C Cambridge University Press
Science in Context 25(1), 1–15 (2012). Copyright doi:10.1017/S0269889711000275
Introduction: Witness to Disaster: Comparative Histories
of Earthquake Science and Response
Deborah R. Coen
Barnard College, Columbia University
E-mail: [email protected]
For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often
terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in
a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is
easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic,
naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of
modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the
foundations of human knowledge. They have been known to cast doubt on divine
providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human
mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake
and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the
limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans.
Recent historical studies of the political ramifications of earthquakes have largely
remained isolated from the history of science (with the exception of Geschwind 2001
and Clancey 2006a). One goal of this issue is therefore to consider earthquakes as
crises not only of political order but also of epistemic order. The peculiarities of
earthquakes as objects of scientific knowledge have repeatedly undermined hierarchies
of knowledge and knowers. Such events appear to be precisely what the concepts of the
exact sciences are incapable of grasping: “catastrophe cannot be comprehended exactly”
(Voss 2006, 13; emphasis in the original). On the other hand, natural catastrophes are
widely seen by historians and economists as “the salt of the modernization process”
(Mauch 2009, 7). Earthquakes can thus be used to probe strengths and weaknesses in
emerging intellectual hierarchies and to explore the complex relationships between
knowledge and fear, expertise and common sense.
From its ancient beginnings, seismology has had a moral imperative to confront
terror with reason. In various ancient traditions, the highest aim of natural knowledge
was to release man from fear. The Roman poet Seneca, responding to the earthquake
at Campania in 62 CE, reflected that seismic disasters could plunge humans into a
uniquely boundless form of fear: “For what can seem safe enough to anyone if the
world itself is shaken and its most substantial parts collapse? If the one thing in the
cosmos which is immovable, and fixed so as to support everything that rests on it,
starts to sway, and if the earth loses its characteristic feature of stability, where will our
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Deborah R. Coen
fears eventually subside?” (Seneca 2005, 112). Unlike fires or floods, earthquakes left
their victims no place to hide. “What consolation – I do not say help – can you have
when fear has lost its way of escape?” For the ancient stoic, the proper response to such
terror was rational explanation. Seneca turned to the theories of Greek philosophers
that explained earthquakes in terms of underground water and trapped air. In other
words, he sought to move from the local circumstances of the disaster to the global
phenomena it illustrated. He accomplished this by envisioning a cosmos in which
earthquakes could be understood as a local imbalance within the universal whole – or,
in his bodily analogy, as a stress in one part of the cosmic body. In order to “protect
against fear of earthquakes,” as one classicist puts it, Seneca “normalized” them “by
setting them in the context of ‘the all’” (Williams 2006, 146). For Seneca, a rational
explanation of earthquakes was meant not to obscure the human toll, but to make the
suffering of survivors more bearable.
At the same time, the moral charge to explain earthquakes has at times
been subversive of scientific authority. Survivors demand explanation immediately,
sometimes to the benefit of theological interpretations and at the expense of rationalistic
ones. The historical relationship between scientific and religious explanations of
earthquakes is thus intimate and complex. In a medieval and Renaissance framework,
earthquakes were to be interpreted either as punishment for sinners or reminders to
the faithful. It was theologically essential that earthquakes, as portents, be recognized
as deviations from nature’s normal course (Daston and Park 2001). In the seventeenth
century, the promoters of empirical science conceived the ambition of assimilating
storms, earthquakes, and other disasters to a framework of natural law. On the principle
that disasters were part of God’s original design, natural philosophers took on the task
of elucidating the function of natural catastrophes in the context of creation as a whole.
Hence some seventeenth-century natural philosophers posited that earthquakes were
one means by which the earth excreted noxious fumes and fluids, like a living body.
Others credited earthquakes with the formation of mountains and continents (Oeser
2001). These early modern naturalists believed that by studying the workings of nature,
they would discover “new testimony of the divine Wisdom” and so would “tempests,
volcanoes, lightning and earthquakes, begin to lose their horror” (Mulcahy 2006, 58).
