Understanding Climate Change Through Religious Lifeworlds 0253056055, 9780253056054

Citation preview

UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH RELIGIOUS LIFEWORLDS

UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH RELIGIOUS LIFEWORLDS k EDITED BY

DAVID L . HABERMAN

Indi a na Univer sit y Pr ess

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2021 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2021 Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-05605-4 (cl) ISBN 978-0-253-05604-7 (pb) ISBN 978-0-253-05603-0 (web PDF)

CONTENTS

Preface vii Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World / David L. Haberman 1

Part I. Recombinant Responses 1. Climate Change Never Travels Alone: Oceanian Stories / Cecilie Rubow 23 2. Climate Change, Moral Meteorology, and Local Measures at Quyllurit’i, a High Andean Shrine / Guillermo Salas Carreño 44 3. Religious Explanations for Coastal Erosion in Narikoso, Fiji / Amanda Bertana 77

Part II. Local Knowledge 4. “Nature Can Heal Itself”: Divine Encounter, Lived Experience, and Individual Interpretations of Climatic Change / Georgina Drew 101 5. Maya Cosmology and Contesting Climate Change in Mesoamerica / C. Mathews (Matt) Samson 123 6. Anthropogenic Climate Change, Anxiety, and the Sacred: The Role of Ecological Calendars in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia / Karim-Aly S. Kassam 153

vi

con t e n ts

Part III. Loss, Anxiety, and Doubt 7. The Vanishing of Father White Glacier: Ritual Revival and Temporalities of Climate Change in the Himalayas / Karine Gagné 183 8. Loss and Recovery in the Himalayas: Climate-Change Anxieties and the Case of Large Cardamom in North Sikkim / Mabel Denzin Gergan 208

Part IV. Religious Transformations 9. Angry Gods and Raging Rivers: The Changing Climate of the Central Himalaya / David L. Haberman 235 10. Recasting the Sacred: Offering Ceremonies, Glacier Melt, and Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes / Karsten Paerregaard 261 Conclusion: Religion and Climate Change: An Emerging Research Agenda / Willis Jenkins Index

309

284

PREFACE

For some fift y yea r s, schola r s from the humanities and social sciences have sought to better understand the role of religion in ecological issues. Research in this field has tended to cluster around a set of conventions that crystalized early in the formation of the field: debates have tended to focus on whether religion generally or particular religious traditions are good or bad for the environment, and the bulk of published literature has tended to concentrate on North Atlantic societies and especially on the forms of Christianity predominant in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. These foci have remained as constraints on the emerging body of scholarship on religion and climate change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds, along with its companion volume Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (edited by Evan Berry), are outcomes of a research project that aimed at broadening the conversation about religion and climate change by expanding the geographic frame of reference, thinking comparatively, and emphasizing ethnographic scholarship. Funded by the Henry Luce Foundation’s Religion and International Affairs Program and managed by American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), this project was called Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective. Although they do not appear extensively in the pages that follow, Toby Volkman, Luce Foundation program officer, Eric Hershberg, director of CLALS, and Rob Albro, CLALS research associate professor, played vital roles in shaping the conversations that formed the basis of this book.

vii

viii

pr e face

Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective began with a focus on three highly visible forms of environmental vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The project hypothesized that religious communities around the world are confronted by similar environmental pressures and that their adaptive responses might afford comparative insight about the ways religion matters for climate-change issues. Specifically, the project was structured around a series of workshops, each of which foregrounded cases from one frontline impact of climate change. A 2016 workshop at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, India, concentrated on urban water scarcity and the challenges faced by megacities in South Asia and South America as they struggle with issues of supply and sanitation. The second workshop was held at Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in Lima, Peru, in 2017 and focused on glacial melt and the ecological precarity of high-elevation communities in the Andes and in the Himalayas. The final workshop, convened at the University of the West Indies, in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, in 2017, was dedicated to the special challenges facing small island developing states in the Caribbean basin and in the South Pacific, namely sea-level rise and storm intensification. The workshops provided space for contributors to share, refine, and recalibrate their scholarship in conversation with experts from other disciplinary and regional contexts. Exchange among project contributors was further facilitated by a provisional framework for the role of religion: conversations were organized into three streams, each representing one important mode of engagement between religion and climate change. In the first, contributors examined the significance of religious actors, including faith-based organizations, religious leaders, and institutionalized systems of religious mobilization. The second explored religious frames of reference, seeking knowledge about the ways religious beliefs, perceptions, and vocabularies shape the way human communities articulate and engage the phenomena invoked within the perhaps too comprehensive term climate change. The final stream imagined the relationship between religion and climate change differently, asking whether, when, and how environmental changes precipitate religious changes. These are complex questions with no easy answers. The roughly two dozen scholarly essays that emerged from the Religion and Climate Change in CrossRegional Perspective project suggest some of the many ways intersections between the issues can be seen and understood, hopefully in ways that evoke sympathy and humane policy responses.

UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH RELIGIOUS LIFEWORLDS

k

INTRODUCTION Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World

David L. Haber man, Indiana University I find it difficult to get a bead on climate change as it appears in the comparative perspective of global occurrences and diverse cultural experiences. Moreover, thinking about climate change provokes an unsettling anxiety—at least for me. I recently finished a book on interaction with a sacred mountain and its stones in northern India (Haberman 2020). Although understood in radically different ways within human cultures, stones are solid—it’s easier to get a grip on them. But climate change is a different matter altogether. A classic distinction between fear and anxiety is that fear has a clear object or understandable threat, whereas anxiety does not. Climate change certainly does not present itself as an obvious object or easily comprehendible threat, nor is it localized like a particular sacred mountain. It appears to be everywhere, yet nowhere. Sometimes it’s an idea; at other times it’s a phenomenon. Climate change poses a problem so all-encompassing that it seems to absorb all other environmental challenges and becomes a category of its own. It’s vast and vague, present here and now, yet threatening in ways that stretch far into an uncertain future. Furthermore, as the essays in this volume make evident, there is a diversity of perspectives on what climate change even is about and what causal forces are involved with it. A multiplicity of climate changes emerge in this collection of studies of the manner in which so-called climate change is interpreted and experienced as well as in the range of responses that various communities around the world call for. There appears to be no one-size-fits-all perspective or solution. In addition to addressing climate change as a global phenomenon, greater attention needs to be given to local cultural explanations of it, which are often articulated in

1

2

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

terms of the mythic, ritual, and theological traditions of a particular place. This is one of the chief aims of Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the relationship between religion and climate change across multiple regions of the world, for a deeper understanding of climate change requires comprehending the ways in which religion is involved in human experiences and reactions. Also featured here are the complex nature of religion in the context of climate change and some transformations it is undergoing in face of climate-related challenges. In many ways, the field of religion and climate change is a new and emerging field; this volume is intended as an introductory contribution to this emergence. R e ligion a n d Cli m at e Ch a nge The subfield of religious studies known as “religion and ecology,” which appeared in the latter decades of the twentieth century, involves the examination of religious worldviews for how they shape human attitudes and behavior toward nonhuman entities and the environment as a whole. This subfield also queries the role of religion in the environmental crisis and tracks how environmental challenges are now changing religions around the globe. The subfield of religion and ecology often traces its history back to a seminal publication by Lynn White Jr., a medieval historian based at UCLA who, along with other scholars, was concerned with the mounting environmental crisis in the late 1960s. In the article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” White (1967) asserted, “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by the beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion” (1205). Here White articulates a foundational idea: that religious beliefs influence human understandings and treatment of the natural world and therefore need to be given serious consideration in the environmental crisis.1 The conversation White and others began in the late 1960s has certainly continued; although the field of religion and ecology is still in many ways in early stages, it has established a firm foothold in academic circles. Perhaps strongest evidence of this in the US academy is a remarkable series of ten conferences—organized by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim— on the major religions of the world and ecology that took place at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions from 1996 through 1998. These conferences brought together more than eight hundred international scholars representing a variety of disciplines to explore the important roles religions play in environmental issues. Harvard University Press published ten

i n t roduct ion

3

volumes resulting from these conferences in the series Religions of the World and Ecology. The conferences also led to the formation of an ongoing academic organization known as the Forum on Religion and Ecology, now based at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Moreover, courses in increasing numbers are being offered in the area of religion and ecology in religious studies and anthropology departments in colleges and universities around the country, and there is growing recognition in environmental studies programs and research centers that religion is a significant factor in thinking about the environmental crisis (Gardner 2002). These efforts also helped spawn a new academic society in 2005 under the leadership of Bron Taylor—the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, which has a growing membership with regular international conferences and a journal (Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture). Where and how the field of religion and climate change fits into the subfield of religion and ecology is an open question. Some view it as a part of this subfield, whereas others regard climate change as so far-reaching that it overwhelms all other environmental issues and therefore deserves a distinct rubric of its own. The word religious in the title of this volume evokes the place of religion in the anxious exercise of deliberating on climate change. Climate change is frequently labeled a scientific or economic issue but rarely a religious one. A strong contention in this volume of essays, however, is that religion matters in considerations of climate change and needs to have a seat at the tables around which climate change is being discussed. And this presence must include a wide range of religious perspectives, wherein a multitude of religious responses is taken seriously. The Christian stewardship model, for example, does not fit all religious contexts, especially religions of embodiment that regard the divine as embedded in the world. This volume aims to contribute to a better understanding of religion’s impact on climate change as well as climate change’s impact on religion. Climate change is causing religious leaders and communities to reexamine the very place and purpose of the human in the world. Climate change affects such strong influence on human life and compels considerable enough reassessment of the human that some scholars not only have called for new religious expressions but also have suggested that climate change has already begun shaping them (e.g., Latour 2017). Essays in this volume add ethnographic support for further deliberation of such claims. What does it mean that climate change is a problem? For many religious communities, it is regarded as an ominous sign of a significant rupture between the human and divine that is articulated in a particular and local idiom. Global discussion of climate change is often a foreign discourse for such communities.

4

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Religious worldviews provide a specific framework for comprehending and responding to challenging events. Religion will therefore be important in finding ways of translating the global discourse into more locally understandable forms. Words the deep ecologist Arne Naess (1973) wrote are still quite relevant: “The global approach is essential, but regional differences must largely determine policies in the coming years” (100). It may also be the case that local or indigenous religious perspectives have important insights to contribute to global discourse about climate change and offer suggestions for possible solutions. What would a productive exchange between global science and local religion look like? It may be that in certain respects they are mutually supportive. Although science and technology have an important role to play in addressing climate change, many have maintained that their contribution alone will be incomplete. Because climate change has occurred within a particular historical framework that has been shaped by certain cultural developments, a scientific approach by itself will not be sufficient. Reflection on culture is required—including religion, one of its key components. In addition to the burning of fossil fuels and the spewing of toxins into our soils and water, scholars of religion and ecology advocate adding particular conceptions of the self and views of the world to the list of major drivers of climate change. Scientists have not engaged in this kind of reflection and, moreover, have tended to believe that facts and graphs would motivate people to action. This unfortunately has not turned out to be the case, leading many to assert that, until climate disruption is seen as a moral challenge related to ultimate concerns, the response will be insufficient in scale and speed. But religion can provide the principled support for the action called on by scientists. People tend to take extraordinary measures to protect what they regard as supremely valuable or sacred. What, indeed, is the sacred? The involvement of religions may be indispensable for a sustainable future for the planet. Such notions have caused some to call for a partnership between religion and science around climate change (e.g., Tucker 2015). But, in addition, religion also has a powerful role to play in areas untouched by science and technology, such as questioning the worldviews that have led to the climate-change crisis, dealing with anxiety, loss, and hopelessness, positing and prioritizing high values, aiding fruitful motivation, and providing potentially transformative practices. Climate change requires more creative solutions than technology alone can deliver, and religion can have much to contribute here. Scientific discourse on climate change often leaves little space for understanding the rich complexity of human life in responding to climatechange-related events. How might religious worldviews and cosmologies expand our understanding of climate change and allied environmental issues?

i n t roduct ion

5

What would knowledge of religious practices, ontologies, and cultural identities add to attempts to better grasp and address the various causes of climate change? How might religion bolster communities to stand strong in the face of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and dramatic seasonal variations? Science alone has little to offer the affective dimension of the climate crisis; religion, on the other hand, is at home in this milieu. It seems that science has expertise in some areas and religion in others. Hope is considered by many to be a necessary ingredient in humanity’s quest for constructive ways to address the climate-change crisis. Religious communities occupy an advantageous position not only for taking care of people vulnerable to climate disturbances but also for providing them with hope. In addition to bringing greater understanding to the general public, this volume aspires to help educate climate researchers, social scientists, and policy makers about the complex nature of religion that emerges from a careful examination of local case studies and to provide access to a different source of knowledge that might contribute beneficially to policy strategies and decisions. For a truly global endeavor toward addressing the challenges of climate change to be successful, nonsecular worlds need be taken seriously. Not all people occupy secular worlds; therefore, secular approaches alone to climate change will not work in many parts of the world. Effective action that does not alienate a local community but rather engages it on its own terms must take into account the religious dimension of human experience, which includes local perceptions of the world or nature. It may even be worth asking, if a society has a narrative that functions productively to help them understand and prepare for events related to climate change, is explicitly scientific knowledge even necessary? What are the best ways of working with a community that is questioning whether Mother Nature or mountain deities are becoming more aggressive or are increasingly victims of human abuse? Climate change is already dramatically altering environmental conditions on the planet and affecting human livelihood in ways that elicit religious responses. The disruption to local communities is further exacerbated by the fact that traditional ways of dealing with dramatic disturbances are being eroded by new forms of global economic development. This volume aims to provide materials to expand current discussions of religion and climate change—which have tended to focus on positive or negative contributions of religious ideas and actors to climate-change policy—to generate a more dynamic, multidimensional conversation reflective of the diverse and complex ways that religion intersects with anthropogenic global warming and to track the various ways in which climate change affects particular cultural traditions and religious communities. It

6

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

materialized out of a multiyear project, “Religion and Climate Change in Cross Regional Perspective,” funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, which sought a deeper understanding of the relationship between religion and climate change across multiple regions of the world. Previous studies of religion and climate change exist, but for the most part, they have been focused on Christian responses in North America and northern Europe. Observing this limitation in a recent survey of the scholarly literature on religion and climate change, the authors noted the need for greater attention to the relationship between religion and climate change in the societies of the global South (Jenkins, Berry, and Kreider 2018). In contrast to most previous studies, this volume focuses on the global South, with special attention to Latin America, South Asia, and the South Pacific—vulnerable regions where climate change dramatically precipitates religious response. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds explores the kinds of adaptive and interpretive responses to climate change that emerge from within local communities in these regions. Whereas previous studies have tended to promote normative theological positions based on textual readings, this volume features anthropological field studies. The case studies presented in this volume take up a variety of themes related to the cultural and ethical complexities of collective action, especially the ways in which communities conjoin scientific, religious, and moral discourses in their understandings of and responses to climate change. This approach differentiates it from more abstract theological studies, such as the one offered by Michael Northcott (2013), or books that concentrate on the predominately Christian societies of the North Atlantic region (Gerten and Bergmann 2013; Wilkinson 2012; and Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt 2017). The editors of the informative book How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change (Veldman, Szasz and Haluza-Delay 2014) focus on the question of whether religion functions as an obstacle or a resource for addressing climate change globally: “The social roles of religions and spiritualities vary tremendously among the peoples of the world, but what they say and do about climate change—whether they encourage attention to the issue or discourage it; whether they help their adherents recognize and cope with the challenge or persuade them to ignore or deny it—could decisively impact how societies all over the world respond to it” (3). They argue that religions are “well positioned to mobilize millions of people on the issue of climate change” (5). This is a very valid and important question to raise, but is it the only one that arises in a

7

i n t roduct ion

comparative perspective that focuses on challenges of climate-change-related disturbances in the global South? Whether it promotes attention to global climate change or resists doing so, religion seems also to be a way of addressing the stress, anxiety, uncertainty, loss, hopelessness, and disempowerment related to the challenges caused by the increasing global temperatures, such as rising sea levels, melting glaciers, vacillating seasons, and unprecedented storms. We might therefore also ask, how are religious traditions being reshaped by climate change? What role is climate change playing in emerging ethical reevaluations? How is climate change affecting reconsiderations of human-nonhuman relationships? What are the levers of change that emerge from a serious examination of religion and climate change? Moreover, many assume that climate change is an it for all cultures to deal with. But is such a homogeneous agreement really to be found? One of the major contributions of Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds is its presentation of a wide range of interpretations of what is often referred to as climate change. The ethnographic studies in this volume make a case for cultural plurality in this context. Orga n iz at iona l St ruct u r e The case studies are presented in four clusters: recombinant responses; local knowledge; loss, anxiety, and uncertainty; and religious transformations. Recombinant Responses The three authors in this section explore the complex relationships between scientific discourse on climate change and local religious views and between imported Christianity and indigenous traditions. Cecilie Rubow tells three ethnographic stories from Oceania that together give strong indication of how seemingly incompatible versions of climate change meet and mix in a variety of Christianities and indigenous notions in different local cultural contexts. Guillermo Salas Carreño analyzes how pilgrims with diverse backgrounds of indigenous traditions and Christianity interpret the retreat of the sacred Qulqipunku glacier in the Peruvian Andes and respond with changing religious practices associated with the pilgrimage. Amanda Bertana offers an ethnographic study of the manner in which biblical accounts and scientific discourse on climate change mingle and come into play in the encounter with rising sea levels by the residents of a village in the South Pacific island nation of Fiji.

8

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Local Knowledge One of the assertions of this volume is that climate change is experienced in local ways that rely on local systems of knowledge. Georgina Drew investigates the way an Indian shopkeeper and ritual specialist in the central Himalayan town of Uttarkashi interacts with particular devatas, or deities of the land, in her portrayal of a local understanding of climate change. Matt Samson presents a study of a Guatemalan spiritual guide and environmental activist to show how a local environmental movement to preserve forests and water sources is informed by Maya religion. Karim-Aly Kassam conducts a study of ecological calendars as developed in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia that provide a very specific sense of time for a particular place, arguing that they offer a valuable source of hope for dealing with climate change at the local level. Loss, Anxiety, and Uncertainty At the very time when they are most needed, it may seem that traditional ways are either disappearing or becoming increasingly ineffective. The result is greater anxiety and uncertainty, the very thing that certain traditional rituals aim to alleviate. Karine Gagné and Mabel Gergan examine two such situations in northern India, the first studying interactions with glaciers in the northwestern region of Ladakh, high on the Tibetan Plateau, and the second studying reactions to the collapse of cardamom cultivation in the eastern region of the Himalaya in the state of Sikkim. Religious Transformations Religion is not only engaging climate change in a variety of ways, it is also undergoing a multitude of changes under the effects of climate change. David Haberman tracks how climate-change-related disasters in the Char Dham pilgrimage region of the central Himalaya of India are initiating theological changes in which gods and goddesses once sought for their blessings are now increasingly understood to be angry and punishing. Karsten Paerregaard examines how the melting of glaciers from climate change in the Peruvian Andes has brought about changes in the practice of making offerings to the high mountain glacial deity of Huayatapallana. Willis Jenkins brings this volume to a conclusion by examining the volume’s contributions to the emergence of a new academic field of religion and climate change, with an eye toward articulating an agenda for future research.

9

i n t roduct ion

Com pa r at i v e T h e m e s Beyond global prescriptive considerations of climate change, and the characteristic focus on religion as either an obstacle or aid in addressing it, other significant themes emerge from the various local responses to the challenges of climate change. Many arose and came into focus as the American University project unfolded during encounters between dozens of international scholars in a series of workshops held in Washington, DC, in the United States; New Delhi, India; Lima, Peru; and Port of Spain, Trinidad. A comparative examination of the multiple responses suggests that something may be happening in the aggregate. More case studies need to be produced in other cultures and regions of the world, but this volume collectively gives indication that the aggregate has at least the following ten characteristics. I have cited specific chapter authors in parentheses in what follows, but most of the themes are found in nearly every chapter of this volume. 1. Complicating Best Practices Discourse about religion and climate change frequently includes the question of best practices. What are the best practices any given religious tradition models for effective mitigation of climate change? It might be worth complicating this question, however, by asking what the question assumes. What is the nature of the problem and goal the question presumes? Is there a singularity shared by everyone? Best practices might include those that lead not only to a reduction of the use of fossil fuels but also something like getting a ritual right (Gagné and Gergan), or reestablishing more mutually beneficial relationships with the gods of the land (Drew, Haberman, Paerregaard, and Samson), or giving greater attention to proper moral conduct (Bertana and Rubow). Is the query about best practices for mitigation even the right question? There is a need to remain open to other questions while examining multiple perspectives on interpretive and behavioral responses to climate change. A major question that seems to emerge from these case studies is, Do these chapters document strategies that augment adaptation and mitigation in the face of the new challenges of climate change? Or are they records of how people are simply struggling to cope in a new and overwhelming situation with no viable solution in sight? Perhaps the answer is some combination of both, but in its extreme the latter view may suggest that there is no such thing as best practices, for we are doomed. At this point, nothing is certain. But in either case, religion continues to engage people in the big questions of life.

