Faiths for Earth, Geo-Commoning, and New Ethics in the Himalayas

Dear Colleagues,

An integral part of the earth’s climate system, a multiregional weather-maker, and a more-than-human pluriverse, the Himalayas and the adjacent highlands of Tibet, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia are inhabited by interconnected, diverse nations of humans and communities of animals and plants. In many ways, the Himalayan highlands are a “terrestrial ocean,” as they hold an immense amount of water in solid, liquid, and vaporous states and are the source of fresh water for two billion humans and countless nonhumans in Asia. Since the advent of modern extractive development in both the colonial and postcolonial eras, Himalayan lifeworlds have undergone multiple anthropogenic transformations of land, air, and water as consequences of global industrialization-induced climate change. Parallel to the UN’s intergovernmental initiation of sustainable development in the 1980s, many local societies, empowered by their traditional ecological knowledge, have exercised faith-based environmental solutions favoring a just, sustainable way of living. The organic alliance of spiritual beliefs, modern science, and sustainability found in Highland Asia is a fertile source of interdisciplinary research and public discourse around the world.

This Special Issue, not limited to religious studies, invites contributions from all fields of the sciences and humanities to feature historical and current case studies of the ecological role of religions and spiritual practices in shaping human–nature relations and in forging faith-based environmentalisms in the greater Himalayan region, including the Tibetan Plateau and places that are under-researched in Himalayan studies, such as Laos, Myanmar, Northeast India, and Southwest China. “Faiths,” “ecospirituality,” and science-based spirituality of the earth in this Special Issue broadly include indigenous beliefs and indigenized world religions. Without assuming that all religious, spiritual traditions, and scientific beliefs are eco-friendly, this Special Issue recognizes a panhuman cultural fact that religions and spiritual traditions, situated in different ecological contexts, play various roles in forging human environmental values and worldviews. It, therefore, welcomes manuscripts that address different ecological facets of faith-based, ancient and modern traditions and how they respond to what the guest editors refer to as geo-commoning. The emphasis on geo is meant to point to both human transboundary environmental politics and the earth’s own geological and ecological patterning in the Himalayas, which shapes what modern humans perceive as “resource commons” or simply “natural resources.” In this respect, human commoning is a series of extractive processes that have led to the worldwide tragedy of the commons, manifested as a multifarious anthropogenic crisis. This Special Issue thus compels contributing authors to recognize the earth’s own agency and liveliness in making commons, e.g., rivers and forests, and let the earth speak through their texts in animistic, spiritual, and affective terms, in addition to hosting human-centered political and ethical debates.

The guest editors particularly encourage authors to situate their contributions in the interdisciplinary fields of religion and ecology, and environmental humanities, or to incorporate some of the perspectives and approaches of those interlinked disciplines. Both are currently in the forefront of an engaged environmental studies that interweaves traditional ecological knowledge with growing scientific and public understandings of the earth as a self-regulatory, living planet and which amplify the moral considerability of the earth in global endeavors to build a new environmental ethics in the Anthropocene.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200-300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send this to the Guest Editors, Prof. Dan Smyer Yü ([email protected]), Dr. Jelle J.P. Wouters ([email protected]), Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker ([email protected]), and cc the Assistant Editor of Religions, Margaret Liu ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

Tentative completion schedule:

Deadline for abstract submission: July 30, 2024

Deadline for full manuscript submission: February 28, 2025

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Acknowledgments: We're deeply grateful to Elizabeth McAnally for her efforts in posting information about the Special Issue on the Forum on Religion and Ecology's website and newsletter.

Prof. Dr. Dan Smyer Yü
Dr. Jelle J.P. Wouters
Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker
Guest Editors

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• Himalayan–Tibetan highlands
• religious ecology
• spiritual environmentalisms
• commoning
• ethics
• the Anthro-pocene