This providential view of earthquakes famously met its test on the morning of
November 1, 1755, when an earthquake, fire, and tsunami swept away one quarter
of the population of the magnificent city of Lisbon. The Lisbon earthquake has
come to stand for the onset of a secular, rational, statist modernity, though its
precise ramifications are still a matter of debate (e.g. Braun and Radner 2005).
Certainly, the disaster was an incentive to naturalistic inquiry. Earthquakes increasingly
became an object of empirical investigation and theoretical speculation. The Calabrian
earthquakes of 1783 in particular drew a host of empirical surveys, including early
instrumental measurements and some of the first realistic illustrations of earthquake
damage (Kozák and Čermák 2010; Keller 1998; Dewey and Byerly 1969). Yet
contemporary philosophy tends to make a broader claim: that, after Lisbon, natural
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Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response
3
disasters were removed from the purview of moral philosophy and set squarely in a
framework of technical analysis, prediction, and control (e.g. Robinson 1990, 22–
23).
This discontinuity thesis ignores, first, the fragility of early seismology. A systematic,
observational science of seismology did not develop until the second half of
the nineteenth century. Moreover, as Monika Gisler has emphasized, theological
explanations continued to blend with naturalistic ones. In the Swiss Protestant context
of the late eighteenth century, renowned naturalists sought physical theories compatible
with a theological interpretation of earthquakes (Gisler 2007; cf. McCook 2009).
Indeed, the assumption that piety has traditionally inspired passivity in the face of
natural disasters appears unfounded (Mauelshagen 2009). This is one lesson of Orihara
and Clancey’s essay in this issue on Japanese responses to the Kanto earthquake of
1923. Seismology flourished in Japan in the Meiji era as part of the nation’s push
to participate in and compete with Western modernity. Despite or perhaps because
of the triumph of seismological expertise over “popular superstitions” in the Meiji
era, the 1923 destruction of a major city opened the door to alternative authorities.
The very prominence of Japanese seismologists and engineers made them particularly
vulnerable to censure in the wake of the destruction (Clancey 2006a, 228). Not
cosmopolitan scientists but right-wing nationalists and millenarian Buddhists won the
most fervent allegiance from survivors. Common to the nationalists and millenarians
was the insistence that the earthquake was not part of the normal course of nature.
Instead it represented “the threat posed by outside powers beyond Japan’s control: in
the first instance Heaven and in the other, the hostile foreign world.” This construction
of the earthquake as an event intrinsically beyond scientific and national control was,
the authors show, formative for subsequent Japanese politics.
Thus seismology has stood as a symbol alternately of the vitality and the
vulnerability of Western-style modernity. Throughout the history of European
imperialism, earthquakes repeatedly undermined the claim that colonization would
spread enlightenment and technological progress. Earthquakes mocked the selfconfidence of European colonists in Asia and the New World by leveling their stone
houses, while leaving native structures unscathed (Clancey 2006a; Montessus de Ballore
1904). Europeans never tired of repeating Darwin’s bon mot that “Earthquakes alone are
sufficient to destroy the prosperity of any country” (Darwin 1989, 232). Darwin’s dark
vision of an England in the throes of seismic tremors, reduced to bankruptcy and prey
to “the hand of violence and rapine,” caught the imagination of a British public anxious
for the future of its empire. As Paul White explores in his essay here, Darwin had been
primed by his readings of Humboldt and Tschudi to appreciate the fortitude of South
American natives in the face of seismic power, a fortitude to which Europeans could
only aspire. Witnessing his first earthquake in Chile, he had apparently been struck by
a vision of imperial decline – not in the course of centuries but in a matter of seconds.
“Who can say how soon such will happen?” he mused in his journal. What might an
Englishman conclude from such experiences? The need for better engineering? Or for
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Deborah R. Coen
greater humility in the face of nature’s powers? Earthquakes thus had the potential to
upend the hierarchies of “modern” and “primitive,” “civilized” and “savage.”
