Ghamal Satya Mohammad

Mount Merapi is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. It is also considered an integral part of a 'sacred landscape' of Java, currently inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people residing within 20 km of its epicentre. The thesis investigates the formation of 'co-volcanic' communities around this volcano through time as local people adapt to this hazardous volcano and the neighbouring environment. By the mid-1800s, successive European colonial administrations on Java had transformed the ‘wild’ yet fertile areas of Mount Merapi into economic ‘state-spaces’ with arable lands, human settlements, and plantations. The combination of colonial and post-colonial economic interests in developing the volcano's fertile slopes, and the traditional beliefs regarding the dangerous nature of this volcano and its impacts, have helped create the historical conditions for normalizing the development of hazard-prone communities on Mount Merapi. The people around Merapi, after experiencing several major volcanic disasters since the early Nineteenth Century (1822, 1872, 1930), learned to mitigate against such hazards, forming disaster response and recovery networks between local settlements, which also involved European planters, government officials, and volcanologists. In the 1920s, a group of dedicated volcanologists influenced the government to introduce a modern warning system with regular monitoring and forecasting of volcanic activity on Mount Merapi. However, the Dutch colonial administration failed to prevent significant casualties during the big 1930 Merapi eruption, which paved the way for further measures to improve the disaster mitigation system. The entangled history of human interaction with Mount Merapi since 1800 tells us that developing prosperous communities at the slopes of Mount Merapi has been a risky, albeit fatal, endeavour at times. Periods of political instability and bureaucratic constraints have also directly affected disaster mitigation efforts and the economic state of the communities living on the slopes of Mount Merapi since 1800.