Disaster and Tragic Events: An Encyclopedia of Catastrophes in American History

Citation

Maximiliano Emanuel Korstanje (2015), "Disaster and Tragic Events: An Encyclopedia of Catastrophes in American History", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 378-379. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-06-2015-0032

This book discusses to what an extent all disasters should be deemed as tragedies. Basically, it is interesting to discuss why some events are framed as disasters, while others have simply been ignored or pushed to the dust of oblivion. This all-encompassing edition compiles study-cases authored by diverse scholars, with different points of view. Anyway the same core remains, it is very difficult to measure the effects of disasters according to the suffering they engendered. Many tragedies such as slavery, AIDS and epidemics have caused much pain in victims, but not just for this reason, we are authorized to call them “disasters”. Why? Newton-Matza argues convincingly that as per the classical definition, disasters are events which inflicted a great sudden misfortune in the society. However, “hooligans” in football stadiums may provoke serious damages, even casualties, from one moment to others, and not just for this reason, this is a disaster. Although the book does not give a specific meaning for these terms, it poses some questions which can help readers to expand the current understanding of what a disaster is.

Any policy-maker should address disasters following these questions:

• What happened and when? This question signals to the need to establish an estimate date of the event. Though, to set an example, we know when 9/11 started, we have no accuracy for slavery in the USA.

• How did it happen? The importance of this point associates to the difficulty in understanding how events occurred. Not only does the science play a crucial role in that stage, but also attempts to find the roots of the disaster.

• Who was affected and how? People who are not directly affected by the disasters are prone to feel more anxiety and fears, as compared to those who are in the fieldwork. This is the argument that leads one to rethink sometimes that a disaster is defined by the type of victims and the losses it produced.

• How did people respond? It is clear that the response to disasters is spontaneous. However, some later days, survivors combine a set of reactions which range from sacralization of death to the blaming-the-victim tactic.

• What happened in the aftermath? This point refers to the process of resilience and lessons learned from the event. Often survivors ask what would we do to stake off a similar event in the future? For example, post 9/11, many airline produces at airport were radically altered to strength the security.

One of the aspects that places this book as a masterwork of the genre is the fact that the editor, Professor M. Newton-Matza, gives a scheme to trace disasters and their effects in the threshold of history. Always appealing to our imagination, disasters were of vital importance to the evolution of societies. For that reason, cinema and the cultural entertainment industries were captivated to report great disasters that took place in history. For some reason, the audience is strongly sensitive to watch movies related to disasters. From Earthquake to Twister, these movies are enrooted in a “pure fiction” (p. 26) which emulates the alternative course of action society follows in emergency-related contexts. Most certainly, disaster-led movies are inspired in true or fictional events, but all of them keep the same goal, building the trust of lay-citizens in their respective social institutions. To what an extent we can learn real lessons from the mixture of real and fictional landscapes is the main point of discussion that this book triggered. In this vein, history may be used as an efficient instrument to learn today what we can or cannot do. As Mitchel Newton-Matza puts it, “if history has taught us anything, it is that we are poor learners” (p. 27).

Although a chronology table of tragic events is described by diverse authors following the study-case method, the book fails to explain further on what is our fascination for disasters. As in earlier works, Korstanje (2014) explains that disasters (even tragedies) catalyze the politics of society as well as the social atmosphere. Not only are disasters politically manipulated by the elite to avoid its responsibilities, but they pave the pathways for the adoptions of ideological discourses associated to “supremacy”, “nationalism” and “ethnocentrism”. Survivors, in the middle of desolation, develop a psychological mechanism of resilience, where they see themselves as “superior” because after all they have survived. This is a natural resource to balance the pain of losing relatives and friends. The allegory of disasters often delineates the boundaries between saved and condemned. Those who had survived disasters can consider their conditions as outstanding, exceptional or simply that they would have been chosen by the Gods. If this sentiment is not duly regulated, two negative effects arise. The first and most important is the formation of ethno-centric discourses that subordinate the “Others” to the proper cultural values. Second, sanctuaries, shrines and temples built to in remembrance of the tragic event convey a wrong message about the reasons of disaster. As a result of this, the community is condemned to the disaster being repeated some later day. This creates a paradoxical situation where our prone (media consumption) by the “spectacles of disasters” rises, and our understanding necessary to prevent a similar situation declines. Sometimes, history exhibits a biased interpretation (done by elite) of real facts as occurred in past time.