cc  >> Thank you for joining me for  Wednesday Nite at the Lab at UW  Madison Biotechnology Center.  Tonight we welcome Dr. Rick  Keller, an associate professor  in the Department of Medical  History and Bioethics at UW  Madison.  Dr. Keller attended the  University of Colorado at  Boulder where he received both  his BA and MA in history.  He received his PhD in history  from Rutgers University, and  then, because of his thesis that  focused on French psychiatry in  colonial North Africa, he  received the Forum for the  History of the Human Sciences  Biannual Dissertation Prize.  He has described his research as  the intersection of the history  and ethnography of European and  global health.  In 2007 his first book,  "Colonial Madness: Psychiatry  in French North Africa,"  was published.  He is now working on a new  project, a study of the  intersections of human and  environmental vulnerability in  the deadly European heat wave of  2003, which is tonight's seminar  topic.  Please join me in welcoming  Dr. Rick Keller to Wednesday  Nite at the Lab.  (applause)  >> Rick Keller: Well,  thanks very much, Nadia,  for your generous introduction.  I also want to thank the  Wisconsin Alumni Association,  the Osher Lifelong Learning  Institute, and the Biotech  Program for the invitation to  speak. 

 And, certainly, I want to thank  you all for coming out tonight.  I'll ask you to bear with me, my  notes are sort of integrated  into the presentation, and they  were a little bit wonky when I  ran through it earlier.  So if I pause, an awkward pause  is not, well, it's part of my  style but also perhaps part of  the technology.  In any event, thank you so much  for coming out tonight.  And I can warn you in advance  that there really are no happy  endings to this story.  It's a story of environmental  catastrophe, a story of death,  and a story of isolation.  It's one of these projects that  when I was engaged in the  research, every research  breakthrough that I had thrilled  me but at the same time saddened  me because every one of the  stories that I investigated had  a pretty horrible outcome.  I want to begin by telling you  where I did my work.  Situated roughly a dozen  kilometers southeast of central  Paris, the suburb of Thiais in  the Val-de-Marne Department lies  about midway between the Orly  Airport on Paris' southern  outskirts and the Rungis Food  Market.  It appears, at first, like many  of the communities of the  suburban Paris region, most  famous, perhaps, for the riots  that engulfed them in flames in  2005. 

 There's a four-lane national  highway that separates this from  its surrounding suburbs, and  there's a number of buses that  link this corridor with the  Paris metro system, the --  on, again, the southern side  of the city.  The highway itself is pretty  uninteresting.  It's lined with big box stores  like the French version of Home  Depot and that sort of thing.  Gas stations, fast food chains,  McDonald's, and so on,  occasional couscous or other  Middle Eastern restaurants, and  the occasional cafe.  But as the highway nears the  suburb of Thiais it becomes  clear that there's another  industry that predominates in  this town of 28,000.  Florists, funeral services, and  monument producers abound,  bordering a vast open space  that sits behind a forbidden  gate on the southern side of the  highway, the Parisian public  cemetery of Thiais.  And here's the gate.  At the southern extreme of the  cemetery lay four divisions that  are colloquially known as the  "poor section."  Each of them contains about 200  identical tombs.  Each labeled with an engraved  brass tag bearing the victim's  name and, where available, birth  and death dates.  In each of these divisions,  several rows of these tombs  remain unlabeled indicating that  their occupants remain  unidentified. 

 The plots in these sections are  owned by the city of Paris, and  they serve as temporary  repositories for unclaimed  bodies of those who die within  the city's limits or in several  suburbs.  Many of these graves are filled  with the bodies of the homeless,  buried at public expense when no  family member claims the body.  Others are those with few or no  social contacts, found dead in  their apartments and who had no  established burial plans.  While some are those who died in  care of charitable organizations  like Les Petits Freres des  Pauvres, or Little Brothers  of the Poor.  Others, still, and in far fewer  numbers, are those who  specifically request burial here  out of solidarity with the poor.  Family members can claim bodies  in these graves for up to five  years after burial.  At that point, the Paris city  morgue and the Paris medical  examiners office reclaims them,  removes them from the tombs and  cremates them.  Now it's here in section 58 that  one could find up until about  the present, about a hundred of  what some have called the first  victims of global climate  change.  These bodies belong to victims  of the heat wave of 2003 which  remains the worst natural  disaster in French history.  This was a disaster that was  linked to a high pressure front  that remained lodged static over  western Europe for about two  weeks in August of that year,  and it assailed much of the  continent with record high  temperatures. 

