Historical Disaster Enesecxpi re - download.e-bookshelf.de · Contents Part I State of Research,...

Historical Disaster Experiences

Towards a Comparative and Transcultural History of Disasters

Across Asia and EuropeGerrit Jasper Schenk Editor

123

Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies

on Asia and Europe in a Global Context

Series editors

Madeleine Herren

Thomas Maissen

Joseph Maran

Axel Michaels

Barbara Mittler

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8753

Gerrit Jasper Schenk

Editor

Historical DisasterExperiences

Towards a Comparative and TransculturalHistory of Disasters Across Asia and Europe

EditorGerrit Jasper SchenkFachgebiet Mittelalterliche GeschichteInstitut für GeschichteDarmstadt, Germany

ISSN 2191-656X ISSN 2191-6578 (electronic)Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global ContextISBN 978-3-319-49162-2 ISBN 978-3-319-49163-9 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49163-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934489

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Cover illustration: Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentary of Cicero’s ‘Somnium Scipionis’(Venice: Lucantonio Giunti/Augustino de Zannis da Portese, 1513), fol. 1r, woodcut. BayerischeStaatsbibliothek, Munich: 2 A.lat. b 493. Credit by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

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Acknowledgments

That books also have a destiny prior to their making is well known. This volume is

no exception. As the editor, I am happy and relieved that the long process of editing

and printing, which really stretched the patience of the authors, has come to an end.

Therefore, I wish to express my gratitude first of all to the contributors of this

volume for their faith in the project.

Thanks to all those who have supported the work on the long road to printing, in

particular Kristine Chalyan-Daffner, Eleonor Marcussen, Martin Bauch, Julia Itin,

Benedikt Mette, Susanne Dressler-Mutz, Robert Schwank, and Andrea Hacker—all

team members in Heidelberg and Darmstadt, who have contributed to the success

of the preceding conferences in Heidelberg, Beirut, and New Delhi and thus to

the development of the volume. Without Elaine Griffiths’ thorough editing, the

adventure of assembling a volume of English texts from all kinds of linguistic and

cultural backgrounds into a readable whole would certainly not have been possible.

Language nuances and coloring, however, are unavoidable: those who do research

in a cross-cultural perspective consider variation an enrichment.

The topic of this volume may be gloomy at first glance, but it is worth the effort:

research on the historical dimension of disaster experiences shows not only that

cultures are sensitive tissues but also how elastic they are and what surprising

patterns, combinations, and opportunities for change they offer. This book invites

the reader to discover the diversity and similarities of these experiences and thus to

learn about oneself. As the editor, this is what I am grateful for: the additional

insight that I have gained from the collected research on the topic of this volume.

I hope and wish that the readers will be able to share the same experience.

December 2015 Gerrit Jasper Schenk

v

Contents

Part I State of Research, Concepts, and Methods

Historical Disaster Experiences: First Steps Toward a Comparative

and Transcultural History of Disasters Across Asia and Europe

in the Preindustrial Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3


Living with Hazard: Disaster Subcultures, Disaster Cultures

and Risk-Mitigating Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Greg Bankoff

Part II Materiality of Disasters: Natural Impact, Social Experience

Several Natural Disasters in the Middle East (at the Beginning

of the Eleventh Century) and Their Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Juliette Rassi

Fanaʾ and Fasad: Perceptions and Concepts of Crises and Disasters

in Fourteenth-Century Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Sarah Büssow-Schmitz

The Black Death and the Human Impact on the Environment . . . . . . . . 93

Stuart Borsch

The Day the Sun Turned Blue: A Volcanic Eruption in the Early

1460s and Its Possible Climatic Impact—A Natural Disaster

Perceived Globally in the Late Middle Ages? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Martin Bauch

Cultural Implications of Natural Disasters: Historical Reports

of the Volcano Eruption of July, 1256 CE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

George Saliba

vii

When Europe Was Burning: The Multi-season Mega-drought

of 1540 and Arsonist Paranoia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

Christian Pfister

Part III Heaven and Earth: Searching for Reasons

“Assur Will Suffer:” Predicting Disaster in Ancient Egypt . . . . . . . . . . 189

Joachim Friedrich Quack

“Natural” Disasters in the Arabic Astro-meteorological Malh˙ama

Handbooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

Kristine Chalyan-Daffner

Tracing the Will of the Stars: Indian Astrology and Divination About

Natural Disasters and Threats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Audrius Beinorius

Explaining the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake: The Role of Science,

Astrology, and “Rumours” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Eleonor Marcussen

Part IV Urban Experience: Earthquakes and Fires

The 1173/1759 Earthquake in Damascus and the Continuation

of Architectural Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

Verena Daiber

Living with Disaster: Aleppo and the Earthquake of 1822 . . . . . . . . . . . 295

Stefan Knost

“The Great Fire in Cairo in 1321:” Interactions Between Nature

and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

Syrinx von Hees

Perceiving Urban Fire Regimes in Europe and China (1830 to 1870):

British Fire Insurance Businesses and the Sudden Challenge

of Globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

Cornel Zwierlein

Part V Frequent Experience and Adaptations: Floods and Landscapes

of Defence

Economic Adaptation to Risky Environments in the Late Middle Ages:

The Case of the Accrues of the Doubs in Chaussin (Jura, France) from

c. 1370 to c. 1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355

Thomas Labbe

viii Contents

Measuring “Disaster”: The “Everydayness” of Fluvial Landscapes

and the Colonial State in Gangetic Diaras, 1790s–1880s . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369

Nitin Sinha

When the “Deluge” Happened: The Flood of 1929 in the Surma–Barak

Valley of Colonial Assam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

Monisankar Misra

Alpine Landscapes of Defence: On Modern-Vernacular Avalanche

Protection Systems in the Swiss Alps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

Michael Falser

Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423

Place Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431

Contents ix

Part I

State of Research, Concepts, and Methods

Historical Disaster Experiences: First Steps

Toward a Comparative and Transcultural

History of Disasters Across Asia and Europe

in the Preindustrial Era


Abstract This introductory contribution presents the main topics of the volume. It

positions research on historical natural disasters as a recent trend bridging environ-

mental history, cultural studies, and global history. The appropriate terms, con-

cepts, theories, methods, and problems associated with this topic are also discussed.

Particular attention is payed to the translingual conceptual history of “disaster” and

“catastrophe” and on the concept of “cultures of disaster,” as developed by Greg

Bankoff, with their specific vulnerability or resilience in the context of “naturally”

induced disasters. The questions that form the basis of the contributions to this

volume are presented in detail and include (trans)cultural learning processes based

on experiences of historical disasters, the hybrid character of natural disasters and

their relationship to nature, society, and power, and finally concerning the role of

governance and the consequences of glocalisation processes. To conclude, this

contribution summarises initial results in the form of hypotheses while mainly

concentrating on the transcultural experiences of historical disasters in the

preindustrial era.

Interaction with the natural environment is part of the stock of experience of any

society and is also a condition for its existence. It can be argued that the question of

the cultural specificity of these “societal relationship(s) with nature”1 and their

changeability represents one of the basic issues of all cultures in history and the

present. This holds true for the greatest length of time spent by humanity on Planet

Earth in the simple sense of its changing ability to survive within a setting that, on

the one hand, supplies all things necessary for life and, on the other, contains

G.J. Schenk (*)

Fachgebiet Mittelalterliche Geschichte, Institut für Geschichte, Darmstadt, Germany

e-mail: [email protected]

1This phrase attempts to render adequately the traditional German concept of “gesellschaftliche

Naturverhaltnisse;” see footnotes 46–50 for further remarks on this concept.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

G.J. Schenk (ed.), Historical Disaster Experiences, TransculturalResearch – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49163-9_1

3

mailto:[email protected]

numerous threats to survival.2 Today, however, this is also true in a high-tech global

society, which is far more dependent on material foundations than ever before in the

history of humankind, and in which there is an ever greater awareness of our own

role and agency within the complex system we call “the world.”3 This is shown in

the very fact that current policy-making takes account of the assumed intentional

changeability of societal relations with nature and the natural environment. The

daily media reports on international policy to counter climate change, on rising

resource prices, and oppressed environmental movements in dictatorships should

be sufficient proof.

