indigenous nature reverence and conservation— seven ways of transcending an unnecessary...

8/14/2019 Indigenous Nature Reverence and Conservation— Seven Ways of Transcending an Unnecessary Dichotomy

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_____________________________________________Guest Editors’ Introduction:

Indigenous Nature Reverence and Conservation—Seven Ways of Transcending an

Unnecessary Dichotomy_____________________________________________

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass

Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University,Fort Collins, CO 80523-1787, USA

[email protected]

Kristina Tiedje

Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes Anthropologiques, Université Lyon 2,Campus Porte Des Alpes, Bâtiment K, 5, avenue Pierre-Mendés-France,

69676 Bron Cedex, [email protected]

Indigenous peoples around the world revere their environment’s trees,rivers, grasses, stones, hills, and forests. Often labeled ‘Animists’,1 indi-genous peoples also personify their environments, treating both theirlands and the non-human denizens occupying those lands as persons to

be related to as cognizant and communicative subjects rather than asinert or insignificant objects. One would imagine that this reverence andpersonification of their surroundings would lead indigenous peoples toconscious conservation thought and practice: that they would do every-thing in their power, logic would seem to dictate, to protect the deities;likewise, that they would strive not to harm plant and animal personswho, in many respects, possess a right to life equal to that of humans.

Many anthropologists do, in fact, suggest that indigenous religionswork to promote balance, harmony, and dynamic equilibrium betweenhumans and their environments, providing evidence for what wouldseem to be religiously inspired conservation ethics among the world’s

1. We capitalize Animism in order to bestow on indigenous religions the samedignity as other purported ‘world religions’ such as Christianity, Buddhism, and

Hinduism. We do not capitalize this term in its adjectival and adverbial forms.

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Snodgrass and Tiedje Guest Editors’ Introduction 7

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indigenous peoples. For example, Roy Rappaport (1967, 1984), taking asystems approach, argues that for the Tsembaga of Papua New Guinea,ritual pig feasts helped to regulate the balance between human and pigpopulations, preventing overpopulation and resource depletion. BothRichard Nelson (1982, 1983) and Fikret Berkes (1999) argue that tradi-tional ecological knowledge (TEK) and religiously inspired ethics ofrespect of and restraint toward animal persons and the natural worldtemper northern Native Americans exploitation of their environments.In a more complex context, Stephen Lansing (1987, 1991; Lansing andKremer 1993), using agent-based models and computer simulation,points to the way that Hindu water temples and priests help to regulatewater usage on the densely populated island of Bali, thus making the

traditional agricultural system more sustainable than new green revolu-tion technologies and innovations.

These anthropological studies have opened a spirited debate on therelationship between indigenous nature-based religions and conservation,understood here as actions or practices consciously designed to preventor mitigate resource overharvesting or environmental damage (Smithand Wishnie 2000). Many scholars, following insights in the above-refe-renced studies, see a close relation between the two. For the Amazon,Darrell Posey and William Balée (1989), and also Robin Wright (2007),

argue that indigenous knowledge can be combined with conservationistefforts (see also Posey 1985). For the Pacific region, Nancy Williams andGraham Baines (1993) advance a similar stance, showing that indigenouswisdom can be useful for conservation and sustainable development.Similarly, the authors in John Grim’s book (2001c) highlight the ‘inter-

being’ of ecology and cosmology in indigenous lifeways, suggesting,implicitly and explicitly, that indigenous religions may lead to moreecologically sound behavior. The increasing interest in indigenous envi-ronmental beliefs as a recipe for better conservation practice is alsoexemplified by the edited volume by Darrell Posey (1999) on the culturaland spiritual values of biodiversity, as well as by recent discussions onthe culture-specific values underlying modern conceptions of natureconservation (Harmon and Putney 2003; Tiedje 2007).

Then again, there are other scholars both within and outside anthro-pology who have argued that indigenous peoples’ religious beliefs donot always get connected to conservation thought or behavior. Pointingto actual environmental outcomes in historical and contemporarycontexts—that is, to the manner in which indigenous peoples who sharean animistic worldview have participated willingly in the dramatic

transformation and even destruction of their natural environments—researchers like Shepard Krech (1999, 2005) strive to dismantle as



8 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture


romantic myth the notion of indigenous peoples living in harmony withan environment which is revered and defended. These scholars wouldthus not recommend utilizing indigenous worldviews to promote or

bolster sustainable development agendas.2 Any polarized discussion of the connection between indigenous reli-

gions and conservation, be it romantic myth or an oversimplified counterto romanticism, tends toward an unfortunate and unnecessary dichot-omy, whose roots can be traced back to at least the Enlightenment:indigenous peoples either live in balance with nature (Rousseau’s 1993[1762] noble savages living harmoniously in a blissful state of nature); orthey destroy their ecosystems (Hobbes’ 1958 [1651] state of nature as‘nasty, brutish, and short’). Though Claude Levi-Strauss (1963) demon-

strates that dichotomies are undoubtedly good to think with, we aremore interested in this instance to do justice to the subtle life experiencesand complex cultures of the indigenous peoples with whom we live andwork.3

We are not alone in this endeavor. In his critical reflections on the usesand misuses of spiritual ecology, one of the anthropological pioneers ofthe study of the interrelation of indigenous religions and the environ-ment, Leslie Sponsel (2001b: 170), calls for a ‘middleground’ to move

beyond the ‘philosophical and political polarization’ that views indige-

nous societies either as conservationists or as destroyers of nature. Based both on his own research among Buddhist forest monks in Thailand aswell as on his interpretation of the cross-cultural record, Sponsel (e.g.1997, 2001a, 2001b) shows that spiritual ecologiesmay indeed have politi-cal implications in some circumstances, just as other religions or beliefsystems might have. Critical of romanticist assumptions that indigenousspirituality in which the environment is respected and treated as sacredleads to conservation behavior, Sponsel (2001a, 2001b, 2005) calls for theimportance of more research on the possible relationships between reli-gion and ecology without undermining indigenous land and resourcerights, or romanticizing indigenous lifeways.

