Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters: The Case of an Earthquake in Java, Indonesia

As the interdependence between human activities and natural forces on earth grows in instability, disaster research is maturing as a discipline, employing concepts and methods from fields as disparate as psychology, history, and engineering. But psychological studies have mainly focused on post-disaster pathology or standard themes of coping, rarely taking cultural factors into consideration.
Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters addresses this omission with an innovative framework for studying culture-specific concepts of vulnerability and local forms of resilience. Expert contributors both build on and transcend traditional clinical ideas to analyze four distinct dimensions of coping: material, social, life conduct, and religious. Extensive findings on the 2006 Java earthquake illustrate both concepts and methods in real-world detail. And a chapter on villagers' visions of their future ably demonstrates the balance between the personal and the collective in coping. Included in the coverage:
Methodological basis of a culture-specific coping approach.
Research ethics: between formal norms and intentions.
Suffering, healing, and the discourse of trauma.
Disaster aid distribution and social conflicts.
Critical perspectives on gender mainstreaming in disaster contexts.
Plus a multidimensional framework for analyzing the coping process.
A truly transdisciplinary work, Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters lends itself to a wide range of professional, academic, and research domains, among them disaster psychology, disaster management/aid, cultural psychology, anthropology, public policy, and public health. The book also makes a useful text for courses in these and other fields.