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Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith (eds.), Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2002, 312 pages.
Reviewer: Alan Smart University of Calgary
This volume illustrates why the School of American Research Advanced Seminar program is so valuable. What might be seen as a specialized topic, the anthropology of disaster, is here revealed as a medium by which the different subfields of anthropology can interact in a synergistic manner. The introductory chapter by the editors makes the case very effectively: "When hazards threaten and disasters occur, they both reveal and become an expression of the complex interactions of physical, biological, and sociocultural systems....Within disaster research, anthropology finds an opportunity to amalgamate past and current cultural, ecological, and political-economic investigations, along with archaeological, historical, demographic, and certain biological and medical concerns" (pp. 5-6). These opportunities, of course, carry with them difficult challenges, requiring work at the interface between the sociocultural and physical worlds, and demanding attention to longer swathes of time than are encompassed...