Anthropological Approach to Vulnerability and Major Hazards - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 294

- a pleasure is something that enables an individual to enjoy
(morally and symbolically) the milieu he/she inhabits;
- a risk is immaterial (since it applies to disasters that are certainly
material but that have not yet occured, which do not therefore have a
concrete existence), and leads to a potentially “destructuring”
relationship (in the sense of Watsuji, that is to say destructuring for its
mediance).
7.4.7. An analytical tool: the ideogram of a catastrophe
The anthropological approach to disasters requires a means of
illuminating the concrete reality of a catastrophe, that is to say its
meaning in relation to the milieu where it occurs. Something that is
experienced as catastrophic equates something in which the meaning
is lacking because this quadruple unpacking has not been - or has only
partially been - operated: the victims can barely envisage the positives
in the event, its motivating, structuring, beneficial and serendipitous
dimensions. From this perspective, the catastrophic is something that
remains a state of menace, fear and anguish, when the protagonists'
relationship to it remains stuck solely at the level of risk and
impediment. Indeed, any reading of disasters that pays attention only
to risks and impediments will end in catastrophism and will lack
“symbols” with which its overall meaning can be grasped. Speaking
of “symbols” enables us - by analogy with the Japanese or Chinese
ideograms - to put forward a graphic version of catastrophes. An
ideogram is in effect composed of “symbols”, which, when combined
spatially, suggest ideas. For example, the “symbol” for water
associated with that of fire gives - in Japanese - the idea of a
catastrophe. Each symbol conveys a specific meaning, a trajectory for
interpretation of what has happened, but it is together that they form a
general idea, the overall character of the catastrophe.
It is possible to develop a graphic form for the understanding of
catastrophes. It enables “connections to be made visible” [WIT 92]
between the disaster and its concrete reality (which is at once
ambivalent and diachronic). Such an “ideogram” of catastrophe can be
operated by linking the four “symbols” that constitute the four medial