ABSTRACT
Through a study of the epidemics that devastated Mesoamerica’s indigenous population in the sixteenth century, this chapter develops ‘sensemaking’ as a useful analytical category for the history of disasters. To do so, it revisits established sources like chronicles, medical handbooks, and indigenous painted annals to investigate the discourses produced by different social groups in Spanish colonial society in their attempts to explain why and how the epidemics had occurred. Comparing these groups (medical professionals, clerics, conquest elites, indigenous intellectuals) under the premise of competition for dominance in a ‘fractal society’, the chapter draws conclusions regarding the social dimension of disaster. It suggests that while different social groups shared certain basic ideas about epidemic disease, they deployed these in different ways to support their respective positions. These disparate discourses are connected by their status as sensemaking, a category that serves an established function within the cycle of disaster and response.
