Processions: How the Spiritual Geographies of Central Java Shaped Modern Volcano Science

Abstract

This paper brings together the spiritual geographies of the central Javanese sultanates and modern volcano science since the early twentieth century. It shows how modern volcano scientists were enabled to undertake their fieldwork along the ritual pathways of Mount Merapi. It shows how colonial scientists relied on Javanese labor to undertake their work and how they engaged with Javanese volcano knowledges. The modern scientific conception of the necessary relationship between volcanism on land and deep water trenches mirrored spiritual-geographical concepts of the Yogyakarta sultanate. Colonial and postcolonial scientific work on Javanese volcanoes made crucial contributions to the formulation and adoption of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s and 1970s that reimagined the evolutionary history of the lithosphere. The theory of plate tectonics did not fundamentally contradict the spiritual topography of the central Javanese sultanates, rather, this paper demonstrates how they were assembled together.