Disasters and 'conditions of possibility': rethinking causation through an analysis of earthquakes in Nepal.
Disasters and 'conditions of possibility': rethinking causation through an analysis of earthquakes in Nepal.
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灾害和“可能性条件”：通过对尼泊尔地震的分析重新思考因果关系。
作者：
Liechty M
灾难的后果是什么造成的？学者们越来越多地转向历史方法，将结果与灾前的社会政治动态联系起来。灾难会导致“关键时刻”，从而“触发”最初现象之后发生的事件。本文认为，“关键时刻”范式与它所衍生的“路径依赖”理论有共同的局限性，即历史主义倾向——一种能够更好地解释连续性而不是变化的功能主义目的论。作为替代方案，这一分析借鉴了米歇尔·福柯对“可能性条件”的理解，将其作为重新思考能动性/因果关系的一种方式，从个体主体、事件甚至历史条件转向灾难后出现的新的、彻底不稳定的“认识论领域”。本文研究了尼泊尔发生的一系列毁灭性地震，以思考灾后的“认识论领域”如何呈现新的“可能性条件”，在这种条件下，新的想法、行动和结果以灾前历史条件无法预测的方式变得可想象和可能。
What causes a disaster's aftermath? Scholars have increasingly turned to historical approaches that link outcomes to pre‐disaster sociopolitical dynamics. Disasters lead to ‘critical junctures’ that ‘trigger’ events that unfold in the wake of the initial phenomenon. This paper argues that the ‘critical junctures’ paradigm shares limitations with ‘path dependency’ theory from which it is derived, namely a tendency towards historicism—a functionalist teleology better able to explain continuity than change. As an alternative, this analysis draws on Michel Foucault's understanding of ‘conditions of possibility’ as a way of rethinking agency/causation, moving away from individual subjects, events, or even historical conditions towards, instead, the new, radically destabilised ‘epistemological field’ emerging in the disaster's aftermath. This paper examines a series of devastating earthquakes in Nepal to consider how post‐disaster ‘epistemological fields’ present new ‘conditions of possibility’ within which new ideas, actions, and outcomes become thinkable and possible in ways that pre‐disaster historical conditions could not have predicted.