“Plural Ecologies in Conflict: Perspectives from Southeast Asia“, a Germany-based network of anthropologists, is currently developing a new synthesis of political ecology and ontological approaches toward human-non-human relationships. We argue that the research traditions on Southeast Asia are particularly apt to support such a synthesis. Political ecology has studied local human-environment relationships from the point of view of their translocal, national and global entanglements in power relationships. The anthropology of ontologies, in contrast, has focused on local conceptions of human-non human relationships that offer radical alternatives to Western-modern or globalized concepts. Southeast Asian local cosmologies, however, always valorize translocal relationships. The translocal, the foreign and the faraway are constitutive elements of these cosmologies and ontologies. This provides them with a specific flexibility regarding the acknowledgment of non-humans, for instance, spirits of life forces, while at the same time linking cosmological and political hierarchies. Therefore, Southeast Asians often practice what we call ‘ontologies of possibilities’ in their engagement with the environment. We therefore develop a theoretical language based on the concept of plural ecologies – ecologies based on the contrastive recognition or exclusion of certain non-humans, be they person or things, animals, plants, spirits or humans. Human-environment relationships thus constantly produce ecologies whose dynamics develop along lines of pluralization and hegemonialization. Pluralization denotes their tendency to produce multiple sets of relationships between humans and non-humans, while hegemonialization denotes the always incomplete tendency of one ecology to dominate or marginalize others. Both terms represent two aspects of each ethnographic situation that are in a constant tension of production and destruction.
Guido Sprenger is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg University since 2010. He has done research on ritual, cosmology and transculturality in the uplands of Laos since 2000. Among his publications is the monograph Die Männer, die den Geldbaum fällten (The Men who cut the Money Tree: Concepts of Exchange and Society among Rmeet of Takheung, Laos) (2006), Animism in Southeast Asia (co-edited with Kaj Århem, 2016) and Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia (Sojourn, co-edited with Kristina Großmann, 2018). His research interests include ritual, exchange, human-environment relations, animism, cultural identity, kinship and social morphology.
Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))
Panel 5: Politics and Poetics of Nature
7:30-9pm HK/SG / 12:30-2pm BST / 1:30-3pm CEST / 7:30-9am EDT / 4:30-6am PDT