Catastrophic Sociology
February 8, 2010 by SocProf and tagged Development, Global Governance, Neo-Colonialism, Poverty, Risk Society, Social Inequalities, Social Stratification, Sociology
Over at Sociology and Criminology at Keele, Mark Featherstone applies Virilio’s theory of catastrophe to Haiti’s recent earthquake. First he summarizes Virilio’s theory in a clear fashion:
How does this apply to a natural disaster like the earthquake?
This resonates with Pierre Le Hir’s article in Le Monde:
It all goes back to SHiP (Structure / History / Power). Natural disasters are what they are but they differentially affect societies based on their history (in Haiti, slavery, revolution and then constant neo-colonial interventionism), social structure (corruption and largely non-functioning government, mass poverty) and power (omnipresence of gangs, corrupt police, unfavorable regime of global governance).
And as studies show (based on research on known earthquakes since 1900), the number of victims of earthquakes is not correlated to the severity of of seismic activity nor to the density of the population in the affected area but to the level of poverty or wealth.
This holds true for any natural disaster. In the past twenty years, 98% of the two million victims of such disasters were in poor areas. At the same time, the economic losses to developing countries due to natural disasters were twenty times what they are for developed countries. It is a double penalty. And it shows no signs of going away.
The study of natural disasters is the study of global inequalities.
Posted in Development, Economy, Global Governance, Globalization, Neo-Colonialism, Poverty, Risk Society, Social Inequalities, Social Stratification, Sociology | 1 Comment »
February 16th, 2010 at 3:18 am
Prof Raymond Murphy at the U of Ottawa has written about the differential impact of natural disasters. For example,he studied the effects of a heavy and ice storm on different groups in the NE States and Eastern Canada. The way he tells it, when the power cables came down, some Amish groups experienced a big storm, but no disaster. The idea is that societies can be more or less brittle, more or less resilient in the face of geological or meteorological events.
http://www.socialsciences.uottawa.ca/soc/eng/profdetails.asp?ID=292&pageID=2