Cultural Adaptation to Threatened Disaster

Social and behavioral scientists have recently undertaken to describe and analyze human behavior under the extreme conditions of disaster, an interest with compelling practical and applied value that has attracted considerable research support, particularly through the former Committee on Disaster Studies of the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council. In the resultant body of literature various problems and approaches have been identified and defined, usually couched in terms of the personal and social consequences of sudden, unexpected disasters. The archetype paradigm seeks to establish empirically in natural disasters laboratories modeled after projections of surprise attack and looks for classes of "disaster behavior" that can be predicted in such events. While it is generally conceded that the pre-impact situation (variously defined) has a bearing on emergent behavior in a disaster, relatively little of the effort has been devoted to conceptualizing and defining research problems with this seriously in mind. Considered in the context of the long-standing concerns of the social and behavioral sciences with continuities, disasters have generally been thought of as irregularities, and most of the research has followed upon their abnormal and disruptive characteristics. To place such study in a larger and hopefully more revealing context, this paper focuses primarily on antecedent conditions and considers the problem of recognizing and coping with the threat of disaster and how such anticipations occur within the frames of reference in whose terms reactions take place.