10

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

2. Double Agency A double agency appears in many religious accounts of the causes of climate change, or at least of what are often labeled climate-change-related weather events and disasters, though, of course, the double agency is articulated in different ways. The first is some negative type of human contribution (e.g., immoral behavior, environmental destruction), and the second a certain negative type of divine contribution (e.g., the punishing anger of the gods). The second type of agency is typically missing from secular climate-change discourse, wherein climate change is considered anthropogenic, or “caused by human beings.” How does one attend to this difference? This is an important question if more effective ways are to be found in working with local communities. Is a hybrid discourse on climate change possible? Clearly there are great differences between scientific approaches to climate change and religious perspectives, but in some cases, there also seems to be significant overlap that is worthy of further attention. Both religious and secular scientific discourses on climate change, for example, promote a moral imperative that calls for a more harmonious relationship with the other-than-human world. Words about the need for living in better “harmony with nature” are not out of place in scientific discourse on climate change, but they tend to remain well within secular limits.2 Religious discourse, on the other hand, is inclined to postulate a deified presence and agency in nature. Although it is expressed in terms of what I am calling the double agency in religious discourse as opposed to more scientific discourse (improving the moral character of the community and reestablishing beneficial relationships with the gods of the land versus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering carbon), in certain cases there appears to be some similarity when it comes to concrete action. Both discourses urge greater attention to our treatment of the more-than-human world. Sin is often regarded in sexual terms within Christianity (Bertana), but other religious traditions view sin more in terms of egoistic obsessions, excessive consumerism, disrespecting earth deities, and environmental abuse—especially those that see divinity embedded in the land itself, such as the indigenous and embodied religions of Himalayan Hinduism (Drew and Haberman), Andean religion (Paerregaard and Salas Carreño), and Mayan shamanism (Samson). Here are points of connection that could be developed; indeed, some of the essays in this volume document how this development is already taking place.

i n t roduct ion

11

3. Diminished Relationship with the Gods of the Land A general religious concept that appears in the majority of the chapters of this volume is what I would label “the gods of the land” (Gagné, Haberman, Salas Carreño, Samson; although the concept appears in almost all the chapters). This relates to some of the work being produced in anthropology that is identified with the ontological turn; examples would include Marisol de la Caneda (2015) and Eduardo Kohn (2013). There is a deep connection between these gods of the land or earth deities, human moral values, and the environment. These are divinities embedded in natural entities such as rivers, mountains, glaciers, springs, and trees or those linked with entire landscapes. Whether it be receding glaciers, raging rivers, or rising sea levels, the causes of these dramatic changes are frequently considered to be a divine response to a changing and problematic moral order and disregard for the sacredness of the land by humans. From a certain religious perspective, the problems that manifest with climate change are due to the breakdown of favorable relationships between humans, gods, and the land. This collapse of kinship with the gods of the land is understood to be both the cause of the problem and a sign of our inability to deal with it in any effective manner. The solution often expressed, then, is to repair the triangular relationship, reestablishing a reciprocal balance or a harmony with nature. We see here, then, that in addition to providing causal accounts of climate change, the double agency described earlier also involves notions of resolution and solvency. In some cases, the modes and practices through which communities restore their relationship to the gods of the land are likely to run parallel with efforts to lighten our environmental footprint. In that the cause of climate-change disasters is often understood to be that the gods of the land have been disrespected, ignored, lost, or forgotten, the remedy involves the restoration of mutually beneficial relationships with the gods of the land and more reverent attitudes and actions toward that land. Somewhat relatedly, I am struck by the words the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable: “It is surely no coincidence that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation to climate change. . . . For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors” (2017, 40). Such deliberations often include a critique of lifestyles of excessive consumption and the concomitant promotion of a simpler life. Although secular climate-change discourse does not recognize the notion of

12

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

“the gods of the land,” it does not necessarily reject it either, and certainly it does not reject the implied ethical message. Policy makers hoping to work with such communities might do well to look for potential areas of overlap, where a similar goal is supported through different rationales. In particular, greater attention needs to be given to possibilities within indigenous cultures, since many indigenous peoples have maintained a connection to the land throughout much of their history and continue to emphasize a tradition of living in harmony with nature. In short, a strong note among indigenous voices is the imperative to restore the lost traditions of respect for the Earth, for when we go against the gods of the land, we do ourselves great harm. 4. Vulnerability and Immunity The increasingly dramatic effects of climate change seem to be disrupting the spiritual or religious worlds of various societies (Gagné and Gergan). Besides being seen as a cause of disturbing weather events and seasonal changes, these occurrences are also regarded as resulting in a further loss of connection with the gods of the land. There is fear that the gods are becoming either unresponsive—they are abandoning us (Gergan and Salas Carreño)—or vindictive— they are becoming increasing angry with us (Bertana and Haberman). The effects of climate change are seen to be both a punishment and a wake-up call. In contrast, some communities strive to represent themselves as invulnerable, immune to catastrophic outcomes. “There is no need for worry; God is in control.” Is this a form of protective denial, or a form of empowerment that resists hopelessness in the face of the actions and messages of powerful countries located far away? Perhaps it is a perspective that preserves a theological tenet, provides comfort and strength in the face of much uncertainty, and enables people to feel that they have access to a form of alleviation more dependable than formidable distant countries. Religious narratives can supply a sense of hope, control, and meaning in the unpredictable and chaotic environment of the changing climate (Bertana). 5. Loss and Anxiety A new globalized economic form of development has now spread through most of the world. Heavily dependent on the burning of fossil fuels, it is a major contributor to climate change. But it is also a chief cause of the rupture of traditional ways of coping with challenging changes. Globalized developmental schemes have led to the loss of sacred spaces, community cohesion, traditional

13

i n t roduct ion

modes of life, and familiar landscapes. The emergent phenomenon of climate change is riddled with uncertainty and is the cause of much anxiety. Glaciers are melting rapidly (Drew) and ocean shorelines are being dramatically altered, forcing relocation (Bertana). Climate change threatens the ability of villagers to anticipate future scenarios that are central to their food systems and livelihoods (Kassam). Cultures that feel their traditional ways are under stress from these enormous changes often make efforts to revive them in order to relieve the anxiety caused by the changing climate. Some efforts are in response to what researchers are now calling ecological grief. Psychological methods of coping are being offered in much Western literature,3 but responses in other societies often entail religious lifeways and rituals. Doubts and anxiety about the effectiveness of such practices, however, are also increasing, as are concerns about the viability of their recovery. Thus, the shattering of traditional ways is seen as both the cause of a disruptive climate as well as a major root of the inability to address it. Ritual has been used in many societies to negotiate anxiety; but some communities are now beginning to wonder whether the problems brought about by the changing climate are too big for traditional ways of coping with them (Gagné). People sense a need to bring back right relations with the gods of the land, but how can they achieve it now with the disruptions that accompany new developments and a rapidly changing climate? At the very time when the need to communicate with the gods is greater than ever, recent developments have broken down the ways of accomplishing that communication. The result is greater uncertainty and anxiety and growing dread that established ways of dealing with the challenges caused by a changing climate may no longer be possible (Gergan). Here is an effect of climate change on religious lifeworlds that is for the most part absent from the list of climate disturbances. It is both a form of cultural damage and the loss of efficacious cultural tools. Such situations call for a response that is religious by nature—and far outside the boundaries of standard science. 6. The Pathos and Empowerment of Self-Blame Sadly, those who have benefited the least from the activities that have caused climate change are often among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall (2016) call this a feature of “environmental colonialism,” asserting, “Climate change is the result of global processes that were neither caused nor can be mitigated by the inhabitants of the majority of climate-sensitive world regions now experiencing the most unprecedented

14

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

change” (11). Moreover, there is a cruel irony that those affected most by the changes in climate that have been caused primarily by wealthy nations have the least resources for adaptation. But perhaps most poignant is the phenomenon of self-blame, which is well documented in virtually every chapter of this volume. For the locals, the retreat of glaciers in the Andes implies the culpability of the Andean people themselves (Salas Carreño); villagers in the mountains of Afghanistan believe they are being punished with a changing climate because of the ongoing violence and war (Kassam); in the central Indian Himalaya, climate disruption indicates moral misbehavior and environmental abuse by those who live in and visit the region (Drew and Haberman); the rising sea levels forcing resettlement is understood to be the result of immorality in the local community (Bertana); and the destructive cyclones that hit the Cook Islands are considered to be God’s punishment for local sinful acts (Rubow). The selfblame is heartrending because the people blaming themselves often turn out to be people with a very small ecological footprint, contributing only minor amounts to global warming. On the other hand, there is once again something empowering about this perspective in that self-blame involves the assumption that there is something manageable and close at hand that can be done. Here is perhaps one of the greatest differences between scientific accounts and religious ones. Secular climate-change discourse has it that powerful forces on the other side of the globe are really to blame for local disturbances and that there is very little an island community in the South Pacific or a mountain community in Peru or India can do about it. Self-blame offers an explanation that is at least somewhat empowering. Might this phenomenon be seen as a means of psychological survival? Such a religious understanding may allow people to maintain some sense of control over the challenges they face with climate change (Bertana). 7. Conditional Hope on the Brink It is quite common these days to encounter apocalyptic warnings in scientific writing about climate change. In 1992, for example, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” which was signed by more than seventeen hundred scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences (Kendall 1992). Incorporated into this document was a dire warning that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of the current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society

i n t roduct ion

15

and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know” (1). In other words, the very future of humanity hangs in the balance. Importantly, the scientists urged substantial cutback of greenhouse gas emissions and the phasing out of fossil fuels, the reduction of deforestation, changes in agricultural production, and the reversal of the trend of collapsing biodiversity. If fundamental changes in our relationship with the environment are made, all might be well; if not, the scientists foretell an Earth unable to support the complex web of life. The statement significantly includes an urgent call for “a new ethic” for care of the Earth. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the warning, “A Second Notice” was produced by the Alliance of World Scientists and signed by more than fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries (Ripple et al. 2017). The second statement increased the urgency of the first considerably, for the scientists found that very little headway had been made toward implementing the strong recommendations of the first report. The second statement too includes an if clause and ends with a call for widespread change, because biological collapse is near and “time is running out” (1028). The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on global warming repeats much of this ominous warning (IPCC 2018). Apocalyptic warnings are likewise to be found in the religious narratives throughout this volume. Narikoso villagers report that the rising sea levels will “chase them up the hill” if they continue to sin (Bertana); Hindus in the central Himalaya warn that if humans do not heed the gods’ stormy warnings and return to a more beneficial relationship with the natural world, then kaliyug’s gruesome end is near (Haberman); and some Quechua people of the Peruvian Andes avow that if the glaciers are not respectfully cared for, they will all melt, and life as they know it will be finished (Paerregaard); or the Last Judgment will arrive (Salas Carreño). The if clauses in all these warnings that give voice to a possible positive outcome are important to note: if the divine warnings are heeded the rising seas will retreat, the storms and menacing floods will cease and the glaciers will return and provide a chance for a better future. Despite the religious tones in some scientific doomsday warnings, religious narratives are significantly different from scientific discourse on climate change. Yet both agree that the changing climate is a sure sign that a dreadful end may be in sight, and both include a moral imperative that involves an if clause: if we change our behavior, then there is still hope. Although the understanding of the nature of this change differs in religious and scientific narratives, one still might question whether what is shared in the collective moral imperatives is worthy of further consideration.

16

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

8. Relationship between Climate-Change Science and Religious Worldviews Research shows that people’s perceptions of climate change are largely shaped by cultural ideas that are often at variance with or even in tension with the science-based global discourse on climate change (which itself comes out of certain culturally constructed ideas). But the story is often more complicated than this. Some communities may resist the global discourse in favor of local religious accounts (Bertana), and in other contexts the relationship between scientific discourse and local religious traditions may be more complex and mixed (Rubow). Ethnographic studies demonstrate how indigenous cosmologies, local morality, and national politics intertwine with global discourses on climate change, generating locally specific accounts of the changing climate (Gergan). Despite the appropriation of global climate change as a category within local discourse, most local interpretations remain informed by religious perspectives. Even when religious actors report an understanding and acceptance of the science on climate change, it is often the case that divine agency remains predominant in their explanations (Drew). As already mentioned, a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate a religious connection between human morality and environmental degradation. Climate scientists would agree with this general assessment, but of course the way it is articulated differs greatly. Again, the question pertains to the degree and kind of overlap there may be. Some religious traditions define the problematic human behavior in terms of sexual immorality, but many others do so in terms of environmental misbehavior. Especially in the latter case, there does seem to be a greater degree of shared aims between religious and secular discourse. Is there a middle ground for productive interaction between the two on the differences that remain? Can the “anger of the gods” map onto climate science in a significant fashion? What is the range of possibilities with regard to the relationship between religious and scientific explanations? Case studies in this volume suggest that any fruitful outcome will involve a wide assortment of local and culturally determined options. 9. Religious Change Climate change is causing much else to change, and this certainly includes religion. The ethnographic documentation of the changes in various regions is an important and particular contribution this volume makes to the emerging field of religion and climate change. Indeed, a major claim of this volume is that climate change seems to be acting as a powerful driver of religious

17

i n t roduct ion

transformations and is compelling religious adaptation. Such a claim should provoke serious reflection on the relationship between religious particularities and the planetary ecosystem at a time when the concept of the “Anthropocene era” wields great power in the environmental humanities. Religion had a conspicuous presence at the climate-change march that drew some four hundred thousand people to the streets of New York in September 2014; religious communities are preaching about climate change, installing solar panels on their buildings, and making other environmentally related changes; every major religious tradition has produced a declaration on climate change; and the chief IPCC climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri wrote in his farewell letter that protection of the planet was his “dharma and religion.” In this volume, we get a glimpse of the kind of changes that are now underway within local communities in the global South. Some of these changes are happening at a theological level—gods that used to bless are increasingly perceived as punishing (Haberman)—whereas others are changes in religious action: people are interacting with divinized glaciers in new ways (Salas Carreño and Paerregaard) and the efficacy of traditional rituals is being questioned (Gagné). What does it tell us about religion that climate change can change it in significant ways? Religion is malleable; and religious traditions are always changing in the face of historical challenges. Because the trials of climate change are among the most daunting humanity has ever faced, one would be mistaken to think that religion will not change along with the changing climate or that it will not find an important role to play in the variety of ways climate disruptions will be addressed. 10. Religion and Its Contradictions The authors of the ten chapters in this volume work with a wide understanding of religion. Although the word appears in every chapter, there has been no attempt to define it with any precision,4 for, even within this small sampling of investigations into religion and climate change, we can observe the very complex nature of religion, sometimes even within one small region (Rubow and Samson). Just as it is difficult to get a bead on climate change, it is also difficult to get a bead on religion, for both are indistinct and shape-shifting. Religion comforts—no worry, God is in charge—and religion disturbs—the gods are angry, perhaps even abandoning us. Religion is opposed to science, and religion stands alongside science. Religion leads to denial and blockage of effective action with regard to climate change, and religion motivates an awakening that supports effective action. Religion gets people deeper into the natural world, and religion encourages people to escape the natural world. Religion promotes

18

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

environmental care as a high value, and religion discourages environmental concerns by prioritizing some other realm as more important. We encounter religion in these essays as a set of beliefs, a variety of practices, and the core of community identity. Sometimes a religious tradition maintains hard boundaries around itself, and in other circumstances we find a blending of religious traditions. Although both religion and climate change are difficult to firmly grasp, the essays in this volume demonstrate that they are bound together in significant ways. Tracking them jointly will be increasingly important with each passing day.

k So where is the hope or basis for global cooperation in addressing the challenges of climate change? Perhaps the hybrid cases documented in this volume and the new forms of local discourse being worked out in them give some indication of the direction cooperation might take. By definition, nothing certain can be said at this time, but I find myself called to highlight the words found in the final paragraph of Karim-Aly Kassam’s chapter: “I cannot think of anything more sacred than hopeful action that makes humanity aware that we are inextricably rooted to the planet.” I have tried to identify several comparative themes that arise for me while reading these chapters together, but I acknowledge that my summary is far from exhaustive. I encourage the reader to look for more in your own reading of this collective volume. David L. H a ber m a n is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He is author of River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India, and Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan. Not e s 1. Poul Pedersen (1995) cautions against “explanations which assume that values and norms directly determine behaviour” (264). It is important to remember that many factors come into play to determine human behavior. Nonetheless, religious values do have a significant impact on shaping human attitudes toward the natural world. Pedersen himself embraces a middle path: “I do not say that values are unimportant for the way people relate to their environment” (265).

19

i n t roduct ion

2. For example, the United Nations has organized several dialogues on harmony with nature within the General Assembly that address climate change. 3. Much of this work is connected with the field of ecopsychology and is either spearheaded by or associated with Joanna Macy (see Macy and Brown 2014). It aims to embrace the pain and grief associated with ecological loss to open the heart and break through the psychic numbness that keeps us from connecting with others and reaching out in more effectual action. 4. Although we have intentionally left the definitional boundaries of religion open, most of the authors discuss religion roughly in terms of a set of culturally shaped beliefs and practices related to spiritual or superhuman beings.

R efer ence s Crate, Susan A., and Mark Nuttall, eds. 2016. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. New York: Routledge. Deane-Drummond, Celia, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, eds. 2017. Religion in the Anthropocene. Eugene, OR: Cascade. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gardner, Gary. 2002. Invoking the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in the Quest for a Sustainable World. Worldwatch Institute Paper 164. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute. Gerten, Dieter, and Sigurd Bergmann, eds. 2013. Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles. London: Bloomsbury. Ghosh, Amitav. 2017. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haberman, David L. 2020. Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan. New York: Oxford University Press. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2018. Special Report on Global Warming. Geneva, Switz.: IPCC. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/. Jenkins, Willis, Evan Berry, and Luke Beck Kreider. 2018. “Religion and Climate Change.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43:85–108. Kendall, Henry W. 1992. 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default /files/attach/2017/11/World%20Scientists%27%20Warning%20to %20Humanity%201992.pdf. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

20

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Macy, Joanna, and Molly Brown. 2014. Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. Gabriola Island, Can.: New Society. Naess, Arne. 1973. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movement: A Summary. Inquiry 16:95–100. Northcott, Michael S. 2013. A Political Theology of Climate Change. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Pedersen, Poul. 1995. “Nature, Religion and Cultural Identity: The Religious Environmental Paradigm.” In Asian Perceptions of Nature, edited by Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland, 258–76. Richmond, UK: Curzon. Ripple, William J., Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Mauro Galetti, Mohammed Alamgir, Eileen Crist, Mahmoud I. Mahmoud, and William F. Laurance. 2017. “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.” BioScience 67 (12): 1026–28. Tucker, Mary Evelyn. 2015. “Can Science and Religion Respond to Climate Change?” Zygon 50 (4): 949–61. Veldman, Robin Globus, Andrew Szasz and Randolph Haluza-DeLay. 2014. “Social Science, Religions, and Climate Change.” In How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations, edited by Robin Globus Veldman, Andrew Szasz and Randolph Haluza-DeLay, 3–19. London: Routledge. White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767):1203–7. Wilkinson, Katharine K. 2012. Between God and Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Part I

RECOMBINANT RESPONSES

one

k

CLIMATE CHANGE NEVER TRAVELS ALONE Oceanian Stories

Cecilie Rubow, University of Copenhagen Over the past deca de, r esea rcher s in climate-change science have repeatedly invited the social sciences to take part in the investigation of how climate change affects people around the world. In scientific communities it is accepted that climate change is cocreated by human activities and physical processes in the natural environment and that widely dispersed social action is essential to mitigate and adapt to its effects. At the same time, most studies and discussions about communities’ responses to climate change seem to revolve around categories like increased sea level rise, perceptions, institutions, or religious beliefs as if they were separate things. The natural sciences are expected to provide the hard facts and the social sciences an understanding of the soft stuff of culture and society, of which religious beliefs are usually considered the most amorphous and unpredictable, by any standards. Much work has been done by social science scholars as a result of the material turn to conceptualize and analyze how the social and the material are entangled (Latour 1993, Descola 2006, Hastrup 2014), which means that hard facts and softer knowledge enter the investigation with quasi objects, quasi subjects, hybridity, and other awkward mixes of collectivities across the sociomaterial. In this chapter, the investigation is ethnographic, and while staying close to the ethnography, I will focus on entanglements of religious beliefs, islands, cyclones, and climate change. The obvious conclusion about climate-change adaptation and alleviation is that expecting a simple social solution is no less naive than relying on an immediate technological solution. As others have pointed out, neither top-down, policy-led implementation of adaptation nor glossing over the diversity of communities and priorities will enhance the chances for

23

24

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

the implementation or success of adaptive strategies (Walshe et al. 2018). But to incorporate the diversity of social and cultural frameworks, among them religious perspectives, into adaptation strategies is a way of increasing complexity and multiplying the number of problems to be solved. Accordingly, this chapter will ask whether the eventual greening of religious beliefs and practices could facilitate changes in environmental attitudes and behavior. It also explores how some aspects of religion can be identified as obstacles to addressing climate change while others are considered to be means of promoting greater awareness and action for dealing with it. On a more positive note, the stories shared here are populated with voices suggesting that responses to climate change have just started. New versions of these responses with new repertoires (that is, the objects and subjects taking part in the enactments) seem to emerge in trading zones, which are, according to Galison (1997), intermediate grounds where people can meet and interact, even when broader ideas and procedures clash. Thus, emerging responses to climate change in trading zones tend to be of a somewhat awkward composition, as if they were thrown together in unfortunate circumstances. They are, nevertheless, new approximated approaches to a seemingly intractable problem. C ycl on e s a n d Pr ay er s I park my motorcycle outside Rongo’s rectory. Rongo is planning to retire within the next few years after a long career as minister in the Cook Islands Christian Church. If it were up to Rongo, he would return to his home island. “It’s paradise,” he says. “You can live from fish, mango, and coconuts.” As every other minister in this church, however, he is regularly—normally every fourth year—transferred to a new congregation in the Cook Islands or in New Zealand or Australia. Thus, he has lived on atolls in the far north with fewer than one thousand inhabitants and on the southern volcanic islands, among them Rarotonga, with around seventeen thousand inhabitants. I have met Rongo a few times before, and he has agreed to have a conversation about environmental problems and the possible role of the church in that context. Today he is preparing to paint the veranda, but he invites me to sit down amid covered furniture and other possessions, while family members of many ages occasionally pass by. I have come to know the Cook Islands Christian Church as a church of what is often termed classical Christianity in Oceania—that is, biblical and conservative. At present, it counts around half the population among its membership, a number that is declining as a result of both secularization and the

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

25

proliferation of many new churches. I have looked forward to this conversation, eager to know more about ministers’ and congregations’ reactions after five cyclones hit the islands in 2005. What I have gathered from conversations and local climate-change reports has led me to conclude that these exceptional cyclones were for many Cook Islanders the first sign that climate change is real. To my surprise, on this particular day, Rongo starts out by saying that he is not doing any theology in relation to the environment—and that the Cook Islands Christian Church does not play any role concerning climate change. It is not a priority. Rongo quickly qualifies this statement by adding that ecotheology has not been developed locally: he knows of theologians elsewhere in the Pacific who have worked in that area, especially in Fiji, but nobody on these islands seems interested. He thinks that pastors will be inclined to say that the phenomena environmentalists attribute to climate change are actually the works of God. But he has the feeling that pressure might come from the congregations; as far as he remembers, he says, one congregation actually organized a prayer week with the environment as the main topic some time ago. This is my third field trip to Rarotonga, the largest of the fifteen islands forming the Cook Islands archipelago. I am coming from overseas and have been doing fieldwork with an almost constant feeling of uneasiness, which I think I share, at least on some occasions—as I will show later on—with my interlocutors. As a northern European anthropologist interested in environmental issues and how theologies and broader metaphysical and ethical engagements take part in local understandings of climate change, I look for people who share my interests in some way or another. I am carrying with me the presupposition that climate change is a confluence of real, long-term, and not always readily discernible processes that are deeply entangled with social life. Therefore, climatic changes may look very different in different people’s lives. It is, I assume, thinking with Annemarie Mol’s (2002) concepts, “enacted” differently, and with different “repertoires”: scientific numbers and concepts, experiences from childhood, the Bible, awareness workshops, fact sheets, hopes and worries, and so forth. During my fieldwork trips, this hypothesis, with all its flexibility, has been confirmed often enough to feed my ethnographic zeal. My strategy is to start conversations without mentioning climate change or religion in order to avoid pushing my interlocutors in those directions. Both topics can narrow the perspective too much when you are searching for an understanding of concrete, lived enactments. It is not surprising that the effect is a sense of getting lost again and again in too many lives and stories of lagoons, cyclones, childhoods,

26

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

newspaper stories becoming truisms, truisms becoming riddles, proverbs, longings, and sorrows, spawning many new questions for the ethnographer trying to take note of everything. Of course, sitting now on Rongo’s veranda, I wonder why he, after our first few conversations, agreed in the first place to talk with me about theology and the environment when he dismisses theology’s role in the environment as unimportant. As we start talking about the islands and his vocation as a minister, I feel lost again, but Rongo seems to be on track. He talks about cyclones—the one in 1967 that blew off their roof and where he, only a child, carried his blind mother to a safe place. And there was cyclone Sally in 1987, on the atoll Penrhyn, which lasted for three days, when he secured a boat right on the veranda, packed with dry clothes and other necessities, covered by a tarpaulin. “That’s what you do on the outer islands. It’s atolls; there are no hills to flee to,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do. You can’t decide what Mother Nature does.” Rongo was praying, everybody was praying, and they were heard, he says, because no lives were lost. We talk about the five cyclones that hit Cook Islands in 2005. Rongo understands cyclones as “God’s punishment.” He claims that “they do a lot of good things. They clean up the sea, the shore, the island, and the people. It is a punishment for sinful acts—not that you know whose acts; only God knows.” Rongo does not want to scare people, he says. “The role of the pastor and the church is to help. To go down on the knees and pray.” As I gather from this and other conversations with pastors, the notion of climate change is first and foremost a foreign discourse, supported by some people on the island, the environmentalists, who generally worry too much about the human impact on nature. Rongo and my pastoral interlocutors seem not to be at all convinced that climate is changing due to human impact. God, and with Him Mother Nature’s power, is far too strong, and the pastors are more confident about looking for nature’s order in the scriptures than in unstable weather patterns. “When I read the Bible,” another senior pastor explained me, “it says that in the age before Noah, people lived longer, sometimes more than eight hundred years. Why so? We don’t know, but it’s perhaps partly because of the diet, partly because they weren’t as exposed to the sun as we are.” Those were literally darker times in that age, he explains. Before the flood, in the age of innocence, scripture says that there were two compartments of water, one in the sky, released in the flood, and one compartment in the ground. From that perspective, “man’s history, the one we know of now, is very short.” The pastor goes on to explain that, according to this understanding, we now live

