Cultures of Disaster

Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines

Greg Bankoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780700717613
• eBook ISBN: 9781135785901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

In this fascinating and comprehensive study, Greg Bankoff traces the history of natural hazards in the Philippines from the records kept by the Spanish colonisers to the 'Calamitous Nineties', and assesses the effectiveness of the relief mechanisms that have evolved to cope with these occurrences. He also examines the correlation between this history of natural disasters and the social hierarchy within Filipino society. The constant threat of disaster has been integrated into the schema of daily life to such an extent that a 'culture of disaster' has been formed.

1 ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse

Natural disasters seem to have increasingly caught the attention of the western media in the late twentieth century, carrying reports and images of drought, flood, famine, earthquake, volcanic eruption, typhoon, tsunami and the like into suburban homes on an almost daily basis. Pinatubo, Kobe, ‘Mitch’, Izmit, Orissa and countless other hazards have become household names overnight as the glare of western public attention momentarily illuminates a less well-known corner of the globe.¹ Whether natural disasters now happen more frequently is a matter of some considerable scientific controversy, not least about what actually constitutes ‘natural’ and what are human-induced ones.² Statistically, it is claimed that the number of hazards causing 25 or more deaths rose annually from 10 in the 1940s to about 50 by the 1990s (Chapman 1994: 5). United Nations experts calculate that the number of disasters rose on average 6 per cent each year between 1962–92 (Associated Press 1995: 1, 6) and that they affected an average of 200 million people each year during the 1990s, a fourfold increase from the late 1960s (Walker and Walter 2000: 188; Smith 1996: 39).³ Various explanations have been put forward to account for this escalation, some even claiming that it is just the product of better media coverage and others that it merely reflects a more densely settled global population. But few would now dispute that hazards are having a growing impact on human society: ironically both as a consequence of greater affluence and of greater poverty, of larger cities and more costly infrastructure (Kobe and Izmit) and of greater environmental degradation caused by overpopulation and unsustainable rural practices (‘Mitch’ and Orissa).

How to mitigate the effects of hazards and relieve the consequences of disasters seem destined to be major issues of academic enquiry in the new century if for no other reason than that they are inseparably linked to questions of environmental conservation, resource depletion and migration patterns in an increasingly globalised world. However, less than adequate attention has been directed to considering the historical roots of the discursive framework within which hazard is generally presented, and how that might reflect particular cultural values to do with the way in which certain regions or zones of the world are usually imagined. In one sense, this chapter is an attempt to tell what is a very old story, one that the reader will undoubtedly have heard many times before but that has the distinctive property of repeatedly reappearing in different guises. This is the story (or rather three separate but related stories) about two worlds called them and us, where the ‘us’ is the West (particularly Europe and North America) and the ‘them’ is everywhere else, most especially the equatorial zone. And where the story is as long as there have been western encounters and contacts with those regions. In another sense, though, the story is also part of a new one, about western societies that are unable to escape from the cultural constraints that continue to depict large parts of the world as dangerous places for us and ours and that provide further justification for western interference and intervention in others affairs for our and their sakes.

Rendering the World Unsafe

The process by which large areas of the globe were rendered unsafe to Europeans predates the nineteenth century, but a systematically constructed paradigm, based on consistent argument and substantiated by empirical investigation that depicts certain areas of the world as particularly deleterious to human health, had to await the scientific advances of the new century. David Arnold describes how the growth of a branch of western medicine that specialised in the pathology of ‘warm climates’ was a conspicuous element in the process of European contact and colonisation from the earliest years of overseas exploration. More than a mere chronology of scientific discovery that drew attention to the medicinal characteristics of new plants, therapeutic practices and esoteric knowledge, he refers to the manner in which western medicine came to demarcate and define parts of the world where these ‘warm climate’ diseases were prevalent (Arnold 1996: 5–6). Here it is the role of the medical practitioner as colonial rather than simply medical expert, where his long-term attitudes to distinctive indigenous societies and distant geographical environments proved instrumental in how such lands came to be conceptualised.

