This volume is the second attempt by a joint international research team (consisting of Bulgarian, Chinese, Russian and American ethnologists) to contribute to the domain of ecological anthropology. The editors of and contributors to this collection share the understanding that catastrophic events challenge society to rework a specific methodology, and to activate a specific resource, to adapt to and cope with crises ecologically, socially and ideologically. The main aim of this volume is to reveal the important role of studying and taking into account the cultural stereotypes in this process. Through detailed analysis of different case studies, the contributors further generalize the definition of disasters and critical situations as situations that arise from the violation of a balance in individual and collective life, as any deviation from normality in the particular context of each discreet culture. This interpretation informs a structural grouping of the materials in this collection into three main parts. The section on Cultural Responses to Natural and Biological Disasters (specific case studies) follows the Conceptualization of Cultural Knowledge about Disasters. The contributors to the collection share the conviction that the ecology of social crises (presented in the volume's third section on Cultural Management of Social Crises) is a valuable and necessary addition to the field of natural and technological, bio- and man-made disasters. They believe this is proved by the texts presented in this volume. The empirical data employed in the volume and the forms of disasters researched include materials from the Tibetan Pastoral area and the Pamir Plateau in Asia, the Rhodopes and Strandja Mountains in the Balkans, Macedonia and Central and Western Bulgaria, to ethnic minority areas in Central and Western China, Ukraine and Moldova.
About the Author: Elya Tzaneva is an Associate Professor and Head of the Scholarly Council at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include theory of ethnicity and nations, ritual kinship, and critical situations and ethnic culture. Fang Sumei is a Professor (Senior Research Fellow) in the Department of Ethnohistory at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her scholarly subjects are focused on the modern history of China's minority nationalities, ethnic issues and ethnic policies in modern China, and modern social and cultural changes of China's minority nationalities. Edwin Schmitt is a Doctoral Student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His PhD research interests include environmental anthropology, anthropology of ritual, and the anthropology of China.