary laboratory in the social sciences com-
bining theoretical questions with empirical studies. Frédéric Keck has
conducted research on the relations between philosophy and the social
sciences in the French context (Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss), has
translated Paul Rabinow’s French DNA (2000) into French, and is cur-
rently working on food safety, raising contemporary questions on a
classical anthropological theme.
Susann Baez Ullberg is a social anthropologist working as a researcher
and teacher at CRISMART at the Swedish National Defence College
(www.crismart.org). She defended her doctoral thesis Watermarks:
Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina at Stockholm University
in 2013. Her research interests involve disaster, environmental and
medical anthropology; social memory and oblivion; and material cul-
ture, with a regional focus on Latin America, especially Argentina. Her
teaching areas include the politics of risk, disaster management, and
ethnographic methodology. She recently published “Argentinean Flood
Management and the Logic of Omission: The Case of Santa Fe City,”
Stockholm Review of Latin American Studies vol. 9 (2014) and Watermarks:
Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina, Stockholm Studies in
Social Anthropology New Series 8. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis
Stockholmiensis, 2013.
I N DE X
administration, 131, 173 fieldwork, 67–8, 91, 127–9, 155, 166–7.

alert See also ref lexivity
sentinel, 64–5, 74, 75
warning system, 30, 44 gift, 103–4, 109–10
anticipation/forecasting, 14–15 beneficiary, 99, 101
government/authority (central and
biopolitic(s)/biopower, 3, 61 local), 36–7, 107
biosecurity, 75–8
hero(es), 32–5, 66, 227
circulation, 59–60, 64, 73–4, 76, 89, humanitarian
91, 181–2 aid/assistance, 89, 91, 104
community, 90, 94, 112 intervention, 89, 94
Community Based Disaster
Management (CBDM), 89, instrumentalization, 36, 97, 103–4
94–6, 112 propaganda, 34–5, 101
local, 15, 202–3 interactions, 3, 5–6, 88, 97, 127,
context (local) 153–4, 225, 228–9
historical context, 112, 143–5, 148–9
social configuration, 96, 165 knowledge, 91, 231
controversy (scientific), 37–9, 42–3 expertise, 11, 61–4, 92, 153, 201, 234
critique, 4–5, 12–13, 60, 61, 67–70, 74, local/traditional, 2
201, 229–31
land development/planning, 43–5, 48,
displacement, 202. See also evacuation 129–31, 143
dispositifs, 3, 12–13, 60, 75, 89, 113
anthropology of dispositifs, 12, 157, media (publicization), 27, 32–3, 41, 66, 71–2,
224–9 88, 109. See also instrumentalization
memory/memories, 15–16, 146–7, 153,
economy of disasters, 43, 49 169
evacuation, 30, 199 memorial landscape, 182, 210–12
no-go area/restricted/prohibited area, memorial space, 177
45, 98, 103, 193–4 mobilizations, 129, 141, 150–1, 179, 201–4
250 Index
order, 223, 232 scales

plays of scales, 11, 70–1, 90
participation/consultation, 89, 128, scales of observations, 90,
179–80, 211–13, 229 226–8
preparedness, 4, 60, 64–6 speech
prevention, 28, 39, 60
silence, 207
testimony, 135, 213
reconstruction, 88–9, 93
ref lexivity, 9–10, 25, 59, 90–2, 132, suffering, 207–8
170–2, 197, 205–6, 222.
See also fieldwork trauma, 87–8, 157, 213
reparation trial, 195, 234
compensation, 154–5
indemnification, 195, 208, 235 uncertainty, 193, 209
resilience, 5, 93, 113, 164
risk culture, 1–3, 127, 132, 153–6, 191 victim, 15, 29, 88, 92–3, 104,
risk society, 4 131–5, 206–9, 233–4

Governing Disasters

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Governing Disasters

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The Sciences Po Series in International

Relations and Political Economy

Series Editor, Alain Dieckhoff

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Politics In China: Moving Frontiers

Part 1 Anticipation, Preparedness,

Part 2 Participation and Consultation

Part 3 Issues of Memory

Notes on Contributors 245

who enthusiastically accompanied us throughout the process of prepar-

1. Workshop “Catastrophes et risques: regards anthropologiques,” Paris, EHESS,

Hardly a week goes by without some “disaster” brief ly casting its

Moving beyond the “Risk Culture”

and Anthony Giddens,5 who see it as “a fundamental cultural aspect of

victims and administrators, residents and technicians, disaster victims

Governing (by) Disaster

Disasters also contribute to feeding an economy of fear, one of the

Everyday Practices and Tactics in Disaster

who experience it. Living, working, raising children, eating, paint-

At the Intersection of Dispositifs and Practices:

Because disaster constitutes an unusual time in which exposed popu-

mainly with institutional actors or mainly with inhabitants. Disaster

therefore inform us about the genesis of disaster, allowing us to release

troubles by way of denunciation or the construction of a political cause.

these, neither the implementation of a global policy of biosecurity nor

Inescapable Ref lexivity

The fields under consideration here are particularly burdened with

Beyond the Great Divides

Finally, it is to be underscored that the present work does not instru-

by technoscientific expertise, which is taken to exclude any possible

Organization of the Work: A Thematic

Despite the diverse array of fields, contrasting contexts, and variety of

Anticipation and Preparation

threatening Alma-Ata in the 1960s and Frédéric Keck addresses the

The “Local Community”

The Memory of Past Disasters

inhabitants as well as in terms of public and institutional recognition.

8. Eric Lepointe, “Le sociologue et les désastres,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie,

et rapports vernaculaires au politique en ‘situation coloniale,’ ” Questions de recher-

Abélès, Marc, Politique de la survie, Paris: Flammarion, 2006.

Governing by Hazard: Controlling

This chapter undertakes a political history of the government by disaster.

narrows, forming what is known as the “Medeo” Gorge. Checked in

An enormous territory situated between Russia, Central Asia, and

The favorable outcome of the 1973 disaster marked a new stage

in consolidating his power and imposing a protection plan centered on

In the Shelter of the Dam?

The Medeo Dam gave the inhabitants of Alma-Ata a false sense of

effects on the local population and surrounding structures nor resulted

projects and alternate forms of mudslide prevention were nearly com-

The dam was supposed to be capable of containing three mudslides

Saving the Dam

Around 6 p.m. on July 15, 1973, a mudslide formed beneath the

But in keeping with the hierarchical information system characteristic

disastrous scenario had to be avoided at all costs: the six million m 3

The Luck of Heroes: Disaster, Emergency, and Heroism

In keeping with the atmosphere of discretion—indeed, silence—that

to the beat of Alma-Ata’s suffering” (Khegai). The same insistence on

Concentrating Responsibility: The Creation of

A Threat to the Dam: “Anthropic Disasters”

Kunaev strove to create unity and unanimity around his plan

In early 1974, one of the leading hydrologists specializing in mudslides,

“misleading the engineering community.” He showed that Fleishman