10 - Defining Catastrophes

Summary

OPINIONS DIVERGE OVER how—if at all—the terms “disaster” and “catastrophe” should be defined. Despite a by now noticeable tendency toward certain interdisciplinary standards (for example, adopting the distinction between “natural hazards” and “disasters”), any critical examination of previous definitory attempts is confronted with a stunning diversity of definitions and approaches. There is little interdisciplinary consensus, and just as little within the individual disciplines that have ventured into disaster studies. Additionally, the definitions given by national and international (governmental or nongovernmental) organizations have done little to reduce the multiplicity of concepts. Not sharing widespread concerns about finding a consensus, the anthropologist Anthony Oliver- Smith has attributed the variety of existing definitions to a great diversity of legitimate and often fruitful approaches, which reflect what he aptly called the multidimensionality of disasters.

In 1952, the anthropologists Alfred Louis Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published an over two-hundred-page survey of the definitions of “culture.” A similar survey of concepts of disaster might lead to a better understanding between disciplines. However, it would be out of proportion for a book chapter such as this one. Instead, I will reconsider the problem of definition from the perspective of history. First, I will begin with a critical examination of some aspects of typical definitions of “disasters” and “catastrophes” that have their roots in European traditions, the longevity of which only becomes discernible by looking at the history of those concepts. In the second part of this chapter I will leave the familiar territory of hermeneutic traditions and venture into frontier zones, where the “three cultures” of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, respectively, collide. Here the starting point will be the question of how “natural” natural disasters are, which transposes into a discussion of the relationship between disasters and modernity in the third and final part of this chapter. In debates about modernity, disaster typologies get entangled with the procedure of periodization, that is, certain types of disasters are considered to be representative of certain stages of societal development. Obviously, in such discourses, catastrophes are no longer the definiendum, but they take over the part of definiens.

Traditions of Defining Disaster/Catastrophe

Concepts and words carry their histories along with them and transport them into the present-day scientific discourse, often indiscernibly.