Sensory Recalibration: Environmental Knowledge and Coastal Imaginaries Among Timor-Leste’s Fishing Communities

Abstract

This article examines how coastal communities adapt their environmental knowledge in response to climate change and environmental degradation. Drawing on ethnographic research with fishing communities in Timor-Leste, I introduce the concept of ‘sensory recalibration’ to show how communities actively reconstruct their understanding of changing seascapes through collective practices of environmental interpretation. Through participatory mapping workshops and fishing trail documentation, I demonstrate how fishers develop new ways of reading environmental markers while maintaining connections to traditional ecological knowledge. The transformation of two fishing trails—“Black Sand Tuna” and “Grouper’s Ghost”—reveals how communities navigate environmental change through careful negotiation between ancestral knowledge and emerging sensory cues. These practices suggest new ways of understanding coastal imaginaries as dynamic frameworks that evolve through embodied engagement with changing environments. The study advances theoretical understanding of how coastal communities maintain meaningful relationships with place even as familiar environmental markers disappear, while offering methodological insights for examining adaptation through attention to sensory practice and collective meaning-making.