 And it was a catastrophe that  was as much social as it was  climatological in origin, as  these bodies suggest.  They're the so-called abandoned  or forgotten victims of the  disaster.  Those whose bodies remained  unclaimed by family or friends  after they died.  They are those who died, and to  a great extent, lived unnoticed  by their neighbors, discovered  in some cases only weeks after  their death.  And they are those who rapidly  became the symbols of the  disaster for a nation wringing  its hands over the mismanagement  of the heat wave and the social  and political dysfunctions that  it revealed.  My project and my talk tonight  tells the stories of these  victims and the catastrophe that  took their lives.  It explores multiple narratives  of disaster.  It explores the official story  of the crisis as it unfolded and  its aftermath as presented by  the media and by the state.  It discusses what I would call  the anecdotal lives and deaths  of its victims and the ways in  which they illuminate and  challenge typical  representations of the disaster.  And it also briefly hints at  scientific understandings of  catastrophe and its management. 

 This is a story about  citizenship, but it's also a  story about poverty and  marginalization.  It's a story about suffering,  dehumanization, and death in the  contemporary West.  It's at once, I would argue,  a social history of risk  and vulnerability in the urban  landscape and an ethnographic  account of how a city copes with  dramatic change and emerging  threats.  It's about the city as a  technological system and an  agent of nature.  And about its intersections with  the human culture that it    reflexively shapes.  It's about the heat wave  disaster in Paris, of course,  but it's equally about the  process of researching that  disaster.  Research that took place in  archives and libraries, in  government offices and  conference rooms, in graveyards  and decaying apartment  buildings.  It's about the complexities of  the truth of this disaster and  the stories of these forgotten  who lay the bare the social  makings of catastrophe.  Now many of you will be familiar  with this devastating heat wave  that swept across western and  central Europe in August of  2003.  It was extreme by any measure. 

 Daytime highs reached 40 degrees  centigrade or about 105 degrees  or so Fahrenheit in Paris for  days on end.  More important, evening minimum  temperatures only dipped to the  low 20s centigrade or about the  low 70s Fahrenheit.  And really when we talk about  the heat waves, the big problem  is the low temperature, not  usually the high temperature.  High temperatures are bad, but  the temperature can get to be  120 degrees during the day and  as long as it cools off at night  a little bit then bodies can get  some respite from that heat.  The problem here is that evening  temperatures only fell to the  low 70s or so which meant that  the bodies just didn't get a  break.  Now, its effect had multiple  outlets.  There were, for example,  taxidermy displays in the  Natural History Museum literally  melted from their mounts.  Displays of dinosaurs and so on  literally just fell down.  The wax melted and so on.  The drought that had struck  France since February that year  had actually devastated trees in  the Parisian capital to the  extent that many of Paris'  parks, which were really the  limited green space that might  have provided some a bit of the  break from the heat's worst  extremes, were actually closed  because of the danger of falling  limbs. 

 So, again, an extreme scenario  by any measure.  And perhaps the greatest measure  of that extremity is the human  cost of the disaster.  This graph reflects daily excess  deaths during the heat wave.  And what we see is, basically, a  plot of the first 20 days of  August or so.  We see the whole month here  really.  But the peak is on August 12th.  When literally on August 12th  2200 people who wouldn't have  been expected to die otherwise,  died.  So this should give us some  indication of the truly extreme  nature of this catastrophe.  Literally 15,000 excess deaths  in France alone.  Now despite its obvious  extremity, I would argue that  we'd be remiss to consider this  a purely natural disaster. 

 The heat wave was marked by  enormous disparities in the  death toll, that reveal, I would  argue, its social origins and  effects.  And this is why I prefer to  discuss this crisis as an  ecological disaster rather than  a natural one.  Now, defining the ecological can  be just as tricky as defining  the natural.  But ecology at least has the  merit of including the social  and human dimensions of the  environment more broadly  construed.  And, therefore, it renders a  catastrophe less an act of God,  and rather more of a complex  interaction of human and natural  systems.  The vast majority of those who  died were, as this graph  reflects, the very elderly.  And elderly women, in  particular, in France's largest  cities.  Literally 4/5 of the  death toll consisted of people  over 75 years old.  Now the fact that these deaths  occurred primarily among the  elderly and during the first two  weeks of August, focused  critical attention in the  country, media attention,  political attention, on the  culture of the August vacation  in France.  As many of you may know, August  1st marks, or whatever the first  Saturday in August, marks a  departure. 

