Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. US$27.00, paper. ISBN 9781478025054.
The established history of geology positions it as an archetypal modern science. The key actors are an elite cadre of Westerners and their specialized technologies, ranging from maps to rock hammers to seismographs. Episodes of intensive theoretical dispute are said to have given rise to securely established verities that increasingly detached the deep history of the earth from the limits of biblical chronology. As Martin Rudwick put it in his two-volume magnum opus, geology “was the outcome of highly contingent events in Europe, and in outliers of Western culture beyond Europe, during the age of revolution”; its materials and findings “were in no way tainted with imperialism” (Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005, 10; Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 554).
The Pulse of the Earth joins the likes of Pratik Chakrbarti’s Inscription of Nature (2020), Robyn d’Avignon’s A Ritual Geology (2022), and the edited volume New Earth Histories (2023) in accreting a stratum that overlays this older historiographical formation. Precipitating eclectic visual, textual, and oral sources into daringly substantial claims, Adam Bobbette reveals how geology was remade by geophysical and epistemic encounters at the outer fringes of European colonialism. Far from being incidental, Java’s political, spiritual, and seismic landscapes were essential constituents of hypotheses that became core geological truths. The six relatively concise yet rich chapters make a powerful case not only that geology is a “barely sober” (176) science, altogether stranger than practitioners and historians have acknowledged, but also that this realization is vital in the Anthropocene, when earth and human histories have become utterly entangled.
The book opens with a materialist account of the impact that “the relentless vibrancy of volcanoes” (4) had on geology in colonial Indonesia, and the contention that “political geology” extends far beyond the role of earth sciences as handmaiden for the extractive activities of (neo)colonial capitalism. This first chapter alludes to—but could have more fully unpacked—how blurring boundaries between the natural and the social, and the spiritual and the scientific, is not the sole preserve of twenty-first century historians and human geographers. Perhaps troublingly for us academics, such imbrications were every bit as much a feature of geology as practiced under colonial and authoritarian postcolonial regimes in Java. The second chapter builds on these themes of volcano-focused geology and the blurred boundaries between geophysics and metaphysics, showing how they manifested in changing ways among Dutch scientists of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries and their Indonesian counterparts of the later twentieth century.
In what I found to be the pick of the chapters (despite fierce competition), Bobbette gives a bravura display of recouching an actor’s category—“intercalation,” denoting the hybrid geology where land and ocean meet—as an analytical category describing how modern volcano science and Javanese spiritual traditions “were made to fit together and transform each other” (57) in chapter 3. In doing so, he gives a completely new account of the emergence of the theory of plate tectonics. Rather than being solely the product of state-backed sciences of the Cold War, a crucial influence was the Javanese spiritual-political tradition that connected earthquakes and eruption through subterranean deities. Labahun (ritual pathways) connecting ocean to volcano summit exercised a vital influence over Dutch geologists and—as Bobbette establishes through fastidious fieldwork photography and oral histories—continue to entangle technoscience and spiritual geographies in the present day. Here and in the following chapter on theories of volcanic catastrophe, The Pulse of the Earth demonstrates how geologists’ postulated histories and prognosticated futures consistently seeped beyond earthy matter. When Dutch scientists at the turn of the twentieth century identified a cataclysmic 900-year-old eruption, they harnessed it to a paternalistic agenda for colonial restoration of a pre-Islamic social order; when some 40 years later their successors wrote of “subterranean thunder” (112), they were anxiously pondering not only spewing magma but also the latent energy of Javanese nationalism.
The final two chapters focus on more narrowly defined case studies: the self-described geopoetics of late-colonial geologist Johannes Umbgrove, and geological observation practices and technologies on Mount Merapi. Bobbette outlines the complex ways in which Umbgrove simultaneously relied upon, and elided, his encounters with texts and interlocutors in Java. While acknowledging that Hindu cosmology in the Ramayana and Upanishads prefigured his own conception of cyclical geological deep time, Umbgrove “erased the Indonesian labour and culture that made [his geopoetics] possible” (123). Although the direct inspiration for Bobbette’s title is one of Umbgrove’s books, “the pulse of the earth” is also a central concern of the sixth chapter. Here, centre stage is given to the string galvanometer, an instrument originally developed to trace human heartbeats that was repurposed to monitor volcanoes in the 1940s. The galvanometer is another instance of how Bobbette relates sympathetically to his geologist-subjects’ conception of “a gradient of ‘livingness’ in all systems” (136), refuting any fixed boundary between lifeless geos and vital bios.
Does the compelling analysis of the main body of The Pulse of the Earth validate the provocative claim in its brief conclusion that “the Anthropocene is the Indonesian moment of the earth sciences” (175)? Not if we adopt the emphasis on planet-wide sedimented traces that dominated geologists’ discussions on a possible Anthropocene epoch until its rejection last year by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. And, in a different way, not if we look to other recent literature (including New Earth Histories) that evidences how earth sciences dabbled in vibrant matter and sociopolitical speculation well beyond the confines of Java. But taken as both aspirational intervention and historical description, Bobbette’s version of political geology is incredibly powerful. His wonderful book insists that earth sciences were never modern in the sense that the conventional historiography has it—increasingly disenchanted, exclusively Euro-Western, and concerned only with lifeless substances. It is this excessive and boundary-violating form of geology—earth science as practiced on the slopes of Mount Merapi—that make it fit for an epoch in which the excesses of a few humans are already violating planetary boundaries.
Thomas Simpson
The University of Warwick, Coventry