The articles in the volume contribute to a relatively new domain of scholarly research - the ecological anthropology, focusing especially on contemporary crises and disasters from different background: natural, social, technological, etc. Based upon expanded field work, in some cases - from a terrain difficult to access, the authors investigate a variety of disasters' situations in two contemporary societies of the developing world - China in Southeast Asia, and Bulgaria in the Southeast European Balkans. The forms of disasters researched, include: epidemics and health-threads (SARS, AIDS, Bird Flu, rat disease, small pox, typhoid fever, etc.); ecologically related disasters (bio-disasters), social catastrophic events (transition in political regime, and towards reforming and opening, also towards a market economy), natural crises (arid areas, snow-falls, rain-falls, draughts). Attention is paid to a full scale disasters' life-cycle from the creation and evaluation of a risk-vulnerability, individual and social reaction and coping strategies, up to the relief management. The articles investigate the interrelationships between cultural, demographic, political, economic, and environmental domains related to the disasters - e.g., the social context of the crisis. It is the authors' understanding that this context defines the preparedness, mobilization, and prevention of disasters for each discrete group of people or society. The volume applies a broad ethnological approach to the field of disasters' study, which interprets them comparatively, contextualy, and in cross-cultural perspective. It is conceived as a first volume of a series investigation papers of a joint research team on this topic.
About the Author: Elya Tzaneva - Initiator of the project and Editor-in-Chief of this volume is an Assoc.Professor at the Ethnographic Institute and Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; since 2003 - scholarly secretary of the Institute. Graduate from the German-speaking high school in Sofia (1975), and the Dept. of History at the University of Sofia with specialization in Ethnography (1981). PhD in Ethnology from Moscow State University, Russia (1985); PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (1999). Frequent Guest-Lecturer in Ethnology at Minzu University of China, Beijing. Research interests in the field of Theory of Ethnicity, Nation and Identity; Traditional Family Customs and Fictive Kinship. Author of studies and articles in these fields in Bulgarian, Russian, German and English, as well as of the monographic work Interpreting Ethnicity (Sofia, 2000); and Bulgarian Ethnography (Sofia, 2000, 2006, 2009).