Award Abstract # 1416651
IBSS: Natural Hazards and Cultural Transformations

NSF Org: SMA
SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities
Recipient: HUMAN RELATIONS AREA FILES INC
Initial Amendment Date: July 31, 2014
Latest Amendment Date: September 15, 2014
Award Number: 1416651
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Jeffrey Mantz
jmantz@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7783
SMA
 SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities
SBE
 Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
Start Date: August 1, 2014
End Date: July 31, 2019 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $999,469.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $999,469.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2014 = $999,469.00
History of Investigator:
  • Carol Ember (Principal Investigator)
    Carol.Ember@yale.edu
  • Peter Peregrine (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Michele Gelfand (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Eric Jones (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Benjamin Felzer (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Human Relations Area Files
755 PROSPECT ST
NEW HAVEN
CT  US  06511-1225
(203)764-9401
Sponsor Congressional District: 03
Primary Place of Performance: Human Relations Area Files
755 Prospect Street
New Haven
CT  US  06511-1225
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
03
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): SN33U4693UA7
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Interdiscp Behav&SocSci IBSS
Primary Program Source: 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 8213, 8605, 9278
Program Element Code(s): 821300
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.075

ABSTRACT

A broad range of natural hazards long have confronted human societies. Through analyses of societies that have persisted over very long periods of time, information and insights can be obtained regarding strategies and approaches that have fostered societal resilience, especially when hazards have been recurrent. This interdisciplinary research project will employ theories and data from a broach range of fields, including cultural anthropology, archaeology, psychology, geography, and climatology in order to compare and contrast a diverse set of populations subject to different levels of frequency and predictability of natural hazards, with special attention given to hazards that have impacted food supplies. Because the investigators will be examining a set of world-wide databases to characterize hazard-related dynamics of human societies and cultures over time and space, project findings will help enhance basic understanding of the factors that have influenced societal success in dealing with various natural hazards. The project also will assist policy makers, planners, decision makers, and others in trying to mitigate the consequences of hazardous events by providing a much broader framework of knowledge regarding solutions that societies have arrived at over decades, centuries, or millennia. The project also will provide special interdisciplinary education and training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and for post-doctoral scholars.

This project will compare societies and populations normally studied by different disciplines, testing theories derived from each of the disciplines across varied geographic and temporal domains. To maximize the range of both environmental and cultural diversity, the investigators will compare and contrast worldwide samples that vary in the frequency, severity, and predictability of hazards experience related to food production, storage, and availability. Research questions that the investigators will consider include the following: How often have events had to occur in order for humans to plan for them? Do unpredictable hazards lead to different cultural transformations than do more predictable hazards? Under what conditions are contingency plans overwhelmed in the face of natural hazards that are more severe or more frequent than normal? The investigators will test hypotheses by conducting analyses and developing models across three different domains and datasets: (1) a worldwide sample of more than 100 largely preindustrial ("traditional") societies described by ethnographers; (2) a worldwide sample of prehistoric traditions described by archaeologists; (3) and a worldwide sample of 33 contemporary countries with data collected through individual interviews. To compliment data on natural hazards from historical and contemporary observations, the investigators will develop measures of environmental predictability and variability based on rainfall and temperature data, and they will assemble paleoclimate data to complement the archaeological dataset. Controlling for different types of economies and political systems, the researchers expect to identify patterns of resilient behaviors in time and space, such as contingency plans, subsistence diversification, and sociocultural transformations that expand and solidify cooperation and networks. These analyses will help identify the approaches used by societies that have enabled them to have more or less success in preparing for extreme events and for reducing their adverse impacts. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Ember, Carol R. and Jones, Eric C and Skoggard, Ian and Adem, Teferi Abate "Warfare, atrocities, and political participation: eastern Africa" Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research , 2018
Ember, Carol R. and Skoggard, Ian and Ringen, Erik J and Farrer, Megan "Our better nature: does resource stress predict beyond-household sharing?" Evolution and Human Behavior , 2018 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.03.001
Harrington, Jesse R. and Boski, Pawel and Gelfand, Michele J. "Culture and national well-being: Should societies emphasize freedom or constraint?" PloS one , 2015
Harrington, Jesse R., Pawel Boski, and Michele J. Gelfand. "Culture and National Well-Being: Should Societies Emphasize Freedom or Constraint?" PLoS ONE , v.10 , 2015 , p.e0127173 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127173
Jiang, Mingkai, Benjamin S. Felzer, and Dork Sahagian. Characterizing Predictability of Precipitation Means and Extremes over the Conterminous United States, 1949?2010. Journal of Climate 29: 2621-2633. DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0560.1 "Characterizing Predictability of Precipitation Means and Extremes over the Conterminous United States, 1949?2010." Journal of Climate , v.29 , 2016 , p.2621 DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0560.1
Jiang, Mingkai, Felzer, Benjamin S. and Sahagian, Dork "Predictability of Precipitation Over the Conterminous U.S. Based on the CMIP5 Multi-Model Ensemble" Scientific Reports , v.6 , 2016 , p.29962 10.1038/srep29962 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep29962#supplementary-information
Jiang, Mingkai, Felzer, Benjamin S., Nielsen, Uffe N. and Medlyn, Belinda E. "Biome-specific climatic space defined by temperature and precipitation predictability" Global Ecology and Biogeography , v.26 , 2017 , p.1270-1282 10.1111/geb.12635
Peregrine, Peter N. "Political participation and long-term resilience in pre-Columbian societies" Disaster Prevention and Management , v.26 , 2017 , p.314-329 10.1108/Dpm-01-2017-0013
Peregrine, Peter N. "Reducing post-disaster conflict: a cross-cultural test of four hypotheses using archaeological data" Environmental Hazards , v.18 , 2018 , p.93-110

