2025/06/16 by Rogelio Altez · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance
paper · doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199389407.013.585
openalex publication_date 2025/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract As happens with all states of thinking, lines of research emerge in correspondence with certain historical and semantic contexts. Although antecedents of the study of an anthropology of disasters can be found around the middle of the 20th century, this field of study only came to exist from the moment it became aware of itself at the end of the last century, assuming its own theoretical basis and defining its objects of study. This context—the last decades of the last century—was marked by the end of the Cold War as a global issue, framed by the increase in the impacts produced by natural phenomena that released large amounts of energy all over the planet. The gradual decline in the political prominence of global issues has led to a growing awareness of vulnerability as a causal factor in disasters. In this scene, the anthropological discipline provided methods and concepts for the analytical understanding of the subject. At the same time, the United Nations stipulated that the whole world should focus on risk reduction as a common objective. This is the same context in which Venezuelan anthropological thought began to approach the study of disasters. It did so in tandem with a discursive transformation driven by institutional changes in risk management and further stimulated by a 1999 disaster that caused widespread destruction and profound social upheaval in Venezuela. The global context in which the anthropological discipline developed its view of disasters coincided with the structural transformation of power relations in this country and with the beginning of a period of economic, political, and subjective deterioration. The contextual conditioning of the emergence, development, and consolidation of this field of research imbued its analysis with a critical view of its object and all its variables. For the anthropology of disasters in Venezuela, the observation of a case study of national scope, such as the 1999 event, was indivisible from the reading of the reality from which it deployed its gaze. To understand the approach and epistemological proposal of this line of research in Venezuela, it is necessary to carefully review this context. In the same way, the process that underlies this background and determines its form and content has worn away the field of study in the very place where it flourished. The anthropology of disasters in Venezuela emerged between multidimensional planes where object and context merged as one problem. It ended up migrating, although without fragmenting its gaze, in a movement that made it disappear from its context of origin to survive at a distance, as happened to millions of people.