Volcanoes, People, and Teleconnection: Local Spirits and Distant Monsters

A unique comparison of how people living in the shadow of volcanoes and those residing continents away experience and live with their effects In 1815, when the volcano Tambora in what was then the East Indies erupted, it precipitated global cooling that lasted for several years and led to one of the great subsistence crises in the western world. In the vicinity of the volcano itself, the eruption had equally devastating but differently interpreted effects. Surviving local accounts in the form of syair, epic Malay poetry, interpreted the cataclysm as divine punishment for everyday violations of traditional social orders. Through the histories of three Indonesian volcanoes—Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa; Krakatau, with its catastrophic 1883 eruption, off the west coast of Java; and Merapi, which is in a state of near-continuous eruption in Central Java—Michael R. Dove compares the global perception of massive eruptions as an incomprehensible break in normality with local villagers’ practice of “domesticating” and thereby adapting to and wresting a livelihood from volcanic activity. Given the historic role of volcanoes as climate-forcing agents, this comparison offers a lesson in how local communities can understand and respond to a global phenomenon like environmental change.