2. For similar arguments, see also Alvard 1993, 1998; Diamond 1986, 1988, 1992;Edgerton 1992; Kay 1994; Meilleur 1994; Redford 1990; Redford and Stearman 1993;

Redman 1999; Whelan 1999. Clearly, uncritical uses of studies that portray indigenouspeoples as destroyers of nature also hold tremendous political implications, especiallywith regards to indigenous resource and land rights. For a useful critique of thearguments of Krech 1999, see Deloria 2000.

3. Though we do acknowledge that uncritical acceptance of the stereotype ofenvironmentally destructive indigenes is more dangerous in its implications in theway it can compromise indigenous land claims and political rights.





In this introduction, we therefore offer seven ways out of what weconsider an over-simplification of the ethnographic record of indigenouspeoples’ relationships to their environments, drawing details to back ourpoints from this volume’s ethnographic case studies. It is our aim tomove beyond the dichotomies that have either romanticized indigenouspeoples as the world’s ‘first conservationists’ or blamed them for eco-logical degradation. It should be noted that in the context of an indige-nous animistic cosmos, we understand the term environment to mean aneco-social sphere of a ‘community-of-beings’ (Berkes 1999), where humanand non-human persons co-exist and interact on a daily basis.

As a first step to transcending this dichotomy, we would simply pointto the tremendous diversity across indigenous societies. The articles in

this volume, for example, are based on ethnographic research conductedamong indigenous peoples in India, Nepal, Mexico, North America, andBorneo. Some of the groups discussed in this volume appear to beconservationists—if only in Wittgenstein’s (2001 [1953]) family resem-

blance kind of way—while others do not. We hope that after readingthese case studies readers will be hard pressed to say as a general factwhether indigenous peoples are conservationists or not. Eventually, wehope, one would realize that we function as historical witnesses of par-ticular local–state–global interconnections of the conservation endeavor,

of how indigenous traditions are constantly adapting to rapidly chang-ing circumstances.

Second, we distinguish between animistic or religious thought on theone hand and conservation thought and behavior on the other. Cognitiveanthropologists have devoted considerable attention to the study ofmodels or frames—cognitive structures which help individuals organizeand process information about the world around them, and attributemeaning and significance to events and experiences.4 Drawing in part onthis work, the authors of the articles in this volume point to the mannerthat indigenous peoples do typically frame their environments animisti-cally, as inhabited by sentient beings that are recognized and related toas living non-human persons. However, readers will see that the particu-lar forms of these animistic models vary from society to society. India’sBhil Adivasis (First Peoples), for example, who are the focus of the chap-ter by Snodgrass and his collaborators, frame the hills that surroundtheir villages on a generally benevolent, though somewhatfickle and ill-tempered, grandfather referred to as Magra Baosi; this mountain deity is

believed to possess bones, blood, and hair in his rocks, rivers, trees, and

4. On cultural models, see D’Andrade 1995; Holland and Quinn 1987; Schank

and Abelson 1977; Strauss and Quinn 1997.





mosses. Mexican Nahuas, discussed by Tiedje, pay similar reverence tothe living and sentient mountains, but they seem even more eager to winthe blessings of a non-human corn person, who features in numerousagricultural rituals. In each case, these models of a living and sentientnature are differentially connected to what we might call conservation thought and behavior. Bhil Adivasi shamans, for example, strive to man-age and control the fickle Magra Baosi for the benefit of themselves, theirclients, and their communities, but they are not themselves seen asgreatly responsible, or even able, to defend these supernatural powersfrom harm. Likewise, the Nahua corn persons demand field-burning andother activities that can lead to, for example, declines in biodiversity.

These ethnographic details lead us to suggest that, to reframe this

second point, a distinction should be made between knowledge models ofhow the world is or is believed to be (animated by sentient persons) ascompared to value or ethical models of how one ought to behave in such aworld (animals and plants should be protected) (Kempton, Boster, andHartley 1995). Making this distinction allows for multiple ‘Animisms’,some which get connected to the ethical mandate to conserve one’senvironment and others which do not. Some individuals, or even somesocieties as a whole, connect ideas about an animated nature with acultural value to protect that nature, while others do not give such a

value priority relative to other values. In discussing Indian Nayaka’srelationship to wild elephants, Bird-David and Naveh, for example,demonstrate how maintaining good relationships with non-human fam-ily members is a local priority. In this South Asian ethnographic context,conservation may come as a by-product of this Nayaka animist model offamiliality and kinship with the natural world, but it is not the explicitintention of these hunter-gatherers.