The contributions in this volume attempt to give an impression of societal

relations with nature in the history of different cultures of Eurasia, which often

have complex relationships with one another. They cite the experiences of histor-

ical (natural) disasters, while adopting a global historical perspective. This intro-

duction begins by presenting the general topic of the volume, along with a few

central terms and concepts. It outlines some of the research traditions underlying

the question and explains essential issues. Finally, it describes the way the volume

arose from a joint research process and what it aims to offer the reader by way of

results. Readers who want a quick overview of the contents of this book may

therefore skip to the last section of this introduction.

Nature, Culture, and Disaster: Concepts, Research,

and Questions

The way societies interact with their natural environment is deeply cultural, just as

the first sentence of this introduction is strongly shaped by a European mindset that

construes “nature” and “society” (or “culture”) as dichotomous entities and relates

them to each other.4 Since a comparative or transcultural perspective on global

2See David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 56–73; a popular but academically problematic treatment by Jared

M. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005);

criticism from Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning Collapse: HumanResilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2010).3We cannot here go into this and the logical problems of differentiation in the systems “world,”

“environment”/“nature,” “society” (e.g. our bodies etc.). In this regard see Niklas Luhmann,€Okologische Kommunikation: Kann die moderne Gesellschaft sich auf €okologische Gef€ahrdungeneinstellen? 4th ed. (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004),11f., 36–39, 71, 218–226,and passim.4For different angles on dealing academically with the construction and constructedness of nature

vs. culture, see Melanie Reddig, “Die Konstruktion von Naturwelt und Sozialwelt: Latours und

Luhmanns €okologische Krisendiagnosen im Vergleich,” in Verschwindet die Natur? Die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie in der umweltsoziologischen Diskussion, ed. Martin Voss and Birgit Peuker

(Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), 129–147. On the historical development in Europe see e.g. Dieter

4 G.J. Schenk

history can be largely determined by analytical prestructuring through the unthink-

ing use of European terms, it is worth reflecting briefly about the way in which some

of the central terms and concepts are used here.5 This hermeneutic precaution is not

intended to provincialise Europe, but, like the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, should

cast a self-enlightening glance at the problems of writing history beyond national-

ism and ideologies—“toward a history on equal terms.”6 This may be accomplished

by drawing on the history of translingual concepts and critically reviewing relevant

concepts and metanarratives. The awareness of the culture-specific genesis of a

concept by no means delegitimises any normative or universal claims it may have,

but it does help us to deal critically with the concept’s validity in specific contexts.

Not just an ordinary reader, but also one familiar with cultural studies, will have

found the topic defined at the beginning familiar, even though the relationship of

“nature” to “culture” has long been rather in the shade of sociological approaches

and, even after some post-modern turns, still plays no particular role within cultural

studies.7 The relationship between “nature,” “human,” and “culture” has, however,

always been a latent topic for philosophical and cultural-historical inquiry.8 The

treatment of the topic has been mostly implicit and has frequently spelled out the

progress discourse in its occasional religious and racist variations, e.g. in older

research on climate, cultural space, and settlement, the history of technology,

sometimes also in older ethnography and the moralising “history of customs”

Groh, Sch€opfung im Widerspruch: Deutungen der Natur und des Menschen von der Genesis biszur Reformation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003); Ruth Groh and Dieter Groh, Weltbild undNaturaneignung: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991); Ruth

Groh and Dieter Groh, Die Außenwelt der Innenwelt: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur, vol.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996).5Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einf€uhrung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2013), 141.6Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29f., 43–45; Carola Dietze, “Toward a History on

Equal Terms: A Discussion of ‘Provincializing Europe,’” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008):

69–84, in particular 78–83.7Gregor Schiemann, “Natur—Kultur und ihr Anderes,” in Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften:Grundlagen und Schl€usselbegriffe, ed. Friedrich Jaeger and Burkhard Liebsch (Stuttgart: Metzler,

2004), 1:60–75. Neither Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in denKulturwissenschaften, 4th ed. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2010), nor Sasha Roseneil and Stephen Frosh,

eds., Social Research after the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) talk about

the environment as an autonomous topic of cultural studies.8See e.g. Jürgen Mittelstraß, “The Concept of Nature: Historical and Epistomological Aspects,” in

Environment across Cultures, ed. Eckart Ehlers and Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Wissenschaftsethik

und Technikfolgenbeurteilung 19 (Berlin: Springer, 2003), 29–35; Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende derNaturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverst€andlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978); Friedrich A. Kittler, Eine Kulturgeschichte derKulturwissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Munich: Fink, 2001), with positions by Johann Gottfried Herder and

Georg W. F. Hegel, James George Frazer and Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl and Martin

Heidegger.

Historical Disaster Experiences: First Steps Toward a Comparative and. . . 5

relating to different peoples.9 Twentieth-century cultural studies on this topic area

are too extensive to be presented here; we can only refer to a few central aspects as

essential points of departure and reference for the topics in this volume.

After World War II, French historical research in the tradition of the journal

Annales, with works such as Fernand Braudel’s book on the Mediterranean (1949),

revived the old question about the “natural” foundation of long-term cultural

developments. The research field then proceeded to divide into the investigation

of climate as a “natural” factor in history10 and the study of collective ideas and

attitudes towards “nature” in the history of literature and mentalities,11 sociology,

and cultural anthropology.12 It covered culturally formed landscapes in historical

geography and the comparative cultural study of “natural” perceptions and descrip-

tions in art and pictorial history.13 The discipline of environmental history and

historical ecology slowly evolved and has long since extended its research from

Europe and North America to the whole world. There is now an encyclopaedia of

9See e.g. Armin Hajman Koller, The Theory of Environment: An Outline of the History of the Ideaof Milieu and Its Present Status (Menasha: Banta, 1918); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: AHistory of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Joachim Radkau,

Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2002), 12; Gerrit

Jasper Schenk, “Der Mensch zwischen Natur und Kultur: Auf der Suche nach einer

Umweltgeschichtsschreibung in der deutschsprachigen Mediavistik—Eine Skizze (avec resume

francais),” inUmwelt und Herrschaft in der Geschichte / Environnement et pouvoir: Une approchehistorique, ed. Francois Duceppe-Lamarre and Jens Ivo Engels, Ateliers des Deutschen

Historischen Instituts Paris 2 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 27–51; Ulf Dirlmeier, “Historische

Umweltforschung aus der Sicht der mittelalterlichen Geschichte,” Siedlungsforschung:Arch€aologie—Geschichte—Geographie 6 (1988): 97–111, particularly 97.10See e.g. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparee du climat (Paris: Fayard,2004–2009); Hubert Horace Lamb, Climate, History, and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (London:

Routledge, 1995); Wolfgang Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des Klimas: Von der Eiszeit bis zurglobalen Erw€armung, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2007); Franz Mauelshagen, Klimageschichte derNeuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010), in particular 28f.; Ronnie

Ellenblum, The Collapse oft the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of theEast, 950–1072 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).11See e.g. Berbeli Wanning, Die Fiktionalit€at der Natur: Studien zum Naturbegriff in Erz€ahltextender Romantik und des Realismus, Natur—Literatur—Okologie 2 (Berlin: Weidler, 2005); Jean

Delumeau, Rassurer et proteger: Le sentiment de securite dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Paris:

Fayard, 1989).12See e.g. Karl-Werner Brand, ed., Soziologie und Natur: Theoretische Perspektiven (Opladen:

Leske und Budrich, 1998); Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson, eds., Nature and Society: Anthro-pological Perspectives (London: Routlege, 1996); Paul E. Little, “Environments and Environ-

mentalism in Anthropological Research,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 253–284.13See e.g. Winfried Schenk, “Historische Geographie: Umwelthistorisches Brückenfach zwischenGeschichte und Geographie,” in Umweltgeschichte: Themen und Perspektiven, ed. Wolfram

Siemann and Nils Freytag (Munich: Beck, 2003), 129–146; Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga

Breuninger, eds., Natur-Bilder: Wahrnehmungen von Natur und Umwelt in der Geschichte(Frankfurt: Campus, 1999); Horst Bredekamp, “Kulturtechnik zwischen Mutter und Stiefmutter

Natur,” in Bild—Schrift—Zahl, ed. Sybille Kramer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Fink, 2003),

117–141.

