practices that articulate past, present, and future knowledge at different geographical
scales: how memories of past disasters resonate with risks of future ones, how
expert knowledge emerges from past and distant experiences, and, finally, how
invisible threats transform space, subjectivity, knowledge, and politics in the SF
Bay Area. This event horizon—the next Big One—provides an important perspective on a set of operations that happen each and every day in this area, and
which, from residential choices to seismic-mapping activities, from memorialization to projection, define and help bring the potential consequences of a major
earthquake into existence—into visibility.
This ethnography is built on my own research in the Bay Area of San Francisco,
where I have identified the network of scientists and experts who connect science
with their own experience of living in a seismic place and help making the Bay
Area resilient [82]. As discussed above, when it come to evaluating a risk or
thinking about a disaster, “knowing” is a complex operation. In the academic
context, it is often taken for granted that scientific and expert knowledge surpasses
lay knowledge, and that risk would be better prevented if only residents could think
more as scientists do. Here, I want to show that, in the Bay Area, scientists and
experts have also learned to think as residents do; re-defining their hierarchical
categories, comparing and discussing everyday risks to re-situate the earthquake
threat in a time frame and context of an individual’s life span. As discussed by one
respondent living in San Francisco, involved in risk prevention and the development of building codes,
With earthquakes, they’re so rare and extreme that to understand them, you have to think of
them in the spectrum of everyday risks, monthly risks, and yearly risks. These all get
compiled together and, most people, whether they articulate it or not, they’re aware of that
difference. You rarely find people that dumb that they don’t understand risk in their daily
life. [It] doesn’t mean they always make the informed decisions, but they have an innate
understanding of the rarity of things.
10
Further, as a one-time non-expert resident, but now an expert in the field,
recalled, the risk of an earthquake is not, and never was, “a given.” Rather, it has
been progressively instaured
11 by research work, specific practices, and attention to
the matter. She stated, “I’m from Massachusetts and New York State. When I
moved here, it was the 1970s; [The idea of a major earthquake] wasn’t in anybody’s
10
Respondent D.21, personal communication, 2011.
11
Toward a definition of instauration, Latour [83] writes: “Instauration and construction are clearly
synonyms. But instauration has the distinct advantage of not dragging along all the metaphorical
baggage of constructivism—which would in any case be an easy and almost automatic association
given that an artwork is so obviously ‘constructed’ by the artist. To speak of ‘instauration’ is to
prepare the mind to engage with the question of modality in quite the opposite way from constructivism. To say, for example, that a fact is ‘constructed’ is inevitably (and they paid me good
money to know this) to designate the knowing subject as the origin of the vector, as in the image of
God the potter. But the opposite move, of saying of a work of art that it results from an instauration, is to get oneself ready to see the potter as the one who welcomes, gathers, prepares,
explores, and invents the form of the work, just as one discovers or ‘invents’ a treasure” (p. 10).
344
C. Mazel-Cabasse
scales: how memories of past disasters resonate with risks of future ones, how
expert knowledge emerges from past and distant experiences, and, finally, how
invisible threats transform space, subjectivity, knowledge, and politics in the SF
Bay Area. This event horizon—the next Big One—provides an important perspective on a set of operations that happen each and every day in this area, and
which, from residential choices to seismic-mapping activities, from memorialization to projection, define and help bring the potential consequences of a major
earthquake into existence—into visibility.
This ethnography is built on my own research in the Bay Area of San Francisco,
where I have identified the network of scientists and experts who connect science
with their own experience of living in a seismic place and help making the Bay
Area resilient [82]. As discussed above, when it come to evaluating a risk or
thinking about a disaster, “knowing” is a complex operation. In the academic
context, it is often taken for granted that scientific and expert knowledge surpasses
lay knowledge, and that risk would be better prevented if only residents could think
more as scientists do. Here, I want to show that, in the Bay Area, scientists and
experts have also learned to think as residents do; re-defining their hierarchical
categories, comparing and discussing everyday risks to re-situate the earthquake
threat in a time frame and context of an individual’s life span. As discussed by one
respondent living in San Francisco, involved in risk prevention and the development of building codes,
With earthquakes, they’re so rare and extreme that to understand them, you have to think of
them in the spectrum of everyday risks, monthly risks, and yearly risks. These all get
compiled together and, most people, whether they articulate it or not, they’re aware of that
difference. You rarely find people that dumb that they don’t understand risk in their daily
life. [It] doesn’t mean they always make the informed decisions, but they have an innate
understanding of the rarity of things.
10
Further, as a one-time non-expert resident, but now an expert in the field,
recalled, the risk of an earthquake is not, and never was, “a given.” Rather, it has
been progressively instaured
11 by research work, specific practices, and attention to
the matter. She stated, “I’m from Massachusetts and New York State. When I
moved here, it was the 1970s; [The idea of a major earthquake] wasn’t in anybody’s
10
Respondent D.21, personal communication, 2011.
11
Toward a definition of instauration, Latour [83] writes: “Instauration and construction are clearly
synonyms. But instauration has the distinct advantage of not dragging along all the metaphorical
baggage of constructivism—which would in any case be an easy and almost automatic association
given that an artwork is so obviously ‘constructed’ by the artist. To speak of ‘instauration’ is to
prepare the mind to engage with the question of modality in quite the opposite way from constructivism. To say, for example, that a fact is ‘constructed’ is inevitably (and they paid me good
money to know this) to designate the knowing subject as the origin of the vector, as in the image of
God the potter. But the opposite move, of saying of a work of art that it results from an instauration, is to get oneself ready to see the potter as the one who welcomes, gathers, prepares,
explores, and invents the form of the work, just as one discovers or ‘invents’ a treasure” (p. 10).
344
C. Mazel-Cabasse