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

27

in the age of grace (following a theological scheme known as dispensationalism), to be followed by the age of millennium. “Is this also what you teach in church?” I ask, quite intrigued by this literalist reading and unsure about its standing in the wider community. The pastor answers that it has to be kept simpler in church but that it is taught at the local theological college. I add that it is fascinating that people live with so many different conceptions of time and futurity and wonder how this may play out more concretely. “The future has already begun,” he answers, referring, I presume, according to his exegesis, to Christ’s Second Coming. According to Rongo’s own observations along the shores he knows and the fields where he cultivates taro and greens, he notes remarkable changes. For instance, in the previous year, there were very few mangoes on his home island. Some people say that is because so many people have moved from the island (primarily to Rarotonga, New Zealand, and Australia), Rongo tells me. I have learned from other islanders that they ascribe changes in fruiting patterns to both natural cyclic changes and global warming. Other pastors note that the seasons and the weather patterns have changed; a senior pastor was already told so by his grandmother, he says. Before, the cyclones came with a sevenyear interval, and it was possible to predict their arrival, because breadfruit was plentiful and the leaves at the tops of new banana palms were curling up before the storm. Now, too, I am told, the nights are colder, some days are very hot, and animals are moving from one habitat to another. But Rongo’s best guess is that the mango trees do not fruit because nobody comes and sits under the trees anymore. He talks to his plants, he says; he prays and sings for them. “If you’re not doing so, the caterpillars think it’s their garden.” Those mango trees are used to people. I have come to understand the cyclones, the flying roof, the prayers, and mango trees in Rongo’s stories as a way of explaining, to the outsider, that the world he lives in is not exactly “an environment” but first and foremost God’s creation, permeated by His power and His story with the world. Rongo’s surroundings, his islands, and the sea where he catches fish for the family are neither explicable nor meaningfully understood as an ecosystem or as “nature” ruled by physical laws and regularities. It’s more important, I gather, that the islands are endowed with the spirituality of the people and their history with God. As other researchers have remarked in relation to Oceania, on the face of it, this point of view does not fit with scientific enactments of climate change. Neither does the scientific version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

28

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Change fit well when communicated with fact sheets and awareness programs educating islanders about the logic of global warming. This observation sometimes brings scholars of climate-change adaptation to the conclusion that biblical beliefs lead to what they call maladaptive practices (e.g., Weir, Dovey, and Orcherton 2017). Thus, religious perceptions, along with lack of resources and proper institutions, are seen as “barriers to adaptation” (Betzold 2015, 485). Keeping closer to the ethnographic mood in this chapter, the geographer Nunn (2017), who has worked in innumerable Pacific island communities, suggests turning the perspective 180 degrees around. He states, “My research suggests that one reason for the failure of external interventions for climate-change adaptation in Pacific Island communities is the wholly secular nature of their messages. Among spiritually engaged communities, these secular messages can be met with indifference or even hostility if they clash with the community’s spiritual agenda” (2017). Thus, after reminding the reader about the colonial history in the Pacific, Nunn’s plea is that “more is to be done”; church leaders are “an important potential target for agencies aiming to make a real difference in how Pacific Islanders cope with climate change.” The next time I meet Rongo, he has a report he wants to show me. It was given to him at an environmental workshop on biodiversity that he attended the day before. He is often invited to say the opening and closing prayer in such meetings, and he finds the meetings interesting: some of the things the environmentalists do he finds quite good. It makes good sense, he says, to clean up the island and the beaches—and to protect the endangered species, for instance—just as the United States and the rest of the great nations overseas should make an effort to stop the pollution. Rongo also scorns his fellow islanders for importing far too much rubbish to the island: fast food, malnourishing soft drinks—all creating heaps of waste. Actually, he says, he includes more and more of what he’s learned from the environmental meetings in his sermons. Unfortunately, I was not quick enough to ask what prayers Rongo said at that meeting, but I have attended other environmental workshops where pastors give thanks for the day among silent and attentive groups of people, secular and Christian, all with bowed heads, and remind them about “God’s ownership of the heavens, the earth, and everything in it” and “man’s stewardship and accountability toward men and nature.” And I have noted chairs responding, “Thanks to the reverend for reminding us about the great responsibility we owe to the environment, a great challenge beyond our control.” Thus, across all the different perceptions of climate change in conservative and biblical Christian church communities and among environmentalists, whom we will meet in the next story, agendas of prayers, protecting endangered species, and

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

29

cleaning the lagoon are also traded, thereby creating places for at least partially shared concerns. What I would like to highlight as ethnographically noteworthy in this story is how it can help one grasp that enactments of climate change and adaptation processes do not comprise religious perceptions or beliefs (of an almighty God and, from a secular perspective, harboring a perhaps suspect inherent fatalism) versus adequate scientific knowledge and effective adaptation strategies. Through the concept of enactment, we can think of practices addressing environmental degradation and climate change as both materially and socially created (see Mol 2002). Thus, climate change is much more than a discourse and consequently more than just a scientific fact traveling the world on its own. At once, the physical and social environments are reworked in new enactments. In the Cook Islands, Rongo and his fellow pastors were not inclined to take up a leadership role in advocating for climate change as a discourse, but that does not mean that they were not daily and deeply engaged with the living world around them. They were much too engaged with otherworldly powers, of course, from a secular perspective. Nunn’s plea (or prayer) for a reconciliation between secular and religious efforts seems to weave between, on the one hand, hard-won experience during a long scientific engagement with environmental change and frustrating experiences with adaptation programs in the Pacific and, on the other hand, a good-hearted utopian hope for people to meet and speak one language, merging the spiritual and scientific agendas. Imagine yourself on Rongo’s veranda or sitting under a mango tree, translating back and forth between emission levels, sea-level-rise scenarios, listening caterpillars, and God’s eternal power. Such an exercise is not just transmitting clear messages or translations among different agendas, discourses, or worldviews; it is the beginning of awkward enactments in a trading zone. As I will show in the next story, even without religion in the equation, in specific lagoons and in the geosciences, climate change is a multiplicity that is constantly reworked in new versions, in different settings, and with different repertoires. Consequently, I argue, it is important to notice the differences between enactments, and how new enactments—perhaps with only minute changes—are created through certain repertoires such as prayers and workshops. T h e Soci a l Li fe of L agoon Facts Muri Lagoon is a spectacular South Seas lagoon with white beaches, sparkling water, coconut palms, a reef, and coral heads encircled by multitudes of colorful

30

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

fish. It is admired, loved, and considered the most popular beach in Rarotonga, an island with more than one hundred thousand tourists visiting every year. To nature lovers, it is a paradise, a pristine lagoon. Or, at least, it was that a decade ago. Now, more and more often, community members in Muri, consisting of around two hundred households, worry about the condition of the lagoon. They complain, among other things, about erosion, sedimentation, algae bloom, murky sand, and dead coral reefs. “It’s a national disaster,” or so it is described in the local press. One day I visit Peter, a New Zealander educated in marine sciences and the owner of a shop in the tourist sector. He is busy. He looks after his young child and the business, and yet he kindly tries to explain to me his understanding of the situation. In the back of my mind, I wonder whether residents link the cases of erosion in the lagoon to sea-level rise. The sea-level rise measured by satellite altimeters since 1993 shows that the mean sea-level rise in these waters is around 4 millimeters a year (ABM and CSIRO 2014, 26), in comparison with the mean sea-level rise of 1–2 millimeters per year over the course of the twentieth century (Dickinson 2009). Climate models simulate “a rise of between approximately 5–15 cm by 2030, with increases of 20–60 cm indicated by 2090 under the higher emission scenarios” (ABM and CSIRO 2014, 37). But again, I’m careful not to ask about this right away, unsure about what these figures mean to the local people and how they are translated to this island and to Muri Lagoon. I have, however, attended a meeting setting up the Environment Forum (a three-day-long workshop held on Rarotonga in July 2010), where Peter stated that he does not see a climate-change scenario in which islands will drown from sea-level rise. As long as islands are healthy, he said, the protective reefs will probably be able to grow and thus cope with the rising sea. Today, we start talking about the many beaches around Rarotonga and the changes he has observed over the past ten years or so. The first thing he remarks on is the local habit of removing stones and coral that the waves continuously bring to the shore—and boulders too—which reach the gardens and roads in storms and cyclones. Doing so is a really bad idea, he says, because it is precisely the material needed to build up the beaches. These islands are alive, he says; the sand is made from the coral and the fish and the constant movement of materials. If the beaches are alive, they will change, and certain seasonal and long-term patterns will evolve. The greatest problem is the way in which people interfere all the time, he continues: the landowners and people leasing governmental and private grounds. In the tourist resort areas (there are around forty tourist-related businesses in Muri), for instance, they change the beach

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

31

profile in order to make the beach more useful. Clearly, he says, interference makes the beaches more fragile and more prone to erosion, such as when the big boulders from inland are placed at the beach or in harbors in order to protect land, buildings, and other constructions. People call in a contractor and place large quantities of boulders, resulting in completely inappropriate protection devices, with the effect that the neighboring beaches are eroded. Completely overlooked, Peter states, is how the island is first and foremost eroded from local malpractice. Peter complains that these local habits are quite widespread. At workshops; communal Lagoon Days (dedicated to the cleaning of the lagoon); in the local press; and in conversations, chats, and speeches, people lament the local treatment of the island. Most vocal are the active “environmentalists,” as Rongo labels them, but there is also a much wider circle of people. The obvious historical mistakes of using explosives for fishing and of removing tons of sand and dead corals for construction work are easy targets. Among the subtler ones are, I am told by an engineer, the misconceptions of the relation between the energy in waves and in the currents, leading people to misinterpret the erosion and accretion patterns of the beaches. Or, as I’m asked rhetorically by a local biologist, who will understand and accept the crucial importance of (uneconomic) wetlands to the whole marine ecosystem? “We need more knowledge”; “it has to be researched better”; “we need more regulation and more policing”; “people are ignorant”; “we lack facts”—residents and governmental officers tell each other. “The density of the tourist accommodations is too high”; “the sewage system is outdated”; and “far too many nutrients from agriculture and polluting detergents reach the fragile lagoons, causing algae blooms.” As I learn from the Environment Forum and from reports written by external experts about the condition of Muri Lagoon over the years, the list of environmental disasters identified during the past decades as being caused by local malpractices is indeed long. One notable effect is that the island, more and more, slowly but steadily, has been conceptualized and practiced as “an environment”: as an inprinciple strong natural ecosystem with many riches but now endangered by a large population and a growing tourist industry and only slowly regulated by the political and practical infrastructure. In a series of interviews that a member of a local environmental organization and I conducted with senior residents, we were told many stories about Rarotonga before the island became such “an environment.” There were remarkable stories about large schools of young fish swarming the lagoon, each fish with its own season, of high beaches with loads of sand, rich vegetation

32

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

on the upper part of the beach, sparkling turquoise water, and regular trade winds from the southeast for weeks and weeks. There were stories about the community’s fishing parties, horse-riding competitions on the beach, and the first odd Europeans living in small huts. Stories of a stabler past were vested with a sense of nostalgia, whereas the present patterns seemed impossible to interpret: an unstable environment careening in weird directions. As one of the keen—and indeed very worried—members of the local environmental organization remarked, “The fruit trees go crazy all year round. It used to be seasonal. We knew the seasons for the oranges, the chestnuts, and the mangoes. Now we seem to get mangoes, oranges, and lemons all year round, even starfruits, and breadfruit. On the one hand it is good, since we get fruit all year. On the other hand, the change is frightening, scary. Watching the documentaries on climate change, in Tuvalu, for instance, you are imagining it will be like that one day, especially at the outer islands.” According to Peter, it is not at all clear what is happening on the island, especially in the lagoon he knows so well from many years of sailing, swimming, and diving. “These islands are very dynamic,” he states. The government and the community have managed to deal with only a few of the problems, and he, like many other Rarotongans I met, observed that climate change is only the latest of a long series of environmental problems. Peter’s conclusion this afternoon is that “climate change is not well researched, nobody offers it attention here—and nothing happens.” And by implication, as I understood it, on these islands, it is extremely difficult to act on climate change. As I gather from conversations with many other Cook Islanders—the local meteorologist, governmental officers, people in the business sector, and others—to them this means that the present and future effects of climate change are debatable and diffuse and, on top of that, practically impossible to act on locally. “We have to wait and see what will happen,” I’m often told. Thus, climate change is understood as another environmental problem, the latest bad news on a long list the islands have to cope with. Simultaneously, islanders also sometimes express with frustration, or sometimes with a less energized despondency, that climate change is a global problem with long-term causes and effects. It is thus difficult to calibrate concrete efforts to prepare to local scales and immediate time frames. It is difficult even for islanders with intimate knowledge of the beaches and lagoons to translate some of the main scientific projections of climate change in the region—cyclone activity and sea-level rise—into local effects for these dynamic islands and the wider environment. As previously mentioned, Cook

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

33

Islands was hit by five cyclones in 2005, four of them reaching category five (the highest rating of severity) in one extreme season, causing no casualties but leaving the impression that something unusual was taking place. A complete list of cyclones compiled by geographer Fes de Scally after this catastrophic season showed that between 1820 and 2006, the average number of cyclones per year in the Cook Islands was 0.8. A closer analysis of the intensity and frequency of the cyclones over time led de Scally (2008) to conclude that the number of seasons with three or more cyclones had increased since the mid-1970s. De Scally also notes, however, that the apparent increase is “almost certainly attributable to the beginning of satellite monitoring of cyclones.” (2008, 455). As a result, de Scally adds, in accordance with other meteorological sources, “these increases cannot be attributed to global warming without a longer record and a better understanding of the role of cyclones in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean.” As I have shown at greater length elsewhere (Rubow 2013, 2018), cyclones and islands do not exist solely as bracketed, isolated, or self-contained physical phenomena. The havoc created when cyclones smash into islands—when cyclones and islands are hurled and whirled together—illustrates a fundamental entanglement of natural and social processes. Moreover, even though the rise in present and projected sea levels has raised global concern that Oceanian islands will soon be swamped, scientific studies confirm that the land masses of islands among those considered to be most endangered have so far seemed to keep up. A study of twenty-seven atolls by Webb and Kench (2010) showed that most of the atolls had either grown or remained unchanged. A more recent study of the 101 islands that Tuvalu comprises, comparing aerial photographs spanning several decades with recent satellite imagery, confirms, maybe somewhat surprisingly, that islands can persist on reefs under the present rates of sea-level rise and that “documented changes in islands throughout Tuvalu are considered to be driven by environmental rather than anthropogenic processes” (Kench, Ford, and Owen 2018). However, the authors caution that it is unclear whether the islands will continue to maintain their size at faster rates of sea-level rise. Climate projections themselves illustrate the thrown-togetherness of cyclones and islands as composite objects, assembled as they are from simulations, figures, photographs, and scientific models of weather phenomena. Of course, science is a great way to disentangle phenomena and isolate certain processes, among them the ways in which cyclones in many instances seem to build up islands by depositing large quantities of sediment, while at the same time they may erode important inhabited areas. Apart from scientific riddles

34

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

about the specific nature of present and future changes, we can add, on each and every island, diverse social factors (which are, of course, already there) and see how quickly everything is entangled in a manner that makes projections, choices, and solutions very difficult. How are the predicted intensification of cyclones and sea-level rise translated into the lived environment? Even when religious prophecies are excluded from consideration, and cyclones are not seen as God’s punishment for swimming in the sea instead of going to church on Sundays—or worse sins—the cyclones and accelerated sea-level rise amount to very unstable and porous phenomena, open to both manifold interpretations and many types of action. Do you secure a boat on the veranda or flee to a hill in your car packed with the community’s most precious books when a cyclone builds up? As a landowner in Muri Lagoon, do you look for funds and materials to build another seemingly robust seawall? Do you engage yourself in the efforts of the local government and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in updating yet another disaster management plan, join an international NGO aiming at raising awareness among the greatest CO2 sinners, or pursue your dreams about moving your family to higher ground? Are you happy, despite the associated property damage, that the latest storm seemed to flush the lagoon so effectively with fresh seawater that the algae bloom disappeared? Are you seeking inspiration in some of the traditional ways of predicting bad weather and managing food security? Do you ask the pastor to come to your awareness workshop and hope for his support even though you think the church is not active enough? These actions all represent some of the repertoires of enactments of cyclones and islands. They go in many directions and can produce tensions among those having diverse lived experiences, but they are not necessarily more awkward than external interventions promoting adaptation to climate change, such as proposals to build safer, climate-change-proofed harbors or to develop resilience through blogs, climate-change workshops, consultations, and meetings in Nadi, Copenhagen, and Bonn. The group of environmentalists (as Rongo labeled them) I met in Muri Lagoon seemed not at odds with their own understanding when they gathered their forces around initiatives that could protect the lagoon from the community’s negative impact. They and their governmental and international partners worked on upgrading the sewage system, campaigned against using polluting detergents, and made critical assessments of their own—and other locals’— waste disposal habits. At an opening of an exhibition on Muri Lagoon, an environmental officer who had traveled to the United Nations Climate Change

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

35

Conferences for years and convened countless awareness workshops and local climate-change assessments summarized it like this: “Keeping the lagoon healthy may turn out to be the best way to prepare for climatic changes.” (See also Rubow 2015.) Thus, focusing on the local, current human impact in this particular environment was perhaps the best way of preparing for the unknown future during accelerated global warming: a great challenge in itself, powered by love and frustration and inspired by scientific knowledge and local wisdom. A N e w A rch a n d a N e w A r k: T e a r s i n Fij i During a workshop on climate migration in Fiji in 2015, a group of liberal theologians from Pacific and Caribbean Protestant traditions argued that “climate change is a crisis moment, where we rethink how we live and how we think about God.” Throughout the talks and discussions, they argued that “we need to undergo an ‘ecological conversion’—climate change is a moral and spiritual concern.” In other words, climate change is not only a religious concern or something to which religions should respond: the root of the problem is religious and should lead to the basic questions about who we are and who God is. At the workshop, the point of departure was that climate change is an unprecedented, anthropogenic threat to the Pacific islands. The time frame is conceptualized as very short, in an urgent presentism, as a crisis moment, and as an anticipation of a great challenge in the decades to come. Maybe the first communities in Oceania migrating because of coastal erosion and storm surge are not directly or solely prompted by global warming (the famous and disputed examples of the Carteret Islands and a few more were reviewed), but many will follow, and it is consequently critical to prepare for them. Indeed, since the 1980s, greater awareness about global environmental changes has caused theological mobilization (Gerten and Bergman 2011). In the 1990s, statements were issued by the world’s major religions showing a remarkable convergence around a position that critiques treating global warming as only a problem for secular modernity. Such statements have shown aspirations of thinking the ecological crisis through religiously informed notions of stewardship, Mother Earth, and other sacralized notions of nature (Chaplin 2016). To complicate things, however, as Taylor, Van Vieren, and Zaheka (2016) have shown, despite overt examples of a greening of religion, that “the majority of religious individuals and groups remain mostly indifferent to environmental concerns, or such concerns, although professed, remain of such a low priority that they do not produce politically effective environmental action” (348).

36

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

As previously mentioned, the Cook Islands Christian Church had taken a hesitant position, often associated with conservative and biblical churches. But congregations and religious leaders elsewhere in Oceania have been outspoken. Statements such as the Otin Taai Declaration (World Council of Churches 2004), issued by the Pacific Conference of Churches as a result of the Pacific Churches’ first major consultation on climate change, have called for societal change and new ways to theologize climate change and, moreover, efforts have also been made to acclimatize the Bible to “traditional Pacific teachings”: Throughout the Bible from the Genesis creation story onward, we learn about God’s love for the earth and all its creatures including humanity. The Biblical understanding of the wholeness and inter-relatedness of all creation has some similarities to the traditional Pacific teachings about the land known as Vanua/Fonua/Whenua/Enua and the ocean referred to as Moana. The implications of this vision include the need for us humans to live with respect and humility within God’s creation. Responding to God’s love for creation, we are called to care for the earth and limit destructive activities such as those that contribute to climate change. (World Council of Churches 2004)

Building on the tradition of contextual theology by Havea (1986), Tuwere (2002), and Boseto (1992), among others, for whom incarnation means “to contextualize,” that is, interpret and translate the scriptures within the horizon of Oceanic indigenous teachings and religions, new eco-theologies have emerged. And so, after centuries and decades in which missionaries, religious leaders, and congregations have detached Christianity from indigenous religions, the current turn hinges on valuing traditional teachings as rich repositories for contextual eco-theology (Rubow and Bird 2016). In Waves of God’s Embrace, Halapua (2008) states, “I write with a deep oceanic sense of interconnectedness with creation, with others and with the mystery of the God who calls into being all things” (3). It is Halapua’s wish to convey how the sea, Moana, is both a mystery and a peril, as well as a harbinger of a sense of “being embraced” and of “awe and of being in the presence of the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars” (5). At the 2015 workshop in Fiji, as it unfolded over some days, it is not only ecotheology that inspired pastors and church representatives. Many references were made to the world economy, postcolonialism, old patriarchal hierarchies, gender issues, and many more politically laden subjects, signaling the core group’s liberal outlook. Presentations and discussion points from church representatives revolved more often around the acute challenges in the communities

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

37

they knew best: water scarcity, inundation, and lack of resources to educate the communities. Often the conveners were reminded how crucial it is to reach out and “to walk the talk” with the affected communities, often located many days of traveling away. In short, it was a workshop with many voices, a potential trading zone, with many discourses—and, it seemed to me, also many occasions of uneasiness: jokes that fell to the ground, presentations that were difficult to follow (now for some listeners, now for others), silent sighs, and as I will show, telling outbursts of regret and moans. The workshop was arranged and funded by a Christian partnership organization dating back to the early days of mission in Oceania in the nineteenth century, with many Pacific churches among its members. I had been asked to give a presentation too—about the reception of climate change in the Cook Islands—and about my more general anthropological interest in Christian and secular responses to climate change. I took the invitation as another illustration of the liberal outlook of the organizers, and I will include an auto-ethnographic twist to this story. My presentation revolved around the mixed response to climate change in the Cooks and the pastors and also other responses that may be said to fall somewhere between the religious and the secular. Among them, versions with a self-proclaimed secularity are among the most challenging, both ethnographically and theoretically (compare Taylor 2016), but nevertheless important, in my perspective, if we are not going to leave spirituality and experiences of transcendence and enchantment to organized religion, be it Christian, traditional, or indigenous. Thus, in my talk I underscored, firstly, the idea that the identification of concrete present and future changes that result from climate change along the shores of the Pacific islands is tricky, because data and projections are insecure. Secondly, I pointed out that people’s identification with the islands is not less so. I suggested that those two issues of identification can be approached from any of three repertoires: One way is to identify with one’s surroundings as nature. Here the repertoire consists of concrete things, objects, and species as they inhabit the outdoors: atolls, reefs, lagoons, and the ocean are seen as physical entities and habitats for animals and human beings, modified through seemingly endless seasons and geological eras. A lagoon can then be enacted as nature by a scientist measuring geological change, as a resource by providing food and building material, or as a great outdoor site where admirers praise a landscape’s extraordinary beauty. A second way of identification is to see the land and the sea as the environs of one’s home: the environment communities interact with, live by, use, and care for. Notions of interactions, feedback systems, and interrelations will usually

38

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

arise here. As an environment, it is typically socialized as such, with care and worries, and perhaps intimate knowledge about the seasons and species, and about how humans in particular affect the environment. The third way in which people identify with their surrounding world, I suggest, is as a source of imagination and enchantment. This distinction is, of course, analytical, but identification zooms in on how nature or the environment offers, in some instances, experiences of inspiration, comfort, respect, and passion. Perhaps most relevant to the workshop was the assertion that one can enact one’s surroundings, whether urban or rural, as a home and as a nourishing source of life, physically and mentally. Islands, lagoons—and cyclones, for that matter—spur the imagination in both secular and religious directions. In Muri Lagoon, at least, I was constantly reminded about the passion and respect with which environmentalists, fisherfolk, sailors, and tourists expressed their feelings about the beauty, importance, and grandeur of the lagoon; the enchantment of, as Rongo and others often said, “Mother Nature” (Rubow 2015). Many family resemblances seem to occur between secular and religious ways of identifying with one’s surroundings in intense ways—sometimes leading to concrete environmental actions. It was not so easy for my presentation to enter the main conversations, because its perspective leveled out differences among Christianities and also among Christianities and other spiritualities and enchantments. In an anthropological account of the world, as I envision it, the repertoires appear in different enactments, and neither God, people, climate change, cyclones, nor the sea can enter the equation alone, without brackets, that is, the social context. Thus, during the workshop, I carried on with an ethnographic stance, unable to contribute to the main objective: how to prepare religiously for climate change. The pastors and scholars who spoke were working with great dedication to change classical theologies and church practices. They were persistent critics of conservative, literal readings of the Bible and talked vehemently about reforming the traditional metaphysics characterizing both the classical mainline Christian churches and the new evangelical churches. They wanted to turn away from the anthropocentric preoccupation with an otherworldly future salvation of the individual soul and pleaded for translating old images of a sovereign and transcendent God into more earth-oriented theologies. Climate change now calls forth a reformation of Oceanian theologies, they said, just as colonization and other exercises of domination, atomic bomb testing, logging, and other types of environmental degradation have in the past prompted religious responses. The speakers encouraged the representatives, pastors, and laypeople to take part in the paradigm shift. A playful atmosphere peeked

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

39

through again and again, and the pastors jokingly confided that they would probably burn in hell, by implication, if they were judged by the conservative paradigm’s standards. They made a plea for new, hopeful ecotheologies, a new ark-building, by reinvigorating the Christian tradition and building on Oceanic environmental approaches, policy making, ecumenical collaboration, and church work in the communities. The workshop was extremely lively, and many perspectives on climatic and environmental changes were shared. The invitation to a reformed and environmentally engaged Christianity was developed in many directions. Stories from various islands about erosion and accretion, past migration patterns, energetic and—judging from the reactions—often provocative Bible readings were mixed with reflection on the difficulties of preparing for the future, including the prospects of future relocation of communities. Also, more critical cautions about the paradigm change were voiced. How exactly could this change come about? And what concrete actions could the church communities take? Among the representatives, the mood was at times very quiet, sometimes so quiet that the silences became dense in a telling way. Unsure about the mutual understanding between the participants and what precisely the silences were saying, I started to inquire a bit between the sessions. In a coffee break, an island pastor told me that he would lose his job if he brought back home this new gospel. And another representative added with tears in the eyes, “The worst is when they [the liberal speakers] talk about going to hell . . . they think they are such smart scholars.” In short, some tensions reached the table, while others—perhaps some very serious ones among them—found expression over coffee and in the corridors. No doubt the well-intentioned religious change in the wake of climate change, politically, environmentally, and religiously motivated, initiated a stream of awkward conversations, bouncing off in many directions. The participants struggled to reach out, yet sometimes the elastic between positions was close to snapping. The theologizing of climate change has started in the Oceanic Christianities with engaged declarations and new eco-theologies and will eventually gain more importance insofar as the churches, as Nunn pointed out, are central institutions in many island communities. But just as climate change does not travel alone, the greening of religion has many hesitant and complicating companions. Taking into consideration the manifold versions of Christianity, the complex environmental problems involving both local practices and anthropogenic drivers, and the wide array of secular concerns pertaining to the states and the communities and the tight economies, the climate-change stories will necessarily multiply in many awkward versions.

