Negotiating Disasters—Politics, Representation, Meanings

Citing the nuclear disaster at Fukushima as a catalyst prompting the rethinking of the relationship between the social and the cultural, Luig (formerly, anthropology, Freie U. Berlin, Germany) presents 11 papers that, together, are presented as a means of moving towards closer transdisciplinary cooperation between the social and cultural sciences in addressing the nature of how humans respond to (or even define) disasters. Topics addressed include: social-ecological change and the changing structure of risk in a pastoral community in northwestern Namibia; the perception of natural hazards in the context of human (in)security; sociological analysis of local perception and management of extreme events based on examples from Mozambique, Germany, and the US; coping mechanisms in response to the 2006 earthquake in Java, Indonesia; the 2010 Attabad landslide in Pakistan and the politics of disaster; the anthropology of the "disaster boom" economy coming out of the 2001 Gujarat, India, earthquake; conception, religious interpretations, and social practices surrounding atmospheric storms among the Quechua people of Peru; Muslim practices of disaster mourning and social reproduction in Uganda; and negotiating culture in media post-tsunami coverage of indigenous communities on the Nicobar and Andaman Islands of India. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ute Luig was until 2010 Professor of Anthropology at the Freie Universitat Berlin. She did long-term fieldwork in different African countries and Cambodia. Her main interests besides the conceptualization of nature and cultural approaches to disaster research are memory and spirit possession cults. She studied disasters from different perspectives, e.g. in form of the HIV/AIDS crisis, war and memory in Cambodia and cultural interpretations of so-called ?natural disasters?.