Cognitive anthropologists are particularly interested in cultural modelsor frames, in the sense of abstract and simplified mental representationsof the world that are widely shared by many individuals, and which thusstructure reasoning and practice in a range of contexts by many differentindividuals. This leads us to our third way out of an overly simplisticview of the relationship of indigenous peoples with their environments:Animistic cultural models, like sentiments to defend nature, are notshared equally by all persons in a particular society; nor are they acti-vated equally in all contexts. We would thus point to a great diversity ofrelationships to the environment not only across but also within individ-ual indigenous societies. In the language of cognitive anthropology,models and ethical sentiments are distributed across individuals and con-

texts. This distributional or epidemiological view of culture (Sperber 1985,1996) reminds us that cultures are not of one piece: yes, animistic





knowledge models, like conservation value models, may be widelyshared by members of a given society, but few (if any) models are shared

by all members of that society. Rather, we would encourage readers tovisualize the indigenous cultures described in these papers as composedof competing models of nature (some animistic, others disenchanted[Weber 1946]) and competing ethical obligations (some ecocentric, othersanthropocentric [Stern 2000; Stern et al. 1999]), which are activated andconjoined in particular lives and contexts depending on the exigencies ofthe situation.

This discussion of the manner in which cultural models are sociallyactivated draws attention to the fact how we, as anthropologists, aremost interested in how beliefs about the world, or about how one should

behave in the world, are played out in actual lives and experiences. Thatis, we are interested in social and personal reality rather than beliefs,ideals, or norms in the abstract. Cognitive anthropologists, for example,speak of the way that cultural models and values are differentially inter-nalized in individual psyches (Spiro 1987). For many indigenous peoples,animistic models and conservation values guide thought, motivate beha-vior, and get connected to the deepest of personal projects and commit-ments. Still, we need to keep in mind that many other individuals withinthe societies discussed within this volume are only knowledgeable in a

detached way about conservation beliefs and values to which they mayonly pay lip-service—they might, for example, consciously appropriatethe conservation language of state agents in order to win political rights,as described in Obadia’s article on the Sherpas of Nepal. We would hopereaders would think of cultural internalization of animistic ontologiesand conservation values along a continuum: some individuals’ (shamansin most of the societies discussed in this volume come to mind) personaland professional identities are built upon the ability to communicatewith non-human natural persons and forces (though not necessarily todefend those persons and forces); however, other indigenous peoples(we are thinking in particular of those Kelabit of Borneo who have con-verted to Christianity) seem little interested in devoting too much effortor energy to the ‘superstitious’ reverence of unpredictable, and ulti-mately weak and even ‘evil’, forest and animal spirits to which others intheir communities are so committed.

Based on these details, as a fourth transcending of a dichotomy thatwould label indigenous peoples either conservationists or not, we wouldremind readers that the societies under consideration in this volume arecomposed of individuals that are every bit as diverse, complicated, and

even conflicted as Westerners. Not all Americans and Europeans areChristians, nor are they environmentalists. Likewise, even the most





committed of Western Christians—or environmentalists—do not invari-ably measure up to their ideals. We would hope that readers wouldrecognize that indigenous peoples are as diverse in their commitmentsand projects as are other peoples; and that they likewise fail to embodytheir highest aspirations, be they religious, environmental, or some com-plex combination of the two. As a result, it is even more dif ficult to labelsocieties as a whole as conservationist or not.

Though we would want to highlight the diversity of individualswithin the indigenous societies featuring in this volume, we would wishto distinguish between cultural ideas and collective agreements (seeD’Andrade 2006). Cultural ideas, as we use the term here, are those thatare widely shared by many individuals inhabiting a given community:

as we have said, we do think that animist models and conservationvalues and ideas are oftentimes cultural in the sense that they are broadlyshared and agreed upon by our interlocutors at the level of individual

belief and commitment. However, an equally important question iswhether such models and values get linked to institutions that embodythem on the level of collective agreement. At the community level, we areinterested in the ariticles of this special issue to map out whether we findinstitutions that create and implement rules, regulations, and sanctionsrelated to land and resource use, which express the joint will of the

collectivity or of the community. In relationship to land management,indigenous peoples often assign special powers to particular agents toperform specific tasks related to the mandate of the institution and thewelfare of the collectivity (Searle 1995). These agents—be they villageheadmen, shamans, lineages, religious societies, or Tribal councils—areassigned the duty and responsibility to resolve disputes related to accessand use of forest resources. In their land management, these institutionsand their agents rely heavily on, and indeed create, community norms:‘the collective shoulds of life, which Searle calls deontic powers’ (D’Andrade 2006), that set the informal rules, related in this case toresource use, as well as to the sanctions that would be enforced if ruleswere broken.

