How residents and volcanoes co-produce risk knowledge: Ways of knowing and affective attunement to the rhythms of Lonquimay volcano, Chile

Abstract

In this paper, we present our understanding of the importance of affects in people's sense-making of volcanic risk in everyday life. In doing so, we explore how local knowledge on volcanism is produced and circulated through communities' ongoing affective encounters with volcanoes. Through ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, we draw on the heterogeneous experiences and narratives of Malalcahuello residents living next to the Lonquimay volcanic complex in the Southern Andes of Chile. Its last eruption in 1988–1990 formed a new cone on the NE flank, called Navidad (Christmas), which has allowed residents to experience active volcanism in a twofold sense: being affected by its impacts during the eruption, and responding affectively to the volcano in everyday life. The results pave the way for a typology of affect-based ways of knowing volcanism. These are constituted by multiple people's viewpoints: 1) knowing the ground, 2) knowing the territory, 3) knowing the risk, and 4) knowing the behaviour. These ways of knowing vary according to, and are in part determined by, the different rhythms of the volcano itself. Therefore, active volcanism becomes a more-than-human agent of knowledge through its rhythmic presence in people's everyday lives. Over time, the local population has become affectively attuned to both ‘hazardous situations’ related to volcanic eruption and ‘risk and safe situations’ during volcanic quiescence. These attributes of human-volcano encounters turn hazardous spaces into affect-laden spaces at different times, raising the need to rethink spatio-temporal dimensions in knowledge dialogue and disaster risk reduction. Overall, the paper underlines the importance of affect-oriented risk research in Chile and worldwide to account for the pre-existent viewpoints from which a volcano is at the heart of people's concerns.