Creating Common Knowledge about the Causes of Tidal Flooding in Kendal Regency, Indonesia

Abstract The process by which “common knowledge” is created via chains of communicative activities is now well understood, especially due to the work of linguistic anthropologists. This paper draws upon this work to examine how “common knowledge” about the causes of tidal flooding in Kendal Regency is created in communiques’ published on Kendal’s municipal government website over a period of seven years. We argue that there are five particular processes at play in the creation of “common knowledge” about flooding in general and tidal flooding in particular as a “natural disaster” in this social domain. We end by pondering why dire predictions about the impact of future tidal flooding events on hundreds of thousands of Indonesians have not yet produced any sustainable solutions within different levels of the Indonesian government.