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The Pulse of the Earth

The Pulse of the Earth

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In The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge. Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes, showing that the origin of the earth sciences emerged from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Adam Bobbette is Lecturer in Political Geology at the University of Glasgow and coeditor of Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life. Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xix
1. Political Geology as Method  1
2. The Origins of Java in Four Maps: From an Island of Ruins to Youthful Throes  20
3. Intercalated: The Political and Spiritual Geographies of Plate Tectonics  52
4. AD 1006 Geodeterminism: Cultures of Catastrophe and the Story of a Date  80
5. Geopoetics: Joannes Umbgrove’s Cosmic and Aesthetic Science  114
6. Volcano Observatories: Proximity and Distance in Science and Mysticism  142
Conclusion  175
Notes  179
Bibliography  197
Index

“Adam Bobbette’s simultaneous making strange of Western science and making reasonable of animist thought gives this book its charm and intellectual heft. I can’t think of any other book that is as balanced in its treatment of Western science and non-Western thought and as insistent on putting them on a level playing field. At once ethnographic and global in scope, The Pulse of the Earth boldly defines and owns the concept of political geology every bit as much as it is a book about Java or a political volcano.”
“Adam Bobbette’s book is ambitious. To quote Goethe, it is ‘endowed with magnificent sensory perception’ and rubs against the patience of scholars who are more ‘successful at ordering phenomena and putting them under the proper rubrics.’ The Pulse of the Earth is a perilous and exciting book.”

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in