Historical_Disaster_Experiences_Towards

Prévia do material em texto

GERRIT JASPER SCHENK (ed.), Historical Disaster Experiences: Towards a Comparative and
Transcultural History of Disasters across Asia and Europe. Cham: Springer, 2017. Pp. ix + 436.
ISBN 978-3-3194-9162-2. $139.00 (paperback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087419000347
While environmental history is a relatively new area of research, in recent years the number of
valuable studies in this field has significantly increased. With much work focused on particular
periods or territories currently happening, such as a newly European Research Council-funded
grant on early modern South Western Europe, guided by Domenico Cecere of the University of
Naples, or Monica Azzolini’s research on social responses to disasters in early modern Italy, the-
oretical as well as comparative studies on natural disasters remain extremely limited. The volume
edited by Gerrit Schenk of the Universities of Heidelberg and Darmstadt seeks to fill the gap by
presenting the first attempt to explore the phenomenon of natural-disaster experiences in global
perspective and, subsequently, providing a theoretical framework for further research on the
subject.
The goal determines the volume’s structure. With a global history of disasters in mind, it is
divided into five major parts. Despite consisting of two essays only (by the editor, Gerrit
Schenk, and Greg Bankoff), Part 1 outlines the basis for the sociocultural and scientific history
of natural disasters, focuses on the current state of the art and examines how the key terms and
theoretical concepts usually associated with the topic in question developed over the centuries.
Given the general focus of the volume, its main body is unsurprisingly structured thematically
and not chronologically, with respective parts dealing with the materiality of disasters (Part 2),
a search for their reasons (Part 3), and social responses to calamities of different types – earth-
quakes and fires (Part 4) and floods (Part 5). In the end, this provides the reader with an extremely
broad picture of how various natural catastrophes were perceived and interpreted in different
epochs and different cultures – something that may simultaneously be seen as a true advantage
and important contribution of the volume as well as its problem. To begin with, the reasons for
the proposed sequence of research parts remain unclear; moreover, since the three insightful
parts on social and material aspects of disasters are somewhat interconnected by the research’s per-
spective, for the sake of the volume’s integrity it might have been a good solution to keep them
unseparated. Similarly, Part 3, devoted to the quest for natural-philosophical (mostly astrological)
and scientific explanations of disasters, would have been better off at the end of the volume, thus
enabling it to be demonstrated how ambiguous and complex interpretive approaches to calamities
in various cultural areas were, and, more importantly, avoiding breaking the chain of the ‘material’
and ‘social’ research parts.
The same can be said about individual contributions. All of them, written by leading experts in
respective fields, are of high quality and true interdisciplinary character. Unlike numerous
contributions, which every scholar has come across in their academic life, that refer to the word
‘interdisciplinary’ as if this were something almost compulsory in a decent academic paper, but
without really getting its proper sense, by combining the results of natural and earth sciences,
statistical analysis, and social, economic and political history, each contribution is a thorough
and innovative study. This, in turn, makes the volume an exciting read to everyone interested in
the perception of natural disasters throughout world history, from ancient Egypt and the medieval
Islamic world to modern Switzerland or twentieth-century Nepal. At the same time, the
volume’s major goal, again, leads to a situation whereby, within each respective research part,
the papers remain rather unconnected and generally present still insightful but separated case
studies. To take one example, Part 3 collects essays on astrology as a valid way to explain the
origin of disasters in ancient Egypt, the medieval Islamic world and India, although the functions
and uses of prediction practices in the mentioned areas and cultures seem to be significantly
different. Moreover, both astrological interpretations in other regions, such as medieval and
374 Book reviews
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087419000347
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 213.162.80.104, on 03 Oct 2019 at 19:04:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
Renaissance Europe, and alternative approaches to the problem of causation are left in the
shadows.
Overall, the present volume is a fresh and valuable contribution to the growing field of environ-
mental studies, with a strong theoretical framework established in the introductory essays and an
impressive list of individual contributions, which are expected to cover experiences of natural dis-
aster in time and space. As noted above, due to the ambitious attempt to get to the level of a global
history of disasters, the book as a whole lacks consistency and therefore constitutes a number of
mostly separated essays. However, combining the volume’s theoretical approach with more struc-
turally tightened papers might have resulted in an ideal, in every respect, edited volume on natural
disasters – something for which the volume has opened the door wide, and which remains the task
for future generations of environmental scholars.
OVANES AKOPYAN
Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
JEFF HARDIN, RONALD L. NUMBERS and RONALD A. BINZLEY (eds.), TheWarfare between Science and
Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 355.
ISBN 978-1-4214-2618-1. $39.95 (paperback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087419000359
The history of the assertion that science and religion are inevitably in conflict is dominated by two
late nineteenth-century narratives; JohnWilliam Draper’sHistory of the Conflict between Religion
and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom (1896). The present very welcome volume contains seventeen essays
that examine these classic texts, their reception by contemporaries and the subsequent history of
the conflict thesis. As Laurence Principe and several of the other contributors make clear,
Draper and White offered significantly different analyses of the science–religion relationship and
therefore of the source of conflict. For Draper, a devout positivist, Catholicism was the enemy
of progress, while White considered that dogmatic theology was the antagonist.
Several of the chapters focus on responses to the conflict thesis in different religious and national
contexts. By showing that local political and social factors are relevant, these studies help to under-
mine the frequently stated claim that the conflict thesis is a universal, atemporal truth. With respect
to local differences, Efthymios Nicolaidis makes the important point that, unlike Protestantism, the
conflict thesis had little purchase in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In particular, the modern
Greek state encompassed both science and religion as it saw itself as heir to both ancient Greek
science and traditional Orthodoxy. Turning to America, Bradley J. Gundlich shows that in the
late nineteenth century Protestant evangelicals managed to accommodate science, even evolution-
ary theory, while waging war against religious reform. However, with the rise of fundamentalism
around the turn of the century, evangelicals increasingly portrayed evolution as incompatible with
Gospel Christianity. By contrast, as Jon H. Roberts argues, liberal Protestants in America rejected
the notion of conflict and generally opted for a separation of the two domains, thus significantly
distancing themselves from fundamentalists.
A very differentperspective is offered by Noah Efron, who argues that American Jews of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perceived the conflict as being not with religion but with
Christianity. Fearful that Christians were seeking to undermine their status as Americans, Jews
embraced science as a natural ally against Christian hegemony, with many Jews pursuing
careers in science. During the same period Muslims in the Ottoman Empire generally emphasized
the harmony between Islam and science as a way of showing that Islam could encompass modern-
ity. Yet, as M. Alper Yalçinkaya also shows, there were some dissenting voices who reflected the
social tensions of the period. The complexities of Roman Catholicism’s reactions to science are
ably discussed by David Mislin, who draws attention to the Church’s stand against such
Book reviews 375
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087419000347
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 213.162.80.104, on 03 Oct 2019 at 19:04:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at