This interview by Cyril Isnart and Christian Hottin with anthropologist Sandrine Revet was originally published in French in the journal In Situ in March 2024. The interview offers an account of the history and epistemological issues of this particular field of anthropological study. Looking back on her own career, Sandrine Revet describes the twists and turns of the intellectual work in progress, which takes disasters as an object of study for the social sciences, analysing their impact and consequences in the specific social and historical context in which the disaster occurs.

Over the last twenty years or so, the anthropology of disasters has become a fully-fledged field of study of contemporary societies. It has opened up new ways of understanding social and cultural dynamics by looking at natural, climatic, or historical events that cause major upheavals in the world around human groups, as well as within the groups themselves. Its challenge is to articulate the collective effects of a crisis with socially and culturally determined conditions of response. It thus extends the treatment of the event in the anthropological study of contemporary societies^[1]Bensa & Fassin (2002)., enabling it to be understood as a two-sided object, as a trigger for social change, and as a product determined by its socio-historical context.

Anthropology provides insight into the impact of a sudden upheaval such as an earthquake, flood, or fire on the societies affected, as well as what the socio-cultural context means in terms of dealing with the consequences of a disaster. Anthropology reveals the many ways in which human groups respond to disasters, in terms of social and collective hierarchies, reconfiguration of political priorities, economic changes, and population movements. But it also reveals the inequalities between social classes, the processes by which international policies are regulated, and the dynamics of resistance to risk. Finally, it addresses the link between the catastrophic moment, the past it erases, and the future it requires. Like the reintegration of history into the anthropological project^[2]Sahlins (1976)., the anthropology of disasters makes it possible to think simultaneously about the socio-cultural dynamics that are reconfigured by the disaster and the long-term nature of culture that determines the reactions of groups to the brutal changes imposed by the disaster.

Sandrine Revet^[3]Revet (2007, 2018)., and with her a number of other social science researchers^[4]Quenet (2000), Langumier (2008), Walter (2008), Labbé (2017)., have contributed to the critical perspective on disasters by establishing a specific methodology and theory to address a topic that has been little or only partially explored by the human and social sciences. In this interview, which took place online on 30 June 2023, Sandrine looks back at the epistemology of the field, highlighting the main stages of its history and the turning points that have led to a better understanding of the sociological and cultural implications of disasters. Sandrine also describes how the anthropological approach has complemented the immediate and practical applications of disaster studies, for which the identification and control of risks remain central. The anthropology of disasters encourages a more historical and sociological reading, whose scope of interest goes beyond the moment of the disaster itself and the time it takes to resolve it, to describe the political and collective mechanisms involved in the event. There is also an intellectual biographical dimension to this interview, since the anthropology of disasters has been built up over the course of Sandrine’s career as a researcher who has crossed paths with other social scientists who, with her, have changed the way we look at so-called natural disasters.

The conceptual and methodological paradigms of the anthropology of disasters have essentially been developed in the context of "natural" disasters. Without claiming to apply them directly to the "world of heritage-related disasters", to paraphrase the title of one of Sandrine Revet’s books, this interview discusses the tools and perspectives that the anthropology of heritage could use to better understand what is at stake in our societies when one of their emblems is struck by disaster, whether it be the destruction caused by armed conflict, accidental fires such as that of Notre-Dame de Paris in 2019, or even the inevitable over-visitation of UNESCO sites.

Disasters as social facts

Christian Hottin [CH] - Over the last twenty years or so, the anthropology of disasters has become an important theme in the human and social sciences. Looking back over your scientific career, can you tell us how you came across this field and how you got involved in it?

Sandrine Revet [SR] - After completing a Master’s thesis, I started my PhD in 2003 following a disaster (mudslides) that occurred on the Venezuelan coast. My research question was more specific and revolved around the displacement of the population caused by the disaster and all the questions of identity and belonging that could arise from this displacement.

