A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing
strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental
sciences. This volume by a prominent scholar of East African
societies is a powerful example of this growing interest. Earlier
theory and research tended to describe social and economic systems
in some form of equilibrium. However recent thinking in human
ecology, evolutionary biology, not to mention in economic and
political theory has come to assign to "risk" a prominent role in
predictive modeling of behavior. It turns out that risk
minimalization is central to the understanding of individual
strategies and numerous social institutions. It is not simply a
peripheral and transient moment in a group's history.
Anthropologists interested in forager societies have emphasized
risk management strategies as a major force shaping hunting and
gathering routines and structuring institutions of food sharing and
territorial behavior. This book builds on some of these
developments but through the analysis of quite complex pastoral and
farming peoples and in populations with substantial known
histories. The method of analysis depends heavily on the controlled
comparisons of different populations sharing some cultural
characteristics but differing in exposure to certain risks or
hazards.
The central questions guiding this approach are: 1) How are
hazards generated through environmental variation and degradation,
through increasing internal stratification, violent conflicts and
marginalization? 2) How do these hazards result in damages to
single households or to individual actors and how do these costs
vary within one society? 3) How are hazards perceived by the people
affected? 4) How do actors of different wealth, social status, age
and gender try to minimize risks by delimiting the effect of
damages during an on-going crisis and what kind of
institutionalized measures do they design to insure themselves
against hazards, preventing their occurrence or limiting their
effects? 5) How is risk minimization affected by cultural
innovation and how can the importance of the quest for enhanced
security as a driving force of cultural evolution be estimated?
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!