Title: Buddhist Faces of Indigenous Ecologies in Highland Asia

Abstract: This article is written as part of the ongoing multidisciplinary inquiry into how ecological Buddhism is, and whether or not the faith-based claim of Buddhist ecology and the natural scientifically-conceived discipline of ecology—which studies the relation of organisms to their physical environments—communicate well and are mutually complementary with each other. It attempts to address these questions by linking regionally-specific Buddhist traditions with modern Buddhism and Buddhist studies in the West, both of which are known for respectively initiating Buddhist environmentalism in the public sphere and shaping Buddhist ecology as an academic field. Situated in the eastern Himalayan-Tibetan highlands, this article offers a twofold argument. First, the canonic basis of Buddhist ecology is exegetically stretched to build its compatibility with the relational understanding of ecobiologically-conceived lifeworlds; second, many Buddhist ecological practices are de facto grounded in pre-Buddhist ecological knowledges of indigenous societies that were historically converted to Buddhism. This argument is based on the case studies of long or spirit-hills in Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, and of lhari or deity-mountains in the Tibetan Plateau. Both long and lhari are often discerned as a spiritual-environmental basis of Buddhist ecology. It is indisputable that Dai and Tibetan societies are predominantly Buddhist, as they respectively accepted Theravada and Vajrayana traditions as their national faiths; however, the cultural customs of long and lhari are pre-Buddhist. Through the comparable cases of human-spirit-land relations among the Dai and the Tibetans, this article concludes that Buddhist ecology from this regional perspective entails a body of syncretized approaches to the relational entanglements of all life communities. These approaches find their origins in indigenous ecological knowledges, the precept-centered Buddhist ethics, and modern secular environmentalist worldview.

Title: Lyopu: the Idu Mishmi’s religious ecology and their relations with the Earth

Abstract: The religion of the Idu Mishmi is anchored around the idea that humans co-exist with other beings in the world on the basis of their animistic interrelatedness, which plays a crucial role in sustaining the ecological well-being of land, people, animals, and plants. The shamanically-mediated animist traditions of Idu Mishmi are, therefore, deeply situated in an ecological context of the Himalayas. We put forth the Idu Mishmi’s concept of Lyopu, which signifies a life chain that incorporates humans and nonhumans as well as their ancestral connections with the earth. As a highly complex indigenous idea, Lyopu not only brings together the past, present, and future of human existence, but is also the central force safeguarding and sustaining all forms of life. Embedded in Idu Mishmi’s animist faith, the ecospiritual principle of Lyopu has shaped and reshaped the humans’ multilayered associations of the indigenous environment, animals, forests, rivers, and mountains since ancient times. By positioning the ecological shamanic concept of Lyopu at the core, we argue that the animist belief of Idu Mishmi regards the earth as the commons for both human and nonhuman beings and, therefore, regulates the socio-ecological and the cosmic worlds, pointing to not only how humans perceive their environment but also demonstrating how the earth thinks and feels of its own accord about us humans in particular and the diverse lifeworlds in general. Keywords: Lyopu, religious ecology, animism, commons, shamans, nature.

Title: Sacred Groves, Eco-spirituality and Non-human Territoriality in Northeast India

Abstract: Sacred groves or traditionally managed forest patches have drawn wide attention as a conservation tool. As an ancient and customary practice to regulate human encroachment on and rampant extraction of forest resources, sacred groves are promoted as an indigenous method of conservation. Northeast India has a number of sacred groves. In the Buddhist Monpa areas of Arunachal Pradesh, many sacred groves are attached to monasteries, and designated as Gonpa Forest Areas (GFA). In other parts of this region, sacred groves are maintained as preserves of spirits and deities and to breach these boundaries is to invite the latter’s wrath. Increasingly, however, sacred groves are being promoted as sites of ecotourism. Building on the idea of ethical territoriality discussed by political theorists, made with respect to immigrant rights, which demands rights and recognition for territorially present non-citizens, I argue that sacred groves norms can lead us to a normative view of recognising territorial rights of the non-human other. This goes beyond an essentialised view of sacred forests as indigenous environmentalism or a functional view, as resources during crisis, or an instrumental view, as aids to conservation to be promoted by eco-tourism. Anthropologist Karine Gagne writes about an ‘ethics of care’ that is possible through practical interaction and affective engagement with non-human life. Using insights drawn from sacred groves norms, I argue for a consideration of a territorial ethics or ethical thinking with respect to the territoriality of non-human life, in their expected presence and unexpected co-incidence. This not only involves respecting boundaries and accounting for non-human co-presence in and around human settlements but also preventing the expansion of human residence, development infrastructure, and capitalist enterprises, including ecotourism ventures, into non-human territory.

Title: On shaky ground? Tlawmngaihna and the response to ecological disasters in Mizoram.

