In the western/modern societies, to raise the question of uncertainty in terms of risks implies a focus on the choices (technical, commercial, political…) that individual or collective social agents operate. To raise this question in terms of disaster reaches another issue: it emphasizes disorders within the distinct domains that nature and culture constitute.This communication tries to keep at distance this double dichotomy to analyze it, considering the presuppositions on which it is based. The cultural construction associated with the concept of risks will be presented via a fast review of its debt to the first Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism and to the French Lumières. It will then be pointed out through the contrast offered by the study of a totally different case. The way relationships to the world and human agency are conceived in a Polynesian society will be used for comparison. I will then examine how the question of catastrophes is handled, risks are perceived and experienced, in the contemporary Wallisian society which is open to the rest of the world and connected to globalized networks and flows.These developments open a reflection on the translatability of the concept of risk and on its operational character, in particular in the context of national and international management of risks and of the flows it can suppose.< Leer menos