40

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Epi l ogu e: T h e Body of Cli m at e Ch a nge In this chapter, the stories started on verandas, with children playing; among consoling prayers, caterpillars, and cyclones; and among inhabited lagoons and islands, in the midst of a sea of change. In everyday practices, in the communities, in the fields of taro, in broken sewers, and in countless workshops and climate-change adaptation programs, the pace of change appears to be slower than it is in the discourse of global warming since the 1980s. But the discourse is settling in and producing many offspring, so to speak; it is gaining a “body multiple,” to quote Mol (2002), whose concept of enactment has served as an inspiration for the ethnographic exploration described here. Even before the 1980s, we must remember, warnings had already been issued, over almost two centuries, from Alexander von Humboldt onward. Yet in most corners of the world, the reorientation has just started. The three stories have played out instances of trading zones where different enactments of climate change and commitments are unfolding in a living social and natural environment. Ethnographically, they are located in different island contexts, yet when woven together, they tell a story about how perceptions, denials, and acceptances of climatic change and adaptive malpractices are intertwined with ways of “doing” cyclones and lagoons and thus, in Mike Hulme’s words, with the ways in which people “pay their duties to others, to nature, and to their deities” (2009, 144). In the Cook Islands, across the Oceanic communities, and across many interests, types of identification, and duties, trading zones are continuously established in workshops, meetings, functions, and conversations, where what is created are not exactly agreements—maybe rather the opposite—but they are nevertheless venues for new approximated enactments of the social and cultural world they inhabit. By way of integrating the religious responses into the wider fabric of society and nature—both the scientific findings and the secular enchantments—the intention in this chapter has been to show how the diverse Christianities in Oceania not only involve beliefs but are constantly entangled with both the social and the natural environment. They are ways of living. Moreover, and in line with this, it is not possible to compartmentalize secular perceptions about the environment in lived practice so as to locate knowledge squarely on one side and worries, fears, and hopes on the other side. By considering the ways in which the voices and lives that peopled the stories identified with the environmental and climatic changes, the stories illustrate new and uneasy encounters between different versions and visions of the world that will multiply in Oceania, and beyond.

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

41

Cecilie Rubow is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Her key research area is in the intersections among environmental change, ecological sensibilities, and cosmology. She is author of the article “Woosh: Cyclones as Culturalnatural Whirls: A Case from the South Pacific.” R efer ence s ABM and CSIRO. 2014. “Pacific-Australia Climate Change Science and Adaptation Planning Program Technical Report.” Ch. 2 in Cook Islands Climate Variability, Extremes and Change in the Western Tropical: New Science and Updated Country Reports. Melbourne, Australia: Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Betzold, Carola. 2015. “Adapting to Climate Change in Small Island Developing States.” Climatic Changes 133 (3): 481–89. Boseto, L. 1992. “The Gospel of Economy from a Solomon Islands Perspective.” Pacific Journal of Theology 2 (8): 79–84. Chaplin, J. 2016. “The Global Greening of Religion.” Palgrave Communications 2 (16047). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.47. De Scally, Fes. 2008. “Historical Tropical Cyclone Activity and Impacts in the Cook Islands.” Pacific Science 62 (4): 443–59. Descola, P. 2006. Beyond Nature and Culture. Proceedings of the British Academy 139:137–55. Dickinson, W. R. 2009. “Pacific Atoll Living: How Long Already and until When.” GSA Today 19 (3): 4–10. Galison, P. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerten, Dieter, and Sigurd Bergmann, eds. 2011. Religion in Environmental and Climatic Changes: Suffering, Values and Lifestyles. London: Continuum. Halapua, W. 2008. Waves of God’s Embrace: Sacred Perspectives from the Ocean. Norwich: Canterbury. Hastrup, K. 2014. “Nature: Anthropology on the Edge.” In Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, 1–26. New York: Routledge. Havea, S. A. 1986. “Christianity in the Pacific Context—South Pacific Theology.” In South Pacific Theology: Papers from Consultation on Pacific Theology, Papua New Guinea, January 1986, edited by Josaia Rayawa et al., 11–15. Parramatta, Papua New Guinea: Regnum and World Vision International South Pacific.

42

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kench, P. S., M. R. Ford, and S. D. Owen. 2018. “Patterns of Island Change and Persistence Offer Alternate Adaptation Pathways for Atoll Nations.” Nature Communications 9:605. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nunn, Patrick. 2017. “Acts of God: Why Secular Climate Projects Fail in the Pacific.” Climate Home News, May 17. http://www.climatechangenews.com /2017/05/17/acts-god-secular-climate-projects-fail-pacific/. Rubow, Cecilie. 2013. “Enacting Cyclones: The Mixed Response to Climate Change in the Cook Islands, the South Pacific.” In The Social Life of Climate Change Models, edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Martin Skrydstrup, 57–77. London: Routledge. ———. 2015. “Respect and Passion in a Lagoon in the South Pacific.” In Waterworlds: Anthropology in Fluid Environments, edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup, 93–109. Oxford: Berghahn. ———. 2018. “Woosh: Cyclones as Culturalnatural Whirls; A Case from the South Pacific.” In Pacific Climate Cultures: Living Climate Change in Oceania, edited by Tony Crook and Peter Rudiak Gould. Warsaw: De Gruyter. Rubow, Cecilie, and Cliff Bird. 2016. “Eco-theological Responses to Climate Change in Oceania.” Worldviews 20 (2): 150–68. Taylor, Bron. 2016. “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part One): From Lynn White, Jr and Claims That Religions Can Promote Environmentally Destructive Attitudes and Behaviors to Assertions They Are Becoming Environmentally Friendly.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10 (3): 268–305. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v10i3.29010. Taylor, Bron, G. Van Vieren, and B. Zaheka. 2016. “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White, Jr, to Pope Francis.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10 (3): 306–78. https:// doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v10i3.29011. Tuwere, I. S. 2002. Vanua: Towards a Fijian Theology of Place. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies/University of the South Pacific. Walshe, Rory A., Denis Chang Seng, Adam Bumpus, and Joelle Auffray. 2018. “Perceptions of Adaptation Resilience and Climate Knowledge in the Pacific: The Cases of Samoa, Fiji and Vanuatu.” International Journal of Climate Change

Cl i m at e Ch a nge N e v er T r av e l s A l on e

43

Strategies and Management 10 (2): 303–22. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCCSM -03–2017–0060. Webb, A., and P. S. Kench. 2010. “The Dynamic Response of Reef Islands to Sea-Level Rise: Evidence from Multi-decadal Analysis of Island Change in the Central Pacific.” Global and Planetary Change 72:234–46. Weir, T., L. Dovey, and D. Orcherton. 2017. “Social and Cultural Issues Raised by Climate Change in Pacific Island Countries: An Overview.” Regional Environmental Change 17:1017–28. World Council of Churches. 2004. Otin Taai Declaration. 2004. Grand-Saconnex, Switz.: World Council of Churches.

two

k

CLIMATE CHANGE, MORAL METEOROLOGY, AND LOCAL MEASURES AT QUYLLURIT’I, A HIGH ANDEAN SHRINE

Guiller mo Salas Carr eño, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú A lthough clim ate ch a nge incr eases a nnua l temperatures on average globally, it does not increase them everywhere to the same degree. High mountains are one of the ecosystems that are facing the greatest escalation in temperatures, which directly affects glaciers. Glacial melt in high mountains has already globally contributed 28 percent of the water in rising sea levels, and glacial loss in the high mountains is accelerating in many regions (Pachauri and Reisinger 2007; Thompson 2010). This chapter examines a complex scenario in which indigenous practices are deeply entangled and copresent with Catholicism at a pilgrimage to a Christian shrine that is near and profoundly linked to a glacier. Andean indigenous practices presuppose the agency and intentionality of any place that has a proper name. Glaciers, being on the highest mountains, are recognized as powerful agents who provide all types of fertility (Allen 2002; De la Cadena 2015). Global warming is affecting the glacier, and this chapter analyzes how the pilgrims’ practices involving the glacier are shifting and adapting to the changes. It is based on ethnographic research of the pilgrimage accumulated during the last twenty-three years. I went to the pilgrimage for the first time in 1996. Since then I have attended its main rituals in twelve years carrying out ethnographic research (including observation, participant observation, informal conversations, interviews, and photographic and video recording). I attended it both as an individual and as part of highland rural communities’ delegations that included dance troupes. Highland indigenous peoples’ practices that mediate their relations with the environment are crucial in their responses to these challenges of climate

44

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

45

change and, in the process, their practices are themselves being changed by it. Indigenous practices that mediate their relations with the environment usually do not conform to the nature-society dichotomy. Their practices usually treat “nature” as involving qualities attributed to humans, like agency and intentionality. Thus, many indigenous practices often violate the nature-society divide that is at the core of modern worlds (Latour 1993). Transcending modern notions of reality, indigenous practices tend to be associated with the supernatural and framed as religious. Although there are many ways to conceptualize religion and productive ways in which indigenous practices can be framed as religious, here I emphasize an understanding of religion as one of the social fields, together with science and politics, that were constituted through separating humans from nonhumans, society from nature, in the historical emergence of modern worlds (Latour 2010; Smith 1991). Hence, I understand the Andean indigenous practices I discuss in this chapter as related to but transcending religion. They do not conform to the divide and hence cannot conform to the “supernatural” (Mannheim and Salas Carreño 2015). Andean indigenous practices are related to religion because they and the worlds they enact coexist and are deeply related with worlds that have emerged from the nature-society divide. They cannot be understood in isolation of each other, yet they cannot be thoroughly translated to each other (De la Cadena 2015). I avoid framing these indigenous practices as religious because doing so would erase their excesses and tacitly inscribe them within the nature-society divide. To so inscribe them would be problematic because the nature-society divide is at the core of anthropogenic climate change (Chakrabarty 2009). This issue is closely related to the notion of moral meteorology proposed by Burman (2017) that will be discussed toward the end of this chapter. Because climate change has a strong impact on glaciers, they have been gaining international attention. As Cruikshank (2005) states, “most of the world’s glaciers now seem to be melting rather than reproducing themselves, becoming a new kind of endangered species” (6). The worrisome and accelerating speed of glacier retreat in the Andes endangers high mountainous ecosystems and livelihoods, as well as the cities that depend on glaciers for water. Glacier retreat has already caused changes in water supply and seasonal availability and deterioration of its quality (Mishra and Verbist 2017; Orlove 2009; Vuille et al. 2008). These changes signal a more challenging future: “Given the current climatic context, and the future changes in atmospheric temperature projected by both global and regional climate models, many glaciers in the tropical Andes could disappear during the 21th [sic] century, and those located below 5,400 m.a.s.l. [meters above sea level] are the most vulnerable” (Rabatel et al. 2013, 97).

46

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Some glaciers, because of their cultural relevance and fame, have been particularly important in the narratives showing the consequences of climate change. This is the case, for example, with Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and Glacier National Park in Montana, United States (Orlove 2009, 24). While less widespread, the case of the Quyllurit’i pilgrimage—the biggest of the Peruvian Andes—is acquiring similar fame. Its shrine, about seventy kilometers east of the city of Cuzco, in the southern Peruvian Andes, lies just at the bottom of the Qulqipunku glacier and has a strong relation with it. This makes the Quyllurit’i pilgrimage particularly important for considerations of the impact of glacial retreat on indigenous worlds and practices. Articles about the impact of climate change on the pilgrimage have appeared in the main Peruvian newspapers (e.g., Guerrero 2008; Ramón 2010) and foreign media outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal (Regalado 2005), BBC World (Plitt 2010), and NPR (Dupraz-Dobias 2016). The glacial ice of the Qulqipunku is quickly receding.1 Figures 2.1 and 2.2 provide comparisons that give a glimpse of the degree and speed of the retreat during much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is clear from these photos that, though the retreat from 1933 to 1979 was considerable, the drastic change between 1999 and 2016 shows that the retreat is swiftly accelerating. These dramatic transformations produced by climate change are related to discussions about the Anthropocene, a proposed new era in which human impacts on the planet are comparable to geological forces. Some have proposed that a better term would be Capitalocene, suggesting the impact that capitalism and its dependence on fossil fuels is having on the planet (Chakrabarty 2009; Haraway 2015). Preference for the latter term indicates that the responsibilities for climate change should not be ascribed to an undifferentiated humanity (as suggested by the prefix anthropo-), but to the main beneficiaries of capitalism and their associated high emissions of CO2. Capitalism coemerged with what Latour (1993) calls the Modern Constitution, a particular ontological configuration based on the construction of nature as opposed to society through a constant work of purification. Purification is crucial in the construction of “our modern world, a world in which the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract” (27). The constant work of purification that separates nature and society paradoxically has allowed moderns to carry out the work of mediation—human interventions in nature—on an unprecedented scope in human history, producing the current global environmental situation (Latour 1993; 2015).

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

47

Figure 2.1. Photographs taken from the shrine during the main days of the pilgrimage. Although they are not taken from the exact same spot nor with the same lens, they give an idea of the process of glacial retreat. The 1933 photo is by Martín Chambi; 1979 photo by Julia Chambi; 2002 and 2008 photos by the author; and 2016 photo by José Enrique Solano.

A “world” should be understood in this text as emerging through historically contingent practices inscribed in heterogeneous networks of humans and nonhuman things and beings. Ethnographic work has shown extensively how other worlds radically depart from modern assumptions of what is real (e.g.,

Figure 2.2. Photographs taken from approximately the same location, close to the Machu Cruz high pass, after Tuesday’s Mass of Blessing that marks the end of rituals in the shrine. The shrine can be seen at the bottom of the pictures. Photo from 1999 by the author; photos of 2013 and 2016 by Karina Pacheco.

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

49

Descola 2005; Viveiros de Castro 1998). The existence of multiple sets of practices—carrying different assumptions of the nature of the world—cultivated by very heterogeneous human societies within different environments, implies that there are multiple copresent worlds (Blaser 2013; Mol 2002). In the Quyllurit’i pilgrimage, as in many other contemporary contexts, modern worlds and those that do not emerge from the nature-society divide are copresent, hierarchically organized, and entangled in—open or silent—conflicts over their actual existence (De la Cadena 2015). The state institutions or disciplines of knowledge in various modern worlds, as part of the work of purification, routinely frame practices that transcend the nature-society divide as folklore, popular beliefs, or superstition, confining them to religion or culture, and negating their world-making consequences. This type of conflict over what is real is what Blaser (2013) calls “ontological conflicts,” and the type of politics that emerges from them is what de la Cadena (2010) calls “indigenous cosmopolitics.” As Burman (2017, 931) claims, climate change implies low-intensity ontological conflicts in the Andes and surely elsewhere. After examining how the Quyllurit’i pilgrims’ organizations have been addressing glacier retreat, I will touch briefly on these issues, as well as those related to the Andean “moral meteorology” (Burman 2017), that are implicit in how pilgrims experience the effects of climate change. T h e M a n y Qu y l lu r it’i Pi l gr i m age s The Quyllurit’i (white shining ice)2 pilgrimage is undertaken on the days before the Corpus Christi festivity, which takes place at the end of May or beginning of June.3 It is the most important pilgrimage in the bilingual Quechua-Spanish society of the southern Peruvian Andes. The Quyllurit’i shrine lies forty-eight hundred meters above sea level in the Sinaqara moraine valley, at the bottom of the Qulqipunku (silver gate) glacier. During the main days of the pilgrimage this quiet high place becomes inundated with more than a hundred thousand pilgrims. The pilgrimage was declared part of the National Cultural Patrimony in 2004 and was placed on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list of UNESCO in 2011 (UNESCO 2011; INC 2004).4 Its proximity to the glacier as well as many of its associated practices relate this Catholic shrine with the indigenous ways of experiencing the landscape (Sallnow 1987). Glaciers, mountains, and all places that have proper names are material beings endowed with power and intentional agency within Quechua worlds. As widely reported in Andean ethnographies, these earth beings, as Marisol de la Cadena (2015) calls them, are the source and owners of all types of

50

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

fertility (e.g., Allen 2002; Gose 1994; Ricard 2007; Sallnow 1987). Being owners and sources of fertility, mountains and other named places are related to human beings through patterns of food provision and forms of cohabitation. They feed humans and give them places to inhabit and work; humans offer them food in order to maintain and promote good relationships. The beings’ materiality is crucial for feeding humans through harvests and herds, as well as allowing humans to dwell and cohabit with them (Salas Carreño 2016). High mountains are addressed with the honorific apu;5 and glacial peaks, being bigger and higher than most mountains, are considered to be the most powerful among them. Apu Ausangate, the highest peak of Cuzco, is the owner of the whole region. Apu Qulqipunku is unavoidable for any pilgrim visiting Quyllurit’i because of their proximity to each other. The apu, however, is not the center of the pilgrimage; it is a big rock that has an image of a crucified Christ painted on it. The Brotherhood of Señor de Quyllurit’i (Lord White Shining Ice) slowly built a large church over this rock during the second half of the twentieth century. Currently the image rock is behind the main wooden colonial baroque-style altarpiece (see fig. 2.3). The altarpiece covers most of the rock, leaving only the Christ image visible to most pilgrims (Salas Carreño 2006). The church does not have benches. Pilgrims permanently crowd it during the pilgrimage. More than a hundred dance troupes wait in long lines to perform inside it in front of Taytacha Quyllurit’i (Dear Father White Shining Ice). The image rock is related to Apu Qulqipunku in several ways. The first is indicated by the name Quyllurit’i itself, that is, White Shining Ice.6 Quyllurit’i is not the toponym of the place where the shrine is—which is Sinaqara—but rather the name of the image rock. Its very name connects the image rock with Apu Qulqipunku’s glacial ice. A sequence of practices that dancers and priests perform also clearly connect the agency of the glacier to the miraculous power of the image rock. Catherine Allen (1997) has shown the indigenous logic that connects the glacier with the image rock and accounts for why the latter is particularly miraculous. The pilgrimage, however, is not only a complex assemblage of indigenous practices that have appropriated and indigenized elements of Catholicism. To characterize it as such would be to oversimplify much of it. There is great diversity in the forms of participation in the pilgrimage. The Quyllurit’i pilgrimage grew steadily during the twentieth century and has grown even more in the last decades with the construction of the Transoceanic Highway that led to the asphalting of the road that passes close to the shrine.7 The pilgrimage growth during the last and current centuries is related to the concurrent and steady increase of rural-urban mobility and migration across the Andes (see Diez 2014). Mobility not only brings more pilgrims but

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

51

Figure 2.3. The Quyllurit’i shrine during the main days of the pilgrimage. Toward the center left is the church that was constructed over the rock with the crucified Christ image, Lord Quyllurit’i. Photo by José Enrique Solano, 2016.

also raises the sociocultural diversity at the shrine during the pilgrimage and increases the predominance of urban pilgrims who kept cultivating the practices of their rural forefathers. Hence, culturally indigenous dance troupes attending the pilgrimage are coming not only from small rural communities but also increasingly from urban spaces. In addition, the pilgrimage is attended by both people coming from the region—rural communities and the current majority of urban pilgrims—and outsiders who participate in, observe, and study it: journalists, filmmakers, anthropologists, and tourists. There is also a small but growing presence of New Age pilgrims, both Peruvian and foreign. Visitors bring with them a variety of presuppositions about the pilgrimage, as well as a diversity of ways to participate in it. Rather than a single one, multiple pilgrimages coexist at the shrine.8 I illustrated some of this multiplicity in a previous work by featuring New Age pilgrims, Catholic priests, and pilgrims from a highland Quechua community (Salas Carreño 2014). Though in proximity to each other, and even despite interactions between them, the pilgrims do

52

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

not participate exactly in the same pilgrimage. The main focus of the pilgrimage varies between Christ as an immaterial being, the material Christ image rock, and the glacier. Furthermore, a person is not necessarily bound to experience only one pilgrimage. The framing of the interaction may lead the same pilgrim to relate to Lord Quyllurit’i as the immaterial Christ in some contexts and then as the material image rock in others without experiencing confusion or contradiction. For regional pilgrims whose main intention is to visit Lord Quyllurit’i and request his favor, the diversity of frame falls into two main patterns of participation that vary on how they relate to the glacier. One pattern relates by means of dance troupes and, crucially, ukuku dancers. The other is that of the pilgrims who relate without a ritual role. U ku ku Da ncer s a n d Ch u n k s of Ice Each dance troupe that attends the pilgrimage comes from a particular community, town, neighborhood association, or other kind of collective. Each troupe has its leaders, sponsors, musicians and nondancing companions, all of whom go to the shrine on behalf of the whole collective, part of which stays home. The primary objective of the dance troupe is to accompany their demanda,9 a wooden box containing a miniature Lord Quyllurit’i—typically a photograph—from home to the shrine and back. Once in the shrine, the troupes’ demandas accompany Lord Quyllurit’i at the church’s altar, remaining there during the troupes’ presence in the shrine. They leave the company of Lord Quyllurit’i only after the Mass of Blessing. This transforms the demandas into other bodies of Taytacha Quyllurit’i, so much so that pilgrims treat them with the same etiquette used for the image rock. Escorted by the dancers, the demandas then go back to bless the community or neighborhood of origin. All dance troupes have two types of dancers. The first one portrays a stylized version of spatial and temporal otherness, such as the merchants of the high southern plateau or the indigenous peoples of the Amazon (Cánepa 1998; Mendoza 2000). The second type includes the ukuku, pawlucha, or pablito and is similar across all dance troupes. Some communities regard the second type of dancers as bears of the rainforest or sons of a bear and a woman (Allen 1983), llamas or alpacas (Flores Ochoa 1990), or even a combination of alpacas and bears (Ricard 2007). Others view them not as animals, but as the “soldiers of the Lord” (Salas Carreño 2010). The ukuku dancers are in charge of keeping discipline within the group and order in the pilgrimage, yet they are also subversive and burlesque characters who mock fellow pilgrims or people with whom the troupe interacts (Ricard 2007; Sallnow 1987).