This leads to a fifth important revision on the unnecessary dichotomy being discussed in this introduction: in the various groups considered inthese essays, we find varying degrees of presence of meaningful institu-tions that organize indigenous peoples for collective action—in this case,for defending their forests against abuse and overuse by both insidersand outsiders to the community—which becomes critically determinantof the degree of actual conservation found in a given society.5 In some

5. On institutions, see Searle 1995, and D’Andrade’s 2006 discussion of Searle.





indigenous societies, we see little or no evidence of a traditional insti-tutionalization of conservation values. Thus, among both the BorneanKelabit who feature in Matthew Amster’s chapter and the Nayakahunter-gatherers discussed by Bird-David and Naveh, we would pointto primarily accidental or epiphenomenal conservation (Hunn 1982) inwhat could be called traditional ecological resource management con-texts, resulting not from explicit or conscious intentions to conserve orfrom active regimes of land management but rather from low populationdensity, limited technology, or low demand for commodities and unde-veloped markets.6 In other cases, for example among the Bhil Adivasis inIndia, wefind a mix of conservation and anti-conservation institutions in

both pre- and post-Independence (1947) settings. In a ritual called

‘spreading saffron’ (kesar bantna), Bhil elders, along with shamans andother members of the clan, ritually close off degraded sections of theforest from further use for five or more years. In another Bhil ritualreferred to as a ‘fire bath’ (agni snan), however, Bhils make vows to theirgods that if certain boons are granted then the supplicants would rewardtheir deities with a gift of fire, which could leave an entire slope dar-kened from fire. These intentionally set fires often do great damage tothe jungle, burning at very high temperatures and thus killing manytrees and damaging soils, and local Adivasis know it. Likewise, among

the Lakota Sioux of South Dakota discussed by Pickering and Jewell,traditional indigenous regimes of land management have largely disap-peared from the local landscape in contemporary times, or have at least

been stripped of real power and authority over natural resources bynation-states and corrupt tribal governments. Here we find a disconnec-tion between individually held values and beliefs which are widespreadand internalized in more than a majority of individual psyches, on theone hand, and the lack of institutions which incarnate these values and

beliefs, on the other. The institutional and ritual gatherings of clan ortiospaye leaders—where religious values, beliefs, and commitments getconnected to resource-management decisions, rules, and sanctionsthrough debate, compromise, consensus-building, and simple bullying—are no more. In these terms, we might say that Sioux religiosity andcommitment remain but their effects have waned.

In all these cases, either through traditional absence, multiple andeven contradictory mandates, or subsequent loss, this lack of viable localinstitutions to protect indigenous lands can contribute to unprecedented

6. On debates concerning epiphenomenal conservation as compared to conservationby design, see Alvard 1993, 1998; Hunn 1982, 2003; Hunn et al. 2003; Krech 2005; Ruttan

and Mulder 1999; Smith and Wishnie 2000.





degradation of indigenous territories in the contemporary era whenpopulations are greater, technologies of natural resource extraction aremore powerful, and demands for natural resource commodities areunprecedented. When there are few, if any, legitimate (from local per-spectives) collectively held or maintained rules and norms related toresource management—and thus no collectively held attempt to limitindividual desires—even environmentally conscious individuals can failto act on their best intentions. Lacking institutions for monitoring andpolicing forest resource use, even committed individuals lose the will to

behave sensibly in regards to their forests. Individual restraint in thesecontexts, after all, would mean that conscientious individuals get less ofa valuable resource than those who fail to exercise such restraint. In the

light of a lack of meaningful institutions that organize joint defense andmanagement of these forest lands, a mad rush for forest resources, evenwhen it goes against one’s personal values, beliefs, and commitments, isan entirely understandable course of action. A ‘tragedy of the commons’(Hardin 1968; Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1999)—at least on de facto ‘openaccess’ lands such as the wildlife sanctuaries and national parks thatfeature in some of the essays to follow, where indigenous peoples viewstate control as illegitimate and thus recognize no legitimate owner orauthority—is not only logical, but to be expected.

It is true that most nation-states, under the pressure of the interna-tional community, are currently striving to institute Western-style con-servation programs on indigenous lands. But as case studies in thisvolume make clear, such models of conservation remain largely discon-nected from local thought and environmental practice. To launch ourdiscussion, we find somewhat useful the distinction by Paul Dwyer(1994: 91) between ‘modern conservation’ viewed as ‘global in its moti-vation and assertions of responsibility’, and ‘traditional conservation’ ofindigenous peoples, viewed as local, based on rights of access and co-operative management calling for immediate action. This distinctiondoes not view modern (or Western) conservation as qualitatively betterthan traditional conservation.7 It merely distinguishes between the scaleand history of traditional ecological knowledge in indigenous societiesand more recent scientific knowledge of Western societies. Such a

7. Here, as in other contexts, we oppose ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ conservation to‘indigenous’ conservation. We realize that such distinctions are problematic in theway they totalize both the West and also the indigenous societies which are the focusof this volume. We do try in this volume to show subtle differences between conserva-

tion in each of the societies treated in our case studies. We acknowledge, moreover,the tremendous diversity of environmental commitments even in a single Westerncountry such as the USA.





distinction proves useful in part in Tiedje’s and Bird-David and Naveh’scase studies—in both cases, Western conservation ideals do not embodyor institute indigenous models and values, and thus have yet to win fulllocal support and allegiance. Then again, they do not argue for a simple

juxtaposition of modern versus traditional conservation practices. Espe-cially Tiedje’s study of Nahua articulations of traditional environmentalnarratives with Western conservation guidelines demonstrates that tra-ditional and modern conservation can become two intertwined models,despite persisting power differentials.

