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Paper short abstract

Reanimating Caah Laut from Bayah, we approach tsunami as a regenerative force within living cosmologies. Tracing its translation from oral memory into scientific discourse, we expose layered mediations and propose cosmopolitical negotiations beyond technocratic, often subtle colonizing risk regimes.

Paper long abstract

In Bayah, South Lebak, Caah Laut circulates as an oral narrative recounting tsunami signs, assembly points, and moral injunctions for survival. Yet its dialogic, non-melodic form renders it vulnerable to erosion; many residents recall its phrasing but not its meaning. All the while the district lies on the very junctures of subducting earth plates, where earthquakes and tsunamis in the near future are anticipated. Drawing on ethnographic research (Bayah, December 2025) and collaborative literary reconstruction, this paper examines how Caah Laut might be reactivated as a “cultural siren”—akin to Smong in Simeulue, whose performative endurance contributed to life-saving responses during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Engaging debates on pluralistic and integrated disaster governance, we argue that such reconstruction is not heritage work alone but epistemic innovation and intervention. Local articulations in Bayah paradoxically frame total destruction as generative—tsunamis as conditions for civilizational renewal. Rather than dismissing this as fatalism, we treat it as cosmopolitical provocation: how might disaster risk reduction become ethically responsive to ontologies in which catastrophe is both threat and necessity?

We propose an STS framework that understands warning not merely as technological signal but as socio-material practice sustained through performance, affect, and intergenerational transmission. Recasting Caah Laut into pupuh, pantun (poets) and songs—opens a transdisciplinary method where science, art, and local cosmology co-produce preparedness. This approach reimagines disaster governance as collaborative world-making rather than risk management alone, which often reproduces power asymmetries and epistemic hierarchies.

Keywords: tsunami, regenerative, cosmpolitics, Caah Laut Bayah