ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the state of anthropological research on disasters in Colombia. Disasters have been a significant part of the socioenvironmental history and the territorial configuration of Colombia. Hydrometeorological disasters have been the most common, floods and landslides being the cause of the greatest percentage of disaster-related loss of life and housing destruction. Although Colombia is a disaster-prone country with a significant history of disasters that has dramatically changed the lives of thousands of people, anthropologists have devoted scant attention to these rather evident and transformative events. Earthquakes, floods, and mudslides are not merely hazardous events that result in disasters and social calamities. The idea of disastrous landscapes as spaces of ethnographic revelation, therefore, stands in sharp contrast with the very definition of disasters as revelatory events. Ethnographic work in disastrous landscapes has also considered the instability and fluidity of certain terrains, surfaces, soils, lands, and water which have also opened new avenues for anthropological research in Colombia.
