MATTHEW LAUER, 2023, Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania, California: University of California Press, 272 pp., ISBN 9780520392076

Keywords: Disaster; Indigenous Ecological Knowledge; Ontology; Resilience; Vulnerability. 

Sensing Disasters by Matthew Lauer is a remarkable ethnographic study of Simbo, an economically poor island with minimal disaster infrastructure, showcasing miraculous survival strategies without modern alert systems. The book opens at a critical moment in the aftermath of the 2007 tsunami that affected the Solomon Islands. Instead of the usual explanation of disaster response as the intergenerational oral transmission of Indigenous Knowledge, Lauer traces Simboan disaster response to their ability to sense and act on environmental cues. In this book, he advocates epistemic democratization by critiquing the imposition of external scientific and bureaucratic frameworks over indigenous knowledge to understand disasters and plan their mitigation. Dissecting the concepts of vulnerability and resilience by historicizing calamities and revealing their socio-cultural and economic entanglements, the book reveals the Simbo experience of sensing disasters.

The book delves into the lifeworlds of the Simboans, situating their disaster experiences within the broader context of their discourses and materialities to challenge standardized forms of ‘perceiving’ (p. 28). It eloquently discusses how the Simbo settlement history and its radical restructuring due to global economic and colonial transformations generated socio-ecological changes and (re)shaped vulnerabilities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, household surveys and ethnographic interviews over eighteen months, the book calls for new approaches to understanding disasters and rethinking the position of indigenous knowledge amidst dominant power structures. Lauer studies spatial reorganization, social solidarities, and the dominance of scientific knowledge during disaster reconstruction efforts by experts. His practice approach reorients knowledge as a form of practice informed by the practitioner, the specificities of time, place, social conditions and interpretations, thus making a strong case for contextualization of knowledge and ascertaining vulnerability as ‘politically polyvalent’ (pp. 84, 18, 184).

Simboans sense disasters as muolongo, glossed in English as ‘sensing, anticipating, interrelating,’ referring to the extraordinary abilities to make sound judgements and respond appropriately to apprehensions. Noticing changes to local environments, anticipating danger by understanding strange events, relationality between humans and nonhumans and getting attuned to reflexive sensitivity together illustrate the Simboan muolongo. Lauer argues that ‘learning to be sensitive’ allowed the tsunami survivors ‘to detect odd shifts in the ocean and act on them appropriately with little codified, intergenerationally transmitted knowledge about the phenomenon’ (p. 186). With brilliant theoretical focus and empirical understanding, Lauer highlights the multiple ontological positions associated with marine habitats. He argues that Simboans can perceive and comprehend even the most subtle and gradual changes to their surroundings.

Simboan sensing is posited as a ‘regenerative process’ of rendering entities as ontologically multiple. The novelty of this conceptualization lies in its ability to highlight the implicit and introduce new entities, ideas, and practices that reinterpret local knowledge and transform it in the process (p. 20). Making sense of the local understanding of vulnerabilities requires contextualizing biophysical uncertainties within the long