Although Anthony F C Wallace opened up the inquiry as early as the 1950s, disasters and their effects on culture and society have been largely disregarded by anthropologists. Most of us have approached the communities and concerns we research as if the fabric of the chosen site had never been rent by some calamity and doesn’t bear the patchwork that results from such events. In truth, many of the places where we have worked have been visited by devastating happenings, either from what Aristotle considered the four elements: wind, water, fire and trembling earth, or from the misconstructions or malfeasance of fellow humans. Many locations experience such events chronically, or if not chronically, since the occurrences are nonetheless embedded in their location or politics, intermittently and predictably.

It has taken several calamities in the last number of years within our own cultural and social abode to awaken more heightened anthropological interest. Two in just the last weeks, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have once again alerted our attention. These dual storms have all but erased the thriving perimeter of one of our major cultural zones and wiped out a city with a unique sub-culture that was cherished. Due to them, it has become blatantly clear how catastrophes modify the living patterns of the people dwelling in the impact zones, and indeed diffuse, whether largely or ever so slightly, into the entire cultural consciousness of a population. Perhaps it is time for us to take the consequences of catastrophes more into account in our endeavors.