 It's an exodus from France's  cities toward the beaches  because literally everyone has  the month off.  And many of you, if you've ever  been a tourist in Paris in the  summer, recognize that literally  three quarters of the businesses  will be closed.  Hotels will be closed,  restaurants will be closed.  It's a very bad time to go to  the city if only because you  might run into a heat wave.  At any event, the story that  played in the media very  quickly, and this played in the  American press, the British  press, as well as the French  press, was that as the young and  well-off headed south for the  holidays at Mediterranean  beaches, they left their poor  isolated grandmothers to die  horrid deaths from heat stroke  and dehydration in their  apartments in Paris and Lyon.  And these were deaths that a  phone call or a visit might  easily have prevented.  And the media seized on one  aspect of the tragedy in  particular to illustrate what  they call the callousness of a  self-indulgent culture of  entitlement.  Weeks after the peak of  mortality, hundreds of unclaimed  bodies lay in France's makeshift  morgues, which included  refrigerated trucks parked in  the Paris suburbs and the food  warehouses of the Rungis Market.  These were bodies that were  abandoned by their families.  They were the forgotten of the  heat wave, who rapidly became  the symbol of aging and  isolation in the modern West and  a repository of national shame  in assessments of the human  damage of the catastrophe. 

 Now I want to back up for a  moment and talk about heat waves  as a specific form of natural  disaster.  In the realm of climatic  disasters, heat waves are what I  would call the neutron bomb.  They destroy lives but they  leave infrastructure largely in  place, as opposed to, say,  hurricanes or floods, for  example.  If you look at Katrina, Katrina  destroyed the city of New  Orleans.  Its death toll was actually  relatively minor when compared  with heat waves.  About 3,000 deaths in Katrina.  Here we've got 15,000 deaths but  infrastructure largely  untouched.  They're also primarily an urban  phenomenon, which is an aspect  that's often explained with  reference to what climatologists  call the urban heat island  effect, which is reflected in  this graph.  This is basically an explanation  that indicates that a  preponderance of reflective  surfaces and heat sources  characteristic of modern cities  basically ramps up the  temperature in cities while the  temperature might be 10, even 15  degrees Fahrenheit cooler in  suburbs or surrounding rural  areas.  Of course, there's also an  absence of heat sinks in most  cities. 

 An absence of green space or an  absence of large bodies of  water, typically.  And this raises temperatures in  urban environments.  Just as an example, I can show  you a photograph that I took in  the course of my field work.  Here is a famous iconic image of  the Eiffel Tower.  This is a photograph that I took  while standing on  the Pont Mirabeau  which is between Paris' 15th  and 16th arrondissements.  And what you see right here is  really the hot zone.  This is precisely where the  greatest concentration of  mortality played out during the  heat wave.  And if you look at the slide, we  can see that this is exhibit A  of the urban heat island effect.  We've got literally these  gigantic buildings that are  mirrors.  They border the river which  serves as a bit of a heat sink,  but the Seine is really  actually quite shallow. 

 It doesn't have that much  capacity to absorb excess  temperature.  And, indeed, even walking here  in May or June which are  typically cooler months, the  temperature is really noticeably  warmer in this district.  Then I pivoted, I didn't step at  all, I just turned and took a  photograph of the area right  across the river.  This is a much more typical  Parisian landscape.  That sort of classic six-,  seven-story 19th century  architecture shaded by trees.  And this is exactly where the  lowest death toll played out.  So these are areas that share an  identical microclimate.  They are literally bordering  neighborhoods, arrondissements.  And yet one had the highest  death toll and one had the  lowest.  This is a reflection, to some  extent, of the urban heat island  effect. 

 But it's more a reflection, I  would argue, of powerful social  inequality.  Which is really, I think, the  distinguishing characteristic of  many natural disasters but heat  waves in particular.  And the elderly poor bore the  brunt of death's burden in  almost all cases.  Indeed, the neighborhood that I  just showed you in the 15th  arrondissement is not  particularly poor, but it's  basically a lower middle-class  neighborhood.  Whereas, the 16th is Paris'  richest neighborhood by far.  Again, in the French case, the  elderly were the bulk of victims  by far.  And this demographic effect of  the heat wave has organized a  media focus around the issue of  age as the primary risk factor  for death and disability as a  consequence of high summer heat.  And this focus on aging by media  and medicine alike is useful,  but I want to argue in this talk  it's ultimately limiting.  The notion that old age is the  critical biosocial factor that  places the population at risk is  important and it points to the  aggregate risk group.  It points to those who are  indeed most at risk. 