The threat that earthquakes posed to European self-confidence was not only a
function of physical devastation. It also stemmed from the methods of research that
Europeans invented in their attempts at the intellectual mastery of seismic forces.
There were, first, no clear limits to the kind of observations that might be relevant to
earthquake research. According to theories widely accepted in the nineteenth century,
earthquakes might be triggered by volcanoes, barometric fluctuations, atmospheric
electricity, geomagnetism, humidity, or the positions of celestial bodies. Equally, studies
of the course and impact of earthquakes required a wide variety of data, from the
geological to the zoological and psychological. Geographically as well, earthquakes
presented no clear limits. Speculation was rife over the apparent coincidence of
earthquakes across vast distances and the subterranean channels that might account for
such teleconnections. This uncertainty about what constituted seismology’s evidence
brought the science into precarious contact with such “pseudosciences” as astrology
and spiritualism. In Victorian Britain, for instance, seismologists joined forces with
the Society for Psychic Research to investigate the case of a “seismic ghost” (Anon.
1897). The fascination that such phenomena held throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries is suggestive of the Romantics’ fascination with the mineral world:
Romanticism “counters the demystification performed by Enlightenment science and
philosophy with a remystification of rock,” giving a “voice and a face to the earth’s
material” (Heringman 2004, 61).
Moreover, until reliable seismographs became widely available in the 1920s, the study
of earthquakes relied of necessity on human senses. “It will be obvious that no single
person can, from his own observations, estimate the area agitated by an earthquake,
though much may be accomplished by the combined observations of many” (De
la Beche 1836, 142). “Likely in no other field,” wrote another late nineteenthcentury geologist, “is the researcher so completely dependent on the help of the
non-geologist, and nowhere is the observation of each individual of such high value
as with earthquakes. . .Only through the cooperation of all can a satisfying result be
delivered” (Neumayr 1887, 305). In the 1870s, the collection of eyewitness testimony
was given a powerful stimulus by a new theory of earthquakes. Eduard Suess showed
in 1873 that intense seismic events in Lower Austria could be mapped along a single
line; he concluded that these earthquakes resulted not from forces of uplift but from
“fractures or faults or some other discontinuity in the earth’s crust” (Strehlau 2006).
With the work of Suess and his Swiss colleague Albert Heim, the empirical study of
earthquakes took on new meaning as evidence for geology’s new global “tectonics,”
the study of horizontal stresses in the earth’s crust and the mountains and basins they
produced (Şengör 2003; Westermann 2010). As I show in my essay for the issue, decades
worth of eyewitness testimony indicated that the capacity to observe an earthquake in
progress bore an ambiguous relationship to scientific training. Often the best observers
were to be found among women, children, and the lower classes, not to mention those
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Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response
5
of “nervous sensibility.” The purest state of objectivity in the face of raw seismic power
seemed to result not from deliberate cultivation but from a pre-conscious, animalistic
response to sheer terror. In this way, earthquakes called into question the efficacy of
“scientific” habits of observation relative to pure instinct (cf. Daston 2008b; Vetter
2011).
Consider, for instance, William James’ reaction upon awakening to tremors on the
Stanford campus just before dawn on April 18, 1906. “My first consciousness was one
of gleeful recognition of the nature of the movement. ‘By Jove,’ I said to myself, ‘here’s
B’ssold earthquake, after all!’ And then, as it went crescendo, ‘And a jolly good one
it is, too!’ I said.” James testified to the earthquake enthusiasm of the Humboldtian
age. He had trained in the tradition of Humboldt and Darwin as a naturalist on Louis
Agassiz’s Brazil expedition, and he was undoubtedly familiar with their rapt accounts
of their own first earthquakes. As it happened, he had been sent off to the West Coast
by a friend with the wish that he might experience “a touch of earthquake.” This
wish was fulfilled just three months after his arrival, and in the following weeks James
penned his analysis of the earthquake’s “mental effects.” He insisted that his state of
mind had
consisted wholly of glee . . . glee at the vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term
as ‘earthquake’ could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely;
and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself together
in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.
