ISBN:
9780520392083
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (292 p.)
Keywords:
Disaster relief
;
Hazard mitigation
;
Traditional ecological knowledge
;
Tsunamis
;
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Disasters & Disaster Relief
Abstract:
In 2007, a tsunami slammed a small island in the western Solomon Islands, wreaking havoc on its coastal communities and ecosystems. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic and environmental science research, Matthew Lauer provides an intimate account of this catastrophic event that explores how a century of colonization, Christianity, and increasing entanglement with capitalism prefigured the local response and the tumultuous recovery process. Despite near total destruction of several villages, few people lost their lives, as nearly everyone fled to high ground before the tsunami struck. To understand their astonishing, lifesaving response, Lauer argues that we need to rethink the popular portrayals of indigenous ecological knowledge that inform environmental research and contemporary disaster mitigation strategies so as to avoid displacing those aspects of indigenous knowing and being that are often overlooked. In an increasingly disaster-prone era of ecological crises, this important study challenges readers to expand their thinking about the causes and consequences of calamities, the effects of disaster relief and recovery efforts, and the nature of local knowledge
Note:
Frontmatter
,
Contents
,
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
,
In English
DOI:
10.1525/9780520392083
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