Gender, Nature and Religious Re-enchantment in the Anthropocene

Dear Colleagues,

In the capitalist economy–ecology connection, people’s equal and spiritual partnership with nature is often incompatible with an equally persistent wish for material wealth and the possibilities of luxury that globalization and mobility have to offer. However, awareness of the necessity to fundamentally change humans’ impudent and exploitative attitude to nature is growing. Scholars of the Anthropocene criticize the self-evident anthropocentrism in scientific traditions and point to the need to broaden our analytical perspective beyond the human and to integrate the more-than-human world in our research projects. This shift brings along a renewed recognition of people’s embodied, affective and spiritual bonding with the natural world (e.g., rivers and seas, land and fields, rocks and mountains, animals, forests, trees and plants) as well as the supernatural world (e.g., saints, gods, spirits, ancestors). The focus of this Special Issue concerns contemporary societal and scientific debates on climate change and its devastating effects on the natural environment and people’s wellbeing. It explicitly adds a focus on gender and religion, as both aspects tend to be missing in these debates. Distancing oneself from anthropocentrism by studying the non-human in more-than-human relatedness apparently implies a disregard of gender. Simultaneously, Anthropocene scholarship tends to focus on secular contexts and ignore the influence of specific ontological and religious understandings of the world and associated practices of connecting with nature and re-enchanting the landscape.

Gender matters to human–nature relatedness in multiple ways. The human world is gendered and so is the natural world. Animals are male or female and socially learn to behave in gendered ways; likewise, plants can be male, female or androgynous. Landscapes are often perceived as gendered when, for example, physical forms or life-giving capacities become associated with femaleness or motherhood (e.g., Mother Nature, Mother Earth, female rivers and womb-like rocks). Human relatedness with nature is gendered as well. Men and women engage differently with nature and are differently placed regarding their vulnerabilities and agency in addressing environmental threats; in fact, these threats particularly affect women as the main actors in nurturing and taking care of the environment. Ecological crises are thus gendered as well. Both lived and ideological aspects of gendered human–nature relatedness incite us to study how, worldwide, environmental threats urge us ‘to go back to nature’ and eventually spark a positive revaluation of both women, nature, and religion, even in allegedly secular Western societies. For a long time, secularization and nature’s disenchantment symbolized modern progress and civilization. Current ecological threats, as well as the urgency to show solidarity with nature, open up possibilities to invigorate the magic and sacredness of landscapes. People’s search for intimacy and familiarity with a sentient and conscious nature creates renewed attention for animist practices and worldviews, as well as for re-interpretations and revitalizations of world religions. In recent scholarship on the Anthropocene, the concept of ‘new animism’, however, is often introduced without explicitly linking it to religion or religious innovation in the 21^st century.

This Special Issue aims to put gender and religion centre stage in discussing more-than-human sociality in the Anthropocene. We welcome theoretical papers as well as extended case studies that discuss the central topic cross-culturally and from different disciplinary perspectives. We aim to include a variety of studies in rural, urban and religiously diverse contexts. 

Possible topics for contributions are:

• Women’s and men’s attitudes to nature in relation to their belonging to a particular religious or cultural context;
• The femininity and masculinity of nature, e.g., in relation to notions of wilderness;
• Nature pilgrimages in various religious and cultural contexts/religious tourism in natural sites/pilgrimages to sacred landscapes in world religions;
• Animism in various societies;
• New age religion—new animism, modern paganism;
• Female and male religious imagery linked to nature (for example, Mother Earth, Mother Mary or Mother Ganges), associated religious notions of creation, forgiveness or compassion, and values of solidarity, justice, and responsibility;
• Gender and religion in environmental care, nature conservation, pollution or destruction;
• Gendered bodies in relation to natural landscape bodies—embodied, intimate and affective connections with landscapes—bodily engagement, storytelling, ritual actions;
• The meaning of sacred landscapes in migrants and refugees’ feelings of belonging;
• Sensory practices of walking, dancing and eating to intimately connect to nature;
• Gendered ways of creating kinship with nature;
• Perspectives from (cultural and environmental) anthropology, ecofeminism, ecofeminist theology, green or ecotheology, ecology, material studies, animal studies and interspecies ethnography.

Dr. Catrien Notermans
Dr. Anke Tonnaer
Guest Editors

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• gender
• nature
• (lived) religion
• Anthropocene
• more-than-human sociality
• ritual
• embodied practices
• animism
• nature pilgrimage
• ecology
• environmental care
• sensory ethnography