Traditional Ecological Practices Of Mount Merapi Towards Panarchy-Based Resilience Case Study: The Pelemsari Court-Village, Sleman, Yogyakarta

Abstract

This book is built in an attempt to understand the capacity of humans to recover from and better adapt to unexpected changes, especially by those who choose to maintain proximity to the source of threats regardless of the devastations they once suffered. It is in this phenomenon of living with risks in Mount Merapi that I invested my fieldwork, observations, cognitive mapping, archival study, and semi-structured and narrative interviews with my respondents in the Pelemsari sub-village. Driven by my four research questions, I approached my study with hermeneutic phenomenology to primarily articulate the reflective characters of human experience as manifested through my respondents’ language and texts. The local knowledge, place attachment, and the sense of community are found in this study as three emergent themes that serve as the Pelemsari villagers’ adaptive capacities to confront multiple disturbances after the eruption in 2010. Eruptions are clearly not the only threats faced by this close-knit community. In fact, other disturbances namely, the relocation policy and the forest controls exacerbated their adversity and anxiety in their everyday life. The unexpected ecological imbalance and the decreased forest biodiversity are among the impacts of the rigid controls following the eruption in 2010 that would endanger the sustainability of their farming traditions. The sense of community, local knowledge, and place attachment of the Pelemsari villagers are not built in a day but formed, shaped, accumulated, and tested from time to time. The panarchy framework offers ways to understand and interpret how these three capacities interplay in hierarchical structures in which social-politico-ecological systems are interlinked in adaptive cycles across different scales in place and time, from the pre-colonial to the reformation period.