Reconstructing Society Through Memory: Smong, Cultural Trauma, and Community Resilience in Post-Disaster Simeulue, Indonesia

For the Simeulue community, trauma does not remain a source of fear or psychological burden. Instead, it becomes a guideline for their survival. This study explores how societies reconstruct themselves through memory by examining smong, the local knowledge of the Simeulue community in Indonesia, as a cultural mechanism that transforms disaster experience into social resilience. Using a qualitative ethnographic approach, the research utilizes interviews, nandong and song lyrics, field notes, and historical documentation. The findings indicate that smong operates through interconnected layers of communicative and cultural memory: it is preserved in family stories, bedtime stories, artistic expressions, commemorative practices, and symbolic markers such as monuments and grave inscriptions. Through these processes, traumatic experiences are reframed as moral instructions and actionable knowledge that guide rapid evacuation, mutual aid, and collective vigilance during earthquakes and tsunamis. This study demonstrates that the reconstruction of the Simeulue community is driven not by a formal disaster management system but by practices rooted in culture. Past disaster experiences are continuously reinterpreted and integrated into everyday life. This highlights the importance of memory-based strategies for strengthening community resilience and offers directions for future research on intergenerational knowledge transmission, cultural adaptation, and disaster preparedness in oral societies.