This was not surprising since I was working with Michel Agier^[5]See Michel Agier (2002). at the time and I was therefore working a lot on displacement, identities on the move, and so on. In the end, I believe it was the field that imposed the theme of disasters on me. At the start of my research, I wanted to talk to the people I met about the aftermath of the disaster, about reconstruction, but they systematically began the interviews by recounting “that night”, what had happened during the disaster, what they had done, where they had gone, and their description was very precise. Little by little, as I worked on my material, I stopped considering these accounts as a sideline or as the antechamber to my research, and I gradually made these accounts one of the central materials of my investigation. I began by looking at the effects of this characterisation, i.e. the way in which people described the event. At the time, I was to some extent exploring the work being done in the anthropology of the contemporary world, and in particular an article by Alban Bensa and Éric Fassin published in 2002, which looked at the notion of event^[6]Bensa & Fassin (2002).and all the ways in which it is qualified. It was a question of taking the disaster not as a given, but as a collective construction, in particular through the way it is narrated, which leads to its qualification.

Figure 1. Macuto, State of Vargas, Venezuela, March 2005.

The anthropologist captures the narratives of the disaster by sharing the daily lives of those affected. The inhabitants reclaimed the river after the disaster, spending afternoons there with their families once again, during which it was possible to listen to echoes of the event that had occurred several years earlier. © Sandrine Revet.

When I returned from the field, and tried to think about all this and draw on the literature, I came across a body of North American literature—I’m thinking of the work of Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, a volume that had just come out, Catastrophes & Culture^[7]Oliver-Smith & Hoffman (2002).—and also Latin American literature, which combined anthropology with a historical perspective, in particular the work of Virginia García Acosta.^[8]García Acosta (2004). And then in Venezuela, where I was doing my research, I met Rogelio Altez, a professor at the Central University of Venezuela, who himself lived on the land that had been devastated by the mudslides. Altez was working on the history of disasters in Venezuela and directed me toward a whole corpus of Latin American literature, stemming from a research network that I have since documented: the Red de estudios sociales sobre desastres (the Network of Social Studies on Disasters^[9]https://www.desenredando.org/ [verified in April 2024].). In the 1990s, this movement greatly contributed to advancing work on the subject. In France, there was very little on the subject of disasters, a few papers in sociology and then Françoise Zonabend's very influencial work, La Presqu'île au nucléaire, which was however more interested in the study of living with threat than in the disaster itself; so there was more of an anthropology of risk than an anthropology of disaster.

Two French authors inspired me while I was writing my PhD: Gaëlle Clavandier, who had just written a book on collective death from a sociological perspective, in which she borrowed heavily from anthropology, looking at the mechanisms by which collective death is constituted and processed (Clavandier 2004); and then, by a miracle of encounters and chance, Julien Langumier, whom I met as we were both finishing our doctorates. Under the supervision of Françoise Zonabend, Julien was focusing on the floods that had occurred in the French department of Aude the same year as the mudslides that I was studying in Venezuela. When we read each other’s thesis in 2006-2007, we were struck by the similarities and the bridges we could build. With Cécile Quesada, who had just finished her PhD and was working on a volcano in the Tonga Islands, and with Violaine Girard, who was doing her PhD on the relationship between industrial risk and suburban areas, we founded the Association for Research on Disasters and Risks in Anthropology (ARCRA).^[10] https://www.arcra.fr/ [verified in April 2024]. We realised that we had encountered each other very late in our research; there was nothing to connect us and so we thought we would try to create a space—one that had not existed for us—to discuss these issues. We prepared a web page, and then, just by publishing this modest website with a few texts on this theme, we began to bring together researchers from all over the world, in particular young European colleagues, including Mara Benadusi from Italy and Susann Ullberg from Sweden who became fellow travellers with whom we started going to seminars and conferences, and others who joined us. I mention these two colleagues because we really did a lot together, setting up panels at international conferences, as well as undertaking projects and publishing together. In a way, we built up this field and, in the end, we collectively carried forward the project of an anthropology of disasters in France and Europe.

Beyond risk

Cyril Isnart [CI] - There has clearly been a shift in the field of disaster studies. The focus, which may have been operational at the time of the emergence of this theme, has given way to a more critical, more diversified approach that is more attentive to the social aspects of disasters. How has this changed the epistemology of this field of research?