 Those who are most likely to die  during a heat wave.  And yet it misses an entire  vulnerable population.  Again, 80% of the victims of the  heat wave were over 75.  It makes great sense to focus on  the elderly as a risk group.  And yet in a death toll of  15,000, 20% is 3,000.  So that means that we're leaving  Katrina's death toll off the map  if we're talking exclusively  about aging as a risk factor.  This idea of aging as a risk  factor has been enormously  influential in shaping policy  initiatives like this poster  which I saw at a Parisian  nursing home in the course of my  field work.  And it reads, heat wave, you're  elderly, you're disabled, you  think that you won't be able to  really tolerate the heat this  summer in Paris because of your  ill health or because of your  solitude, don't hesitate to  register right away with the  city.  And indeed this is an  advertisement, you can call this  number 3975, and you can  register yourself as a potential  vulnerable victim.  A potential vulnerable citizen. 

 And what the city has initiated  is basically  a telephone network.  And anytime the temperature gets  above 80 degrees or so, they'll  call you twice a day.  Someone in the city hall will  call you twice a day if you're  registered.  And some 2,000 people or so have  signed up to be part of the  system.  It's not fool proof.  It's certainly not fool proof.  And my favorite example which is  of an elderly woman who wasn't  there for two phone calls, and  she basically arrived home from  the grocery store with her  groceries in her hands and saw  the firemen breaking down her  door.  So it's one of the ways in which  this is an important network of  social contact, an important  possibility for keeping people  from social isolation, which is  one of the critical risk  factors, but, again, an  imperfect system.  Again, other campaigns that show  the heat risk as primarily a  problem of the elderly.  And this is another poster that  I noticed during my field work. 

 On the bottom it says, together  we are Paris.  And the caption says, heat wave,  stay in touch with your  neighbors.  And what we see is a young girl  bringing a glass of water to,  what we presume is, her elderly  neighbor upstairs.  Same in this image which shows a  little boy actually aiming a fan  at an elderly man.  So cute sorts of images, but  again they focus, they give us  some indication of how these  policy initiatives have  focused really almost  exclusively on the elderly as  the primary risk group.  I want to argue that something's  missing here.  Which I think the story of the  heat wave's forgotten victims,  in particular, brings to light.  When I was researching this  project initially I became  fascinated by media accounts of  the so-called forgotten victims.  And, indeed, they took over the  project.  I had initially planned to do  something entirely different. 

 I wound up spending months in  Paris researching their  individual and social histories.  I began from their grave sites  and compiled lists of their  names and birthdates.  Then I worked from 2003  telephone directories.  I'll tell you what, finding an  old telephone book is a  difficult mission.  This was in 2007 and finding a  2003 telephone book is not the  easiest thing to do.  In any event, because, of course  the libraries don't really keep  them around.  They're considered out of date.  They're not of much historical  interest.  Another story.  In any event, wound up writing  to every one of Paris' city  halls, every postal code in  Paris has its own city hall so  there are 20 different city  halls, in an attempt to obtain  death notices for as many of  these victims as possible. 

 And this range of strategies  enabled me to obtain the  addresses of about a hundred of  the victims, whose addresses I  visited by bicycle, by the metro  and on foot.  I conducted interviews with  building custodians, with  neighbors, and shopkeepers, and  these interviews helped me to  piece together the disparate  fragments of the public record  for many of these victims.  I want to argue that the  individual stories of these  forgotten victims really  constitute, I would argue,  elaborate narratives of social  marginalization that offer a  fascinating lens through which  we can examine the disaster as  well as the phenomena of death  and life in an urban landscape.  So who were they,  quantitatively?  Well, there are 95 of them  total.  They amount to 53 men  and 42 women.  And I visited 93  of their addresses.  I missed two because they were  homeless men, and there was no  indication of where their bodies  were found on their death  notices.  As with the national statistics,  most of them died at home, most  of the heat wave victims  globally, outside of Paris, the  whole 15,000.  Most of them died at home.  Here we see on the right are  those who died at home. 

 A few more men than women.  On the left, noticeably more men  than women died in hospitals.  This might say something about  social contacts, that men have a  few more social contacts and a  few more people who will make  the phone call and bring them to  hospitals.  Perhaps, perhaps.  And who will actually call  firemen or call the paramedics  and get someone to the hospital  to die there.  That's one possible indication.  In any event, most of them died  at home.  And indeed, something else  that's kind of interesting is  the floor of residents, that is  what floor the victims lived on.  And what we can see is that most  of them lived on the sixth or  higher floor.  This is where I was able to  determine where they actually  lived. 

 I can get to that in the  discussion if there's time.  And their homes were literally  everywhere in the city.  This plot shows all 93 addresses  that I visited and shows that  they are literally in every  district of the city.  Though two vast districts on  either side of the city that  look relatively untouched are  actually giant city parks where  no one lives at all.  So that's the only reason why  the extreme east and west are  relatively untouched.  And there are very few obvious  concentrations.  I bounced these numbers every  which way.  I tried to calculate the numbers  of deaths in the city versus the  number of addresses in each  given neighborhood.  How they compared with  population density.  And there's really no rhyme or  reason. 