This brings us to the next point. As we see in case studies from Asia tothe Americas, state- and NGO-sponsored conservation still flows largelyfrom a commodity view of indigenous and tribal lands, and indeed a

history of clearcuts and state degradation of land, that makes theseefforts even more illegitimate in indigenous eyes. Overall, most nation-states are not perceived by indigenous peoples to have the best interestsof the forest or local peoples in mind in their laws and policies, an issueamply demonstrated by the increasing indigenous environmental andland rights movements across the world. Further, even when aiming atconservation, state governments are often seen to be largely corrupt andineffectual from local perspectives, another common indigenous concernthat comes through loud and clear in Pickering and Jewell’s discussion

of the Lakota Sioux. In fact, governmental land-management policies, intypically reversing indigenous peoples’ historical rights of use and accessto these woods, seem to have been explicitly designed not to win localcooperation and allegiance. These contexts all make indigenous conser-vation success less likely, even when values largely consistent withWestern conservation ideals are present and embedded in indigenouscosmologies.

Building on these observations, our sixth way out of the unnecessarydichotomy that is the subject of this introduction is to point to the way inwhich indigenous peoples complexly interact with the global economyand the world system, which makes many of them seem to be conser-vationists at one moment in their history and anti-conservationists atanother. As we have already alluded to, some indigenous peoples,through contact with the capitalist and colonialist global systems, havemodified or lost those institutions, ritualized or not, that allowed themsensibly and sustainably to manage their lands in the past. In addition,illiterate and tradition-bound indigenous peoples are typically seen both

by the state and contemporary NGOs as ‘inappropriate’ for participationin new institutions of forest management, a stance that local Adivasis in

India interpret as a sign of the state’s disrespect, and even disdain, forindigenous peoples and their traditions. In this context, state bureaucrats





and employees see local knowledge and values as out-of-sync with prin-ciples of scientific forest management. There is thus little effort to mergestate policies and practices with indigenous traditions, which furtherleads to the decline of local traditions of land management. 8 Likewise,poverty and political marginality, which seems to go hand-in-hand withmodernization, make it dif ficult for indigenous peoples to act on con-servation commitments even when they might wish to.

Of particular note is the intrusion in all of the indigenous societiesdiscussed in this volume of ‘world religions’, understood here as themost established religions, such as certain strands of Christianity, Hin-duism, and Buddhism. In their introductory essay to Deep Ecology andWorld Religions (2001), David Landis Barnhill and Roger Gottlieb high-

light that most major ‘religious traditions were pretty much blind to theenvironmental crisis until it was pointed out to them by others’ (2001: 3),such as romantic poets, phenomenologists, and Western Marxists whochallenged the dominant Western treatment of nature. Despite theimportance of ‘conservationist’ and ‘animal rights’ figures such as St.Francis of Assisi, it is further argued that a persisting anthropocentrismof the most established religions might have been a disaster for the envi-ronment (Devall 1980; Devall and Sessions 1985; Barnhill and Gottlieb2001a; Sessions 1991). Readers will be struck by the contrast between

traditional Bornean Kelabit ritual entanglement with terrifying andpotentially destructive nature spirits, and their current heavily Christia-nized view of sacred mountains as both places of sin and temptation aswell as potentially uplifting wilderness retreats. The Lakota Sioux havesimilarly felt the impact of various strands of Christianity. The Bhils ofRajasthan (India) have abandoned many animistic beliefs in order to

become more fully Hindu; and the Sherpas of Nepal are now largelyBuddhist. In each of these contexts, we, the authors, attempt to dis-entangle local religions of nature reverence from beliefs drawn from themost established world religions, as in Pickering and Jewell’s statisticalcomparison between the environmental values and knowledge of NativeAmerican ‘Christians’ and those practicing ‘Lakota Spirituality’ or‘Combined Christian and Lakota Spirituality’. But the situation is morecomplex, with indigenous Animism syncretically merging inextricably,if not always seamlessly, with the more recognized religions of thedominant societies within which indigenous communities are nowembedded.

8. In other cases modern states and NGOs have been inspired to transform their

conservation values and agendas as a result of their contact with indigenous peoples.





Other contemporary situations are similarly complex, and in manycases, contemporary Western conservation ideals may contribute to amore conscious conservation behavior among the indigenous peopleswith whom we work. In Nepal among the Sherpas, as briefly mentionedearlier, Lionel Obadia shows how locals sometimes (but not always)reinterpret their local religious beliefs and rituals in an idiom of conser-vation in order to meet the needs and expectations of developmentexperts and state bureaucrats. Framing oneself as a ‘conservationist’, andthus as a good steward of nature, and even selectively and strategicallyreviving long-dead ritual traditions in order to lend a conservation sheento indigenous environmental practice, allows locals to manipulateWesterners’ romantic illusions. Such activity should be understood as

conscious political acts meant to win increased rights and assert fullersovereignty over purportedly state-owned lands. Likewise, the Nahuasreframe globally circulating conservation ideas, easily adopting theminto their worldview. The articulation of conservation-as-sacred-practiceis an example of how they have come to terms with social, economic,and environmental challenges and offers powerful cultural resources toserve local ends that are not merely political. Readers should be conti-nuously aware of the disjunction between indigenous conservation as adeep ethical commitment as compared to a conservation rhetoric, a sit-

uation which further complicates our labeling of indigenous peoples asconservationists or not.