SR – Anthropology of disasters was born somewhat in opposition to—or in response to—a field that had been established earlier, a more applied one, of so-called disasters studies. This field appeared in the particular context of the Cold War United States. At the time, the authorities called on sociologists and psychosociologists to provide information on how people would behave in the event of a nuclear attack.^[11]Fritz & Marks (1954). At the time, governments feared the irrationality of the population, the anomie of the crowd, and the potential for outbursts in the event of a disaster. This was in the years 1949-1950, and the US State Department began to fund numerous studies to treat disaster situations as if they were laboratory situations and to understand and try to anticipate people's behaviour. In fact, the anthropology of disasters, which really emerged in the 1970s, took a stand against these approaches, as well as against the pre-eminence of climate sciences and earth sciences, which were central to the examination of all natural phenomena and which, as a result, had explanations in which the hazard, the natural phenomenon, occupied a central position. In the 1970s, therefore, there was a whole movement inspired by the Marxist perspective. Jean Copans and Claude Meillassoux^[12]Jean Copans (1975). in France analysed the famine in the Sahel (1967-1972) and showed that it was not exclusively due to the climatic phenomenon of drought, but that it was rooted in a long history of transformation of land use and the local economy, due to colonisation. Their work brought to light what we now call the root causes of disasters. This movement is driven by not only anthropologists, but also geographers, whose fields of research are mainly in the South, in Africa, and also in Asia and, from the 1990s, in Latin America.

In a way there is a later generation, to which I belong more, a “European” school—even if it is not fundamentally European. It was inspired by the work of the North American and Latin American researchers I mentioned earlier, namely Oliver-Smith and García Acosta, who identified factors of vulnerability that are important to work on. The approach was slightly different, because it seems to me that what has characterised the anthropology of disasters as it has been conducted since 2005-2006 in France and Europe is the fact that it is also interested in the mechanisms set up to govern disasters and their interactions with people and territories. I suppose we belong to a generation in which the very idea of the social construction of disasters, of vulnerability, was something of a given. We were trained by authors who asserted that disasters were constructions, that they were not “natural”, which led us to look beyond that, and in particular to pay attention to the way in which these disasters were governed.

Figure 2. Constructions in the La Veguita district of Macuto, Vargas state,
Venezuela, March 2005.

Historically, the anthropology of disasters has focused on documenting the factors of vulnerability that transform natural phenomena into disasters. © Sandrine Revet.

It also seems to me that what made us different from the previous generation—and maybe still does—was the desire to maintain a fairly strong disciplinary identity, in dialogue with other disciplines, certainly not only with those working on disasters, but with anthropology in general. While in different ways, I think we all undertook a real task of linking the anthropology of disasters to more general anthropology, to show that this sub-field's contributions were of a general nature for the discipline, that we could analyse wider dynamics: dynamics of kinship, religion, political issues, ways of living, identities, ways of cultivating crops, a range of themes, central to anthropology in general, and which were also central through the prism of disasters. We were not confining ourselves to discussing humanitarian aid, relief, or victims.

It seems that we are now at the beginning of a new turn—if we want to call it a turning point, because anthropology is very fond of turns—which is taking place elsewhere in the discipline; we can clearly see that this reconnection between the anthropology of disasters and anthropology has taken place, since a lot of work is beginning to revolve around the materiality of disasters. After years of denaturalising disasters, of detaching them from the natural phenomenon itself, from the centrality of the earth and climate sciences, from the works, in parallel with the current multi-specific turn,^[13]Tsing (2018). we are now seeking to reintroduce a plurality of actors into investigations such as water, mud, or living entities broadly defined. For me, this is a sign that this sub-field is indeed engaged in dialogue with the discipline as a whole, after having spent many long years constructing itself as a separate field, a form of “disastrology” as it is sometimes referred to with a laugh...

Figure 3. Carmen de Uria, Vargas state, Venezuela, December 2004.

Each physical phenomenon produces specific traces and damage. Mud, for its part, sullies, entombs, buries, and finally dries up, making the search for victims impossible. Traces of the disaster gradually appear. Here, a car buried in Carmen de Uria, Vargas state.© Sandrine Revet.