 And here are their ages by sex.  What fascinated me was the way  in which the distribution of  this subset of a hundred victims  departs so dramatically from the  global statistics.  Where nationally, again, women  over 75 constituted more than  half of all victims.  Here we see that younger men are  significantly overrepresented.  When we look at the population  over 75, it checks out with the  national statistics.  It looks exactly what the global  picture looks like.  But when we go below 75, what we  see is that men are  significantly overrepresented in  the death toll.  And this was a question I wanted  to ask myself.  I wanted to figure out, why does  this picture look the way it  does?  And, indeed, why is anyone under  50 a victim of dehydration,  social isolation and a whole  range of factors that are much  more characteristic of older  populations in heat waves?  But really, who were they?  This is a statistical picture of  who they are, but how and in  what ways can we illuminate the  stories of who these victims  are?  I want to focus on three cases  that suggest why these numbers  make sense and why the story of  the forgotten leads us to a  larger truth about risk and  vulnerability than an exclusive  focus on aging alone does.  These are people, I want to  argue, who matter not  quantitatively. 

 I don't want to say that a  hundred abandoned bodies in the  capital of France represents the  death toll of the heat wave  generally.  They cannot possibly stand in  for the 15,000.  They don't even really matter  qualitatively because it's such  a small and biased sample.  But, rather, they matter  anecdotally.  They matter anecdotally in a  couple of ways.  These people led, what I would  call anecdotal lives.  That is, their lives are  reconstituted in the aftermath  of the disaster in a series of  stories, a series of narratives  that their neighbors tell, that  building custodians tell, that  shopkeepers tell, that drive  invariably toward their  isolation and death.  And I want to argue that to read  their stories, to think  about their stories, to write  their stories, as I'm doing,  constitutes a form of what an  anthropologist might call  meaning-making through  fragmentary story telling.  Among the most interesting  stories is that of Marie France.  Now going by the numbers,  she was a typical victim. 

 She was 89 years old at the time  of her death, and she died on  August 12th, which was, as I  mentioned earlier, the peak of  mortality during the disaster.  And yet her story reveals some  of the ways in which a close  examination of these life  stories opens a curious window  on the disaster.  Marie lived in this building in  the Rue de Lyon in Paris'  12th arrondissement.  One of the more affected  districts in the city.  She fits the profile of a  typical victim by virtue of her  age, by virtue of her sex, by  virtue of her isolation, and by  virtue of the fact that she  lived in a tiny room on the  building's seventh floor.  A range studies, as I indicated  earlier, including my own,  demonstrate that those who live  on upper floors were at a  dramatically increased risk of  dying during the heat wave.  Part of that is because of the  higher temperatures on upper  floors.  As many of us know, you go into  your attic in summer, it's hot.  At the same time, living on high  floors is an important marker in  Paris of poverty and  marginalization.  The elderly poor are extremely  overrepresented in these units  where merely ascending and  descending stair cases can be a  life or death choice. 

 And indeed, these are not  penthouses.  Paris is a 19th century city.  It's not a 20th century city  like New York.  It's not a city built around the  elevator.  It's a city built around  the staircase.  And Parisian apartment buildings  typically, the street level is  typically utilitarian.  It's either retail space  or it's occupied by  a building custodian.  This is where people's mailboxes  are and that sort of thing,  where the boiler might be  located and so on.  The first floor, that is one  story up from street level,  usually are the biggest,  splashiest apartments.  As you ascend the building, the  ceilings get lower and the  square footage gets tighter. 

 Where there might be one  apartment on the first and  second floor of these buildings,  by the time you get to the third  floor that space is divided in  half and it's two.  By the time you get the seventh  story, there can be seven or  eight apartments which occupy  the same space as one on the  first or second floor.  This is Marie's door in the  corner here.  And the spacing of these  doorways might give you some  idea of just how small these  apartments really are.  These are not gigantic barn  doors.  These are normal size doors.  About the size of that one over  here.  And so these apartments are  extremely, extremely narrow,  extremely tiny.  Many of them are less than a  hundred square feet.  Now this is a view from her  neighbor's window who indicates  that her apartment, she shared a  view, looks out on the Bastille  Opera House. 