Overall, and this is our seventh and final attempt to recognize greaternuance in the manner in which we understand indigenous peoples andtheir thought and behavior, all papers in this volume emphasize that weneed to clarify the level or scale on which conservation occurs, or fails tooccur, in indigenous areas. In some instances, this means simply distin-guishing between the conservation thought of indigenous persons asopposed to their actual conservation practice. In the Nahua case, poeticadaptations of corn-child narratives and other stories about extraordi-nary persons emphasize that Nahua environmental thought is situational,reflecting recent and ongoing changes in their environmental and socialrelations, including internal contradictions between economic and reli-gious views of nature. Their conservation practice in turn is out of syncwith the environmental needs of their lands. In the papers to follow, wewill see that some indigenous individuals or groups as a whole demon-strate powerful conservation ethics; yet these individuals or groups, for avariety of structural reasons, can fail to translate their ethical commit-ments, or conservation thought, into practice. In other instances, attention

to scale means thinking about the manner in which conservation thoughtand values are differentially activated on the individual, communal, or





extra-communal levels. As we have pointed out, we can have communi-ties of committed individual conservationists, which neverthelesscontinue to degrade their lands because of failures of cooperative orcollective action at the level of the community as a whole or because offailures in the way the community coordinates its action with states andNGOs. Or, by contrast, we can have communities of individuals who are

by and large not conservation-minded, which nevertheless do notdegrade their lands either because of structural factors like low popula-tion density or successes of local institutions to coordinate their activitieswith strong-armed extra-communal organizations and entities. And aswe might imagine, these scales of analysis are rarely independent of eachother—as this volume’s papers will make clear, they instead intersect

with, and even determine, in complex manners, the conservation failuresor successes on other levels. These points are made especially powerfullyin the case study of the Lakota Sioux, where for analytical purposesPickering and Jewell distinguish between the grassroots, tribal, andAmerican governmental scales of interaction between individual ethicsand actual conservation behavior.

As is evident from the above discussion, the question of whether ornot indigenous peoples are conservationists are not—and how we might

best frame or address such an issue—takes center stage in the essays to

come. However, readers should remind themselves that we are particu-larly interested to determine whether or not it is their religious or animis-tic models and commitments, in conjunction with other factors, that giverise to variations in indigenous conservation thought and practice (orlack thereof). The authors pursue this question in different manners, andcome up with different answers. Snodgrass and his collaborators, in theirstudy of indigenous Bhils in Rajasthan, design a ‘matching pairs’ research design so that the environmental thought and practice of bhopas (shamans) can be quantitatively compared with that of non-shamans.Pickering and Jewell also assess statistically the differences between theLakota Christians and those practicing Native spirituality. However,most of the other authors in this volume eschew a quantitative approachthat attempts to isolate religion as a causal variable, instead suggestingthat indigenous relationships to the environment emerge from connec-tions to the earth that are at once socio-cultural, economic, political, andalso religious. These authors suggest that studies which focus on the rela-tion between religion and the environment do not necessarily exclude a

priori the relevance of other factors.Despite these differences, the papers point to the manner in which reli-

gious discourse provides a language for indigenous peoples to expresstheir deepest commitments and concerns. However, we recommend





caution in only seeing religion as promoting equilibrium, balance, andharmony in indigenous relationships to the environment. As we show,indigenous religions are often harnessed to political and economicagendas that are not only not conservationist but in some cases posi-tively antithetical to conservation. Some indigenous societies may usereligion to justify an ever-greater exploitation of their natural resources.In the way that the greater exploitation of indigenous lands can some-times seem to promote human flourishing, local actors, from the Kelabitof Borneo to the Sherpas of Nepal, argue that such exploitation is right,ethical, and even sanctioned by non-human entities.

When indigenous peoples do not consciously conserve their naturalresources in terms of Western conservation standards, a common anthro-

pological defense of them is that they have been corrupted by Western beliefs and values, related, for example, to the individualistic pursuit ofpersonal gain. We find some truth to such arguments. Out of economicnecessity and in contexts of political marginality, indigenous peoples dopursue short-term interests that they know compromise long-term pros-perity: Krech’s (1999) discussion of Native American engagement withthe fur trade would seem to be a case in point. However, we do not seesuch behavior as an implicit compromise of indigenous beliefs and com-mitments, religious or otherwise. Indigenous traditions and histories are

sometimes tied, on the individual, communal, or extra-communal level,to the conservation of their surroundings; but other times they are not.9

In presenting our case studies in these ways, we do not mean to openthe door for accounts which blame indigenous peoples, or their religions,for environmental destruction beyond their control and largely the resultof the global expansion of capitalist markets and colonialist agendas.Rather, we hope to avoid projecting Western expectations of the mean-ing of indigenous Animism onto their worldviews and cosmologies.Instead, we would argue that indigenous religions, in the way they drawon natural powers and forces to promote human well-being and pros-perity, often but not always in sync with nature’s own well-being, aremalleable and multiplex. As such, they can be adapted with remarkablefluidity to a variety of economic and political contexts and agendas. Thisvolume searches for a middle-ground to over-simplified and dichotom-ous construals of indigenous peoples as either conservationists or not:through careful empirical study, we hope to demonstrate how suchextreme positions do not capture the economic, political, or religious realities of the indigenous lives which are the focus of this volume.

9. In the same vein, Western beliefs and values are not uniform but include

manifold variations—an important point that is beyond the scope of this volume.





