Project description
Animism and extractivism interactions in Southeast Asia
Indigenous populations in Southeast Asia and other regions offer valuable insights into more sustainable relationships with the environment. Their animist beliefs discourage treating the environment as a resource to exploit. In contrast, extractive industries view the environment as a separate entity, facilitating large-scale resource extraction. The ERC-funded Re-S project will conduct ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste to examine how natural resource extraction impacts people’s relationships with the environment. The project will develop a social interactionist framework to understand the mutual influences of animism and extractivism. It will focus on interactions to assess whether animist orientations provide protection against extractivism and how multinational corporations respond to criticism in their operations.
Objective
Indigenous populations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere have become a major source of inspiration for more sustainable relations with the environment. Their animist orientations – attributing agency, personhood or spiritual powers to the non-human world – is what prevents them from treating the environment as a resource to be exploited. Extractive industries, by contrast, are seen to objectify the environment as an entity separate from human beings, which is what allows them to extract resources at an industrial scale. Through long-term ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste, this project investigates how natural resource extraction affects people’s diverse relations with the environment. However, rather than pitching indigenous communities against extractive industries, this project’s conceptual step-change consists in the development of a social interactionist framework that examines how animism and extractivism are constituted through their interactions. The hypothesis is that we find extractive logics within animist practices and that animist assumptions might also be uncovered within extractive industries. The focus on interaction allows us to determine whether animist orientations truly ‘protect’ against extractivism and how multinational corporations counteract criticism by incorporating the very logics on which this criticism is based.
Ethnographic studies of resource extraction tend to be dominated by single cases, focussing on indigenous opposition and the incommensurability between indigenous and modernist ways of relating to the environment. The methodological innovation of this project lies in its comparative multi-scalar approach. Through historically informed, long-term ethnographic case studies in four Southeast Asian countries, it constructs a comparative matrix for South-to-South comparisons and examines how human-environment relations are constituted through their interactions at different scales.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1010 Wien
Austria