4 - Adaptive Disaster Memories: Voices from the Post-earthquake Irpinia (23 November 1980)

Summary

Introduction

‘There is no European Society whose modern history has been deeply marked by disaster than Italy’s.’ In the very first lines of their volume, the authors of Disastro! underline the frailty of the peninsula and how these tragic events ‘seem to test the social fabric and the political system to their limits’ (Dickie et al, 2002, p 3). Actually, if we take into account the seismic events, we note that in the last two centuries, there has been a destructive earthquake (Mw > 5.5) on average every five years. Each of these events forms a link in the long chain of destruction and reconstruction that characterizes recent Italian history (Guidoboni, 2013). Despite the relevance of these tragic events, there has been inadequate interest on the part of Italian social scientists during the 20th century (Bevilacqua, 1996; Guidoboni, 2015). Only after the earthquake in L’Aquila (2009) did national scientific production align itself with international trends (Olori, 2016), and ‘this earthquake gave rise to a new generation of Italian scholars’ (Forino and Carnelli, 2019, p 414). There are many reasons behind this new wave of studies (Carnelli et al, 2016) that, among other things, has stimulated a renewed interest in the earthquakes of the past (Parrinello, 2015; Farinella and Saitta, 2019). In this chapter, I will show a particular line of research that has emerged in Italy in recent years. This perspective aims to combine an ecological approach to disasters and the methodology of oral history (Moscaritolo, 2018; Longo, 2018; 2019; Gribaudi, 2020; Moscaritolo, 2020a; 2020b).

On the one hand, the ecological approach focuses ‘on the effectiveness of societal adaptation to the total environment, including the natural, modified and constructed contexts and processes of which the community is a part’ (Oliver-Smith, 1998, p 187). Therefore, societies are influenced by their historical environmental relations and environments are deeply conditioned by the histories of societies. Disasters, often dramatically, show us this mutuality. For that reason, it is essential to consider a historically produced pattern of vulnerability because ‘disasters are quintessentially historical ones, that is they are the outcome of processes that change over time and whose genesis lie in the past’ (Bankoff, 2007, p 110).