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Everything In Its Path
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Classificação: 4 de 5 estrelas4/5 (1 avaliação)
Duração: 364 páginas5 horas
- Editora:
- Simon & Schuster
- Lançado em:
- Apr 10, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781439127315
- Formato:
- Livro
Descrição
The 1977 Sorokin Award–winning story of Buffalo Creek in the aftermath of a devastating flood.
On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.
On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.
Ações de livro
Comece a lerDados do livro
Everything In Its Path
Notas:
Classificação: 4 de 5 estrelas4/5 (1 avaliação)
Duração: 364 páginas5 horas
Descrição
The 1977 Sorokin Award–winning story of Buffalo Creek in the aftermath of a devastating flood.
On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.
On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.
- Editora:
- Simon & Schuster
- Lançado em:
- Apr 10, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781439127315
- Formato:
- Livro
Sobre o autor
Kai T. Erikson is an American sociologist known for specializing in the social consequences of catastophic events. He is the author of Everything in its Path, Wayward Puritans, A New Species of Trouble, Catastrophe in the Making, and American Indian Environments.
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Everything In Its Path - Kai T. Erikson
Winner of the 1977 Sorokin Award for an outstanding contribution to the progress of Sociology.
On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
"Everything in Its Path is one of the most tender, moving and momentous pieces of scholarship we now possess in the social sciences."
— The New Republic
. . . An eloquent, perceptive, warm and authenticated tale of a complex people all too simple in disaster.
—Scientific American
I find it hard to respond to it in measured terms. It’s a truly great book—not only sociology at its very best, but a deeply moving human document.
—Peter Berger
Captures well the beauty and the pathos, the wholeness and brokenness of the mountaineer, amid a myriad of contradictions.
—Society
. . . A tour de force . . . intellectually complex as well as emotionally powerful and haunting . . . towers above most of academic social science . . . a triumph of contemporary understanding.
Michael Harrington—The New York Times Book Review
Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.
Cover design by Robert Anthony
Photograph courtesy of Wide World Photos
Register online at www.SimonandSchuster.com for more information on this and other great books.
ALSO BY KAI T. ERIKSON:
Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance
In Search of Common Ground: Conversations with Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton (editor)
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Copyright © 1976 by Kai T. Erikson
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Erickson, Kai T.
Everything in its path.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Buffalo Creek, W. Va.—Flood, 1972. 2. Disasters—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
HV610 1972.E74 363 76-26462
ISBN-13: 978-0-671-22367-0
ISBN-10: 0-671-22367-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-671-24067-7 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-671-24067-6 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2731-5 (ebook)
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
PART ONE
February 26, 1972
PART TWO
Notes on Appalachia
The Mountain Ethos
The Coming of the Coal Camps
Buffalo Creek
PART THREE
Looking for Scars
Individual Trauma: State of Shock
On Being Numbed
The Faces of Death
Survival and Guilt
The Furniture of Self
Order and Disorder
Collective Trauma: Loss of Communality
Morale and Morality
Disorientation
Loss of Connection
Illness and Identity
The Illusion of Safety
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Prologue
I
Everything in Its Path describes what happened to the people of a narrow mountain valley in West Virginia called Buffalo Creek when an avalanche of black water and mine waste roared down it in the winter of 1972. The book is being reissued thirty years after its original publication.
The world has seen a remarkable number of disasters in those thirty years, some of them so well remembered that they have become a part of everyone’s history, and some remembered only by those who survived them. The story of the Buffalo Creek flood seems to come to mind virtually every time one of those events occurs. It was a fairly contained disaster, as such things go, having taken place on a scale small enough to allow one to see it whole, and for that reason it helps one get a sense of the contours and dimensions of other catastrophes that take place on a scale so wide that they are hard to get the measure of. I have met or heard from any number of persons over the years who have found that the case of Buffalo Creek helped them locate some other scene of devastation on the landscape of human experience.
This has been particularly the case for journalists. They are often asked to describe horrors that are almost indescribable, to explain horrors that are almost inexplicable, and one of the best strategies available to them is to look for some template or point of comparison to help them visualize the calamity they are trying to understand. The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran a story on its front page not long after the attack on the World Trade Center comparing it to the destruction of Buffalo Creek. Similar parallels have been drawn many times both in public media and in specialist publications, as well as in conversations of a more private nature.
