Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters

As the interdependence between human activities and natural forces on earth  grows in instability, disaster research is maturing as a discipline, employing concepts and methods from fields as disparate as psychology, history, and engineering. But psychological studies have mainly focused on post-disaster pathology or standard themes of coping, rarely taking cultural factors into consideration.Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters addresses this omission with an innovative framework for studying culture-specific concepts of vulnerability and local forms of resilience. Expert contributors both build on and transcend traditional clinical ideas to analyze four distinct dimensions of coping: material, social, life conduct, and religious. Extensive findings on the 2006 Java earthquake illustrate both concepts and methods in real-world detail. And a chapter on villagers' visions of their future ably demonstrates the balance between the personal and the collective in coping. Included in the coverage: Methodological basis of a culture-specific coping approach. Research ethics: between formal norms and intentions.Suffering, healing, and the discourse of trauma.Disaster aid distribution and social conflicts. Critical perspectives on gender mainstreaming in disaster contexts.Plus a multidimensional framework for analyzing the coping process. A truly transdisciplinary work, Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters lends itself to a wide range of professional, academic, and research domains, among them disaster psychology, disaster management/aid, cultural psychology, anthropology, public policy, and public health. The book also makes a useful text for courses in these and other fields.