Disasters, Culture, Politics: Chinese-Bulgarian Anthropological Contribution to the Study of Critical Situations

The articles in this volume contribute to a relatively new domain of scholarly research - the ecological anthropology, focusing especially on contemporary crises and disasters from different background: natural, social, technological, etc. Based upon expanded field work, in some cases - from a terrain difficult to access, the authors investigate a variety of disasters' situations in two contemporary societies of the developing world - China in Southeast Asia, and Bulgaria in the Southeast European Balkans. The forms of disasters researched, include: epidemics and health-threads (SARS, AIDS, Bird Flu, rat disease, small pox, typhoid fever, etc.); ecologically related disasters (bio-disasters), social catastrophic events (transition in political regime, and towards reforming and opening, also towards a market economy), natural crises (arid areas, snow-falls, rain-falls, draughts). Attention is paid to a full scale disasters' life-cycle from the creation and evaluation of a risk-vulnerability, individual and social reaction and coping strategies, up to the relief management. The articles investigate the interrelationships between cultural, demographic, political, economic, and environmental domains related to the disasters - e.g., the social context of the crisis. It is the authors' understanding that this context defines the preparedness, mobilization, and prevention of disasters for each discrete group of people or society. The volume applies a broad ethnological approach to the field of disasters' study, which interprets them comparatively, contextually, and in cross-cultural perspective. It is conceived as a first volume of a series investigation papers of a joint research team on this topic.