UTFacultiesBMSDept TPSSTEPSEventsOnline STEPS Colloquium with Muzayin Nazaruddin

Online STEPS Colloquium with Muzayin Nazaruddin Natural disasters approached from a cultural/(eco)semiotics perspective with focus on Indonesia

Research meeting of the Science, Technology and Policy Studies section, University of Twente, with Muzayin Nazaruddin, who will give a presentation followed by questions and discussion. For more information please contact k.m.w.vandertuin-wagenvoort@utwente.nl

You are welcome! 

Abstract

The Post-disaster Transformation of Interspecies Dependencies: From Talkative Buffalo to De-signified Cows at the Slope of Mt. Merapi 

This paper suggests how natural disasters may serve as the final propulsion for changes already taking place within a society. In general terms, the processes under observation could be summed up as modernisation, but our study highlights the role of interspecific interactions and taskscapes in transforming the abstract market forces into the daily experiences of local people. The paper points out, how the drawing of non-human species to market economic cycles diminishes the need and consequently ability to maintain a daily communication with non-human co-inhabitants. Diminished contacts and communication in turn eases the untying of local ecological connections. As a case study, this paper focuses on the 2010 Mt. Merapi eruption in Indonesia and its aftermath in the villages of its mountain slope. The study analyses how the shift from using plow buffalo to utilizing market economic cattle keeping reflects not just an economic, but also an affective and communicative change stemming from a shift in the intensity and kind of human-animal relations. We also observe, how the change that is often praised as an enhancement of the locals’ prosperity and resilience, may create a new kind of vulnerability: dependence on uncontrollable market fluctuations.

Muzayin Nazaruddin & Riin Magnus

Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu
begawan.nazaruddin@gmail.com