Antonello Ciccozzi, Parola di scienza. Il terremoto dell’Aquila e la Commissione Grandi Rischi. Un’analisi antropologica, DeriveApprodi, 2013
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Antonello Ciccozzi, The Word of Science. The L'Aquila Earthquake and the Major Risks Committee. An Anthropological Analysis, DeriveApprodi, 2013
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Book Reviews
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Gemma Maltese
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10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17154
152
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Antonello Ciccozzi, The Word of Science. The L'Aquila Earthquake and the Major Risks Committee. An Anthropological Analysis, DeriveApprodi, 2013
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152                                                          Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

ing” (p. 94). Thus, specialized procedure of visibilitization become pivot-
al, insofar as they provide the essential tools to identify relevant social
media data and make sense of them. The capacity of an institution – be it
a university or the police – or a market actor to effectively surveil a target
population is proportional to its ability to ‘visibilize’ – rather than merely
visualize – information, that is, to crawl through the crowds of infor-
mation available in order to extract or reconstruct readable patterns. To
this, it should be added that, just as other digital media, social media are
interactive by definition. In such a fast-changing scenario, skilful surveil-
lance may function by elicitation, turning, once again, into something
akin to cooptation.
    With this book, Trottier has provided a valuable contribution to the
empirical study of everyday surveillance practices. The book is clear and
well organized, two qualities which also make it suitable for teaching
purposes. While his empirical research is limited to a tiny case (the use of
Facebook at a specific Canadian university) and does not include ethnog-
raphy – which would have arguably made it more exciting – it nonethe-
less manages to flesh out all the major points and issues in current social
media research.

!
                                    ***
!
!
Antonello Ciccozzi
Parola di scienza. Il terremoto dell’Aquila e la Commissione Grandi Rischi.
Un’analisi antropologica [The Word of Science. The L'Aquila Earthquake
and the Major Risks Committee. An Anthropological Analysis]
Verona, DeriveApprodi, 2013, pp. 188

Gemma Maltese University of Calabria / Lancaster University

    The book by Antonello Ciccozzi can be described as an open path
through the anthropological rooms and cultural semiospheres – as the au-
thor describes them – of the earthquake in the city and among the citizens
of L’Aquila. Through the case of the earthquake of L’Aquila, on the 6
April 2009, Ciccozzi shows the divisions, conflicts, dominations, subordi-
nations, alienations that are reproduced through the current relationships
between forms of subjected and dominant ‘knowledges’, in contemporary
capitalist societies.
    In that earthquake, Ciccozzi was directly involved in several senses: he
is a citizen of L’Aquila; he survived the earthquake; he was a ‘privileged’
witness during the different phases of the trial, appointed to investigate
the management of the earthquake of L’Aquila, and, in particular, the
Book Review                                                               153
Major Risks Committee (MRC), which was established by the Italian gov-
ernment in the period before the earthquake. In fact, Ciccozzi was called
as a cultural anthropologist in order to provide technical advice on the
forms of governmental communication and intervention on the percep-
tion of citizens of L’Aquila with respect to the different earthquakes and
seismic swarms that were occurring in this territory for more than three
months before the 6 April. His research experience can be defined as an
observant participation of what it meant to be part of the places and
community, and of the dynamics of management relating to the earth-
quake. From this convergence of experiences, this anthropological analy-
sis is aimed at drawing attention to how the forms of communication of
the members of the Commission led to an underestimation of risk by a
part of the population of L’Aquila that, in turn, encouraged citizens to
stay at home during the earthquake. In the “word of science” – in this
case, the word of the MRC – and in the desire of the population of
L’Aquila for calming and reassuring messages with regard to the several
months of earthquake activity, scientific-media communication, struc-
tured on the wave of “rassicurazionismo” – being reassuring and persua-
sive through “science” – were able to penetrate and modify those strati-
fied popular ‘knowledges’ and ‘traditional-instinctive behaviors’ that over
time in the face of previous earthquakes had prescribed precautionary
behavior.
    The author does not intend to suggest that the way in which the
Commission managed its communication with citizens was the primary or
only factor which determined the tragic loss of life in L’Aquila. Neverthe-
less, Ciccozzi points out how, in particular, the well-publicised visit of the
members of the Commission at L’Aquila in front of all the citizenship, the
day before the earthquake, had, among other elements, a strong influ-
ence: the communication of this Commission acted as a mixture of nor-
mative-reassuring knowledge, transmitted to the population of L’Aquila,
in a moment of particular individual and collective emotional weakness
and fragility. The author reports the testimony of several survivors who
tell their stories and the stories of their relatives who were casualties in
the earthquake, showing how that night some people decided not to leave
their houses during the earthquake, because they were influenced by the
reassuring diagnosis of scientists. Observant participation, direct testimo-
nies, in connection to themes of anthropology of risk and the theory of
social representations, construct this analysis of the ‘scientific’ ‘manipula-
tion’ of the L’Aquila semiospheres of the earthquake: in other terms, the
way in which the normative power of technoscience, in politics and the
public sphere, particularly in the management of risks and dangers, seems
to act as a sort of arbiter-peacemaker in social conflicts and public con-
cerns, and also, ambivalently, as a (modernist) cultural source of both re-
assurance and risk in current social imaginaries.
    In the earthquake of L’Aquila, the condemnation – the blame and an-
ger that Ciccozzi explores, as a member of the (different) communities
154                                                          Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

