Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania

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 ...