To see accurate pricing, please choose your delivery country.
 
 
United States
£ GBP
All Shops

British Wildlife

8 issues per year 84 pages per issue Subscription only

British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.

Subscriptions from £33 per year

Conservation Land Management

4 issues per year 44 pages per issue Subscription only

Conservation Land Management (CLM) is a quarterly magazine that is widely regarded as essential reading for all who are involved in land management for nature conservation, across the British Isles. CLM includes long-form articles, events listings, publication reviews, new product information and updates, reports of conferences and letters.

Subscriptions from £26 per year
Academic & Professional Books  Evolutionary Biology  Human Evolution

Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment A Comparative Study of two Pastoral Societies

By: Michael Bollig(Author)
324 pages
Publisher: Springer Nature
Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment
Click to have a closer look
  • Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment ISBN: 9780387275819 Hardback Nov 2005 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 1-2 weeks
    £89.99
    #164769
Price: £89.99
About this book Contents Customer reviews Related titles

About this book

A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences. Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment by a prominent scholar of East African societies is a powerful example of this growing interest. Earlier theory and research tended to describe social and economic systems in some form of equilibrium. However recent thinking in human ecology, evolutionary biology, not to mention in economic and political theory has come to assign to "risk" a prominent role in predictive modeling of behavior. It turns out that risk minimalization is central to the understanding of individual strategies and numerous social institutions. It is not simply a peripheral and transient moment in a group's history.

Anthropologists interested in forager societies have emphasized risk management strategies as a major force shaping hunting and gathering routines and structuring institutions of food sharing and territorial behavior. Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment builds on some of these developments but through the analysis of quite complex pastoral and farming peoples and in populations with substantial known histories. The method of analysis depends heavily on the controlled comparisons of different populations sharing some cultural characteristics but differing in exposure to certain risks or hazards.

The central questions guiding this approach are: 1) How are hazards generated through environmental variation and degradation, through increasing internal stratification, violent conflicts and marginalization? 2) How do these hazards result in damages to single households or to individual actors and how do these costs vary within one society? 3) How are hazards perceived by the people affected? 4) How do actors of different wealth, social status, age and gender try to minimize risks by delimiting the effect of damages during an on-going crisis and what kind of institutionalized measures do they design to insure themselves against hazards, preventing their occurrence or limiting their effects? 5) How is risk minimization affected by cultural innovation and how can the importance of the quest for enhanced security as a driving force of cultural evolution be estimated?

Contents

- Introduction: Studying Hazard and Risk in Pastoral Societies
- An outline of Pokot and Himba Societies: Environment, Political Economy and Cultural Beliefs
- Hazards and Damages
- The Perception of Droughts and Disasters
- Coping Strategies during a Drought and Disaster
- Buffering Mechanisms: Minimizing Vulnerability
- Hazards, Risk and Risk Minimization in African Pastoral Societies
- Appendix
- References

Customer Reviews

By: Michael Bollig(Author)
324 pages
Publisher: Springer Nature
Media reviews

"This work concerns the experience and perception of hazards in the two pastoral economies, and their coping strategies for reducing uncertainties and minimizing the risks. [...] The most impressive aspect of this work is the mass of detail that the author systematically brings to bear on his subject, drawing tables and illustrations from a wide range of sources. [...] the book deserves to become a standard reference work for future research on this topic."
- Paul Spencer, Anthropos, Vol. 102, 2007

"Michael Bollig takes an interdisciplinary approach to the Pokot of northern Kenya and the Himba of northern Namibia in this accessibile textbook [...] . There are numerous charts and high-quality maps as well as satellite, historical, and present-day photographs. Transcriptions of interviews, prayers, and songs add another dimension to the impressive variety of topics covered. [...] Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment will be welcome reading for graduate students and faculty [...] . It would be an appropriate textbook for upper-level courses [...] ."
- Heidi G. Frontani, African Studies Review, Vol. 49 (3), 2006)

Current promotions
New and Forthcoming BooksNHBS Moth TrapBritish Wildlife MagazineBuyers Guides