that were playing in the ‘show’ of the governmental management of “Ma-
jor Risks” – is not against science, but it is against the negligence that has
characterized the word of its interpreters. Technicians, scientists, experts
have been called to assume their responsibility for risk assessment and
communication, and not because they had to be able to predict the earth-
quake: as Ciccozzi underlines, earthquake-risk assessment and manage-
ment and its communication are different from the prediction of earth-
quakes. Nevertheless, particularly in situations of emergency and risk, sci-
entific communications can have – even in the face of a particular cultural
semiosphere ‘accustomed’ to earthquakes and their effects – profound
social impact in the perception, representation and evaluation of disas-
ters.
    Although Ciccozzi, at the end of his analysis, puts more emphasis on
the question of scientific communication in the public sphere, the “word
of science” recalls in any case the problem of the technoscientific domain
in the relationships between citizens and power (rationalized) institutions
of knowledge societies: the word of science is a discourse-dispositive of
power. Its normative character is tangled with juridical, political, econom-
ic and cultural beliefs, in the construction of our cognitive maps and in-
terpretations of the world and its phenomena. In this sense, imagining
reflexively the hierarchical structure between forms of knowledge, and its
centrality in capitalist democracies, inside the rooms of the Court of
L’Aquila Ciccozzi’s analysis played a key role in the trial that ended with
a “shock judgment”. This was shocking particularly for the national and
international scientific community; in many case the press reported com-
ments which link this judgment to the story of Galileo: six years in prison
for the Commission of scientists.
    Emphasizing the dimension of scientific communication, Ciccozzi
elaborates upon one of the key themes of this story: a linguistic misunder-
standing about the meaning of the intervention of the MRC. The author
explores how those scientists in that meeting and in the previous commu-
nications kept telling the citizens of L’Aquila to remain calm: by saying
that nobody is able to scientifically predict earthquakes, discrediting any
other technical analysis that could go in other directions, the commission-
ers reassured citizens, and the result was that after the meeting with the
MRC everyone in the city of L’Aquila was equivocally talking about
“non-alarm”. The contradictions of this communication produced, in
many people, a subordination of their own memory and cultural-
instinctive behavior in an earthquake to the reassuring idea that was
transmitted by ‘scientists’, according to which those continuous quakes
could just represent the way in which the earthquake was dissipating. The
author expands on the meaning of “non-alarm”, explaining in this way
why the diagnosis of the MRC was not at all a “failure to alarm” but a
“disastrous reassurance”. The conclusions which lead his analysis are
constructed on the idea that the advice of the MRC was based on two
main themes. On the one hand, the author underlines the difference be-
Book Review                                                               155
tween the non-alarm and reassurance provided by this institution of pow-
er directly to the citizens of L’Aquila. Articulating the “word of science”,
in the final days of the earthquake authoritative scientists came, delivered
and reaffirmed a version that they had already started to communicate to
the population during the intensification of the quakes in the weeks be-
fore. The theory of power was that the tremors should not be understood
as the possible prelude to an earthquake, but as its antidote.
     On the other hand, he focuses on the explanation of how these reas-
surances communicated by scientists led to a change in the behavior of
the citizenry, or rather part of it. The author here uses a theory of social
psychology, the social representations of Serge Moscovici. The element of
this theory that Ciccozzi particularly stresses is the fact that in “ad-
vanced” societies people base their behavior on models of reality that are
predominantly predetermined by scientific institutions. Science, in its so-
cial uses and functions, provides common sense categories that influence
the actual behavior of people. The analysis of Ciccozzi intends to show
that the MRC did not alter the ability to judge or act of citizens, but it did
determine a collective interpretation that this type of phenomenon (seis-
mic swarm) was ‘positive’: there was both the construction of a reassuring
social imaginary and the persuasion of citizens through the ambivalence
of that scientific communication. In effect, in the confusion that the MRC
generated, superimposing its assessment and management of the risk of
earthquake on the prediction of this event, from this mistake, many peo-
ple, despite the quakes of the days before and that night, thought that
they could safely stay at home. And this reduction in the perception of
risk, together with the vulnerability of some buildings, determined the
loss of human lives.
     After that night, it is not only the buildings but also the “word of sci-
ence” that has not stood up to the earthquake. From this perspective, this
anthropological analysis can be defined partly as a critique of bad science,
or more precisely, it is specifically against the quackery and amateurism
that pollute the world of science. Furthermore, it shows the irreducible
normative dimension of ‘science’, and, representing also the singularities
and some peculiarities of the Italian relationships between scientific and
political institutions, Ciccozzi’s writing makes visible that form of scien-
tific authority held up through acquisitions of power from politics. The
judgment – which is a sentence for negligence – has, in this sense, the val-
ue of condemning these forms of the reciprocal admixture of power,
strengthening rather an idea of science and politics as independent and
autonomous constitutional authorities. In any case, as in that of the
earthquake of L’Aquila, in contemporary capitalist democracies, between
the divisions and cracks of modernity, the reality is closer to the situation
of power acquisition from politics to science, from science to politics, re-
ciprocally, and from political and scientific institutions to economic en-
terprises and interests. It is a tangled relational process of power, working
through the co-production of that normative knowledge which ultimately
156                                                         Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