6 G.J. Schenk

world environmental history.14 Under the heading of a “biological expansion of

Europe,” Alfred W. Crosby explored the globalisation of specifically European

societal relationships with nature from the tenth century, which he calls “ecological

imperialism.”15 Mike Davis, in turn, examines the famines in the British Empire at

the end of the nineteenth century from the angle of political ecology as the result of

a fatal interplay of climatic conditions and the socio-economic system, and conse-

quently evaluates them as “late-Victorian holocausts.”16 Here analyses from the

angle of environmental history frequently necessitate different space and time

scales to those of political history, and widen the horizon of traditional epochal

boundaries and national histories.17

The latest research approaches recommend not just another conceptualisation of

time and space, but also a strong differentiation, indeed a dissolution of the

dichotomous distinction rooted in the European tradition between idealised con-

cepts of “nature” and “culture.” This dichotomy is thought to depend merely on the

fictitious continuity and identity of the two factors. As interacting constructs,

however, they are differently related to each other in time and space, and subject

to a process of constant change.18 The most radical approach in this regard is that of

French sociologist Bruno Latour, whose “symmetrical anthropology” abandons all

dichotomous, relational, or constructivist distinctions between systems (society or

14See e.g. Robert Delort and Francois Walter, Histoire de l’environnement Europeen (Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); Carole L. Crumley, ed., Historical Ecology: CulturalKnowledge and Changing Landscapes (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994);

Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz, ed., The Environment and World History, The CaliforniaWorld History Library 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); John R. McNeill and

Alan Roe, eds., Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge,

2013); Shepard Krech III, Carolyn Merchant, and John R. McNeill, eds., Encyclopedia of WorldEnvironmental History, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2004).15Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nded. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); see also Arnold, The Problem of Nature,1–38; Stephen J. Pyne, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe andEurope’s Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Charles

C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Alfred

A. Knopf, 2011).16Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Ni~no Famines and the Making of the Third World(London, New York: Verso, 2001).17See e.g. Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill, and Joan Martınez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environ-mental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, Globalization and the

Environment 1 (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007); with a traditional division into epochs John

McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, eds., A Companion to Global Environmental History (Chich-ester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Erika Maria Bsumek, David Kinkela, andMark Atwood Lawrence,

eds., Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International EnvironmentalHistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).18See Bernd Herrmann, Umweltgeschichte: Eine Einf€uhrung in Grundbegriffe (Berlin: Springer,

2013), 36–38 on the “wrong categories” of “human, nature and environment.”


culture) and environment (nature).19 According to his theory, non-human actors

(animals and artefacts, which he calls actants) have agency. Along with human

beings, they form hybrids and networks that can cause the borders between the

social and the material to disappear. Latour’s approach is problematic in some ways

but opens the possibility of analysing the relationship between nature and culture

from the new angle of mutual hybridisation. According to other analyses, this

relationship started to shift particularly in the postmodern era.20

Social constructivist approaches, as well as Bruno Latour’s radical thinking, cancertainly be accepted to the extent that the stereotypical concept of “nature” cannot

be mistaken for any kind of empirical reality. It is equally problematic to see such

stereotypes as fixed quantities across cultures and epochs, with clearly defined

borders, because they are not; quite the contrary.21 In addition, terms are charged

with sometimes quite different significance depending on time, space, gender, and

sociocultural group. Knowledge of the existence, differences among, and mutual

influence of certain concepts in different epochs and cultures on each other leads to

a better understanding of the problems examined, such as the way societies interact

with their natural environment. This insight into differences and mutual dependen-

cies at the same time reveals common elements and thereby also enables a critical

view of (ethically or politically required) universal elements.22

In many academic traditions, specific terms are useful (and complex) analytical

instruments, or heuristic tools, without which it would not be possible to discuss

19Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005); Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences IntoDemocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Latour, We Have Never Been Modern(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Latour, “Uber technische Vermittlung: Philosophie,

Soziologie, Genealogie,” in Technik und Sozialtheorie, ed. Werner Rammert, Theorie und Gesell-

schaft 42 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998), 29–81.20This is the much-discussed theory of Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity(London: Sage, 1992). It would be worth reviewing whether the thesis of a “crisis of societal

relationships with nature” in present-day cultures is really true or only the postmodern version of a

myth of progress read backwards; on the crisis, cf. Michael Weingarten, “Die Krise der

gesellschaftlichen Naturverhaltnisse: Annaherung an die kulturell konstituierende Differenzierung

von Natur und Kultur,” in Die Kulturhistorische Wende: Zur Orientierung des philosophischenSelbstverst€andnisses, ed. Dirk Hartmann and Peter Janich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 371–414;

Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, “Die Regulation der €okologischen Krise: Theorie und Empirie

der Transformation gesellschaftlicher Naturverhaltnisse,” €Osterreichische Zeitschrift f€urSoziologie 36, no. 2 (2011): 12–34, in particular 15.21See Reinhart Koselleck, “Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen

Wandels,” in Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, ed. Hans Erich

B€odeker, G€ottinger Gesprache zur Geschichtswisenschaft 14 (G€ottingen: Wallstein, 2002),

29–47; J€orn Leonhard, “Grundbegriffe und Sattelzeiten—Languages and Discourses: Europaische

und anglo-amerikanische Deutungen des Verhaltnisses von Sprache und Geschichte,” in

Interkultureller Transfer und nationaler Eigensinn: Europ€aische und anglo-amerikanischePositionen der Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Rebekka Habermas and Rebekka von Mallinckrodt

(G€ottingen: Wallstein, 2004), 71–86.22Dipesh Chakrabarty, “In Defense of ‘Provincializing Europe:’ A Response to Carola Dietze,”

History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 85–96, in particular: 94–96.

8 G.J. Schenk

empirical findings at all.23 Researchers must always be sensitive to differences

between their descriptive use of a certain term, the use of (only partly

corresponding) terms in the sources, and the differentiations that arise in the life

world that is the object of study and in the language itself.24 The descriptive use of

terms and related concepts can—as through tinted spectacles—colour the knowl-

edge acquired with their help, through for example making a distinction between

“natural environment” and “societal system” that prescribes certain assessment

criteria for the societal relationship to nature.25 For this reason, the first chapter

of this volume discusses some of these basic terms and concepts.26 A discussion

using typed abstractions always becomes productive when (1) they are not under-

stood as ontological entities and (2) the discussion is conducted within a certain

area of cultural meaning or a subsystem. This procedure allows for the sharpening

and substantiation of terms so that they can be used to make verifiable statements.

Culture (or a “sociocultural system”27) is not to be understood as an ontological

entity either, but as an analytical category of limited scope and as a dynamic,

significance-producing system. A “sociocultural system” (or simply “culture”) can

be understood as a considerable quantity of common attributions of meaning and

referential connections shared by a more or less firmly defined group or society.28

Consequently there can be smaller, interlocking “sociocultural systems,” such as

linguistic minorities whose borders with a linguistic majority are fluid. In principle,

23See Adi Ophir, “Concept,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1 (2011), accessed August

20, 2013, http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/concept/, translated as “Begriff,” ForumInterdisziplin€are Begriffsgeschichte 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–24.24On the formation of different linguistic systems and the categorisation into standard and popular

language, see the global historical study by Benoıt Grevin, “La lente revolution des cultures

linguistiques,” in Histoire du monde au XVe siecle, ed. Patrick Boucheron (Paris: Fayard, 2009),

651–667.25On the analytical view of the “oneness of the difference” between the societal system and its

environment (“Einheit der Differenz des Gesellschaftssystems und seiner Umwelt”) as a funda-

mental operation of an environmental sociology that makes it possible for a system to reflect on

itself—without necessarily wanting to agree here totally with this system-theoretical tradition—

see Luhmann, €Okologische Kommunikation, 23f., 33, 47, 63, and passim.26See this introduction and the contributions of Greg Bankoff on “(sub)cultures of disaster” and of