 Now that might be kind of  desirable in some ways.  It's a good location in the  city, certainly.  But this means that while the  window has northern exposure, it  also faces the southern facade  of the opera house, which  radiates back intense heat from  the sun.  This is a giant steel building.  It's as if you're looking at an  enormous mirror.  So the sun literally bounces off  the opera house right into these  apartments.  One of the most intriguing  elements of Marie was the story  of her life, I would argue.  She had been born during, many  of you may have noticed her  birth date in late August of  1914, which any history buffs in  the audience will know, this is  exactly during the opening  salvos of the Great War.  And she often told stories to  her neighbors of those who died  during the war, those in her  family.  She had spent time in Algeria  with a fiance. 

 But for one reason or another  that marriage never took place.  She showed neighbors photos of  her family, regaling in the  stories about her mother and  father, again about her older  brother who died during the war  and so on.  And in April of that year, of  2003, she suffered a fall in the  street and broke her hip.  Her neighbor began the process  of getting Marie a domestic  assistant from the city.  The city, indeed, provides  social workers and does provide  some house care, some home care,  someone to come do a little bit  of grocery shopping, clean up  the apartment and so on.  And for those who can't afford  private help you can apply to  the city for subsidized  assistance.  And Marie said she appreciated  the concern, but she never  returned the paperwork to the  neighbor.  And she refused the neighbor's  help filling out the paper work.  Now in August during the heat  wave this neighbor whom I  interviewed was away on  vacation, but the building  concierge, the building  custodian checked in on her.  She found her on August 11th in  her room, naked, where she  screamed obscenities to the  concierge and told her to leave. 

 When the concierge checked  on her again the next day,  she was dead.  Now when municipal authorities  investigated Marie's death, they  also revealed to her neighbors  that Marie's life was a lie.  She was a foundling.  She had been, her parents were  completely unknown.  She had no known family.  Her patriotic name had been  given to her by a public  orphanage in reference to Marie  who is this highly typical  Catholic French name.  Literally, she's named for the  country in this moment of  sweeping patriotism during the  war.  She had never been to Algeria,  the family photos were all  fakes.  And so the paperwork which would  have brought her assistance,  that may well have saved her  life, was actually the  possibility of her undoing, it  was the possibility of her  unmasking.  That paperwork would have  revealed that she had no family,  her secret would have become  public. 

 And so it's a curious testament  to the nature of citizenship in  contemporary France, I would  argue, that Marie's only  official existence really  consisted, not in her links to  neighbors, not in her links to  friends, she is completely  isolated from them and lived a  fictitious life, but instead it  was her relationship to the  state, but, at the same time,  she refused to accept the  state's welfare precisely  because it would have revealed  the nature of that exclusively  civic existence.  I also became interested in the  case of Francoise Vernay, and we  can't even read her dates.  I'm sorry for the quality of the  reproduction here.  The lighting in the room might  have something to do with that.  Francoise's story was extremely  interesting to me because of her  age, she was only 43 at the time  of her death, and the fact that  her body, as this death notice  indicates, was only discovered a  day after she died.  Despite the fact that her death  occurred in, as this death  notice specifies, let me just  find the reference, so it says  that her body was found in the  common parts of the building.  So I wanted to know how is it  that someone can die in a  hallway, inside the doorway of a  building and still not be  discovered for more than 24  hours?  How does this happen to  a 43-year-old woman,  in particular?  Again, one of the things we  might remember from my little  subset of numbers is that in  these younger groups, it's men  who are over represented.  So I was extremely puzzled how a  43-year-old woman might die on a  staircase or in a hallway and  not be discovered for over a  day.  And then I visited the address.  As it turns out, it's a homeless  squat in an abandoned building. 

 So she might well have been the  only person living there.  Here's another image of the  boarded up building.  And we can see the bricked up  windows and so on.  And I saw a few homeless going  in a out of the building.  As it turns out, Francoise was  an alcoholic and heroin addict  who lived with her boyfriend  on and off in the building.  She had been married, but was  later divorced, perhaps as a  consequence of her addictions  and her homelessness.  But again, what we see here is  an atypical story.  This is not someone who's  elderly, not someone who's  necessarily isolated.  She's participating in a  network, in a social network.  A social network that's built  around addiction and  homelessness, but a social  network nevertheless, and yet  clearly we can see that she's a  marginal subject, she's an  utterly disenfranchised subject. 

 For similar reasons, I found the  case of Roger -- fascinating.  Here was a man who was only 48  at his death.  And I wanted to know what  factors put him at risk.  I tracked him down to this  address where he died in Paris'  9th arrondissement, and the  address is actually, as you can  see, perhaps, it's a  boardinghouse, basically, a  rooming house in the city.  As it turns out he was an  alcoholic whose wife had kicked  him out of the house just before  the heat wave struck.  And a friend of his who ran this  boardinghouse offered him this  vacant room on the building's  seventh and top floor.  Now I was really intrigued to  see the inside of the building.  It's at the end of this dark,  dank hallway.  And here we're looking out his  window.  Which shows, as in the case of  Marie, he literally baked to  death from the heat that  radiated into the apartment from  the zinc roof above and across  from his window. 