Abstract: Ecological disasters, whether floods, landslides, or even famines caused by the flowering of a particular species of the bamboo, are not new to the tiny state of Mizoram in Northeast India. The magnitude and intensity with which these disasters have affected the state in recent years suggest the effects of wider ecological disturbances, but are also the consequences of unhampered and unplanned urban development. Located on the Indo-Burmese mountain arc, an offshoot of the Himalayas, Mizoram, with its 21 mountain ranges that run north to south, ranging in height from 1000m to 2000m above sea level, also falls within seismic zone 5, the highest level of seismicity in the earthquake zoning map of India. Recurrent disasters, especially landslides, as recently as those after the cyclonic storm Remal (2024) hit the region, and the ongoing monsoons have caused a profound sense of loss for the entire state that has a relatively low population density. The paper explores how the people of the state experience and respond to such disasters. With the resources of the state being limited, such disasters often rely on communitarian goodwill. What is the basis of this goodwill and what is the extent to which it operates? What forms does it take? How do people organize themselves in order to respond to these disasters? The answer seems to lie in a traditional ethic known as tlawmngaihna, which has always been a guiding principle for all forms of Mizo interaction. Tlawmngaihna can mean several things: from being humble, self-effacing, to having a heart of service; due to changing circumstances its practice and meaning have changed over the years, and the adoption of Christianity by the Mizos has also Christianized the concept. The paper will explore how tlawmngaihna manifests itself in times of disasters as well as in other ecological concerns of the state. The attempt will be to see how people negotiate and understand traditional ideas and practices in the context of ever-changing ecological conditions.

Title: When Things No Longer Align: Shifting Climes, Indigenous Knowledge and Place-Based Understanding in Northwestern Nepal

Abstract: This paper for the Special Issue on Faiths for Earth, Geo-Commoning, and New Ethics in the Himalayas examines local knowledge, perceptions of, and responses to climes — encompassing weather, climate, sacred landscapes, and agricultural livelihood systems — in the Trans-Himalayan region of Dolpa in Nepal. Our research focuses on the experiences of the Indigenous Tarali Magar people of Gumbatara in the Tichurong valley and narrates the effects of changing weather and climatic patterns on their surroundings and livelihoods. In this collaborative contribution, co-authored by a community member and two outside anthropologists with long-standing commitments to the region, we explore: (i) how agricultural practices are changing over time in response to economic and environmental changes; (ii) how and in what ways physical changes in the weather and climate are experienced and imagined by Taralis through the lens of the Tarali concepts of nham (weather) and sameu (time); and (iii) how local knowledge about variations in weather and climate are embedded within Tarali cultural and religious worldviews. We draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and comparative and historical analysis to answer these questions, situating our work within the emerging scholarly conversation about Himalayan climes and anthropogenic alterations. Based on conversations and interviews with Indigenous religious specialists, farmers, and herders, we describe and document how local rhythms and the socio-cultural practices of the Tarali community have been and continue to be impacted by clime-changes, offering a compelling case study of how one historically marginalized Himalayan community is coping with the uncertainties associated with these impacts. In this contribution, we demonstrate how understandings and interpretations held by the Indigenous Tarali community of their biophysical environment — including plants, soil, crops, livestock, and seasonality — reflect a place-based, transgenerational environmental ethics. We conclude that Taralis are reckoning with shifts in weather and climatic patterns that are disruptive to long standing agricultural practices and to cultural and religious knowledge systems that traditionally guide those practices. At the same time, we show how culturally-grounded, place-based religious practices in the Tichurong valley contribute to global imaginaries for sustainable futures and our living planet.

Title: ‘They Are Properties of The Deity, Not Sentient’: Tibetan Plant-hood, Cosmopolitics and Climate Change in Kham Tibet

