Beyond Landfall: An Ethnography About Accompong After Hurricane Melissa

Sammanfattning

On the 28th of October 2025, Category 5 Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica. This thesis examines how it was experienced, narrated, and acted upon in Accompong, a sovereign Indigenous Maroon polity in Cockpit Country. Based on six weeks of ethnographic fieldwork (14 November–23 December 2025), we follow Melissa as an unfolding process rather than a bounded event. Guided by political ecology, decolonial and Caribbean ecology scholarship, and Indigenous Storywork, we take a relational approach to how aftermath unfolds through interconnected material, historical, political, and spiritual relations. Melissa is shown as lived through bodies and senses, interpreted through coexisting explanations (climate change, political motives, religion, ancestors), and met through care, skills, diaspora ties, and negotiation with outside actors. The analysis also traces how sovereignty, leadership, and internal political debates shaped response and recovery, including relations with the Jamaican Government and Jamaica’s Prime Minister Dr. Andrew Holness. January 6 emerges as a key point of orientation, where cultural practice and collective organization make continuity visible as recovery remains ongoing. The thesis contributes by foregrounding how people among the Accompong Maroons understand and respond to Hurricane Melissa, offering an ethnographic account of aftermath as embodied, relational, and political.