Culture, Community and Catastrophe: Issues in Understanding Communities Under Difficult Conditions

Abstract

At the end of this century, changes in the world's geopolitical landscape and its traumatic impact on individuals and their communities have taken center stage. Global communication and a growing universal awareness of the ecological interdependence of the earth's inhabitants have rendered personal suffering in one place of concern in another. Research over the last fifty years on stress, trauma and health in psychology (Lindeman, 1944; Brown and Harris, 1978; Caplan, 1981), physiology (Mason, 1968; Seyle, 1976), and sociology (House et al., 1983; Sarason et al., 1990), have further demonstrated the interrelatedness of human problems. Stress and trauma are not only universal, they are at once biological, psychological and social.