Dealing with natural hazards through local knowledge : the people from Talim Island’s (Taga-Isla) patterns of thought, cosmology and the worlds beyond the human
(2021)
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- Abstract
- This study is an ethnography of conversations between humans and nonhuman entities. By conversation, I mean constant interaction and intimate relationship with the natural surroundings over a long period of time, leading to the acquisition and accumulationof skills, beliefs, perceptions and understandings of the physical world through day-to-day practice and experience. It comprises conversations between the taga-isla, the people from Talim Island, and the elements, between them and nonhuman beings, between them and natural phenomena (masamang panahon/bagyo), and between them, nonhuman beings and natural phenomena. It underscores the centrality of these conversations to the performance and realization of their way of life particularly in grappling with natural hazards. In this light, it looks into their cognition or patterns of thought by probing the domain of the elements and bringing to light the structure, relationships and patterns of the winds, and unveils how these are deeply embedded and suffused into their consciousness and way of life and vital in coming to terms with hydrometeorological phenomena and masamang panahon, the local concept for hydrometeorological hazards.It also delves into their ways of construing their surroundings in view of ensuing masamang panahonand brings to the fore how resiliency is entrenched in local cosmology. In addition, it explores their relationship with nonhuman life forms and zeroes in on the essentiality of the latter’s behaviors in managing the said hazards. Corollary, it probes the worlds beyond the human and the life forms that inhabit them vis-à-vis the taga-islathemselves and their world and presents through ethnography how nonhuman life forms may come to know things on their own, possess consciousness and intentionality, and exercise agency-capabilities that are imperative not only in understanding transspecies/transpersons relationships but also in grasping how the taga-islacome to grips with masamang panahon.On this account, this study valorizes local knowledge, as within it that conversations are contained and constantly shaped and reformulated. In this regard, it is a study that looks into the taga-isla’slocal knowledge in view of the performance of their way of life especially in grappling with natural hazards, underlining their cognition, world view and belief system, and their conversations with other nonhuman life forms and the elements and weather.
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Nunag, A. S. (2021). Dealing with natural hazards through local knowledge : the people from Talim Island’s (Taga-Isla) patterns of thought, cosmology and the worlds beyond the human. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/113191