I have visited the sites of many other disasters since the appearance of this book. Quite a few of them were at the request of individuals who saw a resemblance between the portrait I drew of Buffalo Creek and a scene of havoc they were trying come to terms with themselves. The young chief of an Ojibwa band in subarctic Canada that was staggering under the effects of ethyl mercury dumped into local waters asked me to visit his village because he had come across this book somewhere and was struck by the likeness of the people of Buffalo Creek to his own people. Similar moments of recognition have taken me to a number of other places, among them the southern coast of Alaska after the Exxon Valdez oil spill; Kobe, Japan, in the wake of a deadly earthquake; a remote atoll in the Pacific still haunted by the effects of a radioactive cloud that had drifted across it half a century earlier; a migrant farmworker camp at the edge of the Everglades in Florida, where a group of Haitian migrants lost what were to them vast sums of money; and the northeast corner of England, suffering in ways no one could have anticipated from a virulent attack of hoof-and-mouth disease. Those disasters could hardly have been more unalike in form: a flood was being compared to a toxic spill, an oil spill, an earthquake, a cloud of radioactive fallout, an act of larceny, and an outbreak of disease affecting cattle. What made those events comparable was the human reaction they aroused. That is why the story of Buffalo Creek opened a window onto so diverse an array of disaster settings.
No disaster in my time, however, has evoked the experience of Buffalo Creek more often or more urgently than the hurricane that came to be called Katrina. The story of what happened in that remote mountain hollow surfaced again and again as people learned what the winds of Katrina had done to the Gulf Coast in general and to the city of New Orleans in particular. A friend and colleague who visited New Orleans soon after the flood, knowing that I was scheduled to do the same shortly, said in a note: When you have seen what I just saw, I want you to tell me how it differs from what you wrote about in Buffalo Creek. It seems the same to me.
When I did visit a few days later, I knew why he had raised the point. Photographs could not even begin to convey the look and feel of New Orleans then. Most photos are small rectangular images that zoom in on particulars—a crumpled home here, a flattened automobile there—when it is the whole that captures the eye. The carnage stretches out almost endlessly: more than a hundred thousand such homes, at least fifty thousand such automobiles, the whole mass being covered by a crust of gray mud, dried as hard as fired clay by the sun. It is the silence of it, the emptiness of it, that is the story. A woman from Buffalo Creek, whose voice you will encounter soon, described the look of the valley floor immediately after the flood: We looked out over that dark hollow down there and it just looked so lonesome. That just looked like it was godforsaken. That was the lonesomest, saddest place that anybody ever looked at.
She could as easily have been describing the look of much of New Orleans after the flood.
The most striking view of New Orleans comes into focus when one stands beneath a waterline traced across the wall of a building some ten or twelve feet above the ground and realizes that everything one can see at eye level had been underwater—thick, dark, viscous—not that long ago. That whole layer of the city had been invaded by mold and rot and decay. It looked toxic, and may in fact be so. That is when one senses in a way one had not quite before that the life of any city takes place at ground level, no matter how high the buildings reach above the street, and that New Orleans, for at least that one still moment in time, was virtually lifeless.
As I write these lines, the story of what happened in New Orleans is still emerging. It may be quite some time before the outlines are clear, if indeed they ever are, so I am not proposing that New Orleans is like Buffalo Creek. I am suggesting that knowledge of what happened in one place can be useful in understanding what is happening in the other.
For example, I did not write very much in the book about rumors that drifted up and down Buffalo Creek in the days following the flood that strangers were coming in from the outside and looting the crushed homes scattered all over the floodplain, although you will hear faint hints of that suspicion when you read what follows. I did not know as well then as I know now that rumors of the kind are quite common in catastrophic events. This is because they so often bring outsiders into places they would not otherwise have entered—persons whose job it is to rescue people in danger, to look after survivors, to maintain order, to reestablish lines of communication, to restore essential services, and so on. Rumors that those outsiders are up to no good circulate in most and perhaps all disasters, not because those outsiders act in ways that attract suspicion, necessarily, but because they are outsiders, strangers, and on that account not to be fully trusted. The rumors almost always turn out to be exaggerated. That was the case in Buffalo Creek. It was also the case in New Orleans, where reports of looting soon ripened into sinister tales of rape and assault and murder, of police officers being fired upon, of armed crowds ready to invade the territories of the rich, of anarchy loose in the land, that dominated the news for weeks. A darker, more menacing, prospect was hard to imagine. There was looting, to be sure, some of it a frantic foraging for the necessities of life (living off the land,
one young man familiar with the ways of the street called it), and some of it a straightforward pillaging of things of value—although the sight of young men hauling expensive television sets out into lightless, empty neighborhoods where there would be no electricity for months if not years makes one wonder what the real point of it all was.
In New Orleans, as elsewhere, these rumors of crime and misdoing turned out to be for the most part inaccurate. In that sense, they fit the familiar pattern. But they were so far off the charts when compared to the kinds of rumors that circulate in most disasters that they raise a different set of questions altogether. Most of the persons suspected of engaging in that mayhem were not outsiders or strangers at all, but fellow townspeople, neighbors, many of them African-American. It is almost as if Katrina had peeled away the outer surface of our social order and had exposed fantasies and visions that were lurking somewhere down in its inner workings. Part of that can be attributed to the excitement of the moment, of course, but excitements like that have a way of drawing things out of hidden compartments of the mind where they have been lodged for a long time. That is worth some serious thought.
As you will see in the chapters that follow, many of the people of Buffalo Creek were traumatized to at least some degree and for at least some period of time by their exposure to the disaster that struck them. That is clearly reflected both in the reports of clinical experts brought in to evaluate the situation and in the comments of the survivors themselves.
One reason for the high levels of trauma found along Buffalo Creek, obviously, was that so many people encountered the churning floodwaters close at hand. That would be a shock to any nervous system, presumably, and it was an experience shared by residents of New Orleans who did not (or could not) evacuate before the floodwaters shot over or smashed through the levees that were supposed to protect them. They found themselves thrashing around in a substance that looked to one observer as though a gigantic toilet had backed up,
and many saw death up close in the form of swollen bodies floating by or cast up onto dry islands of concrete. The majority of the people of New Orleans may have been spared the starkest of those moments, since they had been able to leave the city before the waters came, but that was only one moment in a longer and more painful process. They all watched a part of their world disappear.
Another thing they share in common is the experience of water run amok. In Buffalo Creek, a number of witnesses remember thinking that the water pursuing them acted like a living creature. The water seemed like the demon itself. It came, destroyed, and left,
said one person, and a neighbor added: I felt like the water was a thing alive and was coming after us to get us all. I still think of it as a live thing.
Thoughts like that have been echoed again and again by survivors of the New Orleans flood, too, both in conversations that mark the day and dreams that mark the night. The water didn’t knock or ring the bell. It chased us up the stairs, into the attic, and finally up to the roof. Water’s not supposed to be in the attic. But then water’s not supposed to be in bedrooms either. No way.
The feeling that surging floodwaters (or winds or quakes or anything else) are out to get us
is fairly common in disasters. As you will read later, William James, the great psychologist, happened to be in the San Francisco area at the time of the 1906 earthquake and thought at first that the tremors reaching him from underneath the surface of the earth had been sent "directly to me."
For people everywhere, and especially those vulnerable populations that turn out so often to live in their path, it is easy to imagine that disasters are probing the landscape for its softest flanks, searching out the poorest and least-defended people to be found along the horizon. Those people turn out so often to be targets of incoming dangers that it is common for them to wonder why they have been singled out in this way. Why us? Why here? Why now? It is an easy sentiment to understand.
But when one looks in on such scenes from a reflective distance, it is obvious that human populations are spread out across the earth in such a way that the most disadvantaged of them are the most likely to be located in harm’s way. So we are not speaking here of a situation in which disasters seek out the vulnerable but a situation in which the vulnerable have already been herded into places where disasters are most likely to strike.
Tsunamis do not seek out the poor; the poor are shoved out to those low-lying areas where the land meets the sea. Earthquakes do not seek out the ill-housed; they strike evenly at all of the structures in their way, but do the most damage to the frailest and most shoddily built of them, the ones in which the needy have been invited to live. Toxic wastes do not seek out the least protected; they are deposited on the same parcels of land where the poorly protected, in their turn, have been deposited. These confluences have something to do with the flows of the market, the ways in which dangerous occupations like fishing and mining are distributed, and other more subtle chemistries of social life. Added together, they make a world in which the most vulnerable of people end up taking the brunt of disasters resulting both from natural processes and from human activities.
Indeed, one could carry that thought farther. If one were to draw a map of places in which disasters are most likely to strike, we would also be sketching at least an approximate map of places in which the vulnerable are most likely to be gathered. This is not true all the time, of course, but it is a correlation, something that pertains enough of the time to qualify as a stable social pattern. And there is no mystery to any of that. Just ask who lives in stone buildings and who in wooden ones. Who lives along the bluffs and who along the floodplains of volatile rivers? Who lives along such places as that corridor of chemical plants known as cancer alley
? The list of such questions could stretch out endlessly.
The people of Buffalo Creek, as you will learn in what follows, were not poor at the time of the flood in any of the usual meanings of that term, but they followed an occupation that is both extremely dangerous and one that required them to live in terrains where they were exposed to the whims of a hard and unpredictable fate, some of them human in origin and some of them natural. The chapters to follow will consider how well that pattern relates to Buffalo Creek.
But the pattern fits Katrina almost perfectly. It has not escaped the notice of anyone caught up in the New Orleans deluge that the failure of the levees had the sharpest effect on persons who lived in neighborhoods the farthest below sea level. And why? Because that is how gravity works. The persons who lived at those low elevations, meantime, tended to be poor or black or both. And why? Because that is how the social order works. The portion of the New Orleans population that lived below sea level and the portion that lived below the poverty line turned out to be largely the same. That, too, is a matter that we as a society should be thinking about for quite some time to come.
It remains to be seen how many people whose lives were affected by the floodwaters of New Orleans will turn out to have been injured emotionally by that exposure. Early indications suggest clearly that rates of depression and anxiety and other ailments normally associated with trauma are very high, and warnings of worse to come are issued by experts on a daily basis. This will come as no surprise to those who apply the lessons of Buffalo Creek to the case of New Orleans, because the traumatic reactions found there resulted from a number of crushing blows that lie beyond the immediate effects of the water itself.
Something like 80 percent of the homes on Buffalo Creek were either destroyed, severely damaged, or made uninhabitable for at least the immediate time being, and that loss, as you will see, weighed heavily on the spirits of the people who had lived in them. We do not know yet what proportion of the homes in New Orleans proper will be treated as damaged beyond repair, but the proportion of those being regarded as uninhabitable as I write these lines probably approaches that same 80 percent. In New Orleans, as in Buffalo Creek, the inner contents of the home matter as much as the outer structure. These are, as I suggest in the account to follow, an extension of self, a source of identity,
and when people witnessed the houses they had lived in and the things they had lived with disappear, it was, for many, like watching a part of themselves die.
Even where homes still stand in some of the more devastated areas of New Orleans, their contents—easily visible from the street through windows and doors smashed in by the force of the disaster—have been thrashed about as if the whole building had been lifted from its foundations and shaken violently: beds turned upside down, furniture spilled here and there as if it had been dropped from a height, the treasures of a lifetime caked with layers of muck and rotting. Volumes of photographs lie atop the rubbish in the yard, the bindings cracking as the black water in which they were soaked dries, and the images themselves have turned cloudy and opaque, like the glazed eyes of elders who can no longer see. Suicide notes from New Orleans speak as frequently of the loss of things, the furniture of self,
as they do of people or places or prospects or anything else.
Everything in Its Path deals at length with what I call loss of communality,
and it describes that loss as an important ingredient of the trauma that struck so many people on Buffalo Creek in the months and years following the flood. New Orleans was a teeming city rather than an isolated mountain hollow, but it was a city of neighborhood clusters, the kind of urban setting the people of Buffalo Creek might have felt comfortable in. It was in many ways the most rural of urban settings. Close to 90 percent of the African-American residents of New Orleans were born in the nearby countryside of Louisiana, and the percentage of white residents of whom the same could be said, though not so large, was still far above the norm for American cities. Thus many of the people of New Orleans were neighbor people
in something like the sense in which the phrase is used along Buffalo Creek, and it is a reasonable guess that many of them will suffer the kinds of disorientation and disconnectedness that was so familiar a feature of life in Buffalo Creek after the flood.
A number of people from Buffalo Creek left the hollow right after the disaster, and a number of others followed them out when the legal action was settled two years later. We do not know how well they fared in their new communities, but we do know that many of those who stayed shared a feeling for quite some time afterward that they were living in a strange land
or in a different place
even though they were within yards of their original homes. For most, that feeling disappeared eventually, since time is, after all, the surest of healers. But time sometimes works its special magic very slowly, and what happened on Buffalo Creek should ring a bell with many of the people of New Orleans. Evacuees from Katrina often felt as though they were being blown by errant winds to every point of the compass, which may be why it is so common for the media to speak of their departure as a diaspora.
But most of them were not blown that far to begin with. Roughly 40 percent found shelter in Louisiana itself, and another 40 percent landed in Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Georgia. Most, then, remained within a few hours’ drive of their old homes, even though quite a number had to move on later when the patience of relatives or the resources of FEMA and other rescue agencies wore thin. But, meantime, it has been surprising how many evacuees describe themselves as refugees.
They have been informed by their government and by newscasters from every corner of the land that they should not identify themselves in that way, since they are still located within the territorial borders of their own country. But they know the meaning of the word perfectly well, and they should be listened to rather than corrected on that point. They are saying that they no longer feel as though they are at home and among their own kind of folk. They are saying that even though they are within hailing distance of home, they feel as though they are a long way from it.
The last point I would like to bring up is the one with which I end the book—that people who go through such wrenching experiences often develop what I describe there as a sense of vulnerability, a feeling that one has lost a certain natural immunity to misfortune, a growing conviction, even, that the world is no longer a safe place to be.
Among the realizations that troubled the people of Buffalo Creek, as you will see, was a conviction that the disaster had been the work of fellow humans and not a whim of nature or an act of God. Most of them felt that deeply. The flood had resulted from a failure of human engineering and maybe even of human concern on the part of persons who should have had their best interests at heart. It felt like a betrayal, and it contributed to at least a temporary feeling shared by many that local institutions can no longer be relied on, that human governments can no longer be relied on, and even that the ways of nature should be understood as unreliable if not even somewhat malevolent. We should look for that feeling among the victims of Katrina, particularly those from New Orleans, where a vast majority of people seem to assume that they were victimized by human indifference even more than by natural forces. That may turn out to be one of the clearest points of similarity between what happened to the people of Buffalo Creek and what happened to the people of New Orleans.
II
This is a reissue rather than a new edition, so I have not been invited to rewrite any of the text itself. I doubt that I would have done much revising even if the circumstances allowed me to, but I would have been tempted to phrase a few things differently. For one thing, I would have corrected the occasional use of pronouns still surviving from an age, now happily past, in which he
meant all of humankind.
One of the virtues in writing a new introduction to a text that has been in print for thirty years is that it allows me to try to clear up passages that turned out not to be as clear as I had hoped they would be to at least some readers. My portrait of Appalachia, for example, which appears in part two of what follows, was criticized in some quarters by persons who know the area well and whose opinion I respect. I thought I was being misread then, and I still think so now. I tend to approach any cultural landscape as an arena in which contrary tendencies are played out, and you will see when I turn to what I call the mountain ethos
that I do the same here. One of the dangers in that way of portraying a cultural context is that the words one uses can come close to caricature. I even used the word caricature
myself to describe what I was saying. As you follow the thread of the argument in part two, then, I would ask you to keep in mind that every statement I make about the mountaineer
is meant as one facet of a multifaceted reality, one dimension of a complex portrait. I am still comfortable with the main thrust of the point I was trying to make thirty years ago, although, given the chance, I would now look for other ways to express the thought.
I winced more than once in rereading this account when I observed my younger self writing things like everyone on Buffalo Creek . . .
That seems incautious to me now, but I hope it will be clear to a newer generation of readers that I was speaking of the moods and motions of a community, and not
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Avaliações
fullmoonblue
Based on Erikson's involvement in a lawsuit. The goal was to show that the survivors of the Buffalo Creek disaster had lost the defining connective elements of their original community as a result of 1) shock related to how awful the experience of the flood was, and 2) how poorly the post-disaster recovery was handled. The book seems freshly interesting post-Katrina, but is also flawed in certain ways (most particularly for me, the fact that Erikson's sample was so clearly biased). An interesting albeit somewhat dated study; worth reading.
Rating: 4