‘Go it,’ I almost cried aloud, ‘and go it stronger!’
He had the sense that the quake was a “demonic power,” “an individualized being,” a
“living agent,” which he likened to “earlier mythologic versions of such catastrophes”
(James 1911, 209–214).
James’ narrative then turned to his observations in San Francisco later that day
and in the weeks that followed. Where others told tales of crowds gone “mad with
terror” and of “bacchanalian orgies” (quoted in Palm and Carroll 1998, 14), James
stressed the remarkably sober, cooperative behavior of the urban populace. He did
not ignore the theft and vagabondage that ensued, but wrote them off as “petty.”
More important to him was a certain Darwinian process at work: borrowing H. G.
Wells’ eugenic terms, James noted that social “inerts” had left the city, leaving only
“efficients” behind. “Discipline and order were practically perfect.” James insisted that
this ability to organize in an emergency was not merely “American” and “Californian”
but also deeply “human.” Cooperation was a firmly rooted feature of the human
response to catastrophe: “one’s private miseries were merged in the vast general sum
of privation and in the all-absorbing practical problem of general recuperation.” In
James’ pointed assessment, the experience proved “how artificial and against the grain
of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits into which science educates us”
(James 1911, 214; cf. Richards 1987, 409–450).
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Deborah R. Coen
James’ essay directs our attention to a mode of experiencing disaster that seems
unfamiliar in the age of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA):
the earthquake as liberation, catharsis, and utopia (Solnit 2009). For historians of
science, the significance of James’ essay lies in its evocation of the power of an
earthquake to topple our most basic assumptions about the character of “scientific”
observation.
Much would change in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake, as accurate
seismographs began to proliferate. While seismoscopes had been used since ancient
times in China, modern European efforts to build them began in earnest in Italy
in the late eighteenth century. An eighteenth-century seismoscope consisted of a
hanging pendulum attached to a stylus that could make a mark when set in oscillation.
Instruments capable in principle of clearly measuring the displacement of the ground
during a tremor were not introduced until the 1840s. The inverted-pendulum
seismoscopes installed during an earthquake swarm in Comrie, Scotland, in the 1840s
were state of the art. The problem was that they did not work. In one year, residents
of Comrie counted sixty shocks, while the seismoscopes only recorded three. More
useful instruments were developed by British engineers in Japan in the 1880s. These
“seismographs” were capable of tracing the development of earthquake waves over time.
They recorded pendulum movements on a revolving drum attached to a clockwork
mechanism, producing a curve from which the waves’ period and amplitude could
be measured. Such traces became all the more interesting in 1889, when a German
astronomer discovered by accident that his observatory’s pendulums in Potsdam had
recorded a strong earthquake near Tokyo, picking up waves that had travelled from
a spot 5,500 miles away on the earth’s surface. The realization that quakes could be
mechanically recorded at such a distance inspired many new seismographic inventions
at the end of the nineteenth century (Dewey and Byerly 1969; Howell 1990). Earth
scientists became determined to turn their discipline into a more quantitative, objective
science, modeled on physics. They transformed what counted as “evidence” of the
earth’s history. Out went data filtered by human bodies, in came the “hard” evidence
of seismographs and accelerometers. This was the moment when scientists began to
distinguish the “new seismology” from the “old.” Among the achievements of the
new seismology was the development of mathematical methods for using instrumental
traces of the passage of seismic waves as clues to the internal structure of the earth. The
seismograph became a telescope trained on the earth’s hidden depths, where it revealed
a core of iron buried under a mantle of rock (Brush 1980). “Macroseismology,” based
on sensible phenomena, largely gave way to “microseismology,” based on instrumental
records. With the onset of the Cold War, seismology’s status swelled, fed by defense
funding for the detection of nuclear tests. Scientists learned to recognize the distinctive
seismographic traces left by “nuclear earthquakes” (Barth 2003). Seismology’s next
“revolution” came in the 1960s with the acceptance of plate tectonic theory, the
“new geology” (Oreskes 1999). Plate tectonics overthrew the tenacious belief that
the positions of the continents and oceans were permanently fixed. In principle,
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Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response
7
earthquakes thus took on a new significance as evidence that the movement of the
continental plates was still in progress (Wegener 1920, 20, 37). Yet on the global scale
of the new plate tectonics, details of local seismicity tended to fade from scientists’
attention. Simultaneously, the globalization of news in the early twentieth century
made reports of local tremors ever less likely to find their way into print. Working
knowledge of the geography of seismic hazard was fast disappearing.