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

53

Figure 2.4. Ukuku dancers descending from the glacier carrying their nation’s cross to the church. Photo by the author, 1998.

Each dance troupe is part of one of the eight naciones (nations)10 that broadly correspond to contemporary provincial jurisdictions. The following discussion is a brief description of the ways in which the dancers related to the glacier that I recorded toward the end of the 1990s, a pattern that continues today with some modifications and a significant difference. At 2:00 a.m. on the Tuesday before Corpus Christi (which is always celebrated on a Thursday), the ukukus of all troupes congregated according to their eight different nations. Each group climbed to a different known area of the glacier. There they “accompanied” their own nation’s cross and held a meeting in which they baptized the new ukukus, punished those who had committed faults, and elected the pablo caporal, the nation’s head. At dawn, some ukukus detached big ice chunks from the glacier and then carried them on their backs toward the shrine as all ukukus grouped by nation returned from the glacier bearing the eight crosses. The non-ukuku dancers remained grouped according to their nations below the permanent ice awaiting the arrival of their cross, joined the assemblage, and, dancing together, all nations’ dancers accompanied their nation’s cross to the shrine (see fig. 2.4). When the eight crosses arrived at the church accompanied

54

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Figure 2.5. Ukukus arriving at the shrine bringing chunks of ice from the Qulqipunku glacier. Photo by the author, 1996.

by hundreds of dancers, the Mass of Blessing began outdoors. At the end of the mass, the priests sprinkled blessed water on the crowd, and many pilgrims made great effort to get their bodies, framed pictures of Taytacha Quyllurit’i, or miniature trucks or houses moistened by Taytacha Quyllurit’i’s blessed water. After this blessing, most of the pilgrims started to leave the shrine. When the Mass of Blessing concluded, each dance troupe performed a farewell dance in front of Taytacha Quyllurit’i, picked up their demanda from his altar, and commenced their journey back home. It is important to note here that Taytacha Quyllurit’i gave his blessings through Catholic priests only after the eight crosses spent the night on Apu Qulqipunku and the ukukus brought them to the church and into his presence. For the dancers who participate in these practices and those who are aware of them, this sequence shows clearly that the power of Taytacha Quyllurit’i is deeply associated with that of the glacier. Until 2003, the ukuku dancers coming down from the glacier with ice chunks on their backs constituted the emblematic image of the pilgrimage (see fig. 2.5). The chunks were brought to the dance troupe camp, where various members would take some pieces, and either in bottles or as ice, transport them home.

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

55

Some of the ice, however, was left in the shrine in front of the church, where it slowly melted, and any pilgrim was allowed to take some part of it (see Sallnow 1987, 228).11 All nations’ ukukus, however, stopped bringing ice chunks from the glacier in 2004. The change was directly related to the noticeable glacier retreat that was affecting Qulqipunku. The practice being one of the emblematic images of the pilgrimage, the decision was widely reported as showing the impact that climate change was having not only on the glaciers but on the religious practices of indigenous peoples in the Andes (e.g., Fraser 2009; Guerrero 2008; Kormann 2009; Navab 2011; Ramón 2010; Regalado 2005; Welch 2016). Here is a clear case of climate change affecting indigenous ritual practices, but the picture is a little more complex. The first time I attended the pilgrimage in 1996, however, pilgrims were already concerned with the glacier retreat, and it seems that the concern had been there even earlier. Carlos Flores, an anthropologist and former Jesuit priest who was the chaplain of the Brotherhood of Señor de Quyllurit’i, recalls that its members were discussing glacier retreat from the early 1990s (Regalado 2005). If 2004 was not when pilgrims began to worry about glacier retreat, why did the prohibition of bringing down ice chunks take place then? The answer has to do with the 2003 reorganization of the brotherhood and the emergence of a new institution: the Council of Pilgrim Nations. During the 1990s, the brotherhood was accused of serious mismanagement of devotees’ donations, and crucially, of ignoring the dancers’ opinions and concerns in the organization of the main rituals. These accusations by the leaders of the oldest nations (Paucartambo and Quispicanchi) were legitimate: the brotherhood was founded in the 1940s “with the aim to put order among the Indians who go up there to dance and, while drunk, commit excesses” (cited by Flores Lizana 1997, 26, my translation). The brotherhood was organized in opposition to the dancers, despising the latter’s customs performed in front of the brotherhood’s “true Catholic religiosity,” displaying ethnic superiority (Salas Carreño 2006; Sallnow 1991). The 2003 reorganization of the brotherhood meant that all its members had to be respected former dancers who were to be presented by their nations. In addition, the Council of Pilgrim Nations, composed of the eight leaders (the pablos caporales) of the nations, emerged as the legitimate body leading all dancers. Only then was it possible to implement measures to discipline the practices of the pilgrimage. Because dancers were concerned about the glacier’s retreat, one of the council’s first decisions was to prohibit the ukukus from taking ice chunks from the glacier. This is why the prohibition was not implemented until 2004.

56

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

The prohibition was widely reported as dramatically changing the pilgrimage and threatening its ancient practices (e.g., Chakalian 2015; Fraser 2009; Navab 2011; Welch 2016). Some accounts assumed that the ukukus’ main responsibility was to bring back these ice chunks: “They are no longer allowed to discharge their unique responsibility of climbing up to the top of the mountain and bringing back blocks of ice tied to their back” (Navab 2011; see a similar claim by Ceruti 2007, 37). But this was not and is not the case. Clearly, the ice chunks were supplementary to the main rituals described here and not their core. With the goodwill of Apu Qulqipunku, the ukukus bring the power of the glacier to the Taytacha Quyllurit’i—the image rock—by staying on the glacier overnight accompanying their nation’s cross and bringing it back down to the church at dawn. That is their most important task: accompanying the nation’s cross has consequences for the well-being of the whole nation and all the collectivities represented by the dance troupes. That is why, as collectivities, dance troupes collect their demandas from the side of the image rock only after the end of the Mass of Blessing, thus bringing back Taytacha Quyllurit’i himself incorporated in their demandas and why most pilgrims did not seem opposed to the prohibition against bringing down ice chunks and did not manifest great discomfort with it. Although climate change has resulted in changes in certain religious practices, it has not yet led to the end of the pilgrimage or destroyed its essential function. Therefore, it is not fully accurate to claim that because they no longer descend from the glacier carrying ice chunks, “many [of them] now returned empty-handed” (Ceruti 2007, 37). Similarly, it is inexact to claim that the prohibition entails “the loss of [the pilgrimage’s] symbolic core” (Navab 2011) or that the pilgrimage has “ceased to exist as such” (Plitt 2010, my translation). Moreover, it is misleading to claim that the decision amounts to a reversal of the relation between the glacier and the humans: “Rather than supplicants to a powerful deity whose beneficence provides fecundity and healing, the villagers are now caretakers of this ailing glacial god, safe-guarding its integrity with guards and delicate candles. The reversal of social hierarchy often threatens danger and contamination” (Allison 2015, 497). Although certainly there is a diversity of views and concerns about glacial retreat in relation to human behavior, as will be discussed later, there are no grounds for asserting a reversal of social hierarchy between the pilgrims and Apu Qulqipunku. Through the eight crosses that stayed overnight on the glacier, the connection between the apu and the blessing of Taytacha Quyllurit’i involves water. Partly for this reason, it is important for pilgrims to be touched by the blessed water after the Mass of Blessing (see fig. 2.6). It is also important to point out

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

57

Figure 2.6. Pilgrims making efforts so that the blessed water touches the images of Taytacha Quyllurit’i after the main Mass of Blessing. The priest is sprinkling the water with the flowers he is holding in his right hand. In the background, pilgrims are getting ready to leave the shrine. Photo by the author, 2000.

that close to the shrine’s entrance there is a spring called El Agua del Señor (the Lord’s Water), which plays the same role as the blessed water or the ice chunks. Because the ukukus have already taken the crosses from the glacier to the church, the Lord’s Water has the same powerful qualities as the blessed water or the glacial ice. Pilgrims carry this water back home in plastic bottles, and some have these bottles with them during the Mass of Blessing so they are certain that the water carries the blessing of Lord Quyllurit’i. Forbidding the detachment of ice chunks was only one of the measures taken by the Council of Pilgrim Nations. Other measures, implemented in 2008, included a decision by five of the eight nations that not all ukuku dancers had to climb on the glacier to accompany the nation’s cross. The nations now send only a small delegation of ukuku dancers to the places where their nation’s cross stays overnight on the glacier. Associated with this, these nations’ ukukus began to hold their annual assembly just below the glacial ice. Only three nations continued to have their assemblies on the glacier. After the 2016 pilgrimage, the council decided that none of the nations would have

58

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

their annual ukuku meeting on the glacier, but rather only below the glacial ice. The level of deglaciation in 2016 was so great (as can be seen in fig. 2.1 and 2.2) that some nations did not have any other option but to place their nation’s cross off the glacier: the spot they usually occupied no longer had glacial ice (Dupraz-Dobias 2016). The last time I talked with the president of the Council of Pilgrim Nations, he was sure that all nations would comply with the ruling to hold their annual meetings below the glacial ice during Tuesday’s night of the 2017 pilgrimage. Although the level of glacier retreat is worrisome for ukuku dancers and pilgrims in general, their worry has not decreased their willingness to participate in the pilgrimage. The overall attendance at the pilgrimage, including dancers and other pilgrims, keeps growing. Non-u ku ku Pi l gr i ms Cli m bi ng t h e Gl aci er As stated before, not all pilgrims are part of dance troupes; there are also nonnation-affiliated pilgrims: “devotees who attend, not as dancers, not even as members of naciones, but privately, in small groups of kin, neighbors, or friends, or alone” (Sallnow 1987, 223). Many of these pilgrims come from urban areas. During the main days of the pilgrimage, there are specific places in the city of Cuzco (3,400 meters above sea level) where buses are waiting at any hour for this type of pilgrim to fill the seats and start travel to Mawayani (4,200 meters above sea level), from where pilgrims have to walk the remaining eight kilometers to the shrine (4,800 meters above sea level). Many non-nation-affiliated pilgrims (from now on unaffiliated pilgrims) try to arrive at the shrine early in the morning, before dawn, in order to line up to enter the church and be able to light candles and listen to a mass. Most of these pilgrims then participate in the practices of performing petitions to the Taytacha Quyllurit’i through making miniatures with stone, or watching some of the dance performances always going on in the shrine. Around midday, some unaffiliated pilgrims start descending from the shrine back to Mawayani, where they return home via bus. The many unaffiliated pilgrims following this pattern are not necessarily familiar with the main rituals around the glacier, and some might not even consider the glacier as an animate being crucial to Taytacha Quyllurit’i’s power. Such pilgrims could be characterized as professing a popular Catholicism, in Marzal’s terms (2002, 315–17), which does not necessarily involve a practical understanding of the indigenous notions present in the dancers’ practices. Other unaffiliated pilgrims do climb on the glacier. These pilgrims stay only a day at the shrine or perhaps camp one night, staying two days during the main

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

59

Figure 2.7. Non-ukuku pilgrims on the glacier. While some were praying, others were sliding and playing with the snow. Photo by the author, 2008.

rituals. During the Sunday and Monday of the pilgrimage in 2008, I observed many individual pilgrims on the white glacier (see fig. 2.7). The pilgrims who climbed on the glacier during the day included not only unaffiliated pilgrims but also pilgrims who had arrived with the dance troupes as nondancing members of the collective the dancers represented. Some of these pilgrims climbed up the glacier to pray and light candles in small crevasses. After praying, they assumed a rather relaxed behavior. Others seemed to go to the glacier primarily to have the experience of playing in the snow, sliding with a piece of plastic, or throwing snowballs at family and friends. The atmosphere at the glacier in these moments was one of joy and laughter. Since I first attended the pilgrimage in 1996, the representatives of the brotherhood and later the members of the Council of Pilgrim Nations were vocal in condemning this type of climbing on the glacier. They stated that only the ukukus could climb on the glacier. As part of a set of measures coordinated between the Council of Pilgrim Nations and what was then the National Institute of Culture (now Ministry of Culture), in 2008 this prohibition was

60

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

reaffirmed, stressing its importance (Guerrero 2008; Ramón 2010).12 Nevertheless, every year I attended the pilgrimage, I saw non-ukuku pilgrims (who can be companions of a troupe or unaffiliated pilgrims) playing in the snow covering parts of the glacier. As is evident in a 2008 photo (fig. 2.7), many non-ukuku pilgrims did climb the glacier notwithstanding the restated prohibition. Since its creation, the Council of Pilgrim Nations has tried to stop the nonukuku pilgrims from climbing on the glacier, but doing so has proven to be difficult, for it is hard to deploy enough ukukus to control all possible access points to the glacier. Ukukus already have their hands full trying to control and organize access to the church and controlling the overall discipline in the shrine, particularly during the main rituals, as well as fulfilling what their dance troupe expects from them. To charge the ukukus with the added task of closing all access to the glacier might take away too many ukukus and could be a source of conflict. Although ukukus were not able to stop pilgrims from climbing on the glacier, I witnessed occasions in which ukukus did stop non-ukuku pilgrims from bringing some snow or ice away from the glacier. On one occasion, three urban ukukus did not allow a rural pilgrim coming down the glacier to keep a small plastic bottle filled with some snow that was far from being detached glacial ice. After shouting that that was forbidden, one of them whipped the pilgrim without paying attention to what he was attempting to say.13 More recently, because of the notable retreat of the glacial tongue, which used to be much closer to the shrine, the non-ukuku climbing of the glacier has significantly declined. It is possible to climb to the tongues that are to the left and right sides of the shrine, but they are farther away and higher. To climb to these other tongues requires much more effort and time (see fig. 2.2). It seems glacier retreat rather than ukukus has drastically reduced the non-ukuku climbing on the glacier. Mor a l M et eorol ogy a n d L oca l R e sponsi bi lit y As stated previously, there have been many articles and media reports on the effects of climate change on this pilgrimage. Most of them include descriptions of how the glacier is retreating, the measures taken to address the effects, and the broader impact of climate change for highland rural Andean populations (e.g., Fraser 2009; Kormann 2009; Plitt 2010; Regalado 2005). In contrast to the foreign reports, some pieces in newspapers in the Peruvian capital, Lima, present similar data but tend to emphasize the pilgrims’ responsibility for the glacier’s retreat. For example, a piece headlined “Qoyllur Riti Is a Devotion

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

61

That Moves and Melts Mountains,” published in El Comercio (Ramón 2010; my translation), emphasizes how pilgrims ignore the rules adopted by the Council of Pilgrim Nations that were meant to reduce the pilgrimage’s impact on the glacier. This type of discourse can be understood as a case of “environmental blame displacement” through which “not only are those who have contributed least to climate change and benefited least from the activities that cause it among the most vulnerable to climate change, they are also often blamed for it” (Burman 2017, 924).14 To some extent, these narratives of environmental blame displacement seem to be legitimate because they often align with the pilgrims’ own explanations of glacier retreat, for many of them imply that they themselves are responsible for it. Similar blame is present in the broader research on local interpretations of climate change in the Andes. Andean agriculturalists and herders agree that there is a marked change in the climate in the last twenty years (Boillat and Berkes 2013; Postigo 2014; Stensrud 2016), and glacier retreat is highlighted as one of the clearest markers of this change, particularly by older herders who have witnessed the retreat of glacier tongues (Postigo 2014, 389). Research shows that although there is some appropriation of climate change as a category within their discourse, most local interpretations imply some responsibility of indigenous Andean people themselves in causing it. This is related to two main issues: The first one is that people tend to assume that glacier retreat or climate change has local causes, thus erasing the possibility of seeing it as a global phenomenon (Boillat and Berkes 2013; Crate 2011; Paerregaard 2014 and in this volume). The second is that climate change, and glacier retreat in particular, are understood as causally related to human moral behavior. As Boillat and Berkes (2013) report, Bolivian Quechua farmers “linked [climate] changes directly to human moral and spiritual behavior, while others made the link between change and environmental behavior.” Thus, according to some highland rural perspectives, the local population is directly responsible for climate change. One of the earliest recorded Andean narratives on glacier retreat is a good example. Mariano Turpo, a well-known political leader and yachaq—a knowledgeable person mediating between humans and powerful apus—who lived close to the Apu Ausangate, the highest glacier in the Cuzco region, confided to two anthropologists several narratives on this powerful mountain in the early 1970s.15 Here is a small fragment that refers to glacial retreat: In the old times, my grandfather told me that one day Inkariy16 told Apu Ausangate: “If you are no longer respected and feared in the hearts of our runas,17 that day the Last Judgment will arrive.”

62

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

And Inkariy also told the great Apu Ausangate: “For the arrival of the Last Judgment, you, Apu Ausangate, little by little will become a gray spotted mountain and then turn into a totally black one. When you will be a carbon black mountain, that day the Last Judgment will arrive.” Currently, year after year, Apu Ausangate is turning into a gray spotted mountain and runas do not respect him anymore. Day after day, runas forget him. So, I say in my heart, the Last Judgment is not far off. When the Last Judgment arrives, we [inclusive, –nchis] will return to the ancient times and even the black bitter heart of the misti wiraqucha18 will be sweetened. Then, we [inclusive, –nchis] will all turn into one single pure heart, as in the time of our [inclusive, –nchis] old Inkas (Valderrama and Escalante 1975, 176, my translation).

Here glacier retreat correlates with a process in which runas are leaving behind their practices of respecting Apu Ausangate. This is very interesting because of the mention of the misti wiraqucha later in the narrative. While runa can be translated as a generic human, when it is opposed to misti, it acquires another meaning. It emerges as a racial-ethnic label: runa is opposed to misti as Quechua is to Spanish, rural to urban, peasant to nonpeasant, and indigenous to racially and culturally mixed people. Further, the runa emerges as a person who lives according to the moral obligations of reciprocal relations, not only with fellow runas, but also with the earth beings, such as the apus, that constitute Quechua society. It is through this web of relations that runas are morally productive persons. In contrast, misti wiraqucha are stereotypically Spanish speakers who do not cultivate these reciprocal relations with earth beings and thus are nonproductive because they do not cultivate the land. Hence, their wealth can only be the product of abuse and exploitation (Allen 2002; de la Cadena 2015; Mannheim 1991b). In this narrative, Mariano Turpo is saying that as Ausangate is losing its ice, runas are no longer honoring him, which is a way of saying that runas are slowly ceasing to be runas. Although he does not make an explicit causal link between runas no longer respecting Apu Ausangate and glacier retreat, both are clearly part of the same process that is leading toward the Last Judgment. This event will be a pachakuti, a radical turn of times that will start a new era (Fuenzalida 1977). The Last Judgment, however, is presented not as a calamity but as a utopian world in which the evil of the misti wiraqucha will disappear, and with it, the racial-ethnic hierarchies articulated by the opposition runa-misti. Hence, in the utopian world after the Last Judgment, everybody will live in harmonious communion, “as in the time of our old Inkas.”19 This overcoming of differences

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

63

is stressed by the use of the Quechua inclusive first person plural (marked by the suffix –nchis), as opposed to the exclusive one (marked by the suffix –yku that excludes the addressee), in his recorded conversation with the two anthropologists. The latter could not be framed as runas within the context of this conversation. Thus, the use of the inclusive first-person plural in the narrative involves a we that transcends ethnic differences. This narrative is rare in its complexity, but it is not the only one linking glacier retreat with the Last Judgment.20 Similar relations have emerged in brief narratives in the context of the pilgrimage (Regalado 2005) and, unsurprisingly, in the narratives of converts to evangelicalism as reported by Boillat and Berkes (2013) for Andean Bolivia. The association between glacier retreat, the lack of respect for earth beings, and the Last Judgment of Turpo’s testimony, becomes clearly linked with moral judgment in the ways in which Quyllurit’i pilgrims frame glacier retreat. As I stated before, many pilgrims directly or implicitly claim that they are responsible for the retreat of Apu Qulqipunku’s ice. This is done in the following ways. Some pilgrims’ explanations stress local causes involving what could be called the direct environmental impact of the pilgrimage. Some pilgrims mentioned to me that glacier retreat might be caused by the large quantities of plastic tents that cover the Sinaqara valley during the pilgrimage because they reflect sunlight that melts the ice. A variation in this explanation involves the claim that the reflection of the large church’s tin roof has similar effects. Others blame human body heat and the cooking equipment used to feed the tens of thousands of pilgrims for causing the glacial melt. Another explanation emphasizes that this process is the consequence of years of pilgrims dropping waste and plastic in the area. A different type of explanation involves references to the agency of Lord Quyllurit’i himself. It is not always clear whether the person is referring to the Christ image rock as a representation of Christ or as an agent in itself. When emerging as the image rock, Quyllurit’i is inscribed in the landscape and related to the agency of Apu Qulqipunku, something that is in strong dialogue with the indigenous ways of relating to earth beings. One way to account for the glacier retreat, then, is to claim that it happens because of Taytacha Quyllurit’i’s will. An emerging type of narrative has shifted from a previous version that questioned the pilgrimage’s authenticity to one that now accounts for the glacier’s retreat. The previous narrative stated that during the days of the pilgrimage, Lord Quyllurit’i was unable to bear the strong stench of human sins. He either used to leave the shrine, going away where the “real” Quyllurit’i happened in secret (Poole 1988), or departed the rock toward the icy glacier summit far from the pilgrims’ stench (Ricard 2007; Salas Carreño 2014). In 2008, however, three

64

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

pilgrims from different dance troupes told me that the glacier was retreating because Lord Quyllurit’i might have left the shrine because of pilgrims’ great sins. This was mentioned also in some media reports: “When the people saw that the ice was disappearing, they thought that the Apu Quyllurit’i was abandoning them because of their excessive sins, claims Régulo with sadness” (Plitt 2010; my translation). “Mr. Vera said it’s no wonder that the snow is vanishing: ‘It’s because the Apu is leaving. He’s moving away from this place’” (Regalado 2005). For others, glacial retreat is a consequence of Taytacha Quyllurit’i’s anger at human moral behavior, which gets expressed through weather events. For example, when asked how one knows whether Taytacha Quyllurit’i is angry, the president of the Brotherhood of Señor de Quyllurit’i explained: “You can tell that [Taytacha Quyllurit’i] is angry at some people because when the delegation arrives up there [at the shrine], it starts to snow, to rain. He does not let you rest. Now, with the warming, it is even the very glacier that is disappearing.”21 This type of explanations belongs to worlds that transcend the nature-society divide. Hence, for many pilgrims who annually visit Taytacha Quyllurit’i, glacier retreat is related to morally problematic human practices. Notice how, in a similar way, the debate about climate change in terms of environmental justice morally evaluates human responsibilities associated with the process. The difference between metropolitan scholars and activists on the one hand, and Quyllurit’i pilgrims on the other, is that the former see the relationship between human actions and climate change as a complex chain of causes and effects in which nature does not have intentional agency, and the latter live in a world in which human behavior has consequences, but also is judged and rewarded or punished by beings such as Taytacha Quyllurit’i and Apu Qulqipunku. This understanding that human moral action has consequences on the climate in the form of intentional rewards or punishments is what Burman (2017, 927) has called “the moral meteorology of the Andes,” and it entails the following paradox. Paraphrasing Burman (2017, 932), how can it be possible to articulate a critique of environmental blame displacement if simultaneously one wants to take seriously pilgrims’ claim that glacier retreat is related to their own morally regrettable actions? Burman’s response elaborates the opposition jaqi-misti that is the Aymara equivalent of the Quechua runa-misti mentioned by Mariano Turpo (Valderrama and Escalante 1975, 176). The Aymara people with whom Burman works blame themselves for climate change because of their own regrettable actions and ritual carelessness with earth beings, but that does not erase misti (and this includes rinku,22 that is, white Euroamericans’) responsibility for