finds legitimation in the “word of science”, in the name of the mainte-
nance of social order, especially in emergencies, risks, dangers and crises.
But when the events contradict this word, memories, fears, old angers re-
surface and the conflict of subjected knowledges emerges as an open
crack in the damaged walls of the rationalized structures of modernity.
Through the cracks, the day after the earthquake, between the dust and
the rubble, something that was already happening in the days and weeks
before the 6th April became clearer: in that period L’Aquila was in fact
turned into a sort of laboratory of public fear and reassurance, that was
produced by the degeneration of the social function of scientific institu-
tions. The ‘bio-political’ experiment was to intervene through a “media
operation” (as the ex-head of Italian Civil Protection, Guido Bertolaso
put it) on a population weakened by weeks of earthquake, with the goal
not to discuss, make evaluation, research information: the aim was to re-
assure people, persuading them that there would not be an earthquake.
This is the accusation of Ciccozzi against that “word of science” which
provokes death and pain with the negligence and incompetence of power.

!
                                   * * *!


Mathieu Quet
Politiques du savoir: Sciences, technologies et participation dans les an-
nées 1968 [Knowledge Politics: Science, Technology and Participation in
the 1968s]
Paris, Editions des archives contemporaines, 2013, pp. xii+226

Francesca Musiani MINES ParisTech
    When participatory mechanisms fail, it is because their promoters
have taken for granted the founding elements of the very definition of
participation – a reductionist view that ends up breaking against the wall
of “reality” and complexity of today’s political processes. Using as an in-
troductory example the spectacular failure of the 2009-2010 public cycles
of discussions on nanotechnology organized by the French Commission
for Public Debate (CNDP), this is how Mathieu Quet (researcher at the
Parisian Institut de la Recherche et du Développement – IRD), introduces
us to the central argument of his book, based on a PhD dissertation de-
fended at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2009. The
definition that the promoters of participatory mechanisms make of partic-
ipation – often too narrow and reductive, if not outright incomplete or
based on powerful assumptions – should be put on trial so as to highlight
the plurality of organizational, social and political forms that constitute
