This article argues that 'appropriation' is key to understanding how communities respond to disasters, and offers a new methodological approach. It suggests that cultural representations of disasters should be studied through the prism of appropriation. Both in the past and the present, people have crafted specific representations of disasters and used them as identity markers to create a sense of community. Appropriation involves attaching meaning to the disaster in order to make it comprehensible or even acceptable. This meaning was attached in two ways: through representation and identification. Repre-sentation is the substitution of a disastrous event with a cultural artefact, like an image or text, that corresponds to the event. Identification is the process by which people constantly relate themselves to other individuals and groups in terms of similarity and difference. To understand these processes, cul-tural historians should look at producers and consumers (who produced meaning in their turn) as well as the medium, genre, and discourses they can find in disaster representations.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
展开▼