More recently, however, scientists have again begun to appreciate what they can
learn about seismic hazard from the experiences of ordinary people. Macroseismology
and historical seismology have been revived since the 1980s in conjunction with
interdisciplinary studies of disasters. In this vein, Conevery Valencius’ paper traces the
radical shifts in the significance attributed to vernacular accounts of the massive New
Madrid earthquakes of 1812. These accounts, often published in newspapers in the
form of letters, originally constituted a “form of conversation”; they were “generally
agreed to be intelligible only when many individual accounts from many different
places could be collected and compared.” They also reflected a human relationship
to the land characteristic of this period in the American West (Valencius 2002).
Missouri settlers imagined the earth as a living body, and their descriptions of the
tremors were stories of the land modelled on narratives of sickness and health. For
much of the twentieth century, these accounts were of no interest to seismologists.
They lacked the objectivity of instrumental data, and New Madrid itself lay so far
from the borders of tectonic plates that it had fallen off seismology’s radar. Valencius’
story of how these accounts went from the dustbins of history to the center of
seismological investigation is a surprising one. The most surprising part is the way
that seismologists have trained themselves to read these documents. Indeed, the field of
historical seismology has created a rare interface between the sciences and humanities –
overturning, in yet another way, earlier convictions about the nature of geoscientific
evidence.
Hence the peculiarly anxious position of seismology as a modern science. Empirical
seismology emerged in the late eighteenth century marked by this array of epistemic
oddities – an atmosphere of fear and insecurity, an uneasy coexistence with theology,
ambiguous implications for progressive ideologies, an enduringly phenomenological
methodology, and a dependence on untrained observers. These conditions in turn gave
rise to a peculiar politics of seismological knowledge.
Seismology’s epistemological fluidity opened a door, for instance, to East Asian
contributions to the field at a time when Asia was still perceived as backwards in
Western eyes (Clancey 2006a; Fan 2007). Thanks to this entrée, Japan in the 1880s and
China in the 1970s were each able to take center stage on the international scientific
scene. These cases are explored in the essays below by Orihara and Clancey and by Fan.
In both cases, seismology’s ill-defined boundaries allowed Asian scientists an unusual
latitude to define for themselves the meanings and values attached to “traditional” and
“modern,” “indigenous” and “foreign” (Fan 2007, 533). Both Japanese and Chinese
seismology were able to meld aspects of folk-knowledge (such as the predictive use
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Deborah R. Coen
of animals) with approaches legitimated by the international scientific community.
For these reasons, seismology’s histories in China and Japan constitute rich sites for
investigating transnational circulations of scientific knowledge.
The history of seismology has also been decisively shaped by the contributions of
untrained observers. Eighteenth-century earthquakes formed a topic of conversation
across various classes of society, as attested by surviving sermons and newspapers.