Abstract: The Plantationocene is an analytic instrument to unfolding the socio-historical politics of human-plant-environment relationships in this age that the anthropogenic climate change has been recognised. During which, the worldwide types of plantations and post-colonial legacies are brought forward, while many other vegetal and cosmopolitical forms are overlooked, such as plants and pastoralist communities in which floristic power seems little. However, in the Tibetan Himalayas, plants are always socially and ethically contested, due to the plant blindness of the public, indifference to Buddhism knowledge, and scientific life ethics that came into vogue. This paper will initially propose the Tibetan Plant-hood by virtue to cosmopolitics of Tibetans. Meanwhile, this argued term Plant-hood would also go beyond Plant Personhood in philosophical terms. Thereafter, we aim to specialise the Kham Tibetan-plants assemblage on the ground via examinations of local communities with several socially important endemic plants – caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps sinensis L.), highland barley (Hordeum aegiceras L.), and Tibetan turnip (Brassica rapa L.). These hunted, cultivated, and seed-preserving plants extendedly sustain the daily lives of Tibetan agro-pastoralists. Plants are simultaneously suffering from and mitigating the localised consequences of climate change by uprooting themselves, diversifying materials, modifying lands, and compromising social relationships in the vortex of human-plant interconnectedness. Based on the interrogation to Tibetan Buddhism texts and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this research argues for plants 1) as non-sentient beings in Tibetan Buddhism but undergo very epistemic and ethical contestations in quotidian Tibetan pastoral practices; and 2) as the novel ontological anchor that reexamines the confused Tibetan cosmopolitics – constituted of Tibetan Buddhism, traditional mythology, pastoralist practice, scientific and mandarin knowledge in the face of climate change of the globe and state-making of modern China – during which local social relationship, power and sovereignty are co-produced with this ‘blinded’ actant. Key Words: Plant-hood, Tibetan Buddhism, Epistemics and Ethics, Cosmopolitics, Climate Change

Title: The Ecopolitical Spirituality of Miya Poetry Movement: Resisting Environmental Racism in Assam, India

Abstract: Emerging from the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in the riverine environments of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, the Miya Poetry movement is a unique environmentalism of the marginalized in contemporary Assam, India. Writing as a native scholar of Assam, I look at how the poetry movement displays the ethos of an ecopolitical spirituality that embodies the riverine ecology, environmental politics, and traditional spirituality and how it challenges the majoritarian state’s narrative of the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers being denigrated as the “environmental waste producers.” In brief, by “ecopolitical spirituality”, I mean the remembrance and evocation of traditional environmental relationships of and by the marginalized communities with the purpose of healing and rehumanizing themselves. I begin with a short history of the Miya Poetry movement among the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers. It narrates how the leading Miya poets adopt the local “Miya” dialect to express the traditional and continued relationships of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers who find themselves entangled with and nurtured by the land, rivers, plants, and animals. I then examine how Bengali Muslims have been framed by the majoritarian state and Assamese society as “environmental waste producers.” With climate-change induced destructive floods, along with post-colonial state’s rampant building of embankments leading to violent floods and erosion, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are forced to migrate to nearby grazing reserves or national parks. There, the majoritarian state projects them to be damaging the environment and issues violent evictions. In state reports too, the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers have been equated with “rats,” “crows” and “vultures.” These are exact metaphors used to refer to other marginalized migratory communities such as the Roma and the Travellers. I use the concepts of “environmental racism” and “conservation politics” to show how this state-led denigration justifies the allegation of the Muslim char-dwellers as “environmental waste producers” and how the Miya poetry movement counters the racist allegation with new metaphors by highlighting the traditional relationships of the marginalized community with the riverine environment. I thus lay out an argument that the ecopolitical spirituality of the Miya Poetry movement resists the statist devaluation of Miya Muslims by not mocking, violating or degrading the majoritarian Assamese (thereby breaking away from the binary of ‘us’ versus ’them’) but by re-humanizing themselves and their relationship with the environment.

Title: Between “Faith” and “Knowledge” The spiritual healing, Indigenous religions and the idea of nature in the Eastern Himalayas

Abstract: The relationship between nature and the Indigenous community is often portrayed as romantic, with Indigenous peoples being labelled as stewards of nature. However, existing literature also suggests that this portrayal does not always hold as some of the most affected populations by climate change belong to Indigenous communities. The vulnerability and marginalization of these communities regarding access to natural resources contradicts their deep knowledge and intimate relationship with nature often manifested through various eco-cosmological (based on multiple rites and rituals) relationships with natural surroundings. In a society driven by profit maximization, these eco-cosmological beliefs still dictate societal functioning and illuminate a dynamic relationship between humans and nature. This paper deals with such spiritual practices by focusing on different indigenous communities in the Eastern Himalayas. While taking the case of the Misings tribes of Assam and several ethnic communities of Darjeeling Himalayas, this paper attempts to show how these eco-cosmological practices are integral to the well-being of communities, families, individuals, and natural spaces which often shape community existence and emphasize reciprocity of multiple lives. However, these customs are not formally recognized as a religion but as matters of faith. In many cases, these customs have also been considered a form of “black magic," hence the illegitimate source of modern knowledge. Nonetheless, it is not to argue that these practices no longer exist, they appear in diverse forms of human and spiritual interaction while constituting “cosmological commonalities” (Pachuau and Schendel 2022) of different indigenous groups in the Eastern Himalayas. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by different authors in Assam and Darjeeling, this paper seeks to highlight the intricacies in the Indigenous spiritual practices that bring forth the idea of “healing”, “care” and “reciprocity” between humans, non-humans and other species as fundamental to indigenous eco-cosmology. This paper also shows how such practices provide a rich knowledge of well-being and nature conservation beyond the dominant scientific rhetoric of conservation thereby challenging the Western dichotomy of nature and culture. However, these practices are gradually diminishing under the duress of modernity, the Anthropocene and shifts in community livelihood practices and we trace this through the discourse of development activities in both these spaces.

