STRATEGY OF NATURAL DISASTER RESPONSE BASED ON LOCAL WISDOM AT MARITIME SOCIETY IN BARRU DISTRICT
Hamka Naping, Safriadi, Icha Musywirah

Faculty of social and political sciences, Hasanuddin university


Abstract

Indonesia is an archipelago-shaped maritime country, having a territorial sea area of 3,288,683 km2 with a coastline length of 95,161 km. lies along the equator, between the continents of Asia and Australia. Residents living in coastal areas form a community known as the maritime community. In South Sulawesi, especially the west and east coasts, maritime communities occupy areas that are geographically vulnerable to disasters. An actual empirical maritime community in South Sulawesi, able to survive because it successfully developed an adaptive mechanism in overcoming various disasters that occur. The adaptive capacity possessed is summed up in a potential called local wisdom, which includes a belief system, a knowledge system and a value system and a habitual pattern that is continuously inherited from generation to generation. In the perspective of theory, disasters that occur in a society are divided into two types, namely natural disasters caused by natural events such as earthquakes, landslides, winds and others, and social disasters caused by human behavior. The focus of this research is to explain how the characteristics of disaster happened to the maritime community, and how socio-cultural potentials are owned by the community as a coping strategy, how to apply local wisdom as a disaster mitigation effort, and how to understand and handle the disaster. The description of the problem provides a complete picture of how the sociocultural strategies used by maritime communities in the coastal areas cope with the disaster that afflicts them to survive and exist.
This research is ethnographic with the qualitative approach, conducted in Barru Regency, South Sulawesi. Data collection through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and literature review.
The study finds that maritime communities in Barru District are familiar with a number of disaster characteristics such as whirlwinds, seasonal disasters, fire disasters, and floods. They overcame these natural disasters by exploiting their local wisdom in the form of belief systems, knowledge systems, and customs to exert wind power so that the scale of damage is smaller. Similarly, the fire disaster is overcome by reading certain verses in the Quran while being observed near the burning fire, believed to be able to reduce the anger of fire. Flood disaster is overcome with various treatments directed to the water ruler and the ruler of the river in the form of ritual. This study concludes that the socio-cultural potential in the form of local wisdom possessed by the maritime community is an adaptive mechanism for overcoming and mitigating disasters.

Keywords: Disaster Mitigation; Local Wisdom ; Maritime society

Topic: Socio-economic issues

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