Cet article défend une recherche sociologique qui allie le meilleur du constructionisme social avec le réalisme critique, et qui intègre la sociologie des catastrophes à la sociologie environnementale. Il montre comment les perceptions de la gestion des catastrophes sont socialement construites au moyen d'une action communicative dans un contexte d'incitations venant des ≪ actants≫ de la nature, comment les autorités sont tentées de remplacer la transparence par le secret quand ces incitations deviennent particulièrement dangereuses et comment les catastrophes sont utilisées a d'autres fins. La tempête de verglas de Janvier 1998, qui donnait l'impression d'etre une catastrophe naturelle (la plus dispendieuse de l'histoire canadienne), était plutôt un hybride déclenché par des constructions de la nature primale qui sont devenues désastreuses où la nature recombinante vulnérable est devenue socialement construite.
This paper argues for sociological research that combines the best of social constructionism and critical realism and that integrates disaster sociology with environmental sociology. It documents how perceptions of managing disaster are socially constructed through communicative action in a context of prompts from nature's actants, how authorities are tempted to replace openness with secrecy when those prompts become particularly dangerous, and how disasters are used for other purposes. The January 1998 ice storm that seemed a natural disaster (the most expensive in Canadian history) was instead a hybrid initiated by primal nature's constructions that became disastrous where vulnerable recombinant nature had been socially constructed.
There is presently much theoretical discourse claiming that nature is being socially constructed or even abolished. Some authors celebrate this development and others lament it. Still others bracket nature's dynamics out of the analysis. The present paper critically assesses these theories and methodologies concerning relations between social practices and processes of nature. It then develops an alternative argument. The expansion of society into wilderness areas has brought new disturbances of nature into society. Pristine nature has been replaced by socially encompassed primal nature, which retains its capacity for independent dynamics that affect social constructions. Moreover, nature remains embedded in technology and so does its potential to escape control. These hybrids constructed by humans and nonhumans recombine processes and materials of nature. Now that this recombinant nature has been integrated into society and new primal dynamics of nature have been internalised, there is increasing reason to incorporate the forces of nature into sociological analysis. At the present time there are strong currents of discourse in the social sciences stating that nature is being socially constructed, has been abolished, or that it is best to bracket nature's dynamics out of the analysis. The present paper will begin with a critique of these theories and methodologies. Then it will proceed to develop the opposite argument that autonomous nature has been internalised into society and that it is best to analyse the relations between social practices and the dynamics of nature.
The social construction, abolition, mastery, death, or end of natureIn his theory of late modernity, Giddens (1991: 224) contends that the 'invasion of the natural world by abstract systems brings nature to an end as a domain external to human knowledge and involvement '. Beck (1995: 37-8) claims that the 'process of interaction with nature has consumed it, abolished it. . . . it no longer exists '. Eder (1996: 20) has contributed to turning sociology toward cultural theory 'which conceives of nature as socially constituted'. In keeping with this
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