As Monika Gisler has argued, at the close of the eighteenth century this inclusive
conversation was beginning to break down. A science of seismology was emerging in
which earthquakes appeared counter-intuitively as the effects of mysterious electrical
forces. Subsequently, seismology was increasingly the esoteric subject of expert
knowledge (Gisler unpublished). Yet by the 1870s, the demands of empirical inquiry
were redirecting seismology’s attention towards the public itself. The methodological
imperative to multiply observations of every earthquake drove seismology toward a
unique form of public outreach. My own essay for this issue describes Switzerland’s
pioneering effort in the 1870s to organize ordinary citizens into an observational
network. Designed both to advance geophysical science and to devise practical measures
to prevent earthquake damage, the network depended on the training of a diverse
population to observe and report on factors such as the time, duration, and direction of
shock. Analogously, Fa-ti Fan’s contribution analyzes the macroseismological network
developed in China during the Cultural Revolution. In this case, the data sought were
those suspected to be of use for earthquake prediction, including well-water variations,
telluric currents, and animal behavior. Seismology’s cultivation of amateurs thus made
it ideologically useful to very different political regimes.
Paradoxically, both republican Switzerland and Maoist China seem to be good
candidates for today’s increasingly popular term, “citizen science” (Irwin 1995;
Charvolin et al. 2007). As Fan points out, citizen science is an inherently political
concept, an outgrowth of the “ideology, institutions, and functions of a state.” Both
the Swiss in the late nineteenth century and the Chinese in the 1960s and ‘70s
used seismological networks to inculcate scientific habits and a sense of national
unity. At a deeper level, both states fostered a scientific epistemology that prioritized
mass participation. What does this unlikely juxtaposition of direct democracy and
totalitarianism tell us about the potentials of citizen science? Is it merely technocracy
in a democratic guise? Or does it in fact have a (necessarily limited) potential to
challenge the rule of experts? Where, in these two cases, did power really lie? Here
we can draw at least a tentative contrast. In China, seismology was indeed informed
by folk knowledge, yet it remained, according to Fan, “mostly top-down despite
its claim of the mass line.” In Switzerland, seismology was tainted by paternalism
and class bias, but nonetheless launched a genuine dialogue between experts and
laypeople about seismic risk. What are the conditions of possibility for such an
exchange?
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the politics of seismological knowledge is the
science’s intimate relationship to the emotion of fear. Under what conditions might
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Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response
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fear productively motivate scientific research, and when might it be paralyzing? These
questions are of no small relevance today, as research agendas are shaped by threats
ranging from political terrorism to mega technological disasters and environmental
catastrophes, as well as by the imperatives of the insurance industry. Many current
debates turn on the alleged tendencies of the public to over- or under-estimate
risk: the problems of “anxiety,” on one hand, and “apathy,” on the other. Lorraine
Daston has recently lamented the unwillingness of contemporary science and politics to
acknowledge that no policy of risk management will ever banish human fear entirely.
Why, she asks, should science policy aim to suppress fear? Far better to confront it
in a rational manner. Daston thus calls for a “debate about the philosophy of fear,
traditionally the most unphilosophical of the passions” (Daston 2008a).
The authors represented in this issue are hardly the first to pose the question of the
effect of fear on the conduct of science. In Victorian Britain, for instance, it was widely
believed that frequent earthquakes rendered a country inhospitable to natural science.
In one of the most popular Victorian works of history, Henry Thomas Buckle bluntly
claimed that human reason could not withstand repeated natural disasters:
The mind is thus constantly thrown into a timid and anxious state; and men witnessing the
most serious dangers, which they can neither avoid nor understand, become impressed
with a conviction of their own inability, and of the poverty of their own resources. In
exactly the same proportion, the imagination is aroused, and a belief in supernatural
interference actively encouraged. Human power failing, superhuman power is called in;
the mysterious and the invisible are believed to be present; and there grow up among the
people those feelings of awe, and of helplessness, on which all superstition is based, and
without which no superstition can exist. (Buckle 1886, 87)
Buckle’s claims were designed to prove that natural conditions in Britain had destined
it to become the apex of human civilization. In nineteenth-century America, by
contrast, environmental arguments ran in the opposite direction. Americans typically
viewed catastrophes (natural and otherwise) as crucibles of modernity. In a Social
Darwinian vein, Americans expected disasters to produce a more perfect species of
survivor (Rozario 2007; Biel 2001). It is not surprising, then, to find an American
scientist arguing that science too thrives on disaster. As the meteorologist Horace
Byers once noted, reflecting on his contributions to the rise of computerized weather
forecasting in mid-twentieth-century America, “It is an unfortunate characteristic of
meteorology, that its great forward strides depend on disasters” (Harper 2008, 7).
