The Pulse of the Earth

Political Geology in Java

ADAM BOBBETTE

In The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries, to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork on Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge.

The Long War on Drugs

ANNE L. FOSTER

December 2023

224 pages

Medicine and Health / Public Health and Health Policy / Politics / History / U.S. History

Rights: World

Since the early twentieth century, the United States has led a global prohibition effort against certain drugs in which production restriction and criminalization are emphasized over prevention and treatment as means to reduce problematic drug usage. This “war on drugs” is widely seen to have failed, and periodically de-criminalization and legalization movements arise. Debates continue over whether the problems of addiction and crime associated with illicit drug use stem from their illicit status or the nature of the drugs themselves. In The Long War on Drugs Anne L. Foster explores the origin of the punitive approach to drugs and its continued appeal, despite its obvious flaws.

Anne L. Foster is Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University, author of Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941, and coeditor of The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, both also published by Duke University Press.