Sarah Büssow-Schmitz on Fanaˡ and fasad.27“Culture” can be understood system-theoretically, even if this goes against Luhmann’s inten-tions, see Dirk Baecker, Beobachter unter sich: Eine Kulturtheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013). In

this chapter we understand by “sociocultural system” the section of society that observes and

reflects on “society”—and is thereby part of society.28On the concept of culture, see the debate between Chris Hann, Rolf Lindner, Doris Bachmann-

Medick, Aleida Assmann, and Albrecht Koschorke in “Fremde Dinge,“ ed. Michael C. Frank

et al., special issue, Zeitschrift f€ur Kulturwissenschaften 1 (2007): 125–146; also Ansgar Nünningand Vera Nünning, eds., Einf€uhrung in die Kulturwissenschaften: Theoretische Grundlagen—Ans€atze—Perspektiven (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008); Max Fuchs, Kultur Macht Sinn: Einf€uhrung indie Kulturtheorie (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), particularly 53–92; and

Stefan Lüddemann, Kultur: Eine Einf€uhrung (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010),particularly 11–20.


http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/concept/

individuals can even feel they belong to several sociocultural systems at the same

time, or be allocated to them.29 In the internal communication within a sociocul-

tural system, and certainly at its blurred boundaries, there are always translations,

creative misunderstandings, and processes of appropriation and rejection that not

only constitute sociocultural borderlines but, at the same time, change the systems

internally and externally.30 A worldview formed in such a complex, frequently

contradictory way—from cosmologies of ancient cultures to the present scientific

understanding of the world as broken down into parts systems with their own

logic—largely defines the terminological perception, explanation, and interpreta-

tion of what the members of the respective culture experience, name, and interpret

as “nature” and “society,” as well as what they consider a “disaster.”

Consequently, a great variety of examples of “nature” and “society”—from the

most varied epochs and cultures, ranging from ancient Egypt to late-colonial

India—are examined here. However, this allows for a contrastive exploration of

specific forms of understanding in the spirit of a hermeneutics of difference. We

offer a comparative perspective but do not aspire to a systematic comparative

analysis. However, a methodology based on historical comparison through juxta-

position poses some advantages:31 at the very least, it begins to throw “transcultural

29According to Wolfgang Welsch, “Was ist eigentlich Transkulturalitat?” in Hochschule alstranskultureller Raum? Kultur, Bildung und Differenz in der Universit€at, ed. Lucyna Darowska

and Claudia Machold (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010), 39–66, particularly 45–47, “internal

transculturality” can also be studied at the personal, micro-level. It has been shown empirically

that individuals who have a generally western, scientific worldview can still use traditional

religious explanatory patterns for the reasons for disaster; see the contribution of Eleonor

Marcussen in this volume. For an approach to explaining such phenomena based on the sociology

of knowledge, see Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “‘...prima ci fu la cagione de la mala provedenza de’Fiorentini...’ Disaster and ‘Life World’—Reactions in the Commune of Florence to the Flood of

November 1333,” The Medieval History Journal 10, no. 1–2 (2007): 355–386, particularly 376.30That is why, in Europe, the medieval rhetoric of a (uniform) “christianitas” was more than just

rhetoric, and had a constitutive effect, cf. Nora Berend, “The Concept of Christendom: A Rhetoric

of Integration or Disintegration?’” in Hybride Kulturen im mittelalterlichen Europa: Vortr€age undWorkshops einer Fr€uhlingsschule, ed. Michael Borgolte and Bernd Schneidmüller, Europa im

Mittelalter 16 (Berlin: Akademie, 2010), 51–61.31See e.g. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, “Historischer Vergleich: Methoden,

Aufgaben, Probleme: Eine Einleitung,” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ans€atze und Ergebnisseinternational vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Haupt and Kocka (Frankfurt: Campus,

1996), 9–45, particularly 12–15. They discern the following functions of a historical comparison:

it can generate new questions (heuristic function) and highlight single cases (descriptive function)

which can be explained in their peculiarity or similarity with other cases (analytic function). For

more on this method see Thomas Welskopp, “Stolpersteine auf dem K€onigsweg:Methodenkritische Anmerkungen zum internationalen Vergleich in der Gesellschaftsgeschichte,”

Archiv f€ur Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 339–367; Werner Daum, Günter Riederer, and Harm von

Seggern, “Fallobst und Steinschlag: Einleitende Uberlegungen zum historischen Vergleich,” in

Vergleichende Perspektiven—Perspektiven des Vergleichs: Studien zur europ€aischen Geschichtevon der Sp€atantike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Helga Schnabel-Schüle (Mainz: von Zabern,

1998), 1–21.

10 G.J. Schenk

light” on environmental history by approaching it from a global perspective.32 Here

“transcultural” is understood as applying to elements that have gone through at least

one “culture” and reach beyond one individual “culture.”33 A transcultural per-

spective therefore means focusing on several cultures, while also studying the

“contact zone” between them,34 and the dynamic processes arising as a conse-

quence of transculturation.

Besides the spatial breadth of the field, we also have to focus on its underlying

roots, i.e. the temporal depth of cultures and their long histories, which interrelate to

a greater or lesser degree. Transculturality can thus not just be understood as the

entanglement of simultaneous but spatially separate cultures, but also of cultures

separated by time but existing in the same area. One example of the connection

between these two levels of investigating transculturality is what is called

astrometeorology.35 This area of research is based on the very old idea that

astronomical and meteorological events are connected and seeks to make forecasts

about meteorological, climatic, and even geophysical events (floods, drought,

earthquakes, etc.) through astronomical observations. Astrometeorology offers

the opportunity to analyse flows and entanglements both diachronically, within

individual cultures, and synchronically, between cultures. This type of research can

be conducted on, for example, what is meant by the word “disaster.”36 It can also be

approached sociologically, such as by seeking explanatory patterns for natural

disasters, and also in view of material culture (e.g. by using objects like instruments

designed to determine the position of stars).37 This comparativism and even

transcultural analytical intention is consequently found in the authors whose

works appear here jointly asking questions about the entanglement of historical

developments and different traditions.38

32On environmental history as an issue for global history, see Conrad, Globalgeschichte, 232–240.33The concept of transculturation was first introduced by Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint:Tobacco and Sugar, 4th ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); the notion has been

developed in the German context by Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form

of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture—City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott

Lash (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 194–213, accessed August 26, 2013, http://www2.uni-

jena.de/welsch/papers/W_Wlelsch_Transculturality.html/, and note 29 in this contribution.34Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge,

1992), 6.35See Stuart Jenks, “Astrometereology in the Middle Ages,” Isis 74, no. 2 (1983): 185–210.36For bibliographical information about the term see notes 57–86.37It is noteworthy that reciprocal influences are shown specifically, as there can naturally also be

independent, parallel developments. See note 129.38In the premodern context, the concept of “histoire croisee” does not prove fruitful, see Michael

Werner and Benedicte Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisee: Entre empirie et reflexivite,” in

De la comparaison �a l’histoire croisee, ed. Werner and Zimmermann, Le genre humain—Editions

du Seuil 42 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 15–49; for exemplary approaches see Wolfram Drews and Jenny

Rahel Oesterle, eds., “Transkulturelle Komparatistik: Beitrage zu einer Globalgeschichte der

Vormoderne,” special issue, Comparativ: Zeitschrift f€ur Globalgeschichte und vergleichendeGesellschaftsforschung 18, nos. 3–4 (2008).


http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/papers/W_Wlelsch_Transculturality.html/

http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/papers/W_Wlelsch_Transculturality.html/

The research concept of “configuration of order” was originally developed for

the European Middle Ages and understood as a form of “societal orderedness.”39 It

offers an approach to analysing pre-modern, societally-shaped, and established

behaviour (e.g. “statehood,” “administration‚” or “governance”) against “nature”

that is not based on the retroprojection of modern Western models of “state” and

“administration.” Culturally shaped attitudes and ideas help to form societal rela-

tionships with nature, like the European idea of natura as a goddess, or “nature” as

God’s book (liber naturae) or the idea that nature can be controlled.40 In the

Ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe, the explanation and interpreta-

tion of nature and society mutually informed each other. Since antiquity,

organological metaphor has linked society and the state with the natural body.

