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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 



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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 history of Simbo’s associations with capitalist and 

colonial regimes. This sets the stage for Lauer to rethink how viewing vulnerability as an inherent 

condition of the Simbo landscape necessitates external efforts for capacity building, thereby 

keeping the broader structure of epistemic dominance of scientism unchallenged.  

 

Interestingly, Lauer’s ethnography reveals Simbo’s critique of the global economic system and the 

colonial network of power in terms of bulo-poata, meaning a detrimental marketing of everything. 

His focus on performativity ensures an understanding of the assemblages of multiple 

representations of the external reality, influenced by marginalized regional political economy, 

evolving cosmologies and waves of social solidarity. Therefore, Lauer’s attempt in the book is to 

unsettle the predominant analytical frameworks of disaster and develop ‘conceptual tools that 



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bring into view and generate new meanings, concepts, and material processes’ (p. 208). The book 

radically challenges dualistic thinking based on objectivity and argues for ‘poly-ontology’ built on 

the plurality of phenomena (p. 96). 

 

Lauer identifies that the models of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK) or Traditional 

Ecological Knowledge (TEK) fail to consider the cultural values rooted in Simbo’s miraculous 

disaster response. Moreover, Simbo survivors employed ‘a melange of different responses’ which 

was a part of their cultural values of ‘kastom’, understood as generosity and reciprocity, and 

‘varivagana’, or mutual sharing (pp. 134-5). Yet, with humanitarian relief extended by the UNDP, 

NGOs, and disaster experts, ‘new discursive strategies, concepts, experiences, and technoscientific 

practices ... to assemble Simbo land into vulnerable tsunamiland’ were introduced (p. 171). This 

shifted the responsibility and expertise of techno-scientifically managing disasters on the islands 

towards the Global North. In the neoliberal condition, resilience-inspired disaster management 

strategies of experts ‘depoliticize’ and ‘naturalize’ disasters and reinforce the global power 

disparity (pp. 180-2). The book critiques participatory capacity-building workshops as potentially 

reinforcing state control despite their intentions to empower indigenous disaster response methods. 

It exposes the contingent and partial nature of dominant perspectives of various forms of scientism 

in disaster management. Lauer emphasizes the importance of empowering the natives to stress 

their ideas, practices, and worldviews in order to foster a deeper understanding of the entangled 

worlds in the Anthropocene. Such a formulation unmasks disasters as ‘discursively and materially 

catalytic’; that is, instead of diminishing ‘the ebb and flow of life’, disasters coalesce with ‘with 

the preexisting fabric of life and produce an outpouring of local theorizations and speculations to 

explain and digest it’ (p. 201).  

 

Sensing Disasters impressively takes the first step towards understanding the conceptual resources 

of Simbo by listening closely to alternate worldviews with appreciation. Extending disaster 

anthropology’s focus on social dynamics, power structures, and political and economic disparities 

as triggering factors, Lauer makes a case for historicizing calamities by locating them in a web of 

social and ecological relations. This approach generates the space for changes and prospects of 

varied modes of sensing disasters to emerge. It rests on the philosophy that not everyone describes 

the world in the same way or shares the same set of ontological assumptions (Cortesi 2021, p. 



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871). Lauer makes a timely and significant contribution towards exhibiting how the embeddedness 

of cultural practices within the socio-ecological systems explain how differing lifeworlds often 

coexist simultaneously and engender multiple meanings. By complicating the presumptions that 

inform Indigenous and Western Scientific Knowledge, Lauer brings out their nuances and makes 

a relevant addition to the field of the Social Construction of Knowledge.  

 

Works Cited: 

 

Cortesi, Luisa. “An Ontology of Water and Land in North Bihar, India.” Journal of the Royal 

Anthropological Institute 27 (2021): 870–89. doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13611 

(Accessed on 12 January 2022). 

 

 

Sohini Chakraborty is a doctoral candidate in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Indian 

Institute of Technology Delhi, with research interests in sacred geography and environmental 

sociology. Her recent works have been published in the Contemporary South Asia Journal and 

by Bloomsbury. 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2024 Sohini Chakraborty 

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13611

