ABSTRACT
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF DISASTERS HAS BEEN DOMINATED BY A community and individual perspective. Receiving less attention from anthropologists has been the response of institutions to disasters. Institutional response to disasters from an anthropological standpoint necessarily involves the political ecology and ethnohistory of human populations under disaster conditions and is impacted by social and economic factors which combine to create what is identified as the "culture of response" (Dyer 1996).
