A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing
strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences.
This volume by a prominent scholar of East African societies is a
powerful example of this growing interest. Earlier theory and research
tended to describe social and economic systems in some form of
equilibrium. However recent thinking in human ecology, evolutionary
biology, not to mention in economic and political theory has come to
assign to "risk" a prominent role in predictive modeling of behavior. It
turns out that risk minimalization is central to the understanding of
individual strategies and numerous social institutions. It is not simply
a peripheral and transient moment in a group's history. Anthropologists
interested in forager societies have emphasized risk management
strategies as a major force shaping hunting and gathering routines and
structuring institutions of food sharing and territorial behavior. This
book builds on some of these developments but through the analysis of
quite complex pastoral and farming peoples and in populations with
substantial known histories. The method of analysis depends heavily on
the controlled comparisons of different populations sharing some
cultural characteristics but differing in exposure to certain risks or
hazards.
The central questions guiding this approach are: 1) How are hazards
generated through environmental variation and degradation, through
increasing internal stratification, violent conflicts and
marginalization? 2) How do these hazards result in damages to single
households or to individual actors and how do these costs vary within
one society? 3) How are hazards perceived by the people affected? 4) How
do actors of different wealth, social status, age and gender try to
minimize risks by delimiting the effect of damages during an on-going
crisis and what kind of institutionalized measures do they design to
insure themselves against hazards, preventing their occurrence or
limiting their effects? 5) How is risk minimization affected by cultural
innovation and how can the importance of the quest for enhanced security
as a driving force of cultural evolution be estimated?
