The violence unleashed by natural disasters exposes human beings to the most elemental of borderline situations. Human will and capacities, poised on the precarious frontier between nature and culture – a frontier defined differently by each epoch and culture – are forced to undergo an ordeal of life and death. Disaster – viewed as a condition of emergency – becomes the site of survival or failure not only of individuals but of entire communities. The conference will investigate specific culturally formed patterns of action and collective ways of coping brought forth by catastrophic events. This makes all disasters, even those which unfold in the heart of “nature”, profoundly socio-cultural happenings. For survivors the experience of disaster can become a search for meaning: in what terms is the encounter with elemental violence perceived, interpreted, described and interiorized? In order to express that which defies description, cultures take recourse to visual media: verbal images, myths, signs, symbols and films. Representations of calamities domesticate and contain them as icon. Various dimensions of the event – signs of imminent danger, the shock of disaster, destruction and ruin, escape and rescue, overcoming danger, victory over the elements, help for the victims – have generated a repertoire of motifs with a view to portray disaster through a wide range of media, across time and history. The analysis of the ways disasters are imagined and visualized is the theme of this conference, in two senses. First, it will address methodological questions pertaining to a transcultural vocabulary and iconography of disasters and second, it intends to systematically analyze the event of disaster and its medial representation as a complex and composite socio-cultural process.
Internationales Wissenschaftsforum, Heidelberg, March 1 - 03, 2012
International Conference – Organised by
Prof. Monica Juneja (Heidelberg) and Prof. Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Darmstadt)