From sea to spirit: Resilience conceptions in coastal communities of Kaledupa, Indonesia

Abstract

Understandings of fisheries community resilience were studied in two artisanal fishing communities in the Wakatobi Regency of Indonesia. Ecological and spiritual factors were understood as the primary components of community resilience in this region both as independent drivers and interactively. Fundamental ecological concepts such as species distribution and abundance were often mentioned alongside spiritual understandings of hope and fear, space and time. Furthermore, not only did these spiritual and ecological factors operate independently, they were also interactive and intrinsically linked in the way they informed understandings of resilient coastal communities. This spiritual–ecological dimension is unique and relatively unstudied elsewhere in relation to resilience. Both resilience and fisheries can be conceived as ‘boundary objects’. Fisheries, defined as systems involving human communities and aquatic ecosystems in which organisms are collected for use by the human community, inherently blend hu...