# Computational Social Science of Disasters: Opportunities and Challenges
## 2 The Role of Social Science in Disaster Research
### Anthropology  
By approaching disaster research with holistic and comparative perspectives, anthropologists study all aspects of human life--environmental, biological, and socio-cultural--as they relate to disasters. Their work focuses on the interconnections between cultural, social, political, economic, and environmental domains to provide explanations for cultural systems in disaster. Anthropologists ask questions such as how do people and cultures understand disaster? How does culture drive socio-cultural processes and responses to disasters? How do these processes interact with the corresponding physical and technical processes? Anthropological studies cross scales from the local to global and back; they explore not only the external physical relationship between human and environment but also the internal meaning that humans produce to understand and interpret their experience. They unravel long-term processes of cultural adaptation to changing social and physical environments as revealed in archeology and history, and reveal power dynamics in the social structures of individuals and groups. As a result of these analyses, anthropologists have uncovered complex interactions between physical, biological, and sociological systems [53; 54] that involve people's adaptations to and manipulations of their physical environment and construction of sociocultural institutions, beliefs, and ethos. As part of a social process, these interactions produce disaster, the event that involves a potentially destructive natural or technological agent and a population under varying conditions of vulnerability [53; 54; 55; 4]. Anthropological work has shed light on the social production of disasters and the social structures that contribute to vulnerability and risk [4]. Theories of \"embodiment\" have contributed to a better understanding of how culture affects individuals experiences, along with how they comprehend and cope with traumatic experiences (e.g., [56; 57; 58; 59; 60]). Comparative work on multiple cultures has illuminated how different societies respond and adapt to environmental changes [61] and disasters with responsive belief systems and coping strategies [62]. Longitudinal studies have shown how societies cope and adapt through multiple disasters (e.g., [63]). Since disasters affect every feature of society as well as its relations with the environment and its individuals and communities, anthropology's holistic approach uniquely qualifies the field to study the processes of disaster and interactions that cut across domains. We can look at the findings of anthropological research temporally, studies explaining processes in pre-, (early) response-, and post-disaster phases. Anthropology has given special attention to structural conditions of pre-disaster vulnerability, such as gender inequality, global inequities, endemic poverty, racism, a history of colonial exploitation, imbalances of trade, and underdevelopment [56], and set them in the context of historical processes [64]. In responses to disasters, the themes that have been studied include changes occurring in cultural institutions (e.g., belief systems), within political organizations (i.e., power relations between individuals, the state, and international actors), and within economic systems (e.g., allocation of resources). For the post-disaster phase, a great deal of anthropological work criticizes various actors, including the relief programs, for their top-down, non-flexible strategies in which the affected populations are overlooked (which is in line with the sociological findings), or how media becomes a contested space in which actors try to control the narrative, especially in times of uncertainty [55]. As local and international communities wrestle with issues of environmental change, adaptation, and disaster mitigation, the work of anthropology provides examples of how indigenous and local knowledge can substantially contribute to solutions for community disaster risk reduction and resilience [65; 66; 67].