Byers had in mind the invention of computerized weather forecasting for aviation
purposes in the crucible of World War Two. Still, his observation applies equally well
to the emergence of the first telegraphic weather service in Britain a century earlier,
a product of the 1859 storm that wrecked 343 British ships (Anderson 2005, 110).
The flourishing of Japanese seismology in the wake of the Nobi earthquake of 1891
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Deborah R. Coen
is another case in point. As Clancey and Orihara put it in their essay in this issue,
“modern science itself seems to operate comfortably in the realm of emergency.”
Paul White’s essay indicates the possibility of transforming fear into an acceptable and
productive scientific attitude. White shows how Darwin accomplished this by means of
successive revisions of his impressions of the earthquake at Concepción in 1835. Darwin
himself would go on to give nineteenth-century science a remarkable account of fear,
one that emptied this emotion of any moral value, indeed of any human quality at all.
For Darwin, fear was of interest exclusively for what it revealed as an evolutionary link
between men and animals. He treated fear as a physiological state subject to scientific
observation, even self-observation – testifying, for instance, to the contraction of his
own platysma during a shudder. Fear was to be explained physiologically and through
the evolutionary principles of habit, association, and inheritance. It thus became a
morally neutral state and one in principle subject to conditioning (Darwin 1979;
White 2009). Fear became instrumentalized.
This was a lesson of political significance: it suggested the role of fear in the
civilizing process and in the subjugation of citizens to the state (Briese 1998). From
this perspective, any science of disaster is part of a public apparatus for managing and
manipulating fear. Fan’s case of Communist China is a telling example. Seismology
served Mao’s regime explicitly as a form of “national defense,” a system of surveillance
that disciplined nature and the human population simultaneously. Indeed, Jean
Baudrillard has asserted that any state capable of predicting and controlling catastrophes,
whether earthquakes or terrorism, would be so coercive that its citizens would prefer a
catastrophe (Baudrillard 1991).
Clancey and Orihara’s essay can likewise be read as an inquiry into the politics of
fear. They build on recent interest across the academy in the concept of the state of
emergency and the political work this concept has done since the interwar period
(e.g. Agamben 2005; Scheuerman 1997). The authors make the novel observation
that emergency in its early twentieth-century origins designated not merely a political
but a natural state. The Japanese concept of emergency (hijōji) originally identified
Japan as a land destined by nature to endure disasters, but to emerge from them
with renewed strength. Emergency corresponded to a “language of environmental
determinism revitalized by disaster.” This is a crucial insight into the novelty of
the politics of “emergency” in the interwar period. Emergency broke with earlier
formulations of the politics of fear (such as the sublime) in that it constituted a “new
politics of landscape,” a historically specific environmental imaginary. It identified, the
authors argue, not a terrain of human weakness but an “actionable space.” Significantly,
however, in post-Kanto Japan, the management of fear fell not to science but to fascist
factions and millenarian cults.