CH - This makes me want to ask an additional question: at the start of our interview, you mentioned the emergence of disaster studies, saying that this very applied research movement was still going strong today. Is there any dialogue between your research (in terms of anthropology of disasters) and this movement? Does fundamental research feed into the field of disaster studies?

SR - Yes, disaster studies are ongoing, but in a less applied form. While social and political demand is less pressing than it was during the Cold War years, this movement continues, and its applied aims are nonetheless rooted in a fundamental perspective. For example, there are people working specifically on risks and disasters within the Society for Applied Anthropology in the United States,^[14]https://www.appliedanthro.org/ [verified in April 2024]. researchers whose aim is to improve the conditions in which victims are cared for, to influence public policy and the decisions made by political leaders on population displacement, reconstruction, etc. Another strategy has been to seek to integrate international networks, and in particular UN agencies, in order to promote this vision of vulnerability factors. Today international disaster management is built around this framework. In a way, this has become mainstream thinking. So, the dialogue continues, even if there may be a difference in position and approach. We know each other, we read each other’s work, we invite each other to seminars and conferences, we’re not talking about two separate worlds.

Case studies and comparison

CH - Two of the characteristics of contemporary human and social sciences, the distanced gaze of historians and anthropologists as well as the comparative approach, have shown that case studies and monographs are valuable both for the singularity they reveal and for the original insights they offer. The comparative perspective on the case of Notre-Dame de Paris fits modestly into this perspective. How does the field of disaster studies fit into this dynamic, and how do researchers manage to choose the right case and its comparative counterparts from among all the disasters that are constantly occurring around the world?

SR - In the anthropology of disasters, choosing a case often results from prior work on a site that has been affected by a disaster. Many of us have witnessed a disaster in our field (a hurricane, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, etc.), and have decided to take an interest in it. I would say that choosing a case in anthropology is first and foremost choosing the field. Now that disaster anthropology is a little more established, some students wish to study a disaster and try to find a case that allows them to tackle the issues that interest them most. This could be reconstruction, religious issues, or the link with nature and the environment. We then try to guide them so that their research enables them to address these particular dimensions. In fact, a disaster is a prism, a special lens through which to view a society and see social dynamics that are new and emerging, but also very ordinary.

Figure 4. Haiti, February 2012.

Objects can be used to compare cases. Here, the Port-au-Prince cathedral destroyed by the 2010 earthquake can be used to compare the way in which this disaster is interpreted by the society affected with other situations of similar destruction. © Sandrine Revet.

It seems to me that the question of comparison is based on specific themes: some themes can easily be compared, such as commemorations. We can also compare vulnerability factors quite easily: what caused these phenomena to result in a disaster? We can list these factors, and see the ones that were present and those that were not, depending on the group and society. We can also compare aid policies quite easily, both national and international, and do comparative work on the political approach to these phenomena. It is by looking at these objects—more so than at disasters in general, that constitute a mega-object—that we can make progress in our comparisons and, if necessary, shed more light on the dynamics induced by the particular moments that disasters represent. It is also possible to use them as prisms to shed light on routine and pre-existing dynamics. The two are not incompatible. For a long time, the social sciences were concerned with whether there would be social changes after a disaster, and this was an obsession, particularly among sociologists. I think that indeed, we see emerging dynamics all the time, but we also see the reinforcement of pre-existing social dynamics. In fact, even change is based on these dynamics.

Opportunity

CI - What you say reminds me of a theme we discussed in the working group on comparative approaches to disasters at World Heritage Sites: the effect of opportunity, or even opportunism, that disasters can create. We have faced this problem, which is also a moral dilemma: a disaster creates an opportunity for researchers, because it is a socially interesting moment when dynamics are revealed and changed, and a heuristically interesting moment when data can be produced and new analyses opened up. But there is also a kind of opportunism that certain actors on the ground or in the academic world can seize upon through the disaster. Is this a theme that you have come across and that you are working on through the anthropology of disasters?

