ABSTRACT
The 1999 disaster occurred in the closure of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, the platform that stimulated institutions and researchers to specialize in the problem of risks. The role of Latin America was essential on the discursive transformation of the multiple problem presented by disasters. Latin American researchers proposed the most important statement in the interpretative turn of the problem: “disasters are not natural”, but are the catastrophic product of the intersection in time and space of one or several hazards with a vulnerable context. Anthropology is not a megalithic science, but a way of understanding social, historical, and symbolic processes from a broad theoretical, methodological, and interpretative basis. The foundation of the subject Anthropology of Disasters does not mean that it has been accepted since its first proposal. The epistemological precision that lies in the origin of our research about disasters begun with Garcia-Acosta.