 And I visited this apartment in  May.  The temperature outside was  about 65 degrees.  It was extremely pleasant,  beautiful day, as you can see.  Great day for walking around  Paris in the springtime.  And it was broiling inside the  apartment.  65 degrees outside, it was about  85-90 inside already.  So you can just imagine what  it's like if it's 105 degrees  outside.  I could go on and on with case  studies.  I could tell you about Paulette,  an 84-year-old woman who lived  in this mouse-infested apartment  within sight  of the Arc d'Triomphe  with just one common toilet  and sink down the hall  and no bath facilities,  therefore no possibility  of actually cooling off  with a little cold water.  Or I could talk about Robert, a  60-year-old overweight alcoholic  who died alone in his six floor  walk up near --. 

 Where he hauled his 250-pound  frame up these six stories every  day.  And lived down this dark, dank  hallway with exposed wiring,  just a whole range of  indications that tells us this  is just not a nice place to  live.  Or I could tell you about -- a  42-year-old AIDS patient who  lived in public housing in one  of eastern Paris' poorest  neighborhoods and whose body  was found only a month  after she died.  Or finally I could tell you  about the 102-year-old and her  70-year-old boyfriend who lived  in a rent-controlled,  coal-heated apartment in the  12th arrondissement who were  found days after their death in  bed together and who now lie in  these adjoining graves at  Thiais.  The important thing about these  cases is that they're typical  and atypical victims who bring  out divergent narratives.  In cases where the victim didn't  fit the demographic profile of  typical heat stroke risk, the  conversation with their  neighbors invariably began with  the informant saying, the heat  had nothing to do with his  death, the heat had nothing to  do with her death.  The informant would then point  to other health problems.  So in the case of --, I heard  all about her case history as an  AIDS patient.  In the case of Francois, I heard  about her history of addiction  and alcoholism and homelessness.  In the case of Robert, I heard  about his obesity and  alcoholism. 

 Informants admitted that the  heat didn't do any of these  folks any good, but they were  reluctant to call them heat  deaths at all.  And indeed in many cases when I  would say, I want to talk to you  about such and such who  died here during the heat wave,  they would say, oh yeah,  I guess that was during  the heat wave, wasn't it?  And then they would just tell me  about how this was a marginal  subject, how this was someone  with a history of addiction, a  history of a whole range of  unhealthy habits and that's why  they died.  They would never, literally,  never call it is a heat death.  What was remarkable was that  neighbors didn't see problems  such as obesity or alcoholism or  isolation or madness, in some  cases, as risk factors for heat  death themselves but rather as  causes of death in their own  right that were exacerbated  by heat.  Now in the case of the elderly,  a totally different story came  out.  These were stories about how  someone might have been  fiercely, obstreperously even,  independent and have refused all  offers of help from everyone  around them.  This was about someone who lived  a life of isolation, that they  rationalized as a life of  independence.  They were usually stories about  folks who had become bitter in  their old age and who had burned  all of their social and family  contacts.  Interestingly, the case of  Susanne, this is the last case  I'll tell you about, was a bit  different.  She was the first case I  investigated. 

 Now her grave and the dates on  the grave reveal that she was 83  years old when she died in early  August.  She's a typical victim.  An elderly woman who lived in  Paris and who died in early  August.  She was easy to find during a  quick search of an old  phonebook.  Now there were four Susanne --  listed in Paris in 2003, but I  lucked out because the very  first place I biked to was her  address.  She lived in the -- in the 13th  arrondissement, kind of a  marginal neighborhood, not the  worst neighborhood in the world.  Sort of lower-, middle-class  neighborhood.  And I also lucked out because as  I biked up and locked my bike up  to a lamppost, I lucked out  because I saw another elderly  woman walking her dog in front  of the building.  As it turns out, she was  Susanne's next door neighbor.  And she confirmed that Susanne  had died during the heat wave. 

 She told me a story about how  she herself had barely survived  the heat wave.  It was only because she was  forced to leave the apartment  every day to walk her dog that  she had escaped death.  The dog was this critical social  connection for her, and she had  no idea what she was going to do  when the dog died.  The dog was, at the time I  interviewed her, the dog was 17  years old or something along  those lines.  So she was literally facing the  imminent death of her dog.  And it was really a sad story  talking with her.  This was an outstanding break  because here in my first  interview I had found a case  control study.  This was an 83-year-old who had  died and an 87-year-old who had  survived.  I also had a model of the risky  building.  Here we can see, this is  Susanne's apartment right here. 

