A Study On The Disaster - Resistant Ability Of Ethnic Minority Communities From The Perspective Of Anthropology

Most of Chinese ethnic minorities are living in the disaster-prone areas because of geographical and climatic conditions, and their poor social economic conditions make the construction of infrastructure for prevention and reduction of natural disasters is insufficient. Disaster happen very often and cause severe losses. China’s ethnic minorities population distribution is "living together with other nationalities in whole nationwide range, with some small inhabitance of single minority". This leads to a small minority village size community can be relatively independent of modernization, the traditional culture, traditional organization structure, mode of production, the life habits are relatively intact.Community is connecting link between government and individuals, observational field investigate the behavior of ethnic minority communities in response to disasters, and understand the characteristics of this coping behavior and the correlation with the traditional culture, to analyze the positive and negative effect to coping capabilities, put forward to model and method for promoting prevention and mitigation capacity of minority community disaster.Catastrophology on natural disasters have a lot of achievements, including the hazards, vulnerability, risk and coping capabilities in qualitative and quantitative methods.But these studies are all interested in large scale, like region, country, city and county. Hardly focus on community level. Anthropology is expert in in-depth observation, detailed records, long-term follow-up research methods, so the result will be more relevant than general.Select common disasters happen in minority areas, such as earthquake, landslides and debris flows, as study disasters type, Conduct a tracking survey on L village, Taiping Town, Yingjiang County, Dehong Dai & Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, where is a frequent earthquakes district, about the whole process of people handling with earthquake disasters in August 2011, October 2012, and March 2015, respectively. Time span is 5 years, cover the stage of emergency and resettlement and reconstruction after a disaster. In July 2011 and March 2015, investigate D Village, Guanling County, Anshun city, Guizhou province, where event of a landslide, debris flow disaster killed 99 people, the period is corresponding to the post-disaster reconstruction and recovery stage.From the case of L village, it is found that a category of culture concept, such as good preserved traditional social capital, social organization form, institution and values of a minority communities plays a positive role in the whole process of response to disasters. Depth interview with people afflicted by D Village disaster about disaster process, relief, especially the post-disaster reconstruction, consider the severe results disaster is caused by many reasons, in addition to the local natural conditions is prone to this kind of geological disaster, the failure of monitoring and early warning of disaster is one of the main reasons. Because a bad communication with the affected community about the issue of permanent residential area reconstruction and not give full play to the function of community self-organization, the recovery work do not achieve the desired effect, even may cause a new social conflict.Based on a single-sited diachronic and multi-sited synchronic research, through the comparative study, eliminate the natural attribute of different disasters, only from the social attribute of disaster, place the observation point on the community of disaster-affected bodies, cultural and social changes as breakthrough point, with every phase of disaster cycle as the clue, from the disaster preparedness, emergency relief and post-disaster recovery and reconstruction three aspects, respectively, propose some suggestion about promoting the ability of responding to disasters in ethnic minority communities.Keeping the minority culture and organizational structure and maintaining good traditional social capital will play a very positive role to promote minority community coping capacities. The improvement of community participation is the key to disaster mitigation action. And puts forward suggestions on the perfection of the relief system in our country, change the current situation of "every issues concerned disasters rely on the government", setting rules with clear articles, avoid the lack of standards in disaster relief and compensation, unprincipled, prevent the process of relief and reconstruction from making new refugees and being a danger of new social conflicts.