SR - Yes, very much so! However, “opportunism” is perhaps not the word I would use, because it has a moral connotation, and it is not necessarily our role to judge who is an opportunist. On the other hand, our job is to describe the way in which these events produce economic, media, and political effects that enable certain actors to reposition themselves, to take the spotlight or sometimes to seize power. That’s really part of what we’ve been able to work on. There are some emblematic cases: the 1985 earthquake in Mexico and its aftermath put an end to 70 years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) being in power. I don't know whether it was a question of opportunity or opportunism, but the moment was decisive. Anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith has used the concept of “process/event” to break out of this dichotomy, consisting of asking whether there is a rupture or continuity (which is a bit of a theoretical illusion, in fact), and show that it is both an event (obviously, there is a rupture in meaning that has to be remedied—we have to reorganise a lot of things, de-sectorise, do things we didn't know how to do before) and a process. As the disaster is rooted in a history that must be documented, its treatment cannot be totally disconnected from a social ground, a context. We are therefore going to bring out the logics of actors that can only be explained when we understand the disaster as a process. If we adopt a methodological approach that focuses solely on an extremely short timeframe, we will be unable to understand the dynamics involved. This is also why I find the anthropological approach so interesting: this historical perspective, this long-term approach, and this prior knowledge of the field enable us to shed more light on logics than shorter surveys that tend to focus on an emergency timeframe. There is also a great deal of work that crosses humanitarian anthropology and disaster anthropology, that also addresses all the questions of opportunity or opportunism.

Figure 5. Mexico City, Mexico, October 2012.

How do you study a disaster? Disasters pose methodological challenges for anthropologists. One way is to look at how disasters are governed. Shown here is an ethnography of an earthquake preparedness exercise organised by the Mexican authorities and international agencies. © Douglas Reimer.

Should all disasters be compared?

CH - Continuing on the theme of comparatism and openness, what would you see as the advantages and limitations of applying the anthropology of natural disasters, which constitutes a field in its own right, to the realms of armed conflict, cultural heritage, global warming, or technological disasters—disasters that sometimes overlap, as in the case of Fukushima, for example? In other words, can the tools developed in the specific context of “natural” disasters be applied to events of other kinds, on other scales, and perhaps of a complexity that is sometimes hidden by political and media discourse?

SR - It's interesting that you mention Fukushima, because Fukushima is part of a whole, since it was first an earthquake in the Tohoku region, then a tsunami and a nuclear accident. The fact that we are talking about Fukushima clearly shows that there has been an attempt to compartmentalise the phenomena by the Japanese public authorities as well as at the international level. Let me mention an anecdote: when I was in the field observing disaster management professionals in 2015, I attended the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction organised by the UN in the Japanese city of Sendai, which had been devastated by the tsunami in 2011 and quickly rebuilt. The Japanese authorities were very proud to show us the city's resilience. Discussions mentioned “natural” disasters. One day, in an area where NGOs were present, Japanese anti-nuclear activists came in to protest against the aftermath of Fukushima and the Japanese government's discourse on resilience. I had the opportunity to have a quick word with the activists before they were evacuated, and they told me “You’re talking about disaster risks and nobody is going to talk about Fukushima”. This is a deliberate compartmentalisation. Finally, although historically it has been so-called “natural” disasters that have been at the heart of research in this field, other types of disaster have long been addressed by anthropology. Some of the work done by anthropologists on dramatic situations—for example, Kim Fortun’s work on the Bhopal accident in India in the 1980s^[15]Fortun (2001). and that of Diego Zenobi,^[16]Zenobi (2014). who analysed a fire in a night club by drawing on the anthropology of disasters and using this conceptual and theoretical apparatus—can be useful for thinking about all sorts of situations, especially those where there is a break in intelligibility.

The anthropology of disasters also provides frameworks for understanding what happens at the very moment when the disaster occurs. Anthropologists have looked at the possibility of ethnographically documenting such moments. In the 1980s, anthropologists Jean Jamin and Élisabeth Claverie^[17]Lenclud, Claverie & Jamin (1984). explored the issue of violence by asking how it was possible to reconstruct moments of violence, as an ethnographer. With Julien Langumier, we took this line of thought to the field of disasters^[18]Langumier & Revet (2011). by looking at the way in which we work, for example by mobilising accounts of disasters, and the way in which they crystallise. These are old themes, which take us back to the anthropology of religion and witchcraft, to all these mechanisms for attributing causes, and to all the dynamics linked to reconstruction, understood in a broad sense that ranges from commemoration to material reconstruction and reparation, including legal reparation.

