Culture, Community and Catastrophe: Issues in Understanding Communities Under Difficult Conditions

Abstract

This chapter examines the complexity of community response in terms of the available cultural mechanisms that induce, facilitate or maintain community resources. Third world and western examples of the adaptive possibilities offered by social contexts, cultural rules and community life will be discussed. Mechanisms of community response vary from culture to culture and community to community and as such are not always detectable by modern research strategies. Methods for detecting cultural strategies and variation must be included within more standard epidemiologic designs. In the last section of the chapter, strategies for including methods for the detection of cultural goals and social adaption will be presented. This paper takes a social, ethnographic perspective on community stress. By means of examples, three areas of relevance to understanding trauma in communities will be described: (1) Inducing, legitimizing the individual communication of distress and mobilizing resources: taxonomic incorporation; (2) Facilitating resource mobilization embedded in community life: indigenous social security systems; (3) Maintaining resources and support after the immediate trauma has ended: self help healing alternatives. [Adapted from Text, p. 377]