History
Jan Hinrichsen
Unsicheres Ordnen
Lawinenabwehr, Galtür 1884–2014
[Ordering Uncertainty. Avalanche Securization, Galtür 1884–2014.]
Also Available As:
Published in German.
What do folders have to do with avalanche catastrophes, what have catastrophes to do with orders? This historical-ethnographic study describes how knowledge and disaster, archive and crisis, order and threat interrelate. The folders, whose back covers adorn this volume, assemble uncertainties and make ordering intelligible as a vulnerable practice and a practice of vulnerability. From the perspective of an anthropology of knowledge, Jan Hinrichsen traces how the avalanche of Galtür in 1999 inscribed itself in the archive and how this archive wrote the catastrophe. He analyses security technologies used to guard against natural hazards in the Tyrolean community and understands them as assemblages of discourses, practices and things. In this genealogy of uncertainty, it is shown how the avalanche disaster emerges from those epistemic orders that it simultaneously calls into question.