Disaster in Indonesia: Along the Fault Line toward New Approaches

Abstract:This article posits that examining Indonesia as a locus of global learning begins to answer Greg Bankoff’s critique (2001, 2018) of “resilience” and “vulnerability” in contemporary disaster studies as stagist, neocolonial frameworks for recasting developmental concerns. It proposes working “along the fault line” to examine how Indonesia’s disaster sites have generated diverse forms of knowledge about catastrophe, from deep time to the present day. Counter to Anthony Reid’s (2013, 2015) contention that discontinuity must punctuate the past and future of an archipelago located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, this article argues that catastrophic events in Indonesia should not be principally understood as acute episodes triggering rupture and change, but also as occasions for tracing important continuities. These become evident when foregrounding the key preoccupation of the plural communities that have occupied and studied Indonesian sites of catastrophe: that is, how to live with disaster, not just survive it. This article provides an overview of new research from historians, geographers, and anthropologists on how that concern is evident in ancient oral traditions that inform current work on geomythology, in premodern Javanese and Balinese sources on time and power, in state and scientific attempts to mitigate disaster that bridge colonial and postcolonial regimes, and in contemporary religious practices in Indonesia.