PRESENTATION Disasters, crises and political and social responses
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5433/1984-3356.2021v14n27p287Abstract
Over the centuries, human societies have sought to understand and explain the violent manifestations of nature that hit them in the most diverse forms (droughts, intense rains and storms, floods, earthquakes, eruptions, plagues, epidemics). For a long time, too, the explanations provided were integrated into cosmologies or narratives that corresponded to types of magical or religious beliefs that, while giving a sense to the cosmos and seeking to alleviate the anxiety of ancient societies in the face of their vulnerability, legitimized a political and social order.
One of the topics that is most evident in the research conducted in this area is that of natural disasters. It is not a matter of thinking about history as a catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin understood it, but of observing catastrophes as a “total social fact” (Marcel Mauss), insofar as their occurrence and the respective impacts affect multiple dimensions of the affected societies , revealing the same aspects that, under normal conditions, could go unnoticed.
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