Rituals as practices to cope with disaster In Nepal, where communities have a long history and heritage of natural disasters, the symbolic practices of the festivals enable communities to organize a certain salience and repetitiveness in their normal life that contribute greatly to their social capacity to cope with disasters. According to Wenger and Weller (1973) disaster preparedness is also based on belief, values and legend that is integrated as a blueprint for behaviors before, during and after times of earthquakes. By enhancing recovery and response, rituals become therefore more than ever an essential component of human interaction that strengthens community ties and supports social network. If it is commonly believed that disaster throws societies into a chaos and widespread panic, the reality is often elsewhere. Amid devastation, in a time when the normal order is suspended and most of the systems are failing, the resilient capacity of the communities then naturally arises. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book “ Paradise build in Hell”, “human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something that we already know how to do”. Ritual is a way to sanctify certain spaces and driving evil spirit away of the city which can helps in alleviating grieves but also organizes group reaction in the face of disaster. But beyond the notion of belief, procession routes can also be seen as a visual surveillance upon the status of open areas spread all over tissue. In that sense, rituals are vital in order to keep wide open spaces, and by giving them a meaning, it avoids haphazard encroachment on public areas. It is no coincidence then that evacuation routes often overlap with procession routes and function as a network of short segments of roads and rhythm with a series of nodes used firstly as convergence points, but that holds the capacity to then be used as medical assistance center, temporary schools, etc. Those spaces become “breathing areas” (Knottnernus, 2011) that ensure safe spots, inscribed in the collective memory, to which people will instinctively converged in times of earthquakes.
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