The very earliest European accounts describe equatorial regions in almost ecstatic terms, evoking frequent analogies between an environment of abundance, lushness, fecundity and tranquillity and the location of an earthly paradise. In his account detailing the first voyage to the Caribbean of 1492–93, Christopher Columbus depicts a natural world full of ‘safe and wide harbours’, ‘great and salubrious rivers’, ‘high mountains’ and ‘a great variety of trees stretching up to the stars’ (1494). But more unfavourable attitudes that accorded value only in terms of human utility rapidly came to prevail as the seventeenth unfolded (Thomas 1983). The very exoticness of the landscape was increasingly associated with a more malevolent nature: the scene of unrelenting climate (drought and flood), tempestuous weather (storm and typhoon), violent landscape (earthquake and volcanic eruption), dangerous wildlife (the abode of fierce predators – tigers on land, sharks at sea), and deadly disease (plague and pestilence). Heat and humidity were increasingly held responsible for the high death rate of Europeans – the white man’s graveyard of Batavia and India, especially when compounded by the usual intemperance, imprudence, diet and demeanour of the newly arrived. As the European encounter with these regions intensified during the eighteenth century through the slave trade, plantation agriculture and the colonial experience, so, too, did the perception that disease, putrefaction and decay ran rampant in the moist warm air of the Tropics (Anderson 1996; Curtin 1989: 87–90). A more scientific reasoning prevailed by the nineteenth century. In particular, there was a growing conviction that geomedical boundaries restricted races to what were termed their ‘ancestral environments’ (Harrison 1996). Equatorial regions were now defined as ones unsuited to Europeans, whose physical constitutions evolved under different climatic conditions, were unable to tolerate the harmful effects of the ultra-violet rays of the sun (Anderson 1995: 89).⁴

Arnold argues that the growing body of scientific knowledge on these regions, one increasingly substantiated by statistical enumeration of morbidity and mortality and by a medical geography that attributed local diseases to specific climates, vegetation and physical topographies, produced not only a literature on warm climates but also invented a particular discourse that he refers to as tropicality (Arnold 1996: 7–8, 10). One of the most distinctive characteristics of this discourse was the creation of a sense of otherness that Europeans attached to the tropical environment, the difference of plant and animal life, the climate and topography, the indigenous societies and their cultures, and the distinctive nature of disease. More than denoting simply a physical space, the otherness conveyed by tropicality is as much a conceptual one: ‘A Western way of defining something culturally and politically alien, as well as environmentally distinctive, from Europe and other parts of the temperate zone’ (Arnold 1996: 6). In this first rendition of the story, then, western medicine effectively defines equatorial regions as a zone of danger in terms of disease and threat to life and health, one that conceptually culminates with the establishment of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1899. The medical discoveries of the late nineteenth century, the elaboration of germ theory and the realisation that bacteria and not climate were responsible for disease, credited western medicine with the means of effecting a ‘cure’ to the regions’ inherent dangers, an impression that persisted through most of last century.⁵ However, the reappearance in the last decades of the twentieth century of antibiotic-resistant strains of known diseases, the spread of the AIDS pandemic, and the emergence of new viruses such as ebola fever for which there is no known cure, have seriously shaken the notion of western security (Brookesmith 1997).⁶ Once again, those regions of ‘warm climates’, from which these new threats are seen to emanate, are depicted as dangerous and life-threatening to western people, giving a new lease of life to the notion of tropicality in the twenty-first century (Altman 1998).

While large parts of the globe were gradually rendered unsafe and then progressively rendered safer by the conceptual geography of western medicine, the dominant position of disease as the primary delimiting condition was superseded, though never completely replaced, by a new discursive framework especially in the years following World War II. Not that tropicality has ever been completely eclipsed as a paradigmatic concept: western governments continue to issue health and vaccination warnings to their citizens travelling to regions regarded as lying within endemic malarial, choleric or such like zones, as well as imposing stringent quarantine regulations on produce, material (and migrants) originating from those same areas. But Cold War rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union for global dominance led western theorists to formulate new kinds of policies designed to solve what were deemed the pressing social and economic conditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The intent was nothing less than to replicate the characteristic features of ‘advanced’ western nations: industrial, urban, technical societies with high growth rates and rising living standards whose citizens were educated and had largely imbued modern cultural values. But in attempting to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the people who lived in these regions, to give them a ‘fair deal’ and so contain the spread of Communism, western investment and aid policies effectively divided the world conceptually in two between donor and recipient nations, between developed and underdeveloped countries.