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

65

climate change. Misti people, that is, exploiters disconnected from reciprocal relations with earth beings, do have responsibility for climate change by definition as a result of their very disconnectedness: “Few Aymara people would dispute Carlos’ claim that misti-q’aras ‘throw toxics out in nature’ and that this affects pacha as a whole in detrimental ways. Nevertheless, few would argue that changes in the social life of the communities and the abandonment of certain ritual practices have nothing to do with it” (Burman 2017, 934). As Burman acknowledges, the jaqi-misti opposition is complicated by the fluid, shifting, and contextual uses of these words as markers of racial-ethnic hierarchies. The same fluidity and ambivalence applies to the southern Peruvian Andes (De la Cadena 2000). Because of the highly dynamic migration and mobility between urban and rural areas already mentioned, many people who live in cities, be they liberal professionals or merchants, consider themselves mestizos (because they have left the poor and hard life of highland subsistence agriculture of indios), but they honor their roots and cultivate their forebears’ practices, and thus, they remain indigenous. In an oxymoronic way, de la Cadena (2000) calls them indigenous mestizos, and as I mentioned before, they constitute the majority of current Quyllurit’i pilgrims. Though they cultivate their relations with earth beings and yearly visit Taytacha Quyllurit’i, they are fully entangled in the monetary economy, have left agriculture or are involved in it only marginally. Therefore, like Burman’s Aymara interlocutors, few indigenous mestizo pilgrims would argue that their way of life and the ways in which they assume their relations with earth beings have nothing to do with glacial retreat. This acknowledgment, however, does not erase other people’s responsibilities for climate change. Conclusions Glacier retreat is a process highly visible to all pilgrims, but until now it does not seem to have challenged the overarching logic of the pilgrimage. As explained earlier, although the 2004 decision to stop taking ice chunks from the glacier has been widely reported as showing the impact of climate change on Andean rituals, the actual consequence of the measure was minor within the overall sense of the main practices that link Apu Qulqipunku with Taytacha Quyllurit’i. What the prohibition against bringing ice chunks shows is that it was possible to implement a new policy out of concern for glacier retreat only after a legitimate and respected institution—the Council of Pilgrim Nations—had organized all dancers in a hierarchical structure. As Postigo (2014, 394–95)

66

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

claims about peasant communities of the southern Peruvian Andes, institutional responses are of central importance in climate change. But he also points out how some institutional responses might be inadequate and insufficient. Although the measures of the Council of Pilgrim Nations are not related to agropastoral activities discussed by Postigo, his elaboration fits neatly with the pilgrimage’s case. I do not know what the consequences of the continuing glacier retreat of Apu Qulqipunku will be for the pilgrimage. If the ice is totally lost, it might entail a serious challenge to the ways people relate to Apu Qulqipunku and Taytacha Quyllurit’i and might disrupt certain practices of the pilgrimage in crucial ways. Nevertheless, the disappearance of the ice might not necessarily lead to the end of the pilgrimage. Notice also that the total loss of Apu Qulqipunku’s ice would not mean that he stops being an earth being. Similarly, the link between Apu Qulqipunku and Taytacha Quyllurit’i might shift from the centrality of ice to other forms of relatedness, such as consubstantiality and metonymy. After all, both are rocks, the latter likely being a fragment of the former, and rocks already have very important roles in the pilgrimage (Allen 1997). As stated at the beginning of this chapter, indigenous worlds are deeply entangled with modern ones. Most of the media reports about the impact of glacial retreat in the pilgrimage are evidence of that. The necessary brevity of media reports frames the multiple and complex practices of the pilgrimage directly in terms of religion and the sacred, usually overstating the changes that have been taking place in the pilgrimage. This type of coverage is fundamental in the process of making this pilgrimage an emblematic case of global warming’s impact in highland indigenous peoples. It is not surprising that a closer look at what is happening in the pilgrimage is more complex. The great diversity of pilgrims experience it through practices that carry different presuppositions. At the same time, the many pilgrimages enacted by these practices are all inevitably entangled with each other. Glacial retreat surely is affecting all of them but is doing so in different ways. Here I have privileged the experience of the pilgrimage through the practices of the dancers, and to a lesser degree, the unaffiliated pilgrims. An emphasis on other actors might show different processes. Unaffiliated pilgrims cultivating popular Catholicism might not experience glacial retreat as affecting or having a direct relationship with the power of Lord Quyllurit’i. In contrast, ukuku dancers face harder challenges as a result of the prominent role that they have in mediating the power of Apu Qulqipunku with Taytacha Quyllurit’i. The process already has involved the prohibition against

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

67

taking glacial ice chunks and the change of place of some nations’ annual nocturnal meeting of ukukus, previously taking place on the glacier. It is also important to point out that the power of Taytacha Quyllurit’i is deeply related to how it is experienced in the pilgrims’ daily lives. Most pilgrims evaluate in notably pragmatic ways how Taytacha Quyllurit’i is helping them with their particular projects and requests. The future of the pilgrimage, with the impact of glacial retreat, cannot be fully understood without these pilgrims’ personal experiences. Even though glacier retreat is strongly affecting Apu Qulqipunku, the pilgrimage seems to keep growing and attracting pilgrims as never before. It is hard to imagine that it will end if the glacial ice is gone. What I imagine is that the thousands of dancers and pilgrims will adapt and restructure their practices in creative ways, as Andean peoples have been doing for millennia in the face of an extremely challenging environment. Certainly, the Catholic priesthood and some popular Catholic practices present in the shrine clearly emerged within “religion,” understood as a modern social field. As stated before, however, the pilgrimage includes many other practices that, while inevitably related to Catholicism, clearly transcend the nature-society divide and, doing so, transcend the domain of the supernatural. Indigenous practices facing climate change take place within their own ontological terms. Science is indispensable for understanding the evolution, challenges, and possibilities that human societies have facing global warming, but indigenous worlds show us that modern worlds founded on the nature-society divide are not the only possible ones. In that modern worlds coemerge with anthropogenic climate change, the paths for adapting to its challenge necessary involve their questioning and transformation. Contemporary indigenous worlds are not remnants from premodern pasts but rather offer crucial possibilities for hopeful futures. Guiller mo Sa las Ca r r eño is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He is author of Lugares Parientes. Comida, Cohabitación y Mundos Andinos (Fondo Editorial PUCP, 2019).

68

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Not e s The research on which this chapter is based was partially funded by the Dirección de Gestión de la Investigación at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú through the subvention DGI-20163–7–304. The author thanks Karina Pacheco for kindly sharing her photographs of the glacier included in figure 2.2. The late Julia Chambi generously gave me one of her own 1979 photographs of the shrine (a fragment of which is included in fig. 2.1) after an interview in 2003 about her father’s—Martín Chambi—1930s photographs of the pilgrimage. José Enrique Solano, as research assistant, carried out part of the interviews used in this text. 1. Since the first time I attended this pilgrimage, in 1996, I heard consistent comments on glacier retreat. Various pilgrims usually concurred in reporting that they knew how previously the glacial ice was very close to the shrine and therefore had greatly retreated during the last decades. Very similar claims were included by media reports covering the effects of climate change on this pilgrimage. Ramón (2010) quotes a female urban pilgrim who was twenty-five years old at the time as stating that “When I used to come as a child, the snow was like a big blanket that arrived just few meters from the shrine; now it is almost gone” (my translation). Guerrero (2008) quotes the president of the Brotherhood of Señor de Quyllurit’i at the time as stating that “the oldest [pilgrims] tell that, before, the snow arrived up to the Virgin’s grotto [located in the shrine], but now it is very far” (my translation). It seems that these claims originated from the memory of a strong but impermanent snow during the pilgrimage. A review of the pilgrimage’s oldest available photographs taken by Martín Chambi in the 1930s shows unmistakably that the glacial ice was already quite far from the shrine (see fig. 2.1 and Chambi 1990, 99, for the complete picture), which suggests that there are some overstatements in these testimonies. 2. Quyllurit’i (Quechua): white shining glacial ice. While usually I translate it as “white shining snow,” rit’i refers to solid water as an unmarked and general category, in opposition, for example, to chullunku (segmented ice) (see Cummins and Mannheim 2011, 9–10). Hence, in the context of this article, rit’i can be better translated as glacial ice, that is, the perpetual ice of the glacier, rather than snow or a detached part of it. Notice that many texts write Qoyllur Rit’i and its translation as snow star. This written form, however, corresponds neither with the Quechua pronunciation of the pilgrimage’s name nor with its meaning. Cuzco’s intellectuals created the written form Qoyllur Rit’i in the 1970s. It did not emerge from the Quechua register of the shrine’s region (Flores Ochoa 1990).

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

69

3. Corpus Christi (Latin, Body of Christ) is always celebrated on a Thursday, at the end of May or beginning of June, as determined by the lunar calendar that also determines other Catholic celebrations, such as Holy Week. 4. For a general analysis of this pilgrimage, see the work of Michael Sallnow (1981; 1987; 1991), who carried out his study in the late 1970s. For the history of the shrine, see Salas Carreño (2006). 5. Apu (Quechua) is an honorific usually translated as “lord.” Although the term was used for addressing indigenous noblemen in the sixteenth century, currently it is almost exclusively used to address mountains in the southern Peruvian Andes. Some indigenous peoples of the Amazon use this word for referring to their leaders. 6. See note 2. 7. The recent growth of the pilgrimage from 1999 to 2016 can be appreciated in figure 2.2. Regarding the road that passes near the shrine, see Harvey and Knox (2015). 8. Another consequence of growth is that the organization and control of the pilgrimage is alien to the community of Mawayani where the shrine is located. The community of Mawayani resents that the pilgrimage uses and deteriorates its territory without providing what they consider an appropriate compensation (Salas Carreño and Diez Hurtado 2018). 9. Demanda (Spanish): demand. The contemporary Spanish meaning, and its English translation, do not correspond with the connotation that the word seems to have in the pilgrimage. The name came from colonial legal vocabulary. It might be related with the notion that Lord Quyllurit’i’s wants to be satisfied with dance performances, candles, masses, and flowers so that he will feel goodwill and help his devotees. 10. This word is used in its old meaning of people. It does not refer to nation-states. 11. These ice chunks gained wide notoriety in the city of Cuzco during the 1990s when ukukus of urban dance troupes started to bring them to the city center on Wednesday, the day before Corpus Christi, when each parish’s patron saint arrived in procession to Cuzco’s cathedral. 12. Other measures that the Council of Pilgrim Nations agreed with the National Institute of Culture (now Ministry of Culture) in 2008 involved prohibiting loud gunpowder explosions that were detonated in the shrine and meant to honor Lord Quyllurit’i. This prohibition aimed to prevent further cracking of the retreating ice that would accelerate its retreat. It was easy to implement because brotherhood members were in charge of carrying them out. There also have been

70

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

campaigns both by the Ministry of Culture with the help of the Council of Pilgrim Nations to prevent pilgrims from leaving plastic, food remains, or any other type of garbage in the camp areas that surround the shrine (see fig. 2.3). This has been very difficult to achieve. After the 2016 pilgrimage, the Institute of Water Management of the Regional Government collected around ten tons of organic waste that was buried in pits close to the shrine and seventeen tons of inorganic waste that was taken from the area. Besides these efforts, the shrine remains far from clean after the pilgrimage. In addition, although in recent years there has been an increase of sanitary services in the shrine, the quantity of pilgrims largely exceeds the installed capacity. After the pilgrimage, the shrine surroundings are left with much human waste contaminating the moraine valley and the stream that descends toward Mawayani. 13. All ukukus have whips. They use them for dancing and for imposing discipline—rather as a sign than through its actual use—within the dance troupe and among the broader pilgrims. 14. See also this quote from Thompson (2010, 152): “Those who are affected most by the environmental and climatic changes that are instigated by wealthy nations are the least likely to have the resources to adapt. It is a cruel irony that so many of these people also live in or near ecologically sensitive areas, such as grasslands (Outer Mongolia), dry lands (Sudan and Ethiopia), mountain glaciers (the Quechua of the Peruvian Andes), and coastal lowlands (Bangladesh and the South Sea island region).” 15. Regarding Mariano Turpo and his role as a political leader and mediator with powerful nonhumans, see Marisol de la Cadena (2015). 16. Inkariy (Quechua): Inca king. This is a word composed by Inka (Quechua) and rey (Spanish, king). 17. Runa (Quechua): human being. Because there is a mention of misti (racially and culturally mixed people), however, here runa indicates indigenous people who live in reciprocal relations with fellow runas and with earth beings. 18. Misti wiraqucha (Quechua): Racially and culturally mixed powerful person. Misti comes from the Spanish mestizo (racially and culturally mixed). Wiraqucha (Quechua) is a honorific title recognizing power and high social standing. 19. Regarding Andean utopia and the Inkas, see Flores Galindo (2010). 20. To some extent, Mariano Turpo’s narrative is exceptional. Most Quechua narratives on glacial retreat and the corresponding ones in Spanish tend to be descriptive rather than exegetical. Consider the following statement of a Quechua elder: “Our Apus have always had sparkling white ponchos. Now some of their ponchos have brown stripes; others have shed their ponchos altogether” (Bolin 2001, 25). Asked about the causes of glacier retreat, many of my Quechua

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

71

interlocutors were rather blunt in stating that they do not know what they might be. Southern Peruvian Quechua does not have an elaborate tradition of exegesis of practice. Obviously, particular individuals can and do make interpretations. But there is not a strong socially sanctioned tradition of exegetical discourse as in other indigenous traditions (see Mannheim 1986; 1991a). 21. Interview with the president of the brotherhood by José Enrique Solano, Cuzco, August 2016. 22. Rinku (Aymara) White Euroamerican foreigners. From Spanish gringo (Burman 2017).

R efer ence s Allen, Catherine J. 1983. “Of Bear-Men and He-Men: Bear Metaphors and Male Self-Perception in a Peruvian Community.” Latin American Indian Literatures 7 (1): 38–51. ———. 1997. “When Pebbles Move Mountains: Iconicity and Symbolism in Quechua Ritual.” In Creating Context in Andean Cultures, edited by Rosaleen Howard-Malverde, 73–84. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Allison, Elizabeth A. 2015. “The Spiritual Significance of Glaciers in an Age of Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change 6 (5): 493–508. https://doi.org /10.1002/wcc.354. Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology.” Current Anthropology 54 (5): 547–69. Boillat, Sébastien, and Fikret Berkes. 2013. “Perception and Interpretation of Climate Change among Quechua Farmers of Bolivia: Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource for Adaptive Capacity.” Ecology and Society 18 (4). https://doi .org/10.5751/ES-05894–180421. Bolin, Inge. 2001. “When Apus Are Losing Their White Ponchos: Environmental Dilemmas and Restoration Efforts in Peru.” Development and Cooperation 6:25–26. Burman, Anders. 2017. “The Political Ontology of Climate Change: Moral Meteorology, Climate Justice, and the Coloniality of Reality in the Bolivian Andes.” Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1): 921–38. Cánepa, Gisela. 1998. Máscara, transformación e identidad en los Andes: La fiesta de la virgen del carmen paucartambo. Lima: Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

72

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Ceruti, Constanza. 2007. “Realm of the Ice-Cloaked Mountain Gods: High in the Andes Hope Is Melting Away.” Explorers Journal 85 (3): 36–37. Chakalian, Paul. 2015. “The Dancing Glacier.” GlacierHub, June 16. http:// glacierhub.org/2015/06/16/dancing-glacier/. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Chambi, Martín. 1990. Martín Chambi, 1920–1950. Barcelona: Círculo de Bellas Artes, Lunwerg. Crate, Susan A. 2011. “Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 175–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104925. Cruikshank, Julie. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Brenda and David McLean Canadian Studies Series. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Cummins, Tom, and Bruce Mannheim. 2011. “Editorial: The River around Us, the Stream within Us: The Traces of the Sun and Inka Kinetics.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59–60:5–21. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–70. ———. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Diez, Alejandro. 2014. “Cambios en la ruralidad y en las estrategias de vida en el mundo rural.” In Perú: El problema agrario en debate, 19–75. Sepia XV. Lima: SEPIA, Oxfam. Dupraz-Dobias, Paula. 2016. “The Sacred Glacier Is Melting but the Festival Goes On.” Goats and Soda, NPR, May 21. https://www.npr.org/sections /goatsandsoda/2016/05/21/478828495/the-sacred-glacier-is-melting-but-the -festival-goes-on. Flores Galindo, Alberto. 2010. In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia since the Spanish Conquest. New York: Cambridge University Press. http://assets .cambridge.org/97805215/98613/cover/9780521598613.jpg. Flores Lizana, Carlos. 1997. El Taytacha Qoyllur Rit’i: Teología india hecha por comuneros y mestizos quechuas. Lima: Instituto de Pastoral Andina. Flores Ochoa, Jorge A. 1990. “Taytacha Qoyllurit’i: El Cristo de la nieve resplandeciente.” In El Cvzco: resistencia y continuidad, 73–94. Cuzco, Peru: Centro de Estudios Andinos Cusco.

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

73

Fraser, Barbara. 2009. “Climate Change Equals Culture Change in the Andes.” Scientific American, October 5. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article /andes-climate-change-glacieramaru-agriculture/. Fuenzalida, Fernando. 1977. “El mundo de los gentiles y las tres eras de la creación.” Revista de la Universidad Católica 2:59–84. Gose, Peter. 1994. Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Guerrero, Renzo. 2008. “En un 40% avanza la desglaciación de los nevados de la región.” El Comercio, May 24. Haraway, Donna J. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6:159–65. Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Instituto National de Cultura (INC). 2004. “RDN 608/INC-2004: Declara patrimonio cultural de la nación al santuario de Qoyllorit’i y a la festividad de Qoyllorit’i de Cusco, asociada al mismo.” http://administrativos.cultura.gob .pe/intranet/dpcn/anexos/18_1.pdf?4798366. Kormann, Carolyn. 2009. “Last Days of the Glacier.” Virginia Quarterly Review Online, April 1. http://www.vqronline.org/vqr-portfolio/last-days-glacier. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2015. “Telling Friends from Foes at the Time of the Anthropocene.” In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, edited by Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne, and Christophe Bonneuil, 145–55. London: Routledge. Mannheim, Bruce. 1986. “Popular Song and Popular Grammar, Poetry and Metalanguage.” Word 37 (1–2): 45–75. ———. 1991a. “After Dreaming: Image and Interpretation in Southern Peruvian Quechua.” Etnofoor 4 (2): 43–79. ———. 1991b. The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mannheim, Bruce, and Guillermo Salas Carreño. 2015. “Wak’a: Entifications of the Andean Sacred.” In The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes, edited by Tamara Bray, 47–72. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Marzal, Manuel M. 2002. Tierra encantada: Tratado de antropología religiosa de América latina. Madrid: Trotta, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

74

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Mendoza, Zoila S. 2000. Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mishra, Anil, and Koen Verbist. 2017. The Impact of Glacier Retreat in the Andes: International Multidisciplinary Network for Adaptation Strategies. Paris: Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme, UNESCO. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Navab, Valerie. 2011. “Andes under Stress: Qoyllur Rit’i and the Retreat of the Glaciers.” NMAI Magazine 12 (2): 35–37. Orlove, Ben. 2009. “Glacier Retreat: Reviewing the Limits of Human Adaptation to Climate Change.” Environment 51 (3): 22–34. https://doi.org/10.3200 /ENVT.51.3.22–34. Pachauri, Rajendra K., and Andy Reisinger, eds. 2007. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch /publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report _synthesis_report.htm. Pærregaard, Karsten. 2014. “Broken Cosmologies: Climate, Water, and State in the Peruvian Andes.” In Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, 196–210. London: Routledge. Plitt, Laura. 2010. “El calor ‘disuelve’ los rituales andinos.” BBC Mundo, March 11. http://www.bbc.com/mundo/ciencia_tecnologia/2010/03/091117_peru _cultura_lp. Poole, Deborah. 1988. “Entre el milagro y la mercancía: Qoyllur Rit’i.” Márgenes 2 (4): 101–20. Postigo, Julio C. 2014. “Perception and Resilience of Andean Populations Facing Climate Change.” Journal of Ethnobiology 34 (3): 383–400. https://doi .org/10.2993/0278–0771–34.3.383. Rabatel, Antoine, Bernard Francou, Alvaro Soruco, Jesús Gomez, Bolívar Cáceres, Jorge L. Ceballos, Ruben Basantes, Mathias Vuille, Jean E. Sicart, Christian Huggel, et al. 2013. “Current State of Glaciers in the Tropical Andes: A Multi-century Perspective on Glacier Evolution and Climate Change.” Cryosphere 7 (1): 81–102. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-7–81–2013. Ramón, Roxabel. 2010. “El Qoyllur Riti es una devoción que mueve y derrite montañas.” El Comercio, June 4. Regalado, Antonio. 2005. “The Ukukus Wonder Why a Sacred Glacier Melts in Peru’s Andes.” Wall Street Journal, June 17. http://www.wsj.com/articles /SB111896313493862032.

Cl i m at e Ch a nge , Mor a l M et eorol ogy, a n d L oc a l M e a su r e s

75

Ricard, Xavier. 2007. Ladrones de sombra: El universo religioso de los pastores del Ausangate. Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Cusco, Peru: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. Salas Carreño, Guillermo. 2006. “Diferenciación social y discursos públicos sobre la peregrinación de Quyllurit’i.” In Mirando la esfera pública desde la cultura en el Perú, edited by Gisela Cánepa and Maria Eugenia Ulfe, 243–88. Lima: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica. ———. 2010. “Acerca de la antigua importancia de las comparsas wayri ch’unchu y su contemporánea marginalidad en la peregrinación de Quyllurit’i.” Anthropologica 28 (28): 67–91. ———. 2014. “The Glacier, the Rock, the Image: Emotional Experience and Semiotic Diversity at the Quyllurit’i Pilgrimage (Cuzco, Peru).” Signs and Society 2 (S1): S188–S214. https://doi.org/10.1086/674324. ———. 2016. “Places Are Kin: Food, Cohabitation, and Sociality in the Southern Peruvian Andes.” Anthropological Quarterly 89 (3): 813–40. https://doi .org/10.1353/anq.2016.0048. Salas Carreño, Guillermo, and Alejandro Diez Hurtado. 2018. “Estado, concesiones mineras y comuneros: Los múltiples conflictos alrededor de la minería en las inmediaciones del santuario de Qoyllurit’i (Cusco, Perú).” Colombia Internacional 93:65–91. https://dx.doi.org/10.7440/colombiaint93.2018.03. Sallnow, Michael J. 1981. “Communitas Reconsidered: The Sociology of Andean Pilgrimage.” Man 16 (2): 163–82. ———. 1987. Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ———. 1991. “Dual Cosmology and Ethnic Division in an Andean Pilgrimage Cult.” In Pilgrimage in Latin America, edited by N. Ross Crumrine and E. Alan Morinis, 281–306. New York: Greenwood. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. 1991. “‘Religion’ in the West.” In The Meaning and End of Religion, 15–50. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Stensrud, Astrid B. 2016. “Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds in the Andes.” Ethnos 81 (1): 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844 .2014.929597. Thompson, Lonnie G. 2010. “Understanding Global Climate Change: Paleoclimate Perspective from the World’s Highest Mountains.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 154 (2): 133–57. UNESCO. 2011. “Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllurit’i, Peru: Inscribed in 2011 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Paris: UNESCO, Living Heritage Entity. http://www .unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/pilgrimage-to-the-sanctuary-of-the-lord-of -qoylluriti-00567.

