The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective.

Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman, editors, 1999. New York & London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-91986-X (cloth) Cdn$120:00; 0-7735-1837-1 (paper) Cdn $41.99. 334 pp.

The sixteen essays in The Angry Earth provide empirically fascinating, theoretically compelling, and often heart wrenching analyses of the constitution, effects and human experience of disasters. When I read the book I was reminded how stimulating hazards literature can be; a recognition I haven't felt this strongly since I read Hewitt's Interpretations of Calamity (1983) almost twenty years ago. Indeed, one of Hewitt's (1983) central themes, that 'most disasters are ultimately explainable in terms of the normal [social] order' (as paraphrased by Oliver-Smith on p. 23 of this volume), forms the starting point for many of the essays in the collection. The anthropological perspective the various authors employ is well-suited to exploring this theme from several angles: the 'normal' conditions of social vulnerability that prefigure a disaster; the circumstances that make certain events (like oil spills and chemical leaks) incidental to the 'normal' functioning of the economy; the 'normal', and often distressingl y technocratic, exclusionary, and cynical efforts by public institutions to reconstruct 'normality' discursively and materially in the wake of an event (according to Oliver-Smith's research subjects, 'first the earthquake then the disaster'; p.86); and, victims' efforts to regroup psychologically and culturally, and thus to resituate themselves within the 'normal' order. The book tackles these issues in six main sections devoted respectively to (1) situating the concept of disaster, (2) archaeological perspectives, (3) the cultural and social construction of disaster, (4) varieties of cultural response, (5) the involvement of agencies and survivors in the process of reconstruction, and (6) the implications of disaster for understanding cultural continuity and change. While the sections provide a loose logic to the overall structure of the volume, connections among these issues are drawn more fruitfully within chapters than between sections. Rajan's excellent chapter, 'Bhopal: Vulnerability, Routinization, and the Chronic Disaster' is noteworthy in tracing these connections.

One of the most engaging aspects of the essays is that, in addition to bringing an anthropological perspective to bear on the study of disasters, they also use their interrogations of catastrophe to inform more general questions of social organization, cultural continuity and change. While I am skeptical of Hoffman and Oliver-Smith's claim in the first chapter that 'disaster... draws a researcher as close to basic elements of culture and society as ever found' (p.11), I agree with their subsequent contention that 'disasters offer the investigator amazing situations in which to analyze hypotheses pertaining to the constitution of society and culture, to reap data sustaining or confounding such maxims, and, potentially, to create new suppositions' (p.11). Each of the three chapters in 'The Cultural and Social Construction of Catastrophe', and the five chapters in 'Varieties of Cultural Response', offers convincing evidence of this. The volume concludes with an excellent essay by Susanna Hoffman, titled 'After A tlas Shrugs: Cultural Change or Persistence after a Disaster', which uses empirical examples from Greece and California, and the notions of 'deep' and 'surface' structure, to comment on the implications of disasters for long-term social and cultural reproduction and change. Several of the essays also focus productively on the broad question of human adaptation to environmental context, without lapsing into the environmental determinism which still underlies much hazards research. The chapters all build from Oliver-Smith's programmatic assertion that 'disasters are as deeply embedded in the social structure and culture of a society as they are in an environment. In a sense, a disaster is symptomatic of the condition of a society's total adaptational strategy within its social, economic, modified, and built environments' (p. 25).

Given this interest in large-scale issues of social and cultural continuity, change and adaptation, I am disappointed that none of the authors engage with Ulrich Beck's treatments of 'risk society' (1992, 1999). At a more general level, while I think The Angry Earth offers a set of uniformly stimulating, informative, theoretically rigorous, and well-researched essays, each of which contributes substantially to understanding the problem of disaster, I am less convinced that the chapters work together coherently as a book. I attribute this to four specific problems. First, the initial chapter doesn't offer a sufficiently programmatic introduction to a collection as groundbreaking as this; this shortcoming is only partly overcome by Hoffman's provocative concluding chapter, and the second essay, Oliver-Smith's 'What is a Disaster?: Anthropological Perspectives on a Persistent Question'. Second, the two chapters offering archaeological perspectives sit uncomfortably in their own small section near the beginning o f the book. The long-view provided by archaeological analysis would contribute more integrally to the book if these chapters were located near the end, perhaps in the concluding section on cultural continuity. Third, the book focuses too much on cataclysmic 'natural' events: volcances, earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones. Only two chapters -- on the chemical spill at Bhopal, and oil spills in UK waters -- deal substantially with technological disasters, and none examine the disasters of war. The latter are significant omissions, given the complexion of contemporary disasters. Fourth, and related to the imbalances mentioned above, seven of the sixteen essays were written by one or both co-editors. As a result the book as a whole is dominated by the multi-chapter interpretations of the 1970 Peru earthquake and 1991 Oakland firestorm that these two accomplished scholars offer.

These specific criticisms notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that the essays in this volume are essential reading for those interested in hazards and disaster studies, from senior undergraduates to advanced scholars. In particular, they contribute original and provocative insights into the social and cultural dimensions of disaster, offering insightful analyses of the role of gender, ethnicity, poverty, kinship, the media, institutional policy, and transnational power arrangements in the social constitution of catastrophe.

References

Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

Beck, U. 1999. World Risk Society. London: Polity.

Hewitt, K. (ed.) 1983. Interpretations of Calamity. Boston: Allen & Unwin.