Development conveys just as much an essentialising sense of otherness as the concept of tropicality. It strips peoples of their own histories and then inserts them into preconceived typologies ‘which define a priori what they are, where they’ve been and where, with development as guide, they can go’ (Crush 1995: 9). Michael Watts argues that all models of development share common ‘organicist notions of growth’ and ‘a close affinity with teleological views of history’ (1995: 47). Regardless of their ideological persuasion, development has always been conceived of in terms of a linear theory of progress from traditional to modern, from backward to advanced. Thus modernisation theory posits that undeveloped societies evolve into developed modern nations along paths chartered by the West: economically through a stages of growth model (Rostow 1960) and politically from authoritarianism to democracy (Huntington 1968). Though the subject of intense criticism, most notably by the dependency school of theorists who claim that an industrialised centre has been able to appropriate the surplus of a primary producing periphery leading to the latter’s underdevelopment (Frank 1967), the basic assumptions about comparable stages of development to the West (no matter how much the route may have strayed from the path) are not questioned. Indeed, even the most radical critique of capitalism, the Marxist mode of production model, still depicts development in terms of successive stages in which feudalism is replaced by capitalism that, in turn, is ultimately succeeded by socialism. According to Emery Roe, the debate over development is best understood as a folkloric narrative populated by diverse villains, heroes and donors at various times and in different guises (1991: 288). So the 1960s and 1970s saw a shift away from market to state-centred alternatives where civil society was accorded only a minor role; the 1980s were associated with the so-called neo-liberal revolution of the new right and a period of retrenchment, austerity and protectionism; while the hallmark of the 1990s was rising levels of global indebtedness and the harsh application of structural adjustment programmes. Whatever the differences in emphasis or rhetoric, the dominant discourse remains the same; as Jan Pieterse observes, the debates are all about alternative developments and never about alternatives to development (1998: 364–368).

In particular, Arturo Escobar charts the manner in which this developmentalism became the predominant discourse after 1945; how the twin goals of material prosperity and economic progress were universally embraced and unquestioningly pursued by those in power in western nations. He refers to this conceptual ascendancy as a process of ‘colonisation’ as it indelibly shapes representations of reality, making permissible certain modes of being and thinking while disqualifying others (Escobar 1995: 5). As a consequence, many societies began to be regarded in terms of development and to imagine themselves as underdeveloped, a state viewed as synonymous with poverty and backwardness, and one determined by assuming western standards of attainment as the benchmark against which to measure this condition. As with tropicality previously, the discourse of development creates much the same ‘imaginative geography’ between Western Europe–North America and especially the equatorial regions and, in the process, ‘constructs the contemporary Third World, silently, without our noticing it’ (1995a: 213). Terms such as First World–Third World, north–south, centre–periphery all draw attention to the manifest disparities in material gratification between the two, while simultaneously reducing the latter to a homogenised, culturally undifferentiated mass of humanity variously associated with powerlessness, passivity, ignorance, hunger, illiteracy, neediness, oppression and inertia (Escobar 1995: 9).

Escobar has been criticised for losing sight of the larger issues, especially the manner in which the development discourse fits into the political context of power relations that it helps to produce, maintain and benefits from. That it is not just text but a reality that has political, social and economic actuality for peoples (Little and Painter 1995: 605). The question of development’s origins has also been raised; that it has a much longer pedigree than 1945. Notions of development are clearly discernable in nineteenth century concepts of colonial ‘trusteeship’ that became central to the historical project of European empire, as well as in the measures taken to alleviate the worst of the social disorders consequent upon rapid urbanisation, poverty and unemployment (Cowen and Shenton 1995: 28–29). In particular, Friedrich List argues in his National System of Political Economy (first published in 1856) that nations had unequal productive potentials and that it would be a fatal mistake for the ‘savage states’ of the ‘torrid zones’ if they attempted to become manufacturing countries. Instead, they should continue to exchange agricultural produce for the manufactured goods of the more temperate zones (List 1856: 75, 112). Michael Watts also reiterates this link between colonialism and development but argues that it has even older roots and was the product (and the problem) of the eighteenth century normative ideas inherent in modernity. More importantly, he maintains that development was not simply imposed by the West upon the rest but required the existence of a non-developed world for its own production (Watts 1995: 48–49).⁷

