In recent years, Brazil has suffered two mining tragedies: the dam collapse of “Mariana” on November 5, 2015 and the “Brumadinho dam disaster” on January 25, 2019. Although both resulted in death, devastated livelihoods, and poisoned their surrounding environments with tons of toxic mud, they were framed rather distinctly. Whereas politicians labeled the former an “environmental accident,” the latter was primarily addressed as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” In contrast, the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, has not been called a ”disaster” or “catastrophe” at all. Against this background, this paper aims at re-thinking the differentiation between so-called “natural” and “man-made disasters” (cf., e.g., Barrios 2017) in anthropological disaster research, (public) policy, and practice. By analyzing newspapers’ framing and anthropological examinations of the incidents (cf. Taddei 2020), it sets out to unravel the political implications of the nature|culture dualism and the role of science in its (r)evocation. What political consequences emerge from the different ways in which these disastrous occurrences are addressed? To what extent does such labeling pre-structure political, legal, and administrative responses? To what extent are these responses met by counter-narratives and resistance? And what is the role of science in general and anthropology in particular in shaping these debates? Tackling these questions, this paper argues in favor of destabilizing the notion of an essential difference between types of “disaster.” To this end, it enquires into the visual and rhetorical epistemologies by which “disaster imaginaries” (cf. Calhoun 2010) are brought into our everyday life by the media, politics, and science.