The reading and interpretation of natural signs (e.g. in natural history) leads to the

ordering of both lifetime and history.41 Reading divine signs in nature in order to be

able to calculate the Day of Judgement, according to Johannes Fried, helped to

banish the fear of the apocalypse in medieval Europe and, at the same time, to make

a considerable contribution to developing modern, mathematically based, natural

sciences.42 It is therefore doubtful whether the dynamisation, multiplication, and

hybridisation of traditional ideas of order, roles, and social structures in relation to

nature can only be carried out under the conditions of (Western) modernity,

although they are often considered its achievement. In premodern European life

worlds,43 there seems to have been at least competition between different, even

contradictory, patterns of interpretation for extraordinary natural phenomena deriv-

ing from religious cosmology, magic, and natural history.44 For non-European

39Bernd Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter, “Ordnungskonfigurationen: Die Erprobung eines

Forschungsdesigns,” in Ordnungskonfigurationen im hohen Mittelalter, ed. Schneidmüller andWeinfurter, Vortrage und Forschungen 64 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2006), 7–18, particularly 7f.40For the classical (and problematic) position see Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our

Ecologic Crisis,” Science, New Series 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–1207; Hans

Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 29–57; Barbara

Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadephia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Lektüren im ‘Buch der Natur:’Wahrnehmung, Beschreibung und Deutung von Naturkatastrophen,” in Geschichte schreiben: EinQuellen- und Studienhandbuch zur Historiographie (ca. 1350–1750), ed. Susanne Rau and Birgit

Studt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 507–521.41See e.g. Albrecht Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen K€orpers inder Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag 2007); Mischa Meier, Dasandere Zeitalter Justinians: Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbew€altigung im 6. Jahrhundertn. Chr., Hypomnemata: Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben 147 (G€ottingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 64–72, 84–86.42Johannes Fried, Aufstieg aus dem Untergang: Apokalyptisches Denken und die Entstehung dermodernen Naturwissenschaft im Mittelalter (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001).43On the phenomenological and knowledge-sociological concept of “life world” see Alfred Schützand Thomas Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt (Konstanz: UTB, 2003), 327–347; Ilja Srubar,Kosmion: Die Genese der pragmatischen Lebenswelttheorie von Alfred Sch€utz und ihranthropologischer Hintergrund (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).44See Schenk, “...prima ci fu la cagione,” 359, 375–377.

12 G.J. Schenk

cultures, we can likewise assume a host of competing interpretation patterns

stemming from cosmology and natural history and can show how deeply Asia

and Europe participated in a transcultural dialogue, precisely with the example of

premodern cosmological and astrometeorological explanations for natural disasters

such as earthquakes and floods. The use of astronomical and astrological knowl-

edge in forecasting tended to spread, probably on the basis of Mesopotamian

traditions, throughout both the East and the West.45 It was specifically interpreted

and reshaped in each case, integrated into existing knowledge, and, as shown in

Eleonor Marcussen’s contribution here, aroused attention mutatis mutandis even intwentieth-century India.

In keeping with the often very complex worldview of pre-industrialised cultures,

the respective “societal relationship with nature” is complicated in terms of prac-

tical action as well.46 Following socio-ecological and culturalist research

approaches, a “societal relationship with nature” is understood as a non-external

relationship between “society” and “nature.” “Nature” is therefore to be distin-

guished from “culture” (or “society”); the poles of this antipodean difference are,

however, both inseparably and dynamically related to one another. In sociocultural

systems, this main difference can be conceptualised, communicated, and shaped

variably in space and time—symbolically, terminologically, metaphorically, phil-

osophically, religiously, scientifically, etc.—and therefore made an object of his-

torical analysis. All societal relationships with nature are, moreover, characterised

45See e.g. Anu Kapur, Vulnerable India: A Geographical Study of Disasters (New Delhi: Sage,

2010), 91–119; Christopher Z. Minkowski, “Competing Cosmologies in Early Modern Indian

Astronomy,” in Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingreem,ed. Charles Burnett et al., Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Sciences: Text and Studies 54 (Lei-

den: Brill, 2004), 349–385; S. M. Razaullah Ansari, “Sanskrit Scientific Texts in Indo-Persian

Sources, with special Emphasis on siddhantas and karan˙as,” in Burnett et al., Studies in the History

of the Exact Sciences, 587–605; Charles Burnett, “Arabic and Latin Astrology Compared in the

Twelfth Century: Firmicus, Adelard of Bath, and ‘Doctor Elmirethi’ (‘Aristoteles Milesius’),” inBurnett et al., Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences, 247–263; Arabic Astronomy in Sanskrit:Al-Birjandı on Tadhkira II, Chapter 11 and Its Sanskrit Translation, ed., comm., and trans.

Takanori Kusuba and David Edward Pingree, Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science: Texts

and Studies 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); David Pingree, “Mesopotamian and Greek Astronomy in

India,” in Expanding and Merging Horizons: Contributions to South Asian and Cross-CulturalStudies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass, ed. Karin Preisendanz, Beitrage zur Kultur- und

Geistesgeschichte Asiens 53 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007), 41–50;

Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology: From Babylon to Bıkaner, Serie Orientale Roma

78 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 1997).46Selected sources on this section: Thomas Jahn and Peter Wehling, “Gesellschaftliche

Naturverhaltnisse—Konturen eines theoretischen Konzepts,” in Soziologie und Natur:Theoretische Perspektiven, ed. Karl-Werner Brand, Soziologie und Okologie 2 (Opladen:

Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 75–93; Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn, eds., Soziale €Okologie:Grundz€uge einer Wissenschaft von den gesellschaftlichen Naturverh€altnissen (Frankfurt: Campus,

2006); Egon Becker, Diana Hummel, and Thomas Jahn, “Gesellschaftliche Naturverhaltnisse als

Rahmenkonzept,” in Handbuch Umweltsoziologie, ed. Mathias Groß (Wiesbaden: Verlag fürSozialwissenschaften, 2011), 75–96; Brand andWissen, “Die Regulation der €okologischen Krise.“


by production and consumption processes (“metabolism”47), which play a major

role in the exercise of sociocultural and political power. The societal relationship

with nature is not stable; it can be transformed and even slip gradually into crisis,

e.g. caused by slow changes in the main difference or within subsystems of

society.48 It is also conceivable that the abovementioned disturbance of the system,

stemming from the environment surrounding the system (“nature”) that is not open

to cultural control or influence, has a material/substantive character and occurs

suddenly, thus elucidating the societal relationship with nature.49 This principle

holds true for natural disasters. Such “occurrences” (Michael Weingarten) or

“disturbances” (Niklas Luhmann) generally prompt more communication,50

e.g. because a critical re-evaluation of the dichotomy or, on the contrary, a rapid

restoration of the status quo ante, becomes necessary.

The theme of this volume has thus been restricted to exploring the varied societal

interactions with disasters in which the cultural peculiarities of societal relation-

ships with nature can be teased out by way of example. In descriptive terms, the

disasters are related to natural or environmental hazards.51 The societal relationship

with nature is not confined to mental configurations of order, collective ideas, or an

allegorical understanding of society, but also has quite pragmatic and material

sides. At least since the publication of Thomas Robert Malthus’ “Essay on the

Principle of Population” (1798), the problem of how societies handle natural

resources has been a constant issue in view of the rise in consumption through

47Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Andreas Mayer, and Anke Schaffarzik, “Zur metabolischen Trans-

formation von Gesellschaft und Soziologie,” in Groß, Handbuch Umweltsoziologie, 97–120.48See, in particular, Brand and Wissen, “Die Regulation der €okologischen Krise” and Weingarten,

“Krise der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhaltnisse.”49On the possibilities of distinguishing between “disaster” and “crisis” in the communication

system “society” from narratological angles, see Ansgar Nünning, “Krise als Erzahlung und

Metapher: Literaturwissenschaftliche Bausteine für eine Metaphorologie und Narratologie von

Krise,” in Krisengeschichte(n): ‘Krise’ als Leitbegriff und Erz€ahlmuster inkulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, ed. Carla Meyer, Katja Patzel-Mattern, and Gerrit Jasper

Schenk, Beihefte der Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 210 (Stuttgart:

