Abstract
This chapter is about how the populated slopes of the active volcano, Mt. Merapi, in Java, are a battle ground of ideas about what geology is. I show that understanding this battle helps us grasp the processes that make geology a political entity. What occupies this chapter, then, are the spaces of encounter between people and geological materials, the meeting grounds, as multiple and complexly constituted as they are, in which geology comes to shape how people can relate to one another. This battle ground is a social space in which the power to define and describe is at stake but at the same time geological materials do not sit idly by, ordered and manipulated by their human cohabitants but dramatically, and sometimes spectacularly deform, slide, explode, or unpredictably rest in quietude for years. In doing so they are in a rhythm that has its own share in ordering the conflicts of those who live on the slopes and try to predict and understand those materials. They are subject to its explosions and the volatile debris that both destroys and creates new conditions for growth and economic activity. Here, the battle is over how to define and explain what the volcano is made of, and therefore, what causes it. Living with such a volatile entity has compelled the mobilisation of technologies of measure, observation, appeals to gods, spirits, and fate, as a way to get in advance of, control, manage, and make sense of living in that space. These competing modes of knowing have produced controversies that unfold at the intersection of technological mediation and non-human energies that shape what can be known and how.
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Notes
- 1.
The story of official religions in Indonesia is more complex than this. Confucianism, for example, was removed then re-added to the constitution in response to the ebbs and flows of racist hatred against so-called ethnic Chinese Indonesians. See Ananta et al. (2015). The list of official and unofficial religions has changed over the years.
- 2.
The canonical literature on Javanese power is Benedict O. G. Anderson (1990) “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”; James T. Siegel (2006) Naming the Witch; James T. Siegel (1986) Solo in the New Order; Mark R. Woodward (1989) IslaminJava: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate ofYogyakarta: 53–79, 149–199; Mark Woodward (2011) Java, Indonesia andIslam; Clifford Geertz (1976) TheReligionofJava; see also Nicholas Tarling (1992) CambridgeHistory of South East Asia vols. 1–2.
- 3.
In 2015 there was a court case in Jakarta in which a “magic stone” was admitted as evidence in a paedophilia show trial and the well known gatekeeper of the Merapi volcano Mbah Maridjan, as Elizabeth Inandiak (2010) has reported, was involved in a publicity campaign for the energy drink Kuku Bima.
- 4.
In Geertz’s (1976) canonical taxonomy of Indonesian Islam, these liberal, urban Muslims would be a variation of the Abangan class.
- 5.
87.5% of Indonesians were Muslim identifying in 2010, and Java ranges from 75 to 95% Muslim majority by population. See Ananta et al. (2015).
- 6.
His name translates roughly as ‘words of the sky’.
- 7.
On the Western history of ideas of communication that cross boundaries between the living and dead see Peters (1999).
- 8.
It is a trope in the literature to consider Kejawen to be a “traditional belief system” that can be drawn back to the colonial period standardization of “native” perceptions and continues to be mobilized in Indonesian and English language scholarship. See Burns (1989) and more recently Tyson (2010).
- 9.
The notion of a sacred topography is drawn liberally from Pemberton (1994): 269–311.
- 10.
This is Subianto’s description but can also be found in Skeat’s Malay Magic (1984) originally published 1900.
- 11.
- 12.
On the ahistory of gods and the use of ethnographic methods which resist secularism, see Marisol de la Cadena (2015).
- 13.
- 14.
This is consistent with the seventeenth-century clergymen scientists such as Robert Boyle who argued that the purpose of experimental, empirical science was to get closer to the working of god (Shapin and Schaffer 1985).
- 15.
- 16.
I use the terms ghosts and spirits separately because ghosts are recently deceased human souls and spirits are from long ago deceased persons or the other world.
- 17.
This is drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in Keningar.
- 18.
Wolfgang Marschall’s (1995) brief ethnography of a Jatihlan in a village east of Keningar, notes that the movements of circling steps and lifting a leg could have been developed to induce fatigue in the dancers and the onset of possession.
- 19.
The were-tiger is a common form throughout Southeast Asia. See Wessing (1995, 2006), or Skeat Malay Magic (1984). For a comparison between the masked Were-tiger and the tradition of the shadow play see Zoetmulder (1995: 239–169) Pantheism and Monism in Javanese Suluk Literature: Islamic and Indian Mysticism in an Indonesian Setting.
- 20.
Balut is Tagalog, I do not know the Indonesian or Javanese term for it.
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Bobbette, A. (2019). Cosmological Reason on a Volcano. In: Bobbette, A., Donovan, A. (eds) Political Geology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_6
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