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privileged registers of pain. The latter also define, by contrast,
dimensions of resilience. We thus observe at Ambrym in 1913 a
propensity to live effectively the cultural changes on the part of the
settlers by integrating them into strategies in which they could act. For
“white men”, this implies a horizon that can be qualified as “modern”,
where social changes are perceived as positive, indeed necessary. On
the part of the locals, the idea of a human influence on the seismic
environment - notably the existence of magic strategies called up
through rituals - makes effective the possibility to live with a
minimum of suffering on an island with strong volcanic activity. The
danger that an individual faces is evaluated in the light of a field of
competence [DOU 82, DUC 82], this - material or symbolic, rational
or magic - is defined by a certain type of capacity for control imputed
with regard to the environment.
In summary, hazards are perceived as catastrophes when they are
not integrated into a strategy. Every type of strategy is necessarily
relative to a field of competence. The “white man” ( waet man ) fears
large-scale environmental phenomena because they believe that
controlling these is outside their capacity of action, just as the
Ambrymais fear changes that affect their customs since these have,
from their point of view, an ancestral legitimacy that exceeds their
capacity for judgment. The milieu of the settlers is structured on a
essentialist mode of action (a material efficacity), whereas that of the
Ambrymais rests upon a magical mode of action (a “symbolic
efficacity” in Lévi-Strauss's sense [LEV 62]).
Between action and judgment, the domains of intervention are not
the same from one cultural milieu to another. In the first case, it is
assumed that it is not possible to modify certain natural phenomena
(earthquakes); in the second, it is assumed that one should not change
cultural laws (traditions). In the first case, the constraint is considered
as being of a material nature; in the second case, it is regarded as
being of a moral and ethical nature. In the first human milieu (that of
the settlers), the range of human initiatives on what surrounded them
arose from the secular world; in the second case, it was ritual (magic).
Thus, in the two types of milieux, what affects something that cannot
be acted upon is considered as catastrophic. In effect, for each of the
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