Political Geology as Method Available to Purchase

This chapter outlines how the core ambition of political geology is to explore the intersection of politics, the geological sciences, cosmology, and culture. Political geology was inspired by the Anthropocene debate grappling with geological agency. This chapter shows how the Anthropocene debate in the geosciences is prefigured by Javanese spiritual geographies and volcanology by at least a century. The Anthropocene debate belongs to a much older ambition within the geological sciences to question the boundaries between society and the earth, between bios and geos. The Anthropocene debate also signals a moment in which modern scientists are implicitly engaging much older ideas that have long been central to Javanese political philosophy, including the notion that politics is foundationally geological. The chapter then explores three significant volcanic eruptions and the colonial and political milieus that brought about the formation of volcanology as a modern science of governance in Indonesia.