Title: Mutanchi Clan Narratives: Oral Relics of Indigenous Ecosprituality

Abstract: Mutanchis more popularly known by their derogatory terminology Lepchas, are autochthonous to Sikkim, India. Mutanchi is a derivative of the complete phrase ‘Mutanchi Rumkup Rongkup’ and is followed by a response ‘Achulay’ which translates into ‘Beloved children of It-bu-mu who have come from the snowy peaks’. The nomenclature prompts an ontological understanding that is defined by its eco-geography. The Mutanchis have largely remained an oral community despite possessing a well-developed script, categorised under the Tibeto-Burma branch of languages. The declining repository of barely documented Mutanchi clan narratives is witness to the fact that the community largely remains oral. Belonging to the community, I am aware that these narratives form a medium of instruction to express Indigenous value systems followed by my community and sometimes by a specific village. Clan narratives by principle are ingrained with spiritual and cultural significance, but upon close examination one is often confronted with the complexity of accepting the fantastic rationale behind them. The Mutanchi clans ideally have a chyu(peak), Lhep(cave), and da(lake) that the clan members propitiate annually and on specific occasions. The transmigration of apil or soul is attached to these three specific spatial geographies that are different for each clan and held in high reverence by clan members. Additionally, the etiological explanations of different clans are often situated in a habitat, some natural and others supranatural, manifesting a system of beliefs, values, and norms rooted in deep ecology. In the article, I propose embarking on an ecosophical study of a few clan narratives from Dzongu, North Sikkim, part of which falls under the UNESCO Khangchedzonga man-biosphere reserve. This will be done in close consultation and maintaining all the ethical protocols of the clan members of the said narratives. The clans still reside in various pockets of Dzongu and are governed by the Indigenous knowledge systems instilled in them by their respective clan narratives, therefore it is imperative to understand these biocentric views that inform the lifeways of the Mutanchis.

Title: Linking faith and conservation in sacred and community forests of far western Nepal

Abstract: Faith and conservation are deeply entangled in the Himalayas. Focusing on a single community in far western Nepal, we investigate the forms of governance community members use to manage an extensive sacred forest on a nearby mountain and five smaller community forests at its base. The models of governance applied to these two kinds of forest are considered in terms of how they contribute to the maintainence of biocultural diversity, a concept that builds off of ‘biodiversity’ but also extends to human practices and beliefs. We use ethnographic methods paired with household surveys to generate qualitative and quantitative data on two indicators of biocultural diversity: ethnobotanical interactions and spiritual practices. These data reveal a concentrated human impact on the community forests through the extraction of plant resources such as firewood, animal fodder and timber, while the sacred forest receives a far smaller impact from these activities but is the site of limited collection of medicinal plants. The spiritual traditions connected to the sacred mountain portray it as the home of a local deity, who is worshipped in two annual pilgrimages attended by people throughout the region. Spiritual practices that occur in the community forests are more localized, family-oriented and small-scale, and are closely associated with women’s traditions. From the biodiversity perspective, the sacred forest appears critical for conservation because of its large size and the strong tradition of spiritual governance that protects it from most human impacts. The community forests, on the other hand, appear to support relatively less biodiversity and might thus be considered less useful for conservation. In terms of biocultural diversity, however, the sacred and community forests are equally important and play complementary roles in supporting the community’s biocultural heritage. The community forests provide the resources required for subsistence and daily activities, while the sacred forest nourishes identity, embodies communal history and provides a spiritual presence that imbues daily life with inner meaning.