Normalization of threat

The condition Bankoff describes underneath Filipino resilience: hazard treated as an ordinary feature of life rather than as an interruption of it. Housing, farming calendars, family arrangements, savings behaviour and humour all adjust to the assumption that the next disaster is scheduled rather than hypothetical.

It explains something that reads as fatalism from outside and is not. A population that has absorbed the expectation of catastrophe allocates effort differently, and behaviour that looks like indifference to risk is frequently a rational response to risk that cannot be avoided and has never been insured against by anyone else.

Source: Greg Bankoff (2003), Cultures of Disaster: Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines, RoutledgeCurzon, where the normalization of threat is the organising idea and where vulnerability is tied to political, social and economic marginalisation rather than to nature. Paid; chapters circulate on Academia.edu.

First used in: 2.6 · What is actually strong here