Description
Book SynopsisIn 2007, a three-story-high tsunami slammed the small island of Simbo in the western Solomon Islands. Drawing on over ten years of research, Matthew Lauer provides a vivid and intimate account of this calamitous event and the tumultuous recovery process. His stimulating analysis surveys the unpredictable entanglements of the powerful waves with colonization, capitalism, human-animal communication, spirit beings, ancestral territory, and technoscientific expertise that shaped the disaster's outcomes. Although the Simbo people had never experienced another tsunami in their lifetimes, nearly everyone fled to safety before the destructive waves hit. To understand their astonishing response, Lauer argues that we need to rethink popular and scholarly portrayals of Indigenous knowledge to avert epistemic imperialism and improve disaster preparedness strategies. In an increasingly disaster-prone era of ecological crises, this provocative book brings new possibilities into view for understan
Trade Review"
Sensing Disaster is an excellent book that offers a sympathetic and sophisticated introduction to the anthropology of disasters and indigenous knowledge and place-making, and would be invaluable as a teaching resource. The balance of theory and ethnography is highly engaging, making the book accessible to a larger audience outside the academy. . . . as the arguments in the book are highly relevant for (and should be reshaping) development and disaster practice across Oceania."
* Oceania *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Simbo Language and Solomon Islands Pijin
Glossary
Prologue: “Something Was Not Right”
Introduction
1. The Rise of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge
2. Ocean Knowing
3. Ancestors, Steel, and Inland Living
4. New Villages, a New God, New Vulnerabilities
5. Assembling Reconstruction
6. Vulnerable Isles?
7. Sensing Disaster Compositions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