 This is a southern exposed  window.  It's literally a greenhouse of a  building, surely a killer.  And my conclusion of this was  that fieldwork was easy.  Why didn't I go into sociology  or anthropology right away in my  career?  This was a snap.  Except when I received her death  notice.  It indicated that the Susanne  who lived in this building and  here, I'm sorry, this is, right,  so there's her address, it  indicated that she had lived in  this building and she had indeed  died, but she died 10 months  earlier than the heat wave and  in a hospital.  She didn't die in her apartment  like the neighbor said.  She didn't die during the heat  wave like the neighbor said.  And the case, I would argue,  speaks volumes about the way in  which these risk profiles that  are established, by the media  and by public health  authorities, have influenced  thought and memory.  Now, granted, I suggested to the  neighbor that her neighbor had  died during the heat wave. 

 I said, I'm interested in  talking to you about Susanne,  do you know her?  Oh, she was my  next door neighbor.  Oh, I'm fascinated by her story  because I'm studying the heat  wave and those who died during  the heat wave.  And she said, oh, yes, let me  tell you about how isolated  she was and so on.  I suggested it, to be fair.  But the fact that her neighbor  instantly pasted her into the  typical story of a heat wave  victim indicates how easy it is  to think of an elderly woman  dying from the heat.  How easy it is to reshape memory  even though this victim had died  nearly a year before the heat  wave, in October, in completely  different circumstances, in a  hospital.  And I would argue that this  story, in particular, says a  great deal about risk categories  and the retroactive framing of  death and disaster.  I want to conclude by pointing  out the ways in which this  problem raises the question of  the memory of the heat wave as a  traumatic experience for the  French, especially for those who  lived in buildings where people  died alone.  Virtually every interview I  conducted pointed immediately to  what was strange, what was  bizarre, in some cases, about  the decedent.  This one was crazy, drove their  neighbors batty with all of the  stuff that they hoarded. 

 They looked homeless even though  they had a respectable pension  and so on.  Another was a cheapskate.  Even though she was very  well-to-do, she was too cheap  even to save her own life  because the building custodian,  in this case, had offered to buy  her some water and offered to  buy her groceries, look in on  her and so on but she just  refused the offer of help saying  she didn't want to spend the  money.  Another might have been in poor  health and never even answered  her own door when a friend came  to visit.  Another lived, literally, in his  own excrement, never cleaning up  after himself, never changing  his pants and so on.  Another was paranoid and  complained that the whole world  was against him, while he  himself never paid rent on his  rent-controlled apartment.  And yet another had broken off  with her family over money  issues decades in the past.  Virtually every one ever these  interviews wanted to point to  what made these people culpable  in their own deaths.  The only ones who didn't do so  were those who had started their  work after the heat wave, had  started their work in the  building or had moved into the  building after the heat wave and  were just relating stories.  They didn't really seem to have  any guilt complex around the  heat wave at all. 

 And they, of course, couldn't in  any way be blamed for not taking  an interest in a tenant's life  they didn't even know.  These folks took independence  and converted it into isolation.  And that what I think is what's  common in these narratives.  It's not necessarily social  class, although most of them  were poor.  It's certainly not race or  ethnicity, because they came  from all over the map.  It's not sex because I had just  as many men as women.  But instead it's this postmortem  reconstruction of their lives as  quirky, bizarre, cantankerous,  or otherwise unsocial beings.  These are what I would call  marginalizing memories that have  shaped the response to the heat  wave.  My project is a history of the  human disaster.  But it's ultimately about the  very definition of what  constitutes the human as well as  its opposites, the not human,  the inhuman, and most relevant  here, the dehumanized. 

 Now by exploring sociability as  a fundamental component of the  urban environment and the  question of agency in  environmental disasters and the  emergence in recent decades of  new forms of urban  vulnerability, I'm attempting  to use an environmental crisis  to open a window on some of the  central problems of contemporary  French and indeed Western  society in general.  It points to new ways that the  integrity of the human has come  under threat in the urban  environment.  And although the heat wave has  become the critical vantage  point for reading the lives of  these forgotten victims, I would  argue that their histories reach  far beyond the boundaries of the  crisis itself and offer insight  into the changing possibilities  of citizenship, relationships  between the individuals and the  state, and the violence of  everyday life for marginal  populations.  And with that, I want to extend  thanks to those who sponsored my  research and thanks to you for  listening to me.  (applause)