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

In an era of accelerating climate change and more extreme events, climate-related hazards are of great concern to scientists, applied researchers, policy-makers and the public at-large. Policy-makers may invent solutions, but such solutions may be unlikely to succeed if they have little correspondence to types of solutions people have invented in the past. This project was based on the premise that it is important to try to understand how human societies in the past and present, with varying livelihoods and vulnerabilities, have responded to extreme conditions. Our interdisciplinary team employed theory and data from cultural anthropology, archaeology, psychology and geography/climatology, to compare and contrast various populations subject to different levels of frequency and predictability of natural hazards, particularly hazards impacting food supplies, in order to answer the following research questions: How have hazards, especially those hazards seriously destroying food supplies (e.g., droughts, floods), affected and transformed cultures? More broadly, how has past resource stress affected cultural attitude and practices? To answer these questions we collected data and coded variables for two types of comparison--a worldwide comparison of almost 100 largely nonindustrial societies described by observers in the past few centuries and a worldwide comparison of 32 archaeological traditions before and after disasters. 

In our comparison of nonindustrial societies we have found that societies with more natural hazards and other resource stressors generally have: 1) more customary community food and labor sharing; 2) more subsistence diversification--both relying on different types of subsistence strategies as well as using  diverse types of land and water landscapes for collecting and producing food; 3) "tighter" cultures (those with stronger norms and more punishment for deviation from rules); 4) beliefs that gods are involved with weather in some way and can help or harm food supply with weather; and 5) leadership that tends toward autocracy and exclusion, although there are exceptions. The sharing and subsistence diversification findings are consistent with the idea that these practices buffer risk and help ensure more stable access to food in the face of resource stress. Cultural "tightness" theory suggests that stronger adherence to rules may be especially adaptive under ecological threat because tightness may bolster cooperation and coordination. And yet, as a comparison of 32 nations suggests, moderate tightness might be more adaptive than too much tightness or too much looseness because extreme scores are associated with worse health and well-being outcomes. Comparisons of both nonindustrial societies and nations suggest that "tighter" societies may produce more authoritarianism and ethnocentrism.  

Not all the results were consistent with our expectations. While we had expected that natural hazards would also predict more communal (rather than private property) to buffer against loss from hazards, our results only suggested a minor role for drought. The need for mobility, such as for hunting or herding large animals in making a living better predicts communal property. 

The before and after disaster archaeological comparison came to somewhat different conclusions than the ethnographic comparisons regarding tightness and looseness of culture.  In the archaeological comparisons, "tighter" cultures in prehistory appear to have been less stable over time, with less authoritarian cultures appearing to be somewhat more resilient over time.  We note that the archaeological disasters are much more catastrophic than anything in the ethnographic or ethnohistorical anthropological records, so there might be differences due to the scale of disasters. Catastrophic-scale disasters might require more creativity and flexibility, characteristics that are less frequent in tighter cultures.

Our project has also produced climatological measures based on weather records that may be used as measures of drought and flood. 

The project has so far resulted in 11 papers published or in press, 6 manuscripts under review, and 41 conference presentations.  We plan an additional 4 publications plus a synthesis of overall findings. See HRAF's Advanced Research Center site (http:/hrafarc.org) for a complete list of publications to date and preprints for papers under review.

 


Last Modified: 10/02/2019
Modified by: Carol R Ember

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