Anthropological Approach to Vulnerability and Major Hazards - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 276

To summarize, the population concerned is composed of settlers
and Ambrymais. The event links a volcanic eruption and a colonial
process. What stood out as a volcanic catastrophe for the settlers
corresponded to a traditional mode of resolving social crises for the
Ambrymais. What was understood as a saving, civilizing enterprise by
the missionnaries was resented as a cultural catastrophe by the natives.
There is an asymmetry in the interpretations.
7.3.4. What makes a catastrophe?
Depending on whether one places oneself at the standpoint of the
“established” inhabitants or the “strangers”, what makes a catastrophe
for one is a strategy for others. There is an asymmetry of perspectives
or, more precisely, asymmetry in the predicative regimes. At the first
stage of analysis - basing it on the sole case of Ambrym - we can put
forward the hypothesis that a catastrophe is something that derails the
plans of individuals and societies, that which does not enter into a
strategic framework: for the Ambrymais, the eruption was wanted; for
the settlers, it was endured. For the settlers, colonization was
considered as civilizing and saving, volontary and positive; for the
Ambrymais, it was endured and unwanted, lived as destructive and
generated a fear of collapse. Each of the two parties reacted depending
on the registers of their own sensibilities and on the registers of their
actions, whether symbolic or material. Each felt a fear relative to the
non-voluntary character of what confronted them. Each evaluated the
danger of the hazard in the light of their field of respective eco-
techno-symbolical competence.
The settlers feared the eruption because they considered it to be a
self-governing phenomenon, independent of their will. The
Ambrymais were gripped with profound anguish at the idea that their
traditions and ancestral customs might be changed because they
considered them immutable. In the two cases, a danger was
experienced when it touched on what the individuals thought of as
independent of their will, whether that stands out as (1) the laws of
nature (e.g. the tectonic of plates) or (2) social rules (e.g. the
alienation of ancestral customs). For each, the ways of being in the
world correspond to particular domains of vulnerability, and to