ABSTRACT
Disasters researchers engaging with broad post-structural work on societynature relations are beginning to recognize the numerous factors that impinge on social constructions of disaster, influencing the ways in which people perceive and respond to risk and provoking much local variation both within cultures and societies and between them (e.g. Blaikie et al. 1994). This chapter explores natural disaster perception through two case studies: an earthquake that struck Cairo, Egypt on 12 October 1992 and storms that affected the south coast of the UK on 16 October 1987. These cases reveal that although recent thinking in sociology and human geography has indicated that globalization of culture is occurring (e.g. Harvey 1990; Hannerz 1990), environmental meaning remains culturally and ethnically constructed and subject to the idiosyncrasies of indigenous culture.
