ABSTRACT
Disasters have been studied from a social scientific perspective. During this span multiple conceptual and thematic foci emerged from a variety of origins, each contributing in different ways to the overall development of the field. Ranging from Prince’s early study of a munitions explosion in Halifax harbor to studies of populations experiencing wartime bombardment to the social impacts of natural hazards and a myriad of operational definitions used in emergency assistance and reconstruction, there has been little consensus on the definition of disaster. The intellectual vitality of a field of research does not necessarily depend on a conceptual or definitional consensus. In anthropology, for example, A. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, after surveying the literature, found 164 different definitions of culture, the discipline’s core concept. Many events or processes are colloquially referred to as disasters—everything from a failed social event to a region-wide hurricane.