Figure 6. Church of Carmen de Uria, State of Vargas, Venezuela, December 2004.

From an anthropological perspective, reconstruction takes different forms. Explaining, giving meaning, reconstructing places, and commemorating the event are all processes that contribute to reconstruction. Commemorations in the destroyed church of Carmen de Uria, State of Vargas. © Sandrine Revet.

It is clear from all these points that the "natural" factor of the phenomenon is only one of the many factors that come into play. In addition, recent studies on risk have shown that risks are increasingly intertwined and complex, and that it is very difficult to disentangle purely natural causes from social causes. This is nothing new, even if things are now even more intertwined. As far back as the 1970s, we had proof that in the case of a famine in the Sahel, the combination of climatic conditions and political, economic, and social factors produced a catastrophe. The contribution of the anthropology of disasters is undoubtedly to offer an insight into the way in which human beings confronted with these situations understand, qualify, face, and overcome them.

Even so, we need to be cautious: while the anthropology of disasters can provide tools for analysing all these situations, we still need to distinguish between them; they have their own logic, their own materiality and their own specificities. Anthropologists, on the other hand, can approach these situations and events that people at a given moment describe as disasters, and observe the processes of quantification and evaluation that are specific to them.

CH – I have another question on disciplinary comparisons, in an area I am more familiar with: there is a history of disasters and historians have been working on this subject for as long as there have been disasters, I would say at least since Pliny the Elder and the eruption of Vesuvius. What does the history of disasters teach anthropologists about disasters, and what affinities and relationships do they have with history?

Figure 7. Front page of the newspaper La Linterna Mágica,
30 October 1900

A historical comparison puts the data from the field into a longer perspective. The earthquake in Venezuela on 29 October 1900 gave rise to many interpretations of the phenomenon, both religious and scientific. Here, the engraving by cartoonist Lumet depicts Caracas as a woman kneeling over the ruins, begging for mercy, with the subtitle "How Caracas woke up yesterday morning". © Lumet / Reproduction, Sandrine Revet.

SR – I work a lot with historians, and in my PhD thesis I used a lot of work from seismohistory, in particular a book by Emanuela Guidoboni and Jean-Paul Poirier, Quand la terre tremblait, which goes back to ancient history, and some fascinating work on the Middle Ages. There is also Thomas Labbé’s book, Les Catastrophes naturelles au Moyen age, in which he shows that the very term “catastrophe” does not exist in written sources. He looks at the way in which the problem was discussed because the idea of a collective disaster was very differently conceived than the way it is today. So these comparative approaches to history are absolutely essential, because they enable us to place our current visions in the context of a longer history. For my thesis, using my limited resources as an anthropologist and sources that were relatively easy to access, I reconstructed the documented history of disasters that have occurred on the same coastline in Venezuela since the seventeenth century: how they were described and how they were dealt with, and by whom. I was able to show the gradual arrival of the state in the management of these crises in the twentieth century and, before that, the predominance of religious actors, followed by private actors, companies, in colonial continuity. For me, this is probably the most fruitful dialogue between disciplines, although of course we work a great deal with geographers, sociologists, and political scientists. With historians, we share questions about the ways in which we define things, our search for routines... I draw a lot of inspiration from the work of historians and I'm very grateful to them.

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This article was originally published in French as: Sandrine Revet, Cyril Isnart, Christian Hottin. "Les catastrophes, un prisme pour regarder le monde ordinaire : Entretien de Cyril Isnart et Christian Hottin avec Sandrine Revet, directrice de recherche au CERI, Sciences Po-CNRS". In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 2024, 4, 18 p. ⟨10.4000/insituarss.2699⟩. ⟨hal-04492843⟩. The translation was taken care of by the Centre for International Studies (CERI Sciences Po/CNRS).