Community resilience and the dynamics of relatedness and residence in a rural Zimbabwean village from 1986 to 2010

Social resilience to challenges is an important component of sustainability. We explore the diversity and flexibility of the social networks of a rural Zimbabwean community in order to understand their resilience in the face of the AIDS epidemic, hyper-inflation in the 2000s, and increasing variability of rainfall due to climate change. We combine social network analysis with ethnographic accounts to find that broad concepts of relatedness help families adopt AIDS orphans, while household structures are flexible over time, with small groups forming in lands newly available for re-settlement. Change in household membership was attributable more to immigration/emigration than to birth/death. 1