76

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Valderrama, Ricardo, and Carmen Escalante. 1975. “El Apu Ausangate en la narrativa popular.” Allpanchis Phuturinqa 8:175–84. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88. Vuille, Mathias, Bernard Francou, Patrick Wagnon, Irmgard Juen, Georg Kaser, Bryan G. Mark, and Raymond S. Bradley. 2008. “Climate Change and Tropical Andean Glaciers: Past, Present and Future.” Earth-Science Reviews 89 (3): 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2008.04.002. Welch, Derek. 2016. “Climate Change Is Melting Qoyllur Riti, a Sacred Ice Tradition in Andes Mountains.” World Religion News, May 26. http://www .worldreligionnews.com/issues/climate-change-is-melting-qoyllur-riti-a -sacred-ice-tradition-in-andes-mountains.

thr ee

k

RELIGIOUS EXPL ANATIONS FOR COASTAL EROSION IN NARIKOSO, FIJI

Amanda Bertana, Souther n Connecticut State University I n t roduct ion In this chapter, I examine how religious worldviews give rise to narratives that challenge scientific notions of climate change. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Narikoso Village on Ono Island in the Kadavu Archipelago of Fiji, a community that was in the process of relocating as an adaptation to coastal degradation. By documenting how Narikoso villagers interpreted the causes, consequences, and appropriate responses to coastal erosion according to scientific reasoning of climate change and the Christian story of Noah’s Ark, I provide a greater understanding of three general questions: (1) How is climate change as a secular narrative being presented to and understood by vulnerable coastal communities? (2) How does religion give rise to narratives that challenge, accommodate, and synthesize with the climate-change narrative? (3) What implications do religious worldviews have on adaptive responses? This study is situated within a sociological context and recognizes religion as a social institution that influences how people make sense of the world. Religion has been a central focus within sociology. Its “founding fathers,” Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, theorized the fundamental role religion has in social organization, ethics, and collective society. Marx (1990, 91) referred to the “religious world [as] but the reflex of the real world.” He saw it as an ideological representation of the alienated material world, providing the exploited class hope of relief from their deprived condition. Durkheim (1965, 22) perceived religion as “eminently social” in that “religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.” Weber (2012), saw it as a transformational force that indirectly ignites social change. He identified

77

78

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

religion as an external variable that set the preconditions for capitalism but argued that it declined institutionally once the economic system established its own momentum. These studies, among many others, well established that religion plays a fundamental role in society by directly or indirectly interacting with other social institutions in a way that shapes people’s perceptions and actions. Despite variations in whether sociological analyses take the role of religion as a reflection of society, a causal explanatory factor of social development, or both, there is general agreement that religion is a social institution that is dynamic, active, and influential. As a dynamic system, it interacts with, adapts, and responds to a changing world (Cho and Squier 2013). It is thus recognized as continuously evolving with beliefs and traditions that emerge according to historical and temporal contexts. Religious beliefs are not mere background noise. Religious leaders and organizations take an active role in catalyzing beliefs and helping make them real and vital in the lives of their congregations. This assertion in large part is based on the assumption that religious leaders carry authority. For these reasons, religion has been examined for understanding the important ways in which it influences social views and behaviors. The study of religion has expanded across the social sciences by examining how religious worldviews shape an array of social dynamics, including demographic outcomes (McQuillan 2004), rituals around food practices (Johnson et al. 2011), adherence to norms (McNamara, Norenzayan, and Henrich 2016, and attitudes toward the environment (Berry 2015; Haberman 2006). With respect to the environment, the religion-environment nexus has become increasingly important, as it is now well accepted that religious worldviews are a system of meaning that influences people’s attitudes toward and interactions with nature (Gerten and Bergmann 2012). Although the research on this topic— specifically related to Christian theology and the environment—is vast, it is relatively inconclusive. Some studies suggest a negative association between the Judeo-Christian tradition and environmental practices and its anthropocentric biblical teachings derived from God giving humans domination over nature, which contributes to societal exploitation of nature and its resources (Garfield et al. 2014; White 1967). Others identify a paradigmatic shift starting in the 1990s that is often described as the “greening of Christianity,” in which Christian ethics of stewardship are integrated into environmental values to preserve “Mother Earth” (Clements, McCright, and Xiao 2014; Ronan 2017). The divergence of the findings illustrates the complex logic that emerges from religious worldviews, including the possibility of positive or negative outcomes

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

79

associated with belief structures (Arbuckle 2017; Gerten and Bergmann 2012; Rubow and Bird 2016). Despite the differences, all these studies share the assertion that religious views influence how people engage with their environment. Considering the influential nature of religious belief structures, in conjunction with the fact that approximately 80 percent of the world’s population identifies as religious (Pew Research Center 2012), it is logical to assume that religion is an important analytical lens for studying the modern era’s gravest environmental challenge—anthropogenic climate change (Adua, York, and Schuelke-Leech 2016). Climate change has emerged as the most global and controversial political topic since it was first identified in 1980 (Bolin 2008; Roberts and Parks 2007). It gained notoriety in the global community as developed and underdeveloped countries started experiencing its visible consequences in the form of coastal erosion, desertification, shifting rainfall patterns, and more frequent and intense storm surges (Anshelm and Hultman 2014). An abundance of scientific information in tandem with a perceived need to further understand the impacts of climate change eventually led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. In subsequent years, the IPCC’s annual Assessment Reports on the impacts, challenges, and practical solutions to addressing climate change have only enhanced the scientific doctrine’s authority and credibility as a causal explanation of changing climatic conditions (Anshelm and Hultman 2014; Rubow and Bird 2016). Despite the pervasiveness of climate change as a discursive frame, the relatively well known threat it poses to all societies, and the overwhelming documentation of its physical dimensions, the global discourse had largely been confined to the international community of political elites, scholars, and scientists (Höijer 2010). Not until recently, in the last decade or so, has the concept of climate change permeated popular discourse (Anshelm and Hultman 2014). In its growing cache, climate change as a causal explanation of changing ecological conditions is reaching the general public, including those in more remote parts of the world, through international and grassroots organizations, radio, newspaper, and television (Anshelm and Hultman 2014; Rudiak-Gould 2011, 2013). The construction of the discourse is heavily criticized for being framed according to technocratic and scientific observations that exist outside local contexts (Hulme 2007). For this reason, there is increasing awareness of the need to understand how the discourse of climate change is being understood by particular local communities, especially those that are most vulnerable to the risks a changing climate poses (Rudiak-Gould 2013).

80

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Simultaneous with the growing momentum of climate change as a scientific discourse, theological interpretations of environmental degradation are emerging, which is drawing more attention to the reality that climate change is but one conception of changing environmental conditions. And a focus solely on secular narratives dilutes the fact that people perceive ecological degradation in a manner that is also embedded in cultural and religious worldviews (Shehu and Molyneux-Hodgson 2014). Although research on climate change has, for the most part, privileged people’s observations of changing ecological conditions, studies from various parts of the world are now drawing attention to how communities are adapting climatic anomalies to their specific worldviews (Rudiak-Gould 2013). A growing body of scholarship on explanations of changing ecological conditions associated with particular sociocultural understandings of the world is illustrating the extent to which religious beliefs are integrated into causal explanations of ecological degradation (Duke, Ihssen, and O’Brien 2012). In his study on Porgerans in Papua New Guinea, Jerry Jacka (2009) found that climatic changes were interpreted along lines of local folklore. Porgerans believed the El Niño– induced drought of 1997–98 was a consequence of societal rupture between themselves and their culture. In order to mend the disjointed relations, some communities from the Porgera Valley deliberated whether to make a sacrifice to Lemeane, the ancestral spirit believed to control rain (Jacka 2009). Ben Orlove (2009) discovered a similar cultural understanding of environmental change among Peruvian herders in the Andes, who drew conclusions from the supernatural world to explain glacial retreat. The range of explanations included seeing it as “divine punishment for immoral behavior, [or] for neglecting the spirits, and others to interpret the retreat as a sign of the sadness of the spirits about the lack of human respect for the Earth and nature” (Orlove 2009, 144). In addition to these studies, Peter Rudiak-Gould (2011) found in the Marshall Islands that the scientific discourse on climate change and local Christian theologies of environmental change were blurred. Although RudiakGould points out that the Marshallese have a well-founded distrust of scientific “truths,” his findings are nuanced in pointing out that scientific and local knowledge systems are not always mutually exclusive but instead create unique hybridizations—a “global-local duality”—in this context a global discourse of climate change that exists within a local context. Most of the research I have cited, as well as the present case study, focuses on indigenous communities in more remote parts of world. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the belief that environmental degradation is the spiritual world’s retribution for humanity’s moral decline is not confined to remote

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

81

communities but also occurs in the industrialized world. This has been well documented in North American Christianity (Veldman, Szasz, and HaluzaDeLay 2014). The overwhelming representation of conservative Christian Evangelicals in the media during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina connecting the catastrophe to what was described as New Orleans’s sinful culture (Duke et al. 2012; Leduc 2010) is an example that highlights the salience and widespread nature of theological interpretations of ecological events and change. Gen er a l Backgrou n d Fiji is a particularly relevant case study for the examination of theological and scientific understandings of environmental degradation. Not only is the country considered to be on the front lines of climate change, but religion also plays a strong ideological role in shaping the consciousness of Fiji islanders. According to the most recent census (2017), Fiji has an estimated population of 884,887, less than 1 percent of whom do not declare a religion. This places it among one of the most religious countries in the world. Although the islands have a diversity of religions, including Hinduism and Islam, the vast majority of indigenous Fijians identify with some denomination of the Christian faith (Fiji Bureau of Statistics 2007). The importance of religiosity is widely visible throughout this region. As South Pacific scholar Patrick Nunn (2017, 1) states, “Unless you are cocooned in a tourist bubble, it is hardly possible to miss God when you visit the Pacific Islands.” Nunn identifies churches on almost every city block as tangible markers of Christianity’s influence throughout the South Pacific. Religion is a central aspect of urban Fijian life, and it can easily be argued that faith plays an even greater role in the rural areas. This is due to a number of characteristics of village life. For example, every village will have its own church; whether grandiose or modest, there is always a place for the community to gather for Sunday services. The traditional village layout, if space permits, usually has the church strategically placed at the center of the community as a testament to their faith. As a villager asserted to me, the church is the focal point of the community—a concrete demonstration of how Fijian life is organized around God. In addition, Sundays are reserved for worship, in which communities pray, listen to sermons, and abstain from work and from drinking kava. The South Pacific as a whole has received considerable international attention because of climate change and coastal erosion. With the IPCC (2012) projecting a rise in sea levels of 18 to 59 centimeters by the end of the century, small

82

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

islands are often referred to as the “canary in the coal mines” (Farbotko and Lazrus 2012). Their geographic and low elevation have made the South Pacific islands especially vulnerable to any fluctuation in sea level, and they often experience flooding, groundwater salinization, and severe coastal degradation. The IPCC’s scientific claims alongside sensational headlines of “Sinking Islands” have popularized a global imagery of small archipelagoes being engulfed by the ocean (Farbotko and Lazrus 2012), raising concerns about the possibility of a potential mass exodus from low-lying atolls. Alarmed by scientific projections, and partially motivated by the regional discourse on climate-change-induced displacement, the Fijian government has taken on climate change, sea-level rise, and relocation as its primary national agenda. In light of the geographical and social vulnerability of coastal communities, the government of Fiji has been establishing National Relocation Guidelines, which would bureaucratize relocation for vulnerable Fijian coastal villages. While the proposal for this policy started in 2012, the discussion on relocation actually began years earlier. Unlike other faith-based organizations that have recently adopted climate change as a paramount concern, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) has had a presence in the climate-change dialogue from the beginning through its engagement with the resettlement discourse. A PCC representative informed me that in 2007 the Fiji government solicited assistance from the conference to research resettlement in the Pacific, since evacuation was starting to become a major concern throughout the region. The request was not unprecedented; the ecumenical organization has had a long-standing relationship with Pacific Island governments and a positive rapport with island communities. The initial intention of the PCC’s involvement was embedded in the need to further understand the social justice and moral implications of sea-level rise on Pacific Island communities. They eventually took on a greater role and issued the Moana Declaration (Pacific Conference of Churches 2009), a set of guidelines that addresses the possibility of resettlement because of climate change from a human rights perspective. Not only did the declaration gain widespread recognition for its content, it also confirmed the important role religious institutions were taking in addressing climate-change-related issues. The PCC adopted the science of climate change, but not all faith-based organizations accept scientific authority on climate change. On the contrary, many religions actively preach a connection between rising tides, immoral behavior, and punishment from God. Although government workers are aware of what they often refer to as misinformation being spread by church representatives, they cannot prohibit religious groups from entering rural villages. Nor do they

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

83

have the right to regulate what is being preached within these communities. Government and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers often express frustration about the discourses that link climate change to punishment from God, arguing that they perpetuate risk by keeping coastal communities ill prepared for facing the dangers posed by rising sea levels. Consequently, rural communities are bombarded with discrepant messages about environmental degradation. Such is the case in Narikoso. Local and national government officials and NGO representatives conduct climate-change awareness workshops in Narikoso framed within a secular perspective. At the same time, theological interpretations connecting immorality to rising tides circulate throughout the village and are actively preached in Sunday church sermons. Ca se St u dy Fieldwork for this research was carried out from August 2015 to April 2016 in the Fiji Islands, including two weeks in Narikoso Village on Ono Island in the Kadavu island group. Narikoso is relatively secluded, with the local provincial office, post office, and health center approximately thirty minutes away by boat. Although the fourth-largest island of Fiji’s 106 inhabited islands, Kadavu is described by travel books as rugged and lacking “modern civilization” (Goodwin 2010, 167). Goodwin refers to the island group as “an excellent place to visit a village and experience relatively unchanged Fijian culture.” These remarks are in line with common assumptions made by government officials that Kadavuans are more traditional in lifestyle and mindset. Some of these general characteristics of Kadavuans tend to apply to Narikoso villagers. Households operate largely of the market economy, relying on subsistence farming and resources from the sea. As is the case with most Fijian outer islands, residents of Narikoso have a reputation for being more religious, with concurrent beliefs in Christianity and the ancestral gods known as kalou-vu (Ryle 2012). The villagers in fact consider themselves religiously devout. With respect to environmental degradation, Narikoso is experiencing the consequences of sea-level rise through flooding and severe coastal erosion. Because of the changing ecological conditions, a villager was said to approach a provincial officer in 2012 and request adaptation assistance. As a result, Prime Minister Bainimarama was asked to visit Narikoso to see firsthand the eroding coastline. It was during this visit that the prime minister suggested that the community relocate to higher ground, because the seawall was no longer acting as an adequate barrier. Within a few months, the Bainimarama administration sent the military to start excavation for a new village site. At the time

84

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

of my fieldwork, the relocation had not yet taken place, there was no proposed timeline, and half of the village was still frequently flooding during high tide. As a predominantly subsistence community, villagers were acutely aware of the changes in their environment, anxiously acknowledging the rising sea levels that were gradually eroding the coast. Elders in Narikoso identified Cyclone Meli in 1979 as the point at which the sea started to encroach further into the village. Those who were not around then, or were too young to remember Meli, still observed coastal changes in more recent years. Almost everyone recognized ecological markers throughout the village that characterized shifts in the environment. Interviewees pointed to tree stumps submerged in the ocean, for example, as indicators of where the shore and ocean used to meet. An elderly woman referred to the transformation of the coconut trees that lined the coast as evidence of soil salinization: the trees did not fruit as they had in the past, they were noticeably sparse and their coconuts smaller and drier. These observations, although relevant to understanding the physical consequences of sealevel rise on coastal communities, do not address a critical but often overlooked question: How do villagers account for the causes of the encroaching sea? I provide in the following sections more detailed descriptions of the messages and information that were being disseminated to villagers, as well as how the messages have affected people’s perceptions of coastal erosion. This is followed by consideration of the religious discourse related to the relocation initiative. I then draw attention to an emergent narrative that, although not limited to Narikoso, attempts to reconcile the religion-science dichotomy by inserting religious undertones into the climate-change narrative so that people can better identify with it. In doing so, I draw from individual household interviews with Narikoso villagers and couple them with interviews conducted in Suva with local and national government workers, community workers, representatives from NGOs, and a Pentecostal minister. Cli m at e Ch a nge a s a Sci en t i fic Doct r i n e i n Na r ikoso In Fiji, concern about climate change is everywhere, dominating public policy, science, education, and everyday conversation. It appears daily in national political discussions and is disseminated to the general public through newspapers, television, and radio. Even Fiji’s national pastime, rugby, is used to spread the word about climate change. In 2015, the Flying Fijians, Fiji’s national rugby team, changed their uniform to green for the Rugby World Cup as a message to the rest of the world that climate change is an immediate threat to

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

85

the Pacific islands (Fiji Times, September 14, 2015). The Australian sportswear company BLK used the Bayleys Fiji Coral Coast rugby tournament to advocate for climate-change awareness by printing messages such as “Climate Change Is Real” and “Protect Our Environment” on the team’s apparel (Fiji Times, January 15, 2016). Since residents living in more remote areas of the islands have less access to national newspapers and television, the local government offices, NGOs, and the PCC are the primary distributors of climate-change messages in these rural areas. Perceiving it as their responsibility to keep coastal communities safe from rising tides and more intense and frequent storm surges, local government workers frequently hold or arrange for workshops to educate villagers about the causes, consequences, and dangers associated with rising tides. In doing so, they present information about sea-level rise according to the secular narrative of climate change, which relies largely on technical and scientific observations (Hulme 2007). It is unclear exactly how climate change is being conveyed in villages such as Narikoso. When I asked government and NGO workers what types of messages they give the villagers about climate change and asked villagers what the government tells them about climate change, the answers in both cases were vague. Three key themes, however, emerged from these interviews: (1) ideas about naturalness, (2) notions of responsibility, and (3) a sense of urgency. It is not my intention to recreate the nuances of climate change and its links to sea-level rise. My goal instead is to show how the climate-change discourse is presented in a way that aligns with scientific authority but does not necessarily resonate with villagers’ perceptions of the world or nature. Naturalness: Concerns about the naturalness of changing climatic conditions are evident in the larger political discourse of Fiji. I use the concepts of “anthropogenic” and “natural” to describe the dichotomy somewhat ironically, as if man-made and natural processes do not interact with each other. Within this context, however, the two are approached as mutually exclusive terms. As a local government worker pointed out, villagers “know that the sea level is rising but they don’t care. The NGOs and the government intervene to tell them this is climate change and it’s really happening in your village.” Another local government worker mimicked the reference to the anthropogenic nature of sea-level rise: The government “inform[ed] the people that it was not a natural process.” Both comments represent climate change as an unnatural process that is causing the rising tides. The aforementioned disconnect between people’s observation and inaction was largely attributed to villagers’ perceptions of nature

86

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

as a dynamic system. From this viewpoint, alterations in sea levels were not a byproduct of carbon emissions, but rather a natural process like the tide’s ebb and flow, continuously changing. Responsibility: According to the science of climate change, human activities—including carbon emissions, production, and consumption patterns— are the cause of environmental degradation. With respect to international discourse on climate change, as minimal carbon emitters, Fijians are victims of industrialized nations’ actions. Implicit in this message is a lack of control. Government and NGO workers noted the importance of explaining to communities that they were not responsible for the rising tides; therefore, islanders had no way to make them stop rising. In many of my conversations with villagers, this theme would emerge, and locals would say it was people like me (Americans) with our airplanes, cars, and buying that was threatening the fate of their islands. These comments illustrate an awareness of the causes of climate change, but they are also coupled with contradictory religious claims. Urgency: The theme of urgency has a temporal dimension, involving a panicked message for the need to be prepared at all times. A local government worker addressed villagers about climate-change awareness in this way: “If you’re not careful, it [rising sea levels] will bring this. . . . If you’re not prepared enough, this will happen.” This type of message often produces responses of resentment. A Narikoso man in his forties observed, “We have been living like this for years. You come here with your science and bring fear.” The villagers’ responses display a hesitancy to trust the scientific narrative of environmental change because its negative undertone brings with it feelings of hopelessness and immediate danger. This is important to consider in a country such as Fiji, where messages of demoralization are generally not well received by the public. Though motivated by the best of intentions, comments such as “Be careful, or else . . .” does not align well with the South Pacific’s cultural climate of optimism. Although Narikoso villagers continuously cited climate change as the culprit for the rising tides, there was evidence of confusion about some of the basic facts. In most cases, it was used as a catch-all phrase to describe daily weather patterns. Rain, wind, sunshine, and rusty tin roofs were all considered by-products of climate change. In some circumstances, conversations would end abruptly when I asked people to elaborate on what they meant by climate change. In other interviews, however, people would simultaneously cite climate change and religion as causal explanations for rising tides. The most notable responses were embedded in the notion of responsibility, wherein people pointed

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

87

to carbon emissions from affluent lifestyles while still maintaining the idea that God controlled the weather. My observations of a general lack of understanding about the basics of climate change were not merely my own. Government and NGO workers seem universally aware that most villagers throughout the islands do not resonate with the nuances of the scientific reasoning for the coastal degradation. This became more evident during follow-up interviews. In one specific instance, after visiting Narikoso, I conducted an interview with an NGO worker who frequently held climate-change awareness workshops in the community. I asked whether she thought villagers understood the discourse. The response was quick and explicit: “They [villagers] don’t know.” From this NGO worker’s perspective, climate change was minimally understood throughout rural Fijian villages. She went on to compare Narikoso to Vunidogoloa (another village that had relocated because of coastal erosion): “In Vunidogoloa there was climatechange awareness. They knew of the impacts. Even though the awareness of climate change was inaccurate, they knew of it.” Other scholars working in Fiji have noted the same inconsistencies, with locals attributing environmental change to non-climate-change-related factors (Lata and Nunn 2012). These observations amplify the disconnection between a familiarity with and an actual understanding of the technical terms related to climate change. R e ligious E x pl a nat ions of R isi ng T i de s i n Na r ikoso Despite climate-change awareness campaigns and the pervasiveness of the terminology itself, Fijians do not automatically believe in climate change as a socio-ecological process. In many instances, theological explanations of the rising tides serve as reasoning for rejecting the scientific basis of climate change. In addition to promoting literal interpretations of the Bible, church leaders throughout Fiji speak about coastal erosion in their sermons. In contrast to the government’s approach to climate change, many of these religious leaders preach a theological understanding of rising tides, identifying rising sea levels not as a by-product of carbon emissions but rather as God’s disapproval of immoral beliefs and practices. The paragraphs that follow offer a glimpse into the religious messages of coastal erosion that are actively being preached to rural communities throughout Fiji. It is important to emphasize that although the interview was with a minister of the Pentecostal faith, his theological interpretation is not unique to the Pentecostal denomination. On the contrary, the Catholic and Methodist

88

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

residents of Narikoso also identified immorality as the culprit for the rising tides throughout the village. During my time in Suva, I met a Pentecostal preacher. I was seeking a boat ticket to Narikoso but accidentally walked into the wrong office building. When I spoke to the minister at the desk, he explained to me that this was the office of a Pentecostal church, the largest one in Fiji. Although located in Suva, they were affiliated with and received the majority of their funding from a sister church in the United Kingdom. This inadvertent encounter turned into an impromptu interview on religious presentations of coastal erosion in the South Pacific. I asked the minster whether climate change was discussed in his church. He replied, “Yes, that’s the focus of our message.” When I encouraged him to elaborate on his sermons, he asked me, “Tell me, do you think we can stop the sea from rising?” Rather than allowing him to turn the table on my inquiry by answering with a simple yes or no, I put the question back to him, “Do you think we can stop the sea from rising?” He immediately said yes and went on to quote Genesis 1:26–27: “Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.’”1 The preacher’s answer brings to mind Lynn White’s (1967) thesis that relates much of the current ecological crisis to the Judeo-Christian scripture teaching that humans have authority over the environment. The minister interpreted the biblical quote literally and used it as evidence to suggest that God gave Adam, and thus humankind, dominion over nature. He interpreted dominion to mean that people have the power to request that nature behave in certain ways, including asking the sea to stop rising. The Pentecostal preacher went on to provide a common concept found throughout the Pacific: the belief that the sea is rising because God is punishing people for their sins. He spoke about how communities had to repent, act righteously, and ask the sea to stop rising. He went on to explain in more detail the story of the rising tides, using the biblical story of Noah, in which God flooded the Earth because The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord had regretted that he made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” (Genesis 6:5–7)

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

89

In the story of Noah, God spared Noah because he was a faithful and righteous person but punished the rest of the world with a flood. After forty days and forty nights of rain, God told Noah, “Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of the flood” (Genesis 9:11). The preacher’s literal biblical interpretations were being used for two primary reasons: (1) to confirm that humans do in fact have the power to control nature and (2) to maintain that the Fiji Islands will remain safe. This preacher and many Fijian communities believe that God will keep his covenant with Noah and will never again flood the Earth (see discussion in Rubow and Bird 2016). Broadly speaking, God will not destroy Fiji and the rest of the islands with water because he made a promise, and it is believed that the benevolent Christian God abides by his word. There was an inadequacy in the preacher’s use of God’s covenant with Noah because it provides a rationale for why the islands will eventually be safe from flooding but does not explain why the tides are currently rising. When I posed this question to him, he proceeded to explain that God holds containers of water, one in the sky and one in the ocean, “When we sin too much He releases the water as a way to punish us. If we pray and ask the sea to stop where it is, it will listen. If we don’t pray and repent for our sins, then the sea will continue to rise.” The preacher believed that people would repent, and this would eventually cause the sea to retreat. When I asked him, “Do you go to villages and preach your message?” He said, “Yes. We ask them: Do you want to move to the hill? If you don’t want to move, you need to ask the sea to stop. You need to go to church. You need to pray. You need to do confession. If you don’t, the sea will continue to rise and you will have to move away.” This preacher’s theological rationale is pervasive throughout Narikoso. It is interesting that unlike other studies that identify age, education, and interaction with environmental NGOs as deterministic variables of beliefs in nonsecular climate-change narratives (Rhoades, Rios, and Ochoa 2008), in Narikoso, men and women, youth, and the elderly all reported immoral behavior as the primary cause for the rising tides. In fact, Narikoso stands out because, despite continual interactions with NGOs, local government, and the PCC—all of whom bring the climate-change discourse into the village—villagers still adhere to a religious worldview of ecological degradation. As an elderly woman in her sixties stated, in reference to the rising tides, “If we’re not faithful, the tides will continue to rise up to the new site. . . . Be faithful or don’t ask what’s wrong.” A husband and wife in their late twenties also related the rising tides to God’s retribution for immoral behavior. The wife explained what she and her husband believed was happening in the village, “If you disobey God’s laws,

90

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

you will be punished.” To the villagers, it was not just lack of church attendance that caused the sea to rise; part of the cause was what they perceived to be the immoral behavior of their neighbors. In sum, they blamed each other for the rising tides. Many people validated their claims of God punishing Narikoso through observations. In one case, an elderly woman pointed out that Narikoso was the only village on Ono Island experiencing the rising tides. She went on to argue that neighboring villages were being spared because they were faithful. In other instances, people referred to the power of God when natural disasters occurred. A young man in his late twenties, for example, observed that the preacher’s house and the church were the only two structures unharmed after Cyclone Tomas in 2010. He used the lack of damage to these structures, which are connected with God, as evidence of God’s powerful ability to provide protection against nature. Blind faith in God’s promise to Noah seems to be providing some coastal communities with a false sense of security. This complacency frustrates government officials and community workers who constantly reiterate the damage of certain religious discourses to the well-being of the people. They felt that villagers living by the coast were naive about the danger they were in and saw religious doctrines as hindering them from keeping villagers safe from climaterelated disasters. Consequ ence s for A da p tat ion a n d R e l ocat ion Efforts i n Na r ikoso Narikoso villagers’ religious perspectives appear to be constraining the relocation efforts and people’s willingness to take precautionary measures against the risks posed by climate change. This case study brings into question a common belief: The assumption that a knowledge deficit on climate change is the cause of inaction and failure to adapt. Many local government workers hold this misconception, lamenting a lack of awareness among coastal communities and recommending more climate-change awareness campaigns. Although lack of awareness is a well-documented barrier to adaptation, from another angle, distorted perceptions of risk associated with spiritual explanations of rising sea levels can also inhibit coastal communities from taking measures against ecological degradation (Lata and Nunn 2012). As is shown in the case of Narikoso, it is not a matter of knowledge deficiency, for climate-change awareness workshops are frequently held in the village, as much as it is the pervasiveness of a religious explanation for the rising tides.