However, these important qualifications do not significantly detract from the singular manner in which development as a discursive historical framework both creates and maintains a domain of thought and action that has conceptually invented the Third World. Moreover, it has achieved this feat not only in the western imagination but also among those in the region itself, who find it difficult to think of themselves in any other way than through such signifiers as overpopulation, famine, poverty, illiteracy and the like (Escobar 1995a: 214). It also continues to colonise reality despite the increasing decentralisation of societies, the demise of the Soviet Union, the emergence of a network of world cities, and the globalisation of culture (Castells 1996: 1, 112–113). In this second retelling of the story, the concepts inherent in development similarly cast most of the non-western world as a dangerous zone. But it is one where poverty and all its manifestations have replaced disease as the principal threat to western well-being now defined in terms of values and lifestyle. How to achieve development and so overcome underdevelopment becomes the fundamental problem facing most societies, and one where the ‘cure’ is envisaged in terms of modernisation through the agency of western investment and aid. Despite the ability of certain, mainly Asian economies to industrialise in the late twentieth century, development remains for most peoples a chimera, a dream, moreover, that over 50 years has progressively turned into a nightmare of ‘massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression’ (Escobar 1995: 4).

Natural Disasters and Vulnerability

While ‘natural disasters’ are not a conceptual term in the same way that tropicality and development are, the regions in which such phenomena most frequently occur have been incorporated into a discourse about hazard that sets them apart from other implicitly ‘safer’ areas. Between 1963 and 1992, over 93 per cent of all major global hazards occurred outside of North America and Europe, which respectively accounted for only 2.8 per cent and .9 per cent of these events (Smith 1996: 33).⁸ During the 1990s, 96 per cent and 99 per cent respectively of the annual average number of persons killed or affected by hazards resided outside the United States/Canada and Europe (Walker and Walter 2000: 173–175).⁹ But the disproportionate incidence of disasters in the non-western world is not simply a question of geography. It is also a matter of demographic differences, exacerbated in more recent centuries by the unequal terms of international trade, that renders the inhabitants of less developed countries more likely to die from hazard than those in more developed ones. No single term has yet emerged that defines the areas where disasters are more commonplace: the media often sensation-alises a certain region as a ‘belt of pain’ or a ‘rim of fire’ or a ‘typhoon alley’, while scientific literature makes reference to zones of ‘seismic or volcanic activity’, ‘natural fault lines’ or to meteorological conditions such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Whatever the denomination, however, there is an implicit understanding that the place in question is somewhere else, somewhere where ‘they’ as opposed to ‘we’ live, and denotes a land and climate that have been endowed with dangerous and life-threatening qualities.

More recently these qualities have come to be increasingly expressed in terms of a society’s vulnerability to hazard. The concept of vulnerability, however, denotes much more than an area’s, nation’s or region’s geographic or climatic predisposition to hazard and forms part of an ongoing debate about the nature of disasters and their causes. In the 1970s, some western and western trained social scientists began to question the hitherto unchallenged assumption that the greater incidence of disasters was due to a rising number of purely natural physical phenomena. Attributing disasters to natural forces, representing them as a departure from a state of normalcy to which a society returns to on recovery, denies the wider historical and social dimensions of hazard and focuses attention largely on technocratic solutions. It establishes a conviction that societies are able to take steps to avoid or ameliorate disasters through the application of the appropriate technocratic measures properly carried out by bureaucratically organised and centrally controlled institutions. Disaster prevention, therefore,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• List of acronyms
• Introduction: Of jellyfish and coups
• 1. ‘Vulnerability’ as western discourse
• 2. Environment and hazard in Southeast Asia
• 3. A history of hazard in the Philippines
• 4. The ‘costs’ of hazard in the contemporary Philippines
• 5. The politics of disaster management and relief
• 6. The economics of red tides
• 7. The social order and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation
• 8. Cultures of disaster
• Conclusion: Hazard as a frequent life experience
• Notes
• References
• Index