Descripción del proyecto
Interacciones entre animismo y extractivismo en el sudeste asiático
Las poblaciones indígenas del sudeste asiático y otras regiones ofrecen valiosas perspectivas para establecer relaciones más sostenibles con el medio ambiente. Sus creencias animistas desaconsejan tratar el medio ambiente como un recurso a explotar. Por el contrario, las industrias extractivas consideran el medio ambiente como una entidad aparte, lo cual facilita la extracción de recursos a gran escala. El proyecto Re-S, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, llevará a cabo investigaciones etnográficas en Indonesia, Malasia, Filipinas y Timor Oriental para examinar cómo afecta la extracción de recursos naturales a las relaciones de la población con el medio ambiente. El equipo del proyecto desarrollará un marco social interaccionista para comprender las influencias mutuas del animismo y el extractivismo. Se centrará en las interacciones para evaluar si las orientaciones animistas protegen contra el extractivismo y cómo responden las empresas multinacionales a las críticas en sus operaciones.
Objetivo
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.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitución de acogida
1010 Wien
Austria