Steiner, 2013), 117–144, particularly 126f. Good examples of sudden disturbances are large

volcano eruptions, tsunamis, or earthquakes, see the contributions of Martin Bauch, George Saliba,

Verena Daiber, and Stefan Knost in this volume.50Weingarten, “Krise der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhaltnisse,“ 407f: ”Widerfahrnis”; Luhmann,€Okologische Kommunikation, 97f., 210, 218–226, speaks on 40–50, 96–100, 218–226, 269 of the

“Resonanz” of the system, with which it reacts to environmental events according to its own

structure (as “disturbance”—in German, St€orung—of the main difference).51On the terminology see the most comprehensive discussion yet of the different definitions of

disaster in Enrico L. Quarantelli, ed., What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question (London:

Routledge, 1998). See also Anthony Oliver-Smith, “‘What is a Disaster?’ Anthropological Per-spectives on a Persistent Question,” in The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspectives,ed. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman (New York: Routledge, 1999), 18–34; Carsten

Felgentreff and Wolf R. Dombrowsky, “Hazard-, Risiko- und Katastrophenforschung,” in

Naturrisiken und Sozialkatastrophen, ed. Carsten Felgentreff and Thomas Glade (Berlin: Springer,

2008), 13–29.

14 G.J. Schenk

population growth, even if it takes place in different situations and prompts

diametrically opposing standpoints in discourse.52 The heart of the matter is the

old question of how to deal with commons or common-pool resources (forests,

water, air, raw materials), which was reformulated in 1968, in reference to the

industrial era, by the North American biologist Garret Hardin as the “Tragedy of the

Commons.”53 In view of growing environmental protection and the rising con-

sumption of raw materials, he updated the question of what legal status these

resources have and how they should be distributed, administrated, and used

(whether privately or collectively owned, for the common good, etc.). These

questions are not new and have always been eminently political. They concern

social, economic, legal, and institutional aspects of individual and societal relation-

ships with nature54 and are thus the focus of recent studies in history, sociology, and

political science.55 As a central aspect of societal relationships with nature,

common-pool resources are considered here too, mainly with the example of

dealing with regular and sometimes disastrous river flooding.56

A Short Conceptual History of “Disaster”

and “Catastrophe”

In the present, everyday understanding, a disaster or catastrophe is thought to be an

extreme situation, the sudden irruption of an extraordinary misfortune with grave

consequences like the injury and loss of life for humans and animals, material

damage, and destruction on a large scale.57 On the one hand, this understanding

52See Donald Winch, “Malthus,” in Three Great Economists, ed. David D. Raphael, Donald

Winch, and Robert Skidelsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 105–218; for differing

positions see Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of theWorld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Nicolas Stern, The Economics of ClimateChange: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).53Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.54See e.g. the discussion of Wittfogel’s theses below, note 117f.55Werner R€osener, “Zur Erforschung der Marken und Allmenden,” in Allmenden und Marken vomMittelalter bis zur Neuzeit: Beitr€age des Kolloquiums vom 18. bis 20. September 2002 imMuseumsdorf Cloppenburg, ed. Uwe Meiners and Werner R€osener, Kataloge und Schriften des

Museumsdorfs Cloppenburg 14 (Cloppenburg: Museumsdorf, 2004), 9–16; Elinor Ostrom,

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1990); Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker, eds., Rules,Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Brand

and Wissen, “Die Regulation der €okologischen Krise;” Arun Agrawal and Elinor Ostrom, “Col-

lective Action, Property Rights, and Decentralization in Resource Use in India and Nepal,”

Politics and Society 29, no. 4 (2001): 485–514.56See in particular the contributions of Stuart Borsch, Thomas Labbe, Nitin Sinha, and Monisankar

Misra in this volume.57For definitions see above, note 51; Jacques Berlioz and Gregory Quenet, “Les catastrophes:

Definitions, documentation,” in Histoire et memoire des risques naturels: Actes du seminaire


covers events connected to geophysical, meteorological, or biological natural

hazards such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, flooding, storms, fires, epidemics,

and famines, but also includes events arising from technological and sociopolitical

hazards such as power plant accidents, wars, and acts of terrorism. However, this

understanding of disaster does not necessarily have an objective linguistic equiva-

lent in other times and cultures and we must thus clarify the history of the term.58 In

English, the term disaster has been mostly used to describe these phenomena. Also

found in German (Desaster,Unstern) and the Romance languages (French desastre,Italian disastro, and Spanish desastre), its origins go back to the astro-meteorolog-

ical prehistory of the term. This corresponds to the idea found in antiquity and the

Ancient Near East that certain constellations of stars were responsible for a fatal

“turn” (in astronomy, “revolution,” in the theory of drama, “catastrophe”) in the

human life-world. The conceptual histories of “disasters” and “catastrophes” have

been the topic of academic study in recent times but need to be outlined in greater

detail here, in view of the transcultural history of natural disasters in particular.59

The word disastro is a thirteenth-century Italian neologism composed of Greek

and Latin elements (Latin dis- and the Greek ἄστρoν, or “star”) that arose in an

environment of linguistic and cultural exchange, probably in Tuscany.60 While

international ”Histoire et memoire des risques naturels en region de montagne” organise parl’equipe Histoire Economique, Sociale et Politique (HESOP) du Centre de Recherche d’Histoirede l’Italie et des Pays Alpin (CRHIPA), Universite Pierre Mendes France—Grenoble 2 au MuseeDauphinois de Grenoble les 25 et 26 novembre 1999, ed. Rene Favier and Anne-Marie Granet-

Abisset (Grenoble: CNRS—Maison Sciences de l’Homme-Alpes, 2000), 19–37, particularly

24–28, Dieter Groh, Michael Kempe, and Franz Mauelshagen, “Einleitung:

Naturkatastrophen—wahrgenommen, gedeutet, dargestellt,” in Naturkatastrophen: Beitr€age zuihrer Deutung, Wahrnehmung und Darstellung in Text und Bild von der Antike bis ins 20.Jahrhundert, ed. Groh, Kempe, and Mauelshagen, Literatur und Anthropologie 13 (Tübingen:Gunter Narr, 2003), 11–33, particularly 15–19; on threshold values, see the discussion in

Felgentreff and Dombrowsky, “Hazard-, Risiko- und Katastrophenforschung,” 20–25; BenWisner

et al., eds., At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd ed. (London:

Routledge, 2004),10f.58See Mischa Meier, “Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe in der griechischen

Historiographie: Einige einleitende Anmerkungen,” Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007):

44–56; Anna Akasoy, “The Man-Made Disaster: Fires in Cities in the Medieval Middle East,”

Historical Social Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 75–87, particularly 75–78.59Latterly Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit? ‘Disastro,’ Katastrophe, Strafgericht—Worte, Begriffe und Konzepte für rapiden Wandel im langen Mittelalter,” in Meyer, Patzel-

Mattern, and Schenk, Krisengeschichte(n), 177–212; and the shortened english version: Gerrit

Jasper Schenk, "’Disastro,’ Catastrophe, and Divine Judgement: Words, Concepts and Images for

‘Natural’ Threats to Social Order in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in: Disaster, Death and the

Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400-1700, ed. Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45–67; Monica Juneja and Gerrit Jasper Schenk,

“Viewing Disasters: Myth, History, Iconography, and Media across Europe and Asia,” in Disasteras Image: Iconographies and Media Strategies across Europe and Asia, ed. Monica Juneja and

Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2015), 7–40.60See Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini, s.v. “disastro,” accessed August 31, 2013, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/.