While each study in this issue focuses on a different context, what raises them
above the status of microhistories is their common contribution to the emergence
of the globe itself as an object of empirical inquiry. As Andrea Westermann neatly
puts it, the earth’s seismicity was “a material substrate for the experience of globality”
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Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response
11
(Westermann 2010; cf. Dörries 2005, 2009). By studying seismology, a science of
the globe, in a multitude of national contexts, we stand to learn a great deal about
the process of scientific globalization – how local knowledge has been scaled up and
global theories scaled down. Valencius, for instance, reveals the unexpected “sense of
global interconnection” that earthquakes brought out in the rural American West of
the early nineteenth century. Yet we also find here clear reminders of the barriers to
the globalization of the earth sciences. Seismology developed in ways that were finely
adapted to regional contexts – for instance in the language used to describe tremors and
in the architecture to which damage assessments were keyed. Even the Richter scale,
now the symbol of an objective, universal description of an earthquake, was originally
intended only for use in Southern California (Richter 1935).1
Methodologically, the topic of earthquakes brings the history of science into
productive contact with the concerns of other subfields. First, earthquakes can be said
to erupt on the common ground between the history of science and environmental
history. Valencius’ paper shows how fertile a space this is. As she demonstrates, talking
about earthquakes in the nineteenth-century American West meant asking in the
broadest terms about the land and its relationship to its inhabitants. That relationship
was very much in flux at the time, transformed in part by urbanization, new transport
networks, and the industrialization of agriculture. Seismology, as the science of a
volatile earth, seems to have been of special interest to populations conscious of such
changes in their ties to the land. Nineteenth-century naturalists themselves indicated
that seismology entailed a new environmental awareness, namely a recognition of the
earth’s instability. As the Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler announced in a popular
article of the 1880s, “The notion that the ground is naturally steadfast is an error –
an error which arises from the incapacity of our senses to appreciate any but the most
palpable and, at the same time, most exceptional of its movements” (Shaler 1887, 259).
Thanks to empirical seismology, humanity was learning that its foundations were far
shakier than suspected, a discovery that Shaler compared to that of the heliocentric
system: a fundamental shift in man’s sense of his place in the cosmos. For Shaler and
his contemporaries, this discovery forced the question of whether humans ought to
adapt to such an unreliable environment through modest accommodations or by brute
force engineering (Hones 2001). Through the methods of environmental history,
earthquakes can illuminate evolving relationships between scientific ambitions and
ecological conditions.
Earthquakes also bridge the gulf between the history of science and disaster
studies. The latter field takes for granted the non-existence of “natural” catastrophes.
The damage wrought by an earthquake always depends on complex interactions
between environmental factors and the social, political, and economic determinants
of vulnerability. In this light, earthquakes can serve to reveal pre-existing weaknesses
1
The idea behind Richter’s logarithmic scale was that the ratio of the amplitudes produced by a single shock at
two stations should be inversely related to the ratio of the distances of each station from the epicenter.
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12
Deborah R. Coen
or, in Charles Walker’s felicitous phrase, “social fissures” in the stricken state (Walker
2008, 190). On the other hand, earthquakes often clear the stage for projects of
centralization and modernization (Walker 2008; Buchenau and Johnson 2009). In
this sense, earthquakes can be analyzed as punctiform events from which significant
social change radiates. Stuart McCook, for instance, has recently offered a revisionist
interpretation of the 1812 Caracas earthquake, which was quickly followed by the
collapse of Venezuela’s first republic (McCook 2009). Historians have traditionally
assumed that the earthquake discredited the revolutionary government because it was
interpreted as divine retribution for the country’s revolution against Spanish colonial
rule. McCook shows that this thesis is little more than a reflection of the elites’ own
bias against the masses and their “superstitions.” Instead, he stresses the material effects
of the earthquake, which crippled the republic and gave the royalists a crucial military
advantage. At the same time, however, he uses the complex and varied responses to
the earthquake to illuminate long-term trends of religious thought and social relations
that transcended Venezuela’s revolutionary breaks.
McCook’s analysis is thus a fine example of the integration of what might be seen as
two contrasting templates for historical narratives of earthquakes. As Greg Clancey has
suggested, one possibility is a process-oriented view of earthquakes, embedding them
in long-term narratives about ecosystems and political cultures. Another approach
instead takes a point-like view of earthquakes as singular events with unpredictable
ramifications (Clancey 2006b). Both perspectives, the processual and the event-like,
are needed to reveal the full implications of earthquakes for the history of modern
science.
Acknowledgments
This issue builds on a workshop held at Barnard College in October 2009, and it is
deeply indebted to all the participants in that event. Thanks too to Alexandre Métraux
for very helpful feedback on this introductory essay.
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