ABSTRACT
Disasters result from a complex mix of both natural hazards and sociopolitical and economic processes in any society. Yet, a review of disaster research worldwide indicates that many studies do not adequately address the social processes in their accounts of calamity. Geophysical and other natural processes, such as drought, floods, tropical storms, or earthquakes, receive a great deal of attention at policy-making levels while the social and economic processes involved are often ignored, resulting in largely unsustainable technical solutions for disaster preparedness, management, and mitigation. As a concept, vulnerability refers to the social and economic characteristics of a person, a household, or a group in terms of their capacity to cope with and to recover from the impacts of a disaster. As a discipline, anthropology provides a unique opportunity to observe how people live with disaster and crisis and make sense of things simply by virtue of “being there.”.
