Societies define, through their powerful agencies, certain structures and activities as central, proper and visible, while others are defined as peripheral, deviant and private.

The law, his main field of interest and writing, is the archetype of the former, but he was clearly fascinated by the latter—by ‘improper or undesirable’ activities of the deviant, by sleep, the ‘night-side’ of society, by ‘love as a sociological problem’, by the role of chance and the seemingly meaningless and absurd, by total institutions hidden from view, for instance on ships, and by the sociology of secrecy, as exemplified in underground organizations. In this lecture I also want to explore what is, but in a different way, hidden: that is, I want to talk about what is hidden from view in normal times but which an abnormal event, such as a sudden disaster, can reveal. In a sense, the revelation tells us nothing new, nothing that we did not already know. No normally intelligent and sensitive tourist visiting New Orleans, for example, can have failed to notice, alongside its exotic and historic allure, that it was an impoverished southern town exhibiting in concentrated form the interlocking and worsening inequalities of race and class that run through contemporary American society. What I want to talk about today is what can no longer be hidden from view after the disaster that has befallen that town and its surroundings. [...]