Between sirens, escape routes, and emergency drills: everyday life under the risk of disaster

Abstract

This article aims to present the problematics of the recent institutional dissemination of a given set of disaster risk reduction strategies, characterized by the triad composed by sirens, escape routes, and emergency drills, using a sociological perspective, in interface with the anthropological view. It begins with the identification of significant links of the notions of everyday life, social order, and communitas. Then, it is analysed the modulations of such links, concerning the (in)practicability of the collective wellbeing. Although these are present in the civil protection and defense system as effective strategies when facing considerable dangers, this reflection suggests that such dispositifs for disaster reduction serve a secondary purpose. That is to hinder from society the critical perspective about the origins of the socioenvironmental processes that generates such dangers. By asking how effective this set of standardized strategies could be, given the complexity of socioenvironmental dynamics in different community contexts in which such strategies have
been replicated, one concludes that their primary effect is to convert the collective fear of a possibility of occurrence of disaster into a means by which a new non-democratic social order based on docile collective behaviour is emerging.