The essays to follow are diverse in their ethnographic context, researchmethods, arguments, and style. There are thus many equally legitimateways to organize them. We begin, perhaps arbitrarily, with three essaysdiscussing indigenous peoples’ relationship with three different animal persons. Each of these three communities have a deep tradition of hunting-gathering, though they now also support themselves throughother means. Two of these case studies come from India, the other fromBorneo. We begin with a chapter by Snodgrass and his collaborators onAdivasi shamans’ relationship to leopards, ‘Leopards and other LovelyFrightful Things: The Environmental Ethics of Indigenous RajasthaniShamans’. These co-authors argue that shamans do demonstrate a moredeeply mystical connection to these wild carnivores as compared to non-

shamans, though shamans and other Adivasis feel only weakly bound todefend and protect these animals. If anything, the arrow runs the otherway, with leopard-god-brothers protecting weaker humans. In ‘Rela-tional Epistemology, Immediacy, and Conservation: Or, What do theNayaka Try to Conserve?’, Bird-David and Naveh discuss the relation-ship of indigenous Nayakas from the Nilgiris of South India with wildelephants. They argue that the Nayakas’ ethic of ‘immediacy’ stresseskeeping good relations with animal families who share the environment,rather than them having a conservation ethic per se. In his treatment of

the indigenous Kelabit of Borneo in ‘Where Spirit and Bulldozer Roam:Environment and Anxiety in Highland Borneo’, Matthew Amster focuseson a local ritual referred to as ‘calling the eagle’. He uses this ritual,along with other ethnographic details, to point to the manner in whicholder anxieties related to correct or incorrect interactions between humanand non-human persons have been replaced with new political andeconomic anxieties related to logging. Amster further argues that theKelabit as Christians who sacralize mountain retreats are now morecommitted conservationists (if largely in the modern sense) than theywere as Animists who revered their environments.

Kristina Tiedje’s ‘Situating the Corn-Child: Articulating Animism andConservation from a Nahua Perspective’ introduces the second collec-tion of three papers, each of which focuses on indigenous peoples with adeep historical relationship to agriculture, either through their ownagricultural activity or through interactions with neighboring societies.Tiedje shows how the Nahua engage in reciprocal, spiritual relationshipswith non-human beings, such as the ‘corn-person’, who is the focus ofmuch of her paper. She argues that Nahua animistic beliefs both promoteand hinder environmentally benign behavior according to modern con-

servation principles. Tiedje pays particular attention to conflicts betweenNahua environmental behaviors, such as field-burning to prevent





wildfires and degradation, and conservation as imagined within thecontext of modern regimes of natural resource management. When theNahuas accepted a recent governmental conservation and developmentprogram in their community, they seemed to weigh economic needsover religious ones. But it turns out that they did not leave behind theirobligations to the corn-child and other non-human persons. Throughstories, elder Nahuas situate the corn-child in the context of modernconservation to retain their local authority vis-à-vis conservation agents.The poetic articulation of conservation-as-sacred-practice offers powerfulcultural resources and is an example of how the Nahuas have come toterms with social, political, economic, and environmental challenges.

In a Nepalese context, Lionel Obadia’s ‘The Conflicting Relationships

of Sherpas to Nature: Indigenous or Western Ecology?’ explores a seem-ing correspondence between Nepalese spirituality and Western ecology.However, he demonstrates the illusory nature of such correspondences,which is the product of a romantic oversimplification of a more complexanimistic, shamanistic, and Buddhist context.

We end this volume with the contribution by Kathleen Pickering andBen Jewell, ‘Nature is Relative: Religious Af filiation, Environmental Atti-tudes and Political Constraints on the Pine Ridge Reservation’, whichexplores the intersection of religion and environmental practice in a

contemporary Native American context. We conclude with this essay because of its useful distinction between the grassroots, tribal, andAmerican governmental scales of interaction between individual ethicsand actual conservation behavior. We find this distinction helpful inexplaining the disconnect between, on the one hand, an often deep andabiding indigenous love for and feeling of connection to their environ-ments and, on the other hand, the environmental degradation charac-teristic of many indigenous lands. We hope that readers will use thisanalytical framework—along with others discussed in this volume—tohelp them better understand the complex situations that characterizecontemporary encounters between the world’s indigenous peoples andtheir environments.

We have organized our discussion in this introduction around theterms ‘Animism’ and ‘nature reverence’. However, our use of this voca-

bulary has been somewhat loose, which is in part an artifact of thesecategories’ long and contentious histories. Before allowing readers toengage the rich case studies to come, and by way of conclusion to thisintroduction, we briefly consider the history of the term ‘Animism’, aswell as its connection to ‘nature reverence’. We do this further to specify,

and also to justify, our use of such a contested and potentially problem-atic vocabulary. In doing so, however, we would prepare readers for





somewhat idiosyncratic understandings of these terms in the chaptersthat follow.

