Indigenous “relationalities” of kinship and mutual custodialship between human and other-than-human personages include those that also obtain between and among land-, water-, and sky-scapes. In Oceania, this expansive web of social and environmental relations of kinship and reciprocity is materially embodied and mobilized in indigenous water crafts, like voyaging outrigger canoes, and in the craftwork of Indigenous “local” ecological knowledge of sea and skyways, as found for example in the paafu mat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzZFje4bayc). An intergenerational teaching device featuring a circle of shells upon a woven pandanus mat by which Central Carolinian navigators teach children (or ethnographers) the rising and setting points of stars used for directional purposes, paafu also holds knowledge that have larger “instructional” lessons about ethical obligations and reciprocal responsibilities. This presentation charts the emergent topographies -- the protocols toward a decolonial academic knowledge production praxis – as they inform and are further informed by an augmented and mixed reality rendering of a traditional paafu mat produced in an ongoing art/science/technology collaborative involving researchers in critical Indigenous Studies and Computer Science and Engineering on the one hand, and traditional voyagers from Polowat Atoll in the Central Carolinian region of Micronesia on the other.

Evil spirits surfaced in the waters off Pulau Angsa in 1925, carrying off a net that had been heavily weighed down just minutes ago. Remarkably, this incident had surfaced in the Annual Report of the colonial Fisheries Department of British Malaya, a document produced by British officials trained in Western scientific epistemologies.[1] At the turn of the twentieth century, Western scientists were so unfamiliar with tropical seas that colonial knowledge production still relied heavily on local intergenerational knowledge to understand these waters. Yet local communities themselves were also reshaping their relationships with the sea as they responded to the introduction of new fishing technologies. Through a close reading of colonial and contemporaneous sources, I suggest that intergenerational and scientific knowledge were deeply entangled, mutually reinforcing epistemic processes. At the same time, as a relatively nascent PhD student, I share my insights and difficulties in engaging with and incorporating diverse cosmologies into my study of Malayan fisheries.

Volcanic eruptions in Indonesia occupy a prominent place in world history and many interdisciplinary studies. These events positioned as moments that werewas pivotal to the advancement of volcanology as a field of study and the establishment of infrastructure that enabled scientific knowledge-making. Less known and at times, improperly understood, are vernacular knowledges of volcanoes among the diverse ethnic communities living in close proximity to them. This presentation examines local responses to seminal volcanic eruptions during the long twentieth century across the archipelago: Krakatau (1883), Agung (1963) and Merapi (2010), utilizing vernacular sources that range from court chronicles, oral histories and pamphlets by community disaster response groups. Far from being estranged from scientific epistemologies, this survey shows how each successive eruption leads to new local vocabularies and methods of organizing disaster responses in ways that accommodated both scientific and traditional religious understandings. These evolving articulations of what a volcanic eruption could mean and how to respond to it underscores the importance of place in exploring forms, objects, and practices of knowledge production regarding disaster mitigation.