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

91

In general, many villagers’ belief in God’s covenant with Noah deterred them from taking precautionary measures against storm surges and coastal erosion. In Narikoso, some households went against government advice during Cyclone Tomas and stayed in their homes as a testament to their faith. During interviews, people spoke about how they did not evacuate their home during the 2010 cyclone under the presumption that God would protect them because they were holy. A couple living in a house that was frequently inundated by the sea spoke with pride about how they did not seek refuge on the hill during Cyclone Tomas. The woman retold their story: “They [government workers] told us to move up the hill, but we stayed here. We prayed. We said no, God will protect us.” When the storm passed, the woman and her family were unharmed. She relayed this story as evidence for the truth of her belief system, maintaining that her family was spared because of their faith in God’s protection. Her narrative highlights the possible repercussions of religious explanations for environmental change and how they can contribute to a failure to adapt. The belief in God controlling weather patterns contradicts relocation as a viable adaptation to coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels. The contradiction is made clear in the fact that Narikoso villagers’ worldview of God punishing people for immoral behavior does not align with the goal of relocation. According to villagers’ religious understandings of coastal erosion, God’s judgment is the causal explanation for the rising tides that are damaging the coastline. But the goal of relocation is to keep people safe from the imminent dangers posed by rising sea levels caused by climate change. Although villagers accept that ecological problems are a result of climate change, they insist that relocation will not save them, arguing that the rising tides will chase them up the hill if they continue to sin. From their perspective, penance and a shift in lifestyle are the only ways to make the sea stop rising. Villagers identify ecological problems associated with climate change as the causal explanation for the rising tides, but that is secondary to the religious explanation. Substantiating this claim is the fact that people did not accept relocation as a viable adaptation to coastal degradation. This state of affairs raises an important question: If people do not accept climate change as the cause of the rising tides, why is the community relocating? The relocation effort offered an opportunity for people to secure housing. In the Narikoso relocation, the government was providing the finances for the construction of villager’s houses, alleviating financial pressures for individual households. In this sense, relocation meant an opportunity for new housing. This interpretation was evident in what I heard when I asked villagers, “How do you feel about relocating?” Answers varied; some people were opposed to

92

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

moving altogether and had no intention of moving up the hill.2 Among those who did not oppose moving, people uniformly stated that the relocation was good because everyone would receive a new house. As one woman remarked, “I like it. We get a new house with two rooms, a kitchen, a toilet.” A single man living with his extended family reiterated how he was pleased with the relocation because “I will get my own house.” A woman who was financially better off than others in the village said, “It’s good. There’s some people in the village that wouldn’t be able to build their own house.” These responses from the community suggest a clear decoupling between the Fiji government’s intent of relocation as an adaptation to the challenges of coastal erosion and the villagers’ reception of it. This disparity can, and indeed already has, created unforeseen consequences. Paralleling people’s resistance to take precautionary measures during storm surges, the belief in God’s covenant with Noah provided people with the illusion of safety, preventing them from accepting relocation as an adaptation, and thus choosing not to move. Without support or acknowledgement of the relocation effort by the community, Narikoso faces the risk of the project being abandoned in the future. It is likely that, if people do not like the move and do not perceive sea-level rise as a risk, they will move back to the coast. R e ligion-Sci ence Com bi nat ion The influence of religion on every element of most Pacific Islanders’ social life is common knowledge. The prevalence of faith, in conjunction with the fact that religious perceptions of rising tides lead to problematic inaction for vulnerable communities, deters some community organizers from omitting God in their climate-change messages (Nunn 2017). Moreover, the obstacles caused by these messages are difficult to undo because religion, specifically Christianity, is so deeply embedded in current Fijian culture. As a result, community organizers have created a narrative that attempts to mediate the religion-science schism by intertwining religious undertones with climate-change messages. The emergent God-science synthesis, however, is fundamentally centered on a goal different from what many NGOs and government workers who emphasize the climate-change narrative have in mind, and that is, how can vulnerable coastal communities remain safe from the dangers posed by climate change? An interview with a scholar from the University of the South Pacific shows how some people are creatively weaving God into discussions of climate change. The scholar drew parallels in her work with rural villages in Tuvalu and Fiji. As a scholar who frequently conducted climate-change awareness workshops, she

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

93

spoke about the pervasiveness of the narrative of God’s covenant with Noah in the South Pacific, emphasizing that this worldview is not unique to Narikoso, or Fiji, for that matter. Her perspective, along with that of many others, is that theological understandings of coastal erosion is problematic because of the false sense of security they give communities. In order to mitigate this outcome, she and her colleagues are attempting to embed the larger discourse of climate change into a local religious context. The illustration below provides an example of how those working with South Pacific communities are incorporating God into their messages about climate-change adaptation: They always say God promised to never flood the Earth again. I tell them the story about an Australian man whose house was flooded from a storm. He’s on the first floor of his house and a boat comes to save him from drowning. The man refuses to get on the boat and says, “No, my God will save me.” The first floor gets flooded, so he goes to the second floor, and the boat comes trying to save him again. Again, he replies, “My God will save me.” The second floor gets flooded, so he goes to the third, and again the boat comes to save him. He gives the same response and has nowhere left to go but the roof. When he’s on the roof, the clouds part, God comes out, and says to the man, “Stupid man, I sent a boat three times to save you.”

This approach articulates the role of technology and adaptation measures as gifts from God. The point is that God manifests through people. She presents this as an indirect relationship: God gave people brains and skills to build things that would keep them safe. The primary difference between her message and that of other community workers is the focus on adaptation. Her particular concern is not so much that people understand how environmental change occurs, but rather that people stay safe from the dangers posed by climate change. Conclusion There are theoretical and practical implications for studying ideological interpretations of ecological degradation (Jacka 2009; Orlove 2009; Rubow and Bird 2016; Rudiak-Gould 2011). Theoretically, by examining religion as an organization and belief structure, we can better understand how it works as a driver to accommodate or challenge the climate-change discourse. Pragmatically, perceptions of risk associated with climatic or theological interpretations of environmental change influence adaptation responses (Lata and Nunn 2010). By better understanding risk perceptions associated with specific theological

94

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

explanations of environmental change, more effective adaptation strategies can be developed that local communities will support (Crate and Nuttall 2009). It is also important to note that invoking God as a causal explanation is not an absurd response to understanding environmental change. Religious meaning making is a natural reaction to the global climate-change narrative in that it is presented as a doomsday scenario wherein villagers have no control over the rising tides that will eventually displace their community, cause physical harm to them, or both (Stephens et al. 2012). On one hand, resistance to the climate-change discourse can be understood as people not identifying with the technical and scientific language. On the other hand, rejecting the apocalyptic message associated with climate change is an example of what sociologist Kari Norgaard (2011) refers to as socially organized denial. It is not that people are saying, “I do not believe in climate change,” but rather, “I do not want to believe in climate change.” From that perspective, the driving force to reject the secular narrative for coastal degradation is a form of emotional self-preservation. In the context of Narikoso, the parable of Noah invokes a sense of hope, control, and meaning in an increasingly unpredictable and chaotic environment (Stephens et al. 2012). The religious meaning making of the coastal degradation in Narikoso is an expression of wanting to maintain normalcy. In the religious understanding of the rising tides held by residents of Narikoso, God directly controls the sea, but villagers have indirect control through their behavior. By being faithful and engaging in moral behavior, the community aims to prevent relocation and continue living their lives with business as usual. A m a nda Berta na is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University. Her research broadly looks at the political economy of ecological degradation. Not e 1. All quotes come from the New Living Translation Version of the Holy Bible. 2. This is a contested characteristic of the relocation. In social settings, people were inclined to say that they were proponents of the relocation, but individual household interviews showed that most people opposed the move.

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

95

R efer ence s Adua, Lazarus, Richard York, and Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech. 2016. “The Human Dimensions of Climate Change: A Micro-level Assessment of Views from the Ecological Modernization, Political Economy and Human Ecology Perspectives.” Social Science Research 56:26–43. Anshelm, Jonas, and Martin Hultman. 2014. Discourses of Global Climate Change. New York: Routledge. Arbuckle, Matthew. 2017. “The Interaction of Religion, Political Ideology, and Concern about Climate Change in the United States.” Society and Natural Resources 30 (2): 177–94. Berry, Evan. 2015. Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bolin, Bert. 2008. A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cho, Francisca, and Richard King Squier. 2013. “Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81 (2): 57–398. Clements, John M., Aaron M. McCright, and Chenyang Xiao. 2014. “Green Christians?: An Empirical Examination of Environmental Concern within the U.S. General Public.” Organization and Environment 27 (1): 85–102. Crate, Susan A., and Mark Nuttall, eds. 2009. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Duke, Anna, Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen, and Kevin O’Brien. 2012. “Natural Disasters as Moral Lessons: Nazianzus and New Orleans.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6 (1): 56–70. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press, 1965. Farbotko, Carol, and Heather Lazrus. 2012. “The First Climate Refugees?: Contesting Global Narratives of Climate Change in Tuvalu.” Global Environmental Change 22 (2): 382–90. Fiji Bureau of Statistics. 2007. “Religion.” https://www.statsfiji.gov.fj/. Garfield, Andrew, Brian Drwecki, Colleen Moore, Katherine Kortenkamp, and Matthew Gracz. 2014. “The Oneness Belief Scale: Connecting Spirituality with Pro-Environmental Behavior.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53 (2): 356–72. Gerten, Dieter, and Sigurd Bergmann, eds. 2012. Religion in Environmental and Climate Change. New York: Continuum. Goodwin, Bill. 2010. Frommer’s Fiji. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

96

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Haberman, David. 2006. River of Love in the Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Höijer, Birgitta. 2010. “Emotional Anchoring and Objectification in the Media Reporting on Climate Change.” Public Understanding of Science 19 (6): 717–31. Hulme, Mike. 2007. “Geographical Work at the Boundaries of Climate Change.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (1): 5–11. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2012. Climate Change 2012: Mitigation of Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch. Jacka, Jerry. 2009. “Global Averages, Local Extremes: The Subtleties and Complexities of Climate Change in Papua New Guinea.” In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, edited by Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall, 197–208. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Johnson, Kathryn, Andrew White, Brenna Boyd, and Adam Cohen. 2011. “Matzah, Meat, Milk, and Mana: Psychological Influences on Religio-Cultural Food Practices.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42 (8): 1421–36. Lata, Shalini, and Patrick Nunn. 2012. “Misperceptions of Climate-Change Risk as Barriers to Climate-Change Adaptation: A Case Study from the Rewa Delta, Fiji.” Climatic Change 110 (1–2): 169–86. Leduc, Timothy. 2010. Climate Culture Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North. Ottawa, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press. Marx, Karl, and Ernest Mandel. 1990. Capital. New York: New Left Review. McNamara, Rita Anne, Ara Norenzayan, and Joseph Henrich. 2016. “Supernatural Punishment, In-Group Biases, and Material Insecurity: Experiments and Ethnography from Yasawa, Fiji.” Religion, Brain and Behavior 6 (1): 34–55. McQuillan, Kevin. 2004. “When Does Religion Influence Fertility?” Population and Development Review 30 (1): 25–56. Norgaard, Kari. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nunn, Patrick. 2017. “Sidelining God: Why Secular Climate Projects in the Pacific Islands Are Failing.” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com /sidelining-god-why-secular-climate-projects-in-the-pacific-islands-are -failing-77623. Orlove, Ben. 2009. “The Past, the Present, and Some Possible Futures of Adaptation.” In Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, edited by W. Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni, and Karen O’Brien, 131–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pacific Conference of Churches. 2009. “Moana Declaration.” https://www .oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/justice-diakonia -and-responsibility-for-creation/climate-change-water/pacific-church-leaders -statement.

R e l igious E x pl a nat ions for Coa sta l Erosion i n Na r i koso

97

Pew Research Center. 2012. “Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Rhoades, Robert E., Xavier Zapata Rios, and Jenny Aragundy Ochoa. 2008. “Mama Cotacachi: History, Local Perceptions, and the Social Impacts of Climate Change and Glacier Retreat in the Ecuadorian Andes.” In Darkening Peaks, edited by Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian Luckman, 216–28. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roberts, Timmons, and Bradley Parks. 2007. A Climate of Injustice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ronan, Marisa. 2017. “Religion and the Environment: Twenty-First Century American Evangelicalism and the Anthropocene.” Humanities 6 (4): 92–106. Rubow, Cecilie, and Cliff Bird. 2016. “Eco-theological Responses to Climate Change in Oceania.” Worldviews 20 (2): 150–68. Rudiak-Gould, Peter. 2011. “Climate Change and Anthropology: The Importance of Reception Studies.” Anthropology Today 27 (2): 9–12. ———. 2013. Climate Change and Tradition in a Small Island State. New York: Routledge. Ryle, Jacqueline. 2012. “Burying the Past—Healing the Land: Ritualizing Reconciliation in Fiji.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 157 (1): 89–111. Shehu, Muazu, and Susan Molyneux-Hodgson. 2014. “Faith Communities and Environmental Degradation in Northeast Nigeria.” International Journal of Environmental Sustainability 10 (1): 24–40. Stephens, Nicole M., Stephanie A. Fryberg, Hazel Rose Markus, and MarYam G. Hamedani. 2012. “Who Explains Hurricane Katrina and the Chilean Earthquake as an Act of God? The Experience of Extreme Hardship Predicts Religious Meaning-Making.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 44 (4): 606–19. Veldman, Robin Globus, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-DeLay, eds. 2014. How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations. New York: Routledge. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. New York: Routledge, 2012. White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–7.

Part II

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

four

k

“NATURE CAN HEAL ITSELF” Divine Encounter, Lived Experience, and Individual Interpretations of Climatic Change

Georgina Dr ew, University of Adelaide Sever a l deca des of schola r ship provide evidence that there is a relationship between the religious beliefs that people hold and how they see the environment.1 A growing body of work builds on this knowledge base by exploring how religion shapes ways of understanding the biosphere-altering phenomena known as climate change. In these latter explorations, a key challenge is the question of how and where we locate religion as operational in the lives of those responding to climate change in a world characterized by hybridity. A main assertion of this essay is that a focus on individual interpretations and encounters helps us to illuminate not just “where religion lives” but also how religious belief shapes responses to the phenomena that aggregate to constitute climate change. This call requires keen attention to the ontological turns and postcolonial politics that are so important to contemporary scholarship. It also requires a willingness to acknowledge the ways in which religious beliefs and practices can at times diminish the concern that devotees might otherwise feel when they are exposed to climate science epistemologies alongside major weather disruptions. To ground this discussion, the particular relationship of one man and his god is described in detail. The encounters that constitute the heart of this text explain how, and why, this Hindu-identified person believes in the power of the divine to correct the climatic imbalances underway in the Indian Himalaya despite his knowledge of relevant climate science. Also examined are the ways that other residents of the mountainous region to which this man belongs consider the role of moral deterioration as a factor in the ecological degradation that we are witnessing. These empirical observations, arising from a set

101

102

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

of ethnographic data acquired through fieldwork in the Garhwal region of India’s central Himalaya from 2007 to 2010, 2012, and 2014, indicate nuance in the ways that individuals make sense of ecological change while drawing from local observations and interpretations influenced by the Hindu faith. The act of looking for nuance in the religious dimensions of everyday practice, and the ensuing interpretations of ecological change that people produce, is significant for the potential that it has to “illuminate relations of religion and environment left hidden by a focus on the global traditions” (Jenkins and Chapple 2011, 444). R e ligion, En v ironm en t, a n d Cli m at e Ch a nge: A n E volv i ng Con flu ence As the increasingly prominent work on religion and ecology attests, we are often tripped up by words, and the subtleties of their interpretation, in our efforts to understand the connection between beliefs and what might be called environmentally sound practices. Scholars of the relationship between Hinduism and ecology, for instance, will note that the very terms Hindu and Hinduism are problematic in that their use is associated with colonial bodies of knowledge, including the incessant census-taking endeavors in colonial India that grouped people of diverse beliefs into camps that divided Hindu (or Hindoo) from Buddhist and Muslim populations. This was and is problematic when one considers that the Hindu faith—sometimes referred to as Hinduism or as sanatana dharma—is a highly varied and amorphous set of beliefs and practices that have evolved over time. When we add in concerns of Hindu-identified populations for the environment and environmental sustainability, the study of the Hindu faith becomes even more complicated. Even though some Hindu texts urge what might be deemed environmentally sound behavior, many contemporary practices in relation to resources are unsustainable, as demonstrated by the iconic examples of pollution in the religiously revered Ganga and Yamuna Rivers. Pointing to the limitations that distinct Hindu beliefs and practices pose for the sound or sustainable management of the natural world, some scholars candidly suggest that religious precepts can as easily lead to the decline of the environment (Agarwal 2000; Alley 2000, 2002; Haberman 2006; Nagarajan 1998). The difficult process of determining how conclusively religious practices support or degrade the environment means that scholars often start on a backfoot position when attempting to identify how religious beliefs and practices translate into understandings of, and reactions to, climate change. At the same time, a selection of preliminary investigations find that, although some religions

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

103

(including Hinduism) are mobilizing in response to climate change—either to promote mitigation or to facilitate adaptation—others are directly or indirectly obstructive (Veldman, Szasz, and Haluza-Delay 2014). Further complicating our efforts, we are also discovering that both helpful and obstructive responses may be actively present within the same institutional religions, sparking “conflicts that reduce adherents’ ability to adapt to climate change” (Veldman et al. 2014, 6–7). As a result, no simple or unidirectional relationship between religions and climate change can or should be presumed (Veldman et al. 2014). Another challenge with the scholarship on religion and climate change is that it often tends to reproduce the assumptions made in the early scholarship on religion and ecology, which emphasized the impact of scripture and sermons on human action without necessarily interrogating the contradictions and inconsistencies that are present in everyday life. Or, to put it differently, much of the literature on religion and climate change was and is “theological and prescriptive” (Veldman et al. 2014, 9; emphasis in original) rather than focused on how people live “complex lives” while still “evoking great powers and grand schemes” in ways that aspire, but often falter, in their adherence to scripture and teachings (Schielke and Debevec 2012, 4). In the meantime, comparatively little of the existing literature could be characterized as empirical and based on grounded studies conducted with a social science approach—although recent efforts, including the contributions to this edited volume, attempt to correct previous omissions.2 Grounded research is especially needed on the relationship between Hinduism and climate change, because it can help us move beyond assumptions of the ideal ways that people respond to systemic climatic disruptions while focusing on the revelatory power of lived experience. Despite the promise of such studies, and despite the centrality of climate-change phenomena to the present ecological crisis, “the study of Hindus’ engagement with the changed climate is still nascent” (Halperin 2017, 74). If, moreover, we wish to form a better understanding of Hinduism’s ecological worldview, then “we should explore the impact of changing climate conditions, rising temperatures, and precipitation irregularities on its contemporary foundations and practices” (Halperin 2017, 74). It is in the spirit of offering a ground-up view of the connection between individual Hindu beliefs and what we might term climate change that I offer, in the following section, an encounter between a man and a Himalayan mountain deity known as a devata. A conceptual point of inspiration for framing the ensuing encounter between one man and his god is the argument made by Marisol de la Cadena in 2010 that we need to disrupt our “conceptual comfort zones” when exploring human encounters with “earth-beings” (335). Such encounters, she argues, pose

104

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

challenges for the political sphere and for our ability to understand resourcerelated conflicts. A main effort of her intervention is to ask us to consider a new kind of politics that includes diverse ontological possibilities when engaging with non-Western cosmopolitics. Cosmopolitics is different from other forms of postcolonial politics; there is no room in de la Cadena’s arguments for the kind of cosmopolitics that stop at a discursive respect for the potential existence of “more-than-human” entities that has characterized some efforts at ontological inclusion. What is needed, instead, is a radical affirmation of such perspectives as viable ways of being in and seeing the world. Following de la Cadena, the present discussion asks, “Can we think about these presences as political actors. . . instead of brushing them away as excessive, residual or infantile? [And, if so,] How do we do that?” (de la Cadena 2010, 335). If we apply this query to the field of climate change, then the provocation forces our climate-change politics to give serious consideration to diverse ontologies and to the religious beliefs emphasizing their potency. Furthermore, if we take the sentience of these beings as really real in an expanded ontological politics (de la Cadena 2015), then we are encouraged to revisit the challenge of efforts to mitigate climate change when devotees contend that these beings have the power (omnipotence) and the knowledge (omniscience) to turn the tide of climate-change phenomena should they so desire. In addition to the significance of the politics of ontology that de la Cadena flags, there are important postcolonial politics involved in our efforts to examine how the issue of climate change is perceived and experienced differently in different sociocultural contexts. In his thought-provoking and revisionist book, Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) asserts that, although postcolonial politics examines the otherwise forgotten histories of