Understanding Disasters in Indonesia and Beyond

This book develops multidisciplinary angles on disaster studies with a focus on Indonesia-the epicenter of natural disasters in the world-with additional case examples from Japan and China, covering events including volcano eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires, coastal flooding, and related environmental perils. The authors pay attention to the spiritual, anthropogenic, historical, environmental, and multispecies dimensions of disaster. It also brings the discussion of specific moments of ruination and extinction, locating planetary concern in specific histories of communities' relations with their surrounding ecologies. The book starts with a fundamental rethinking the concept of disaster in Asian contexts, offering a nuanced angle that goes beyond merely technical scientific aspects of disaster studies. It questions the separation of nature and culture, and the human and nonhuman, that has been central, albeit uncritically discussed, in disaster studies to date. Instead of conceptualizing disaster as a disturbance produced by human involvements or natural hazards, the book seeks to show how "disaster" is a contextualized situation and discursive event. In looking at Indonesia, as well as Japan and China, the book provides dialogue with other contexts affected by disasters. It is relevant to scholars working in anthropology, sociology, disaster studies, Asian studies, human geography, political geography, human ecology, and eco-theology.