Abstract

LIGI, Gianluca. La inundación del Vajont: Representaciones periodísticas de un desastre italiano. Desacatos [online]. 2005, n.19, pp.71-84. ISSN 2448-5144.

Even though twenty years have passed, many aspects of the "Vajont" disaster are still being debated. This event, in which 2 000 people lost their lives, has been deemed the greatest "non natural" disaster in Italian history. This paper analyzes the social perceptions of the disaster, using the accounts of witnesses and other texts collected by local memory, and establishing relations with the rhetorical strategies (lexicon, metaphors, photographs and headlines) and with the narrative structure of some of the articles published in four nation-wide newspapers, during the first week that followed the disaster. When studying disasters, the anthropological analysis of mass media is essential, since they hold a great power over the construction of social reality and over the individual's elaboration of systems of knowledge.This approach allows to delve deeply into the formation and functioning of the processes surrounding the allocation of guilt and in increasing or reducing vulnerability.

Keywords : social vulnerability; flooding; mass media; blaming; risk.