‘Animism’ derives from the Latin word for ‘soul’—animus. A belief insouls, spirits, and non-empirical levels of reality is found in all societies.As such, it has been argued that Animism is the earliest form of religionas well as the basis of all religion (Tylor 1958 [1871]; cf. Chidester 2005).In this volume, however, we are most interested in the tendency ofindigenous peoples to attribute souls, and thus vital life-force, to whatA.I. Hallowell (2002 [1960]) refers to as ‘other-than-human persons’. Inclassic work on the Ojibwa in southern central Canada, Hallowell tells usthat eagle-, bear-, and frog-persons, and also stone- and thundercloud-persons, share the world with human beings. Contemporary scholars

had largely abandoned the term ‘Animism’, mainly because of its link toevolutionary theorizing and to the idea that indigenous Animists mis-take objects for subjects, and thus are less analytically astute thanmoderns (e.g. see Tylor 1958 [1871]). However, Graham Harvey (2005a,2005b), Nurit Bird-David (1999), Philippe Descola (2005), and others, fol-lowing Hallowell, have stimulated renewed interest in a ‘new Animism’,which frames indigenous encounters with other-than-human persons asa vital alternative to modernist Western cultures that over-exploit anddominate nature. In treating animals, material objects, and even features

of the natural landscape as ‘communicative subjects’ (Hornborg 2006)which can be related to much as human subjects, rather than as merelyinert and inanimate objects, Animists establish deeper and more satisfy-ing relationships with the natural world. They appreciate more fully thesubtle and complex relationships between ‘communities of living per-sons, only some of whom are human’ (Harvey 2005a, 2005b, 2006). Assuch, their ‘relational’ and ‘participatory’ ways of interacting with theworld, in which humans do not stand apart and above nature, providevaluable lessons for a modern West out of balance with its surround-ings—that is, with what we might call its ‘environment’.10

In theoretical frameworks such as those described above, Animismcan involve the projecting of human mentalities and abilities onto therest of the natural world: animal and rock persons, for example, think,reason, and feel much like human persons. To anthropomorphize andpersonify nature in this way—that is, to use the model of the humansocial world to construe other-than-human beings and processes—mightseem to imply an indigenous failure to recognize the uniqueness of

10. On recent ‘new animist’ discussions of indigenous religions, see Bird-David1999; Descola 1994; Hornborg 2006; Ingold 2000; and also the collection of articles inEthnos 71:1.





non-human parts of creation. However, the authors of the papers in thisvolume, perhaps as ‘new Animists’ ourselves, follow scholars such asHarvey (2005a) and suggest that the animist recognition and apprecia-tion of other-than-human persons represents a truly deep form of naturereverence. Animists typically bestow equal or even greater-than-humanqualities on other-than-human persons. For example, indigenous Anim-ists in India deeply revere, and even worship, animals, plants, and thelandscape as superhuman gods; as such they are perceived to haveequal, and oftentimes greater, rights to life and happiness as comparedto humans. More importantly, Animism forcefully challenges the idea ofhuman exceptionalism: in recognizing that animal, plant, and even moun-tain ‘relatives’ have cultures and communities, indigenous peoples

reveal their feelings of kinship with the natural world, and thus alsodisplay the sentiment that humans and other-than-humans alike are

beholden to the same forces and fates.11 Indigenous religions typically appreciate the vital force underlying all

reality—labeled mana in Polynesia, wakan in Lakota cosmology, andshakti in India and South Asia—that unites humans and other-than-human communities. This force can take form in person-like desires,abilities, and agendas. But it need not; or, at least, such a form is oftenrecognized by indigenes to be more metaphor and way of speaking than

hard and fast reality. Early scholars such as Marrett (1909, 1911; see alsoBengston 1979) referred to this life-force as a pre-animistic ‘Animatism’,distinguishing between impersonal energies and personified spirits, andviewing the former as evolutionarily prior to the latter. The authors ofthis volume do not engage with evolutionary debates of this nature. Infact, we would be hard pressed to distinguish definitively between a‘spirit’ and the more abstract ‘vitality’ that is seen to animate that spirit,or between a polytheistic cosmology and a belief in a unifying life-forcethat manifests itself in all nature’s diversity.

Instead, we point out that animistic and animatistic cosmologies donot typically maintain boundaries between humans and non-humans.‘Nature’ is often understood in Western terms to reflect that part of theworld that is less heavily impacted by human activity and ingenuity (e.g.Mill 1904 [1874]). We do take the point that Yellowstone National Park isdifferent from New York City. However, in separating human beingsfrom nature in this way, we feel that we give up too much, failing tocapture the essence of indigenous ‘animistic’ worldviews. Following ourindigenous interlocutors, we choose instead to define nature as those

11. See Bekoff 2007 for an attempt to get at similar perceptions through cognitive

ethology.





forces, processes, and potentials that forms the basis of all life and reality, both human and other-than-human. In this sense, we see much of valuein terms like ‘Animism’ and ‘Animatism’, mainly because they representattempts to capture the way our indigenous informants themselves pointto the underlying unity in all nature, human and non-human.

We do understand why other contemporary scholars choose not to usethe term Animism: the evolutionary baggage alone is dangerous, towhich can be added the risk of projecting a unity onto disparate indige-nous cosmologies where no such unity exists. However, the authors ofthis volume find much in common in the societies described in the fol-lowing pages, not least of which is a deep respect and reverence for thatother-than-human world of persons that lies just adjacent to our own. As

such, we use the term ‘Animism’ in an attempt to capture the diverseindigenous principles, activities, beliefs, and rituals that orient our infor-mants toward the natural world—a set of diverse but overlappingrecipes for how best to interact with nature so that humans, other-than-humans, and the earth itself might flourish. We hope that using such anall-encompassing, and thus imperfect, vocabulary will allow readers toappreciate the important commonalities in the societies described in thisvolume—without, of course, ignoring their differences.

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