Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that Carol R. Ember of Human Relations Area Files at Yale University will deliver our next research seminar, "CULTURAL ADAPTATIONS TO NATURAL HAZARDS AND RESOURCE STRESS," on Wednesday, January 22nd, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Forum Room 301.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list.
For the past decade, our interdisciplinary cross-cultural research team has coded data from a sample of societies in the anthropological record to test theories about how societies living in hazard-prone environments may have adapted their cultures to deal with climate-related and other resource stressors. Our main strategy was to compare societies living in such environments with those in less hazard-prone environments to see how their culture traits differed in realms such as beyond-household food and labor sharing, subsistence diversification, property rights, cultural tightness or looseness, uniformity of dress, and beliefs that gods are involved with weather. After summarizing our previous findings, I discuss how our ongoing research project is coding more nuanced properties of hazards, such as fast or slow onset, degree of predictability, severity, and whether the hazards are food-destroying or not, in order to create more specific profiles of the risks societies face. We ask whether these new ways of measuring hazards change our previous understandings of cultural adaptation. Preliminary findings suggest that the food-destroying and nonfood destroying contrast may help us understand puzzling differences between results of cross-national and cross-cultural research.
*If attending, you must be a CUID holder*
