A Cultural Psychological Framework for Coping with Disasters
3.5 Critical Characteristics of a Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters
By formulating a cultural psychology of coping with disasters, it is our goal to close the theoretical gap between sociocultural disaster research, which has been promi-nently developed in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, and universalist
psychological research approaches to disaster or stress. The cultural psychological perspective is reflected in the fact that our analysis begins at the nexus between local events and the subjective experiences and actions of the affected parties. We view individuals as embedded in multiple contexts and at the same time, we consider the person–context relationship to be mutually or co-constituting. Personhood, there-fore, is contained within different forms of social interaction as well as in symbolic meanings, material manifestations, and performative behaviors while simultaneously helping to create these phenomena. Our analytic perspective thus aims to understand subjective coping processes with regard to disaster while positioning these processes within person–context relations.
If disasters are multidimensional processes (Oliver-Smith1999), then it is reason-able to think that coping with disasters is also multidimensional: Coping processes are embedded in structural and sociocultural contexts that not only produce—or inhibit—agency, but also interpretatively frame the very “stressor” to be coped with and structure the embodied experience of suffering. Following the disaster research paradigm of complex interactions between nature and human described in Sect. 1.1, we argue for a complexity theory of coping.
Coping is a complex material-symbolic, cognitive-embodied, and individual-social process. Coping can neither be reduced to an “objective” material sphere nor to a symbolic arena in which the environment and resources are deemed to be solely a matter of perception. Subjective experiences, perceptions, emotions, and meaning are socially mediated, constructed, and simultaneously linked to a biophysical mate-riality. The way in which people cope is significantly shaped by their actual access to resources. However, the mediation between the material and symbolic takes place; an individual’s actual losses or gains (e.g., reputation, property, power and capabilities) represent an important component of subjectivity. In addition, personal–subjective responses to disaster are products of an individual’s (religious) orientation system or practiced habitus. In the sense of mindful bodies, the habitus comprises the physical and emotional side of experience, action, and performance; body and emotions are linked to the context through an individual’s socialization history and can be under-stood on this basis. Coping processes cannot be reduced to what decontextualized individuals think, feel, and do; at the same time, the individual component, which is based on different interests, experiences, and positions in power relationships and personalities, must not be neglected for the sake of a broader collective context, be that the individual’s community or “culture” (i.e., macro-reduction of individual dif-ferences). As interpretative (meaning) or behavioral (habitus) patterns imply, coping is never an idiosyncratic process. Nevertheless, it is analytically necessary to exam-ine personal methods of coping and relate them to their complex social contexts.
While a cultural psychological perspective on collective coping efforts focuses on the subjective involvement of multiple actors, these collectives may refer to different social units—from the family to the village, the congregation, or the nation.
Coping processes are contingent upon the micro- and macrodynamics of an indi-vidual’s life course, community processes, and global histories. Accordingly, coping processes are driven by multiple potentially contradictory interests, which do not necessary relate to “coping” itself, but to other—not necessarily disaster-related—
dynamics. A cultural psychology of coping therefore needs to include the broader
picture and abandon functionalist assumptions. The challenge is to comprehend—
or at least try to comprehend—what is subjectively at stake for the different actors involved when they rely on any given method of coping.
Throughout this chapter, we developed our argument for a person–context situated understanding of coping, elaborating on multiple aspects of context, which we view as a broad, and necessarily vague, category. Because any theoretical framework based on this type of person–context understanding would need to accommodate these hazy notions of context, we borrow the conceptual framework of complexity from disaster research and suggest framing coping (with disasters) as a complex process. At the same time, we do not want to imply that complexity is a sufficient means of describing the local and subjective dynamics of coping with disasters; such answers can only be found in qualitative, interpretative, in-depth studies localized in specific settings. In our research strategy, we turn the causal models of conventional coping theory into heuristic frameworks of relational references, while at the same time opening our analytical perspective by integrating a multidisciplinary body of disaster research and reviewing relevant ethnographic literature.
Acknowledgment We would like to thank Devin Martini for assistance with editing and translating parts of this chapter from German into English.
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