Papers (Part 1)

• Pacifying the Gods, Exploiting the Resources: A Field Finding from Tayan Hilir, West Kalimantan, Indonesia Julia University of Bonn

  This paper discusses how local deities are used to legitimize land grabs in Tayan Hilir sub-district of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. I examine the views of the customary leaders on their roles in performing rituals for the companies as a symbol of “asking permission” to the spirit guardians of the land and water before they start their extraction activities. Despite being strong adherents of Islam and Christianity, both Malay and Dayak communities in West Kalimantan are characterized by the hybridization process of Abrahamic religions with their customary religious (animistic) practices and culture proper (e.g. Ahyat 2014). The customary leaders of both communities are the mediator of inter-human relations, and also the mediator (and interpreter) between human-and-non-human nature relations. The role positioned them to have power over the communities, especially by their socio-political position, and authority as the non-human nature mediator. This paper argues that in the context of land grabbing, companies employed a strategy where they approached and “recruited” local customary leaders in order to minimize local resistance on their presence and activities (which first and foremost may come from the customary leaders themselves). Animism and its materialities become the interface of power struggle and negotiation between the owner of the culture–religious belief and the companies. The vacuum of knowledge of the latter on the animistic practice and the social authority of the customary leader creates this negotiation space between the two parties. However, this space is also prone to elite capture by the customary leaders for their own personal interests.

• Twenty-First Century Animism as a Theme of Farmer Activism in Java, Indonesia Thomas Reuter University of Melbourne

  Farmers in Java, Indonesia, have been subjected to interventions beginning with the establishment dual economy in the colonial period (comprising subsistence and export agriculture) and culminating in the Green Revolution during the Suharto period. While traditional Javanese culture does feature a number of animist elements, these are also overlaid with an increasingly literalist Islam. The animism we can expect today thus necessarily takes a modern, reconstituted form, which is likely true for much of Indonesia. This paper describes how this reconstituted animism manifests in political economic and social critiques of industrial agriculture and in alternative trajectories, or “concrete utopias”, based on these critiques. A comparison between three empirical case studies will document the range of different expressions this modern animism can take.

• Why Does Animism Persist? An Attempt at Explanation Using the Case of Laos Michael Kleinod University of Bonn

  The persistence of animism in times modernization and globalization contradicts modernization theories which, following Max Weber, suggest an increasing rationalization and reduction of “religious” worldviews. This assumption often also underlies political-ecological accounts which see Southeast Asian spirit territories overrun by a capitalist market logic. So how can we can we account for animism’s persistence from a political-ecological viewpoint?

  Against the backdrop of Critical Theory and World-Ecology, this paper seeks an answer to this question focusing on animism in Laos. On a general level, the persistence of “irrational” attitudes (from a modernist perspective) is explained by the fact that capitalism is not simply a force of rationalization but itself essentially irrational as it keeps individuals powerless regarding their own social fate. Rather than merely liberating actors from a situation of being dominated by external nature, they are increasingly dominated by a social system of “blind” exchange value production. On a more particular level, many regions of Southeast Asia can be considered frontier regions in the global world-economy: they are places of the appropriation of cheap nature and work that is essential for global capital accumulation. In this context “[l]abor power ‘produced’ by peasant formations within reach of capitalist power, but not yet subordinated fully to the law of value, is labor power with a low value composition” (Moore 2011, 24). This is so because such labor power is to a large extent reproduced in “traditional”, uncapitalized and unpaid networks of care and moral economy. Such networks also facilitate to some extent the cheap appropriation of natural resources that often comes with a perpetuation of precarious livelihoods, such as, via resettlement. Moreover, according to Critical Theory animism is itself already part of a logic of nature appropriation. Thus, not least the hierarchical nature of Southeast Asian animism and its “domestication paradigm” of (Arhem 2017) may to some degree even support resource appropriation.

  Thus, in the case of Laos, the persistence of animism may be explained by the fact that it is necessitated by violent historical ruptures: it persists precisely through change, not despite of it. The civilizational rationale of the precolonial baan-meuang structure valued positively the turning of the “wild” (pa/kha) into “civilized” space. This symbolic valuation springs from a situation where the “frontier”, as it were, between meuang and non-meuang space was stable on the average over time. It is prolonged by, and may productively tie into, a situation where the frontier is constantly advancing towards the “end of the frontier” (Moore 2014). However, animism’s persistence in Laos and elsewhere consists not just in a simple and smooth cooptation by capitalist dynamics but might as well provide the ground for criticism of environmental plunder.