16 G.J. Schenk

http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/

http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/

rendering a perhaps Occitanian version of the narrative cycle of the “Seven wise

masters” in his vernacular, an anonymous translator conveyed the meaning of the

apparently unknown Old French word micieffo to his readers by using the Italian

word disastro.61 It was meant to denote the misfortune inflicted on the hero of the

story through a band of robbers. The story goes back to a widespread Oriental and

Indian narrative (the Sindbad cycle), which came to Europe perhaps through the

Crusaders.62 The translation was obviously influenced by this originally Greek-

Arabic, Persian, or even Indian narrative, along with an increased interest in horo-

scopes that occurred in Europe after the High Middle Ages. Both these factors

favoured the view of a fateful coincidence influenced by certain constellations of

stars.63 Further, early evidence likewise suggests that this new word originated

among seafarers and merchants in the Mediterranean between the Levant, North

Africa, Sicily, Tuscany, the South of France, and Catalonia; their risky experiences

at sea, with their sometimes happy, sometimes terrible endings (Italian: fortuna dimare), were apparently familiar in their transcultural narrative versions.64 While the

power of the elements played a major role for ships, it seems that the word “disastro”

first only went back to the concept of an individual misfortune associated with

unfavourable stars, but was not related to natural disasters. However, the association

was easy to make. At the turn of the late Middle Ages, through their reception by

scholars of Arabic and Greek texts, natural explanations for earthquakes, storms, and

floods had begun to spread, having recourse to Aristotelian theories. Mediated by the

commentary De diluviis (“On Floods”) on a passage from Plato (Timaios 22c–23b)

by Avicenna (980–1037 CE), and translated from Arabic into Latin, there was a

discussion on whether there could, on natural grounds, be too much of the four

elements air, water, fire, and earth.65 The view that a particular constellation of stars

61See Andrea Giannetti, ed., Libro dei Sette Savi di Roma: Versione in prosa F, Scrittura e

scrittori: Serie Miscellanea 25 (Alessandria: Edizione dell’Orso, 2012), 121.62See Udo Gerdes, “Sieben weise Meister,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters:Verfasserlexikon, vol. 8, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), cols.

1174–1189, and more generally the website of the Society of the Seven Sages, accessed August

30, 2013, http://myweb.dal.ca/hrunte/seven_sages.html.63See Gerd Mentgen, Astrologie und €Offentlichkeit im Mittelalter, Monographien zur Geschichte

des Mittelalters 53 (Stuttgart: Thorbecke 2005), and some contributions in Günther Oestmann,

Rutkin H. Darrel, and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds., Horoscopes and Public Spheres: Essays on theHistory of Astrology, Religion and Society 42 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005).64See note 59; Francesco Bonaini, ed., Statuti inediti della citt�a di Pisa dal XII al XIV secolo, vol.3 (Florence: Vieusseux, 1857), 535; Burkhardt Wolf, Fortuna di mare: Literatur und Seefahrt(Zürich: Diaphanes, 2013), 11–14, 89–109; Sylvain Piron, “L’apparition du resicum en

Mediterranee occidentale aux XIIeme–XIIIeme siecles,” in Pour une histoire culturelle du risque:Genese, evolution, actualite du concept dans les societes occidentales, ed. Emmanuelle Collas-

Heddeland et al. (Strasbourg: Universite d Haute-Alsace 2004), 59–76, particularly 61–68.65See the Libellus de diluviis, Manuel Alonso Alonso, ed., “Homenaje a Avicena en su milenario:

Las traducciones de Juan Gonzalez de Burgos y Salomon,” Al-Andalus 14, no. 2 (1949): 306–308,particularly 306. On the textual history see Jean-Marc Mandosio and Carla Di Martino, “La

‘Meteorologie’ d’Avicenne (Kitab al-Sifa’ V) et sa diffusion dans le monde latin,” in Wissen


http://myweb.dal.ca/hrunte/seven_sages.html

resulted in the “victory” of one of the elements over the others was subsequently

discussed by Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280 CE) and other scholars as a possible

natural cause of the Great Flood and other floods.66 Through university teaching and

popular wind and water flooding forecasts—like the constantly reformulated Toledo

letter (since 1186 CE), in which an apocalyptic “flood” through wind or water was

predicted in a certain sign of the zodiac—this interpretation pattern gradually spread

throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.67

A telling description of this notion of linking unfavorable stellar constellations

and natural disasters is found in an illustration of a book on cosmological questions

printed in 1513 in Venice, namely in the Neo-Platonic commentary of Ambrosius

Theodosius Macrobius (ca. 385/90–post 430 CE) on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis(see the cover of the book).68 This visualised what the theoretical concepts had

already linked: wise men from the East, indicated by their turbans, calculate the

position of the stars between the sun and the moon using technical instruments

(there is a quadrant in the right-hand half of the picture). Two cherubs in the sky

with inflated cheeks, typifying the wind, point to the ancient theory of heating air

through incidents in the stellar sphere. The lower half of the picture depicts the

effect of the heated air—a collapsing building, shaken by the air expanding in the

earth’s cavities. The natural disaster “earthquake” (Latin terraemotus) is thus

envisaged pictorially as dis-astro. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, this

abstract concept rapidly left the sphere of learned discourse and spread to the

general public. When some astrologer-astronomers (no clear line was drawn

between these two occupations until well into the modern era) predicted a new

great flood for 1524 as the result of human sinfulness and foreshadowed by the

natural sign of a conjunction in pisces, broadsheets depicting graphic impressions

of the apocalyptic forecast started to make their rounds (Fig. 1).69 At the centre of

the simple woodcut is the fatal constellation of pisces and its effect, the flood with

€uber Grenzen: Arabisches Wissen und lateinisches Mittelalter, ed. Andreas Speer and Lydia

Wegener (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 406–424, particularly 420.66See Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit?” 189f.67On the Toledo letter, see Dorothea Weltecke, “Die Konjunktion der Planeten im September

1189: Zum Ursprung einer globalen Katastrophenangst,” Saeculum 54, no. 2 (2003): 179–212;

Mentgen, Astrologie und €Offentlichkeit, 17–158.68Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius and Joannes Riuius, En tibi lector candidissime, Macrobius,qui antea mancus, mutilus, ac lacer circu[m]ferebatur, nu[n]c primu[m] integer, nitidus[et] suonitori restitutus, in quo graecae maiestatis dignitas quo ad eius fieri potuit superstesreperit[us] (Venedig: Lucantonio Giunta, 1513), fol. 1r; for the broad reception of Macrobius’scommentaries of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis see Bruce Eastwood, “Manuscripts of Macrobius,

Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, before 1500,” Manuscripta 38, no. 2 (1994): 138–155.69See Heike Talkenberger, Sintflut: Prophetie und Zeitgeschehen in Texten und Holzschnittenastrologischer Flugschriften, 1488–1528, Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur

26 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), 154–335, 436 and 520 fig. S7; Gabriele Wimb€ock, “In den

Sternen geschrieben—in die Bilder gebannt: Die Furcht vor der Großen Sintflut im Zeitalter der

Reformation,” in AngstBilderSchauLust: Historische Katastrophenerfahrungen in Kunst, Musikund Theater, ed. Jürgen Schlader and Regina Wohlfahrt (Dresden: Henschel 2007), 212–239.

18 G.J. Schenk

Fig. 1 Practica deutsch Meister Hansen Virdung von Haßfurt/vff das Erschroecklich Jare.M.ccccc. vn[d] xxiiij [. . .], Speyer: Anastasius Nolt, 1523 [Verzeichnis der im deutschen

Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts, VD 16 V 1281], here according to the

copy at Munich, Bavarian State Library, 4 Astr. P. 510/54


several corpses floating by. Astronomer-astrologers stand in the middle, on both

sides of the flood, holding instruments (at the left, a quadrant, and at the right, an

armillary sphere or astrolabe) that enable them to observe and measure the heavens.

The disastrous events on earth are not confined to the flood: in the foreground to the

left, a wild skirmish goes on, while on the right, people pray on their knees. This

highly popular forecast was widely disseminated against the background of the

Reformation and Peasants’ War, but was also strongly criticised, not least because

the prophecy never came true.70 Yet neither the Macrobius text of 1513 nor the

broadsheet of 1522 used the word “disastro” to describe what was shown.

In German-speaking areas, the corresponding wordDesaster did not develop in asimilarly influential way to disastro in the Italian-speaking world. Instead, the wordused was Katastrophe (catastrophe). The history of the word and term took a

different course here. While the term Katastrophe was likewise semantically

charged with astronomic-astrological significance in the Renaissance period, the

concept of a sudden and mostly fatal change was differently accentuated thanks to

its origin in dramatic theory and owed itself to the rediscovery and reinterpretation

of some ancient facets of the concept of catastrophe.71

In antiquity, the Greek word καταστρoφή generally stood for turning points and

sweeping changes, albeit with a certain ambivalence as to whether they were

negative or (seldom) positive in connotation.72 By contrast and to simplify greatly,

in the transition from late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, “catastrophe”

occupied five semantic fields.73 The word was used to mean turning, e.g. when

playing with a ball, and by Christian writers like Jerome to mean repentance, or a

confessional change of heart. In parallel, the word was used as a technical term only

in specialised areas of life as in ancient stagecraft and dramatic theory, to indicate

the resolution at the end of a comedy and as a medical term for morbid “turns” in

the digestive system. This broad utilisation was almost forgotten in the medieval

millennium. In the eighth century, diligent monks in the St. Gallen monastery and

elsewhere held to the basic meaning of turning-point in their glossaries, probably

70Aby Moritz Warburg, Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische

Klasse 26 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1920), 29–35; see e.g. Paola Zambelli, “Introduction: Astrologers’Theory of History,” in Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time,ed. Paola Zambelli (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), 24; Ottavia Niccoli, Profeti e popolo nell’Italia delRinascimento (Rome: Laterza, 1987), 185–215. On the perception of the planetary conjunction of

1524 in China with differing interpretations see David W. Pankenier, “The Planetary Portent of

1524 in China and Europe,” Journal of World History 20, no. 3 (2009): 339–375.71See Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit?” 194–199, with all necessary references for the following.72See also Mischa Meier, “Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe;” Olaf Briese and Timo

Günther, “Katastrophe: Terminologische Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft,” Archiv f€urBegriffsgeschichte 51 (2009): 157–163, 167.73Internationale Thesaurus-Kommission, ed., Thesavrvs lingvae Latinae, (Leipzig: Teubner,

1912), 3:598; fully treated by Alan Rosen, Dislocating the End: Climax, Closure, and theInvention of Genre, Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature 35 (New York: Lang, 2001),

6–11; Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 161–163, who completely overlooked the medical term;

cf. the following paragraphs.

20 G.J. Schenk

because of their reading of Jerome. Furthermore, the word remained only as the

Latinised Greek medical term for morbid changes in digestion.74

This reduction of the meaning of catastrophe was not broadened until the

emergence of Renaissance humanism, primarily in German-speaking countries.

North of the Alps, among the humanist class of the Reformation, the old and

nearly-forgotten concept from drama theory gained increasing currency from the

end of the sixteenth century, referring to tumultuous politico-religious swings. This

can be attributed to a conceptual rediscovery of the ancient poetological facets of

the term by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam.75 It was hardly an accident that, soon

after the abovementioned flyers forecasting a disastrous Great Flood started circu-

lating in 1524, the Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, a friend of Erasmus, took up the

Greek word for a politico-religious upheaval that he expected in 1531 in connection

with what contemporaries described as a prodigious appearance of (Halley’s)comet.76 The use of this astrologically inflected term in a Reformation-humanistic

context created a terminological and narratalogical expectation that problems and

situations of the present would eventually dissolve at the end of history. This

expansion of the meaning of the word, highly charged with medieval astrological

and salvific traditions, can also be found in the correspondence of other humanists.

The semantics of “catastrophe” changed, as Olav Briese and Timo Günther aptlyput it, very gradually, “from a stage of ‘categorical ambivalence’ [. . .] to that which[. . .] it is today: ‘bad case’ or ‘worst case’.”77 However, this was not necessarily thecase for the countries which spoke Romance languages, probably because “catas-

trophe” there was competing with desastre and disastro and, in England, with

“disaster.” Therefore, “catastrophe” remained a word confined more or less to the

realm of poetry.78

74See Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Dis-Astri: Modelli interpretativi delle calamit�a naturali dal medioevo

al Rinascimento,” in Le calamit�a ambientali nel tardo medioevo europeo: Realt�a, percezioni,reazioni; Atti del XII convegno del Centro di Studi sulla civilt�a del tardo Medioevo S. Miniato,31 maggio–2 giugno 2008, ed. Michael Matheus et al., Centro di Studi sulla Civilt�a del Tardo

Medioevo San Miniato, Collana di Studi e Ricerche 12 (Florence: Firnze University Press, 2010),

23–75, in particular 68f.; Schenk, “Vormoderne Sattelzeit?” 195f.75See Rosen, Dislocating the End, 6–11; Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 164f.76See Philipp Melanchthon, Philippi Melanthonis opera quae supersunt Omnia, vol. 2, ed. CarolusGottlieb Bretschneider, Corpus Reformatorum 2 (Halle a.d. Saale: C.A. Schwetschke et filium,

1835), 546 no. 1009; see also Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: TheCase of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 124–173.77Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 164 (translated from German by the author).78For example in France, see Paul Imbs, Tresor de la langue francaise: Dictionnaire de la languedu XIXe et du XXe siecle (Paris: Gallimard 1977), 5:299. In the mid-fifteenth century, Francois

Rabelais uses “catastrophe” in an astrological context (comet) with a negative connotation, but

narratively integrated, see Francois Walter, Katastrophen: Eine Kulturgeschichte vom 16. bis ins21. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2010), 16f; Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 163, 165; seealso Michael O’Dea, “Le mot ‘catastrophe,’” in L’invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siecle: Duchatiment divin au desastre naturel, ed. Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre, Bibliotheque des Lumieres

73 (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 35–48, on the later development; Olaf Briese, “‘Genommen auß den

Comoedien:’ Katastrophenbegriffe der neuzeitlichen Geologie,” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte als


In the debate held in German by Johannes Kepler and Helisaus R€oslin from 1597

to 1604 over the significance of heavenly phenomena for terrestrial political events,

the term “catastrophe” was fully Germanised and came to describe a turn of events

on Earth reflecting movements in the heavens. This use of the term harkened back

to astronomical terms and stood for a range of extraordinary (according to R€oslinpositive, but normally negative) phenomena; however, it referred to societal pro-

cesses, not natural disasters. The term “catastrophe” also had a second career, by

virtue of a narrowing of special terms in the pre-modern era, when it competed with

“revolution” and “crisis.”79 While “revolution”—originally an astronomical-

geological term—had taken on a primarily socio-political meaning following the

events of 1789, the term “catastrophe” was increasingly used after 1800 to refer to

extreme natural events and, by around 1900, was fixed in this meaning in German

with the coining of the compound noun Naturkatastrophe.This transcultural and translingual history of the word and term also throws light

on the processual interconnection, indeed the inseparability, of natural and cultural

history in the sense of modern cultural studies, which is unmistakable when

studying “disasters” and “catastrophes.” The inter- and transcultural dimension of

a topic that has hardly been analysed so far in research also becomes clear, since the

terms point to the millenary career of an interpretative pattern from the Ancient

Near East and its transformations into other cultural contexts. The asymmetry

between the Orient, which thanks to its reception of ancient knowledge and

Indian mathematics was highly educated in astronomy, and the medieval West,

which remained almost illiterate until long after the V€olkerwanderung, led to the

transfer of the disastro-meteorological concept from East to West, although it was

understood differently and given different nuances in other cultural contexts.80 The

same seems to apply to the term “risk,” which probably found its way into European

languages from the Arabic-speaking Levant in the twelveth century via the Med-

iterranean.81 In the European contexts of trade, law, and religion, it changed its

meaning considerably, however, until the fifteenth century, when it took on an

importance in Italy’s emerging insurance sector that semantically corresponds to

our current “risk.” This new understanding of danger came into competition with

ancient retributive-theological models of interpreting disasters as punishment for

sin, enabled a calculating attitude to risks and eventually led, at the level of

Begriffsgeschichte: Terminologische Umbr€uche im Entstehungsprozess der modernenWissenschaften, ed. Michael von Eggers and Matthias Rothe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009),

23–50, in particular 30f. on development in the English-speaking world.79See a recent and more differentiated account in Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 172–195.80On the complex entanglements of cultural “flows” see Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and

Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture, and Society 7, no. 2 (1990):

295–310, in particular 296–301 (but limited to the the modern era).81See Piron, “L’apparition du resicum,” particularly 61–68.

22 G.J. Schenk

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