Table of Contents

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  215

About the Author

Adam Bobbette is Lecturer in Political Geology at the University of Glasgow and coeditor of Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life.

Reviews

“Adam Bobbette’s simultaneous making strange of Western science and making reasonable of animist thought give 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.” - Nigel Clark, coauthor of (Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences) “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.” - Rudolf Mrázek, author of (The Complete Lives of Camp People: Colonialism, Fascism, Concentrated Modernity) "Java is a worthy stage to host this intense combination of fiery volcanism, cosmology, and culture, and this work provides an accessible introduction to political geology in both concept and practice. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers." - J. Brewer (Choice) "This book is a novel, deep-time riff on Java’s famous volcanoes. . . . It is a must-read for aspiring political geologists, historians of Indonesia, and ethnographers of science. Anyone interested in the Indian Ocean will also find ample inspiration for thinking the sea as an inhabited and geologically animated extension of far-reaching polities." - Lukas Ley (H-Environment, H-Net Reviews) "Bobbette’s new book marks again an important contribution to an emerging scholarship that blurs the boundary between geological and social history . . . . Bobbette succeeds, not only in centering 'the geo in geopolitics' . . . but also in unearthing the geosocial tectonics through which different earth knowledges are folded and through which geopower operates." - Rony Emmenegger (Geographica Helvetica) ". . . the extensively researched work is a profound contribution to the intersection of geography, religion, and the history of science. . . In Bobette’s revision of the history of science in colonial Indonesia, the importance of non-western influence is illuminated, while the unity of science is preserved." - Benjamin Trumble (IIAS Review)