Enduring disaster: social theodicy in response to three gulf coast hurricanes, 1900-2005

2013-07-29This dissertation defines and advances a theory of social theodicy as a collective response to disorder and misfortune in American society. It advances sociological theories of risk by providing a more cultural model of the risk society, in which risk mitigation efforts are affirmed or critiqued on the basis of their fit with broader institutional logics drawn from civil, religious, and technological arenas, in moments of reflexive ritual. The narratives produced in these ritual moments, I argue, are unique in that they are as much about restoring a shared sense of social reality and establishing meaningful moral worlds, as they are with simply recounting the events of a given disaster. I employ a comparative historical approach in order to track cultural persistence and change in these narratives, against the backdrop of the growth of state responsibility for disaster management and risk mitigation. ❧ Examining three Gulf Coast hurricanes – the Galveston Storm in 1900, Hurricane Camille in 1969, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – I analyze editorials, letters to the editor, organizational records, oral histories, government hearings, and speeches relevant to each storm. I then focus on master narratives of each storm, through which the broad disruptions to the social order of coastal communities are resolved in public speech. Specifically, I describe narratives that focus on civic virtues as a moral signifier of a shared fate in disaster. Then, I examine the narratives that are produced to explain failures of evacuation; in contemporary societies where state organizations are tasked with managing disasters, the narratives through which their failures are accounted for are increasingly relevant in public debate. Finally, I examine a moment of ritual affirmation of technocratic risk management in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in which notions of civic virtue are intertwined with technical and organizational cultures of preparedness. ❧ Taken together, this analysis suggests that the organizations, polities and other sets of social relations that make up what theorists have described as elements of “risk society” are made real in public settings in part through ritual moments that have grown increasingly reflexive over time. Nevertheless, in these ritual moments non-technical forms of rationality continue to legitimate and help shape the administration of technical expertise as they are brought to bear upon expert administrative settings by social movements, public-minded groups, citizens, and the political actors who must answer to them, as well as in other forms of specifically public speech