Description
Product ID: | 9780520392076 |
Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
Country of Manufacture: | GB |
Title: | Sensing Disaster |
Subtitle: | Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania |
Authors: | Author: Dr. Matthew Lauer |
Page Count: | 292 |
Subjects: | Social impact of disasters / accidents (natural or man-made), Social impact of disasters, Ethnic studies, Indigenous peoples, Social and cultural anthropology, Human geography, Natural disasters, Ethnic studies, Indigenous peoples, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Human geography, Natural disasters, Australia, Oceania |
Description: | Select Guide Rating In 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 understanding the causes and consequences of calamity, the unintended effects of humanitarian recovery and mitigation efforts, and the nature of local knowledge. |
Imprint Name: | University of California Press |
Publisher Name: | University of California Press |
Country of Publication: | GB |
Publishing Date: | 2023-03-07 |