SPEAKER 1: Violent quakes shook buildings and houses,
reducing them to rubble.
It was night, so the people of the town
were caught unaware in their sleep, buried under crashing
roofs and crumbling walls.
Those that survived the initial shocks rushed out
of their homes panicked, disoriented,
fleeing the ruins of their fallen town.
But it was not over yet.
At the break of dawn, a towering tidal wave
came roaring inland, washing over the town
and reducing it to nothing but a sign under the waves.
This is the account, given by a historian, of a real disaster.
Where and when did this disaster happen?
It could be Lisbon, 1755.
It could be Japan, 1896.
It could be Indonesia, 2004.
Were it not for the earthquake, it
could even be Houston, Texas, which only this summer became
a submerged city.
But this is, in fact, the account
given by historian Diodorus of the earthquake and tsunami that
destroyed the ancient Greek town of Helike
in the fourth century BCE.
And while this picture may not be real,
Helike served as the model for the story of Plato's Atlantis.
The point is this--
disasters affect all periods in history,
all societies, all people.
But how do different cultures interpret and make
sense of disaster differently?
As a classicist, I study the literature and history
of ancient Greece and Rome.
And I'm especially interested in how the ancient Greeks
and Romans coped with, and made sense of, disasters.
How did they experience plagues, famines, and earthquakes?
What did the destruction of Helike mean to them?
As I started looking into the testimonies of ancient Helike,
my research quickly zoomed in on the communicative aspect
of disaster.
Greeks and Romans believed disasters tell us something,
they function as signs.
This is how I became interested in semiotics,
the study of the sign.
One semiotic model suggests that the sign
is a coded message between a sender and a receiver.
In the case of Helike, the sender is divine.
It is believed that the god Poseidon
had sent the earthquake and flood as signs.
The message being, I'm very angry with you.
But in the scholarship, these religious interpretations
are often looked upon as superstitious,
irrational, primitive, even.
We don't like to think of disasters as Acts of God.
And yet-- precisely, to be sure--
this is based partly on our experience.
For example, the 1906 earthquake that
set fire to large parts of San Francisco
had left intact, miraculously, the largest whiskey
depository on the west coast, known as A.P. Hotaling.
A poet with a sense of humor composed the following verse--
"if, as they say, God spanked the town for being over frisky,
then why did he burn his churches down
and spare Hotaling's Whiskey?"
[LAUGHTER]
But I wasn't quite done with semiotics just yet.
It seemed that, even without a divine sender,
disasters are trying to tell us something.
My next clue came from an Italian travel writer--
18th century-- by the name of Scrofani.
Scrofani had traveled to Greece, and in one of his memoirs
he claimed that he could still make out,
under the deep water, the ruins of the sunken city of Helike.
And to him, the sunken city still
functioned as a, sign, communicating to him
the possible disaster that was awaiting his home town that
lay at the foot of Mount Etna an active volcano
on the island of Sicily.
And as Scrofani sits there in his boat,
peering down under the water, he starts crying.
And he cries, and he says, "how can I
look at this sign, this disaster, that stares at me,
suggesting that the same could happen to Sicily any moment?"
And I looked at the Italian.
And the Italian word for disaster,
here, that Scrofani uses is [? shagura, ?]
which is derived from a Latin word that means
to read and interpret signs.
What I realized is this--
the question I should be asking is not
what does disaster mean to this or that culture,
but how does disaster mean?
And signs play a role.
So why does any of this matter?
What does this matter?
Well, by comparing ancient and modern discourse of disaster,
I believe we can learn from disaster.
But not, as this Time magazine cover recently
suggested, by being bigger, or better,
or stronger than the storm.
Not by outdoing nature.
No.
We can learn from disaster something
fundamental about the way in which human cultures construct
disaster as communication between themselves
and an environment that is perceived as perilous.
And so, perhaps.
If we just stop to listen.
maybe we can hear what disasters are trying to tell us,
follow the signs.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]