Catastrophes, risques et représentations sociales: réflexions sur les "puits de causalité"
Disasters, risks and social representations

Summary/Abstract: This article is confronting the contributions of the sociology of the risks with the study of the social representations. The second theory, even if it wants to be multidisciplinary and multidimensional, has difficulty in integrating the field-research of the collective imagination and of the contextual or historic factors, because it is regularly centered on the strictly methodological objective. This kind of reductionism makes it lose the substance of these phenomena (risks, disasters, extraordinary events) which are symbolic, temporarily-locally referred, cultural and with plural aspects. After having described the sense and the definition of the terms "disaster" and "risk", we shall analyze the existing relations between the social impact of the disastrous phenomena and the structuralist approach of the change in the social representations theory. We shall notice that the latter theoretical trend could be enriched by a reflexive and anthropological conception of the catastrophic facts and of the proliferation of the risks in the contemporary societies.

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