Papers (Part 2)

• Ancestor’s Ontological Presence and Transformative Landscapes among the Fataluku, Timor-Leste Susana Viegas

  Ethnographies focusing on Southeast Asia have highlighted the entanglement of cosmologies, historical trajectories and kinship, usually referred to as topogeny. Based on fieldwork in the easternmost region of Timor-Leste among the Fataluku speaking people, I propose to think the space-temporal dynamics of topogenies, operated by the co-presence of ancestors in the lives of their descendants. Responding to one question addressed in the call for this panel, namely, how do ontologies interplay with changing physical landscapes over time, I will discuss the lived experience and historicity of the Fataluku in relation to a site known among the Fataluku as the plateau of Nari. This site was a dwelling place in the past and is now only “inhabited” by ancestors. It is the origin site where people from a specific clan among the Fataluku originated and a place where another one settled after arriving in the island from the sea. The paper looks at the dynamic changes of this site in three different periods. First, in the 1950’s when people living in Nari have been subject to forced colonial resettlement, moving from the top of the hill to the lowland places. Secondly, from 1974 to 1999, during the period of Indonesian occupation, when Nari became at certain moments a refuge site for the living, but also a potent dwelling place for ancestors in their graves. Third, after the Indonesians left in 1999, when Fataluku people from clans pertaining to Nari have returned to tender gardens and small plots of land, and to care for the ancestors’ graves through ritual practices. Nari is a prototypical case and not an exception in the understanding of the entanglement between dynamic ontologies and landscape among the Fataluku in a long time frame.

• Dynamic Ontologies in Dynamic Bornean Landscapes Annina Aeberli University of Bern

  This paper aims to make Philippe Descola’s ontologies more fluent, dynamic and related to the landscape and herewith, relevant for Political Ecology. Departing from Descola’s four ontologies of animism, analogism, naturalism and totemism, I shed light on the dynamics at play within and between ontologies as well as the entanglements of ontologies and landscapes with an example from Malaysian Borneo. My findings are a result of field research with the indigenous Kenyah in the Baram area of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, mainly through interviews and participatory observation. In this paper, I find that the Kenyah can neither be clearly classified as animists nor analogists as defined by Descola, as they have elements from both ontologies. Furthermore, Kenyah ontologies have been changing under processes of resource exploitation and Christianization. This has led to the strengthening of analogist over animist components. Interestingly for Political Ecology, ontologies and changes in ontologies have an influence on how people interact with their environment and shape the landscape, they enable different types of behaviour towards nature. My research also reveals how the entanglement of the Christian belief in combination with traditional ontologies furthered the emergence of a powerful indigenous movement against a hydro-power project, the so-called Baram Dam. My research concludes that while Descola’s ontologies are a very useful tool, they need to be used flexibly and dynamically in order to understand the processes that happen in societies and landscapes. Once we acknowledge the entanglement of landscapes and ontologies over time, the ontological turn becomes relevant for Political Ecology.

  Key words: ontologies, political ecology, animism, Borneo

• The Spirit of Egalitarianism: Sabulungan, Forest Exploitation, and Wealth Distribution Among the Mentawaians in Siberut Island, Indonesia Darmanto Darmanto Leiden University

  This paper examines the relations between the Mentawaian animism (sabulungan) and forest exploitation in Siberut Island, West Sumatra. Sabulungan ontology sees that forest is crowdedly dwelled by the spirits who have the primordial pact with humans, in which they are living in separate domains but sharing a world where no parties feeling subdued or dominated. The egalitarian ethic of sabulungan generates ambivalence attitude toward and compels the living Mentawaians to have both respect and fear of the spirits when about to exploit forest material. This ethic also has been crucial when large scale forest exploitation has enclosed and extracted Siberut forest. Timber companies are reluctantly permitted but continuously been protested, accused and cursed by the Mentawaians because giving unequal share of their fortune and generating new social hierarchy. This paper argues that the egalitarian ethic of sabulungan is fundamental for humans-spirits relations, serves as a political-economy tool for the Mentawaians in struggle to gain equal material redistribution of forest exploitation, and shapes their attempt to maintain autonomy and political equality amidst hierarchal social relations brought by a new mode of accumulation. Further, this paper will contribute to the discussion on ‘ontological turn’ that has been criticized of being ignorant to political-economy dimension by discussing the importance and power of egalitarian and equality ethos of an animist belief for the politic of redistribution.

Abstract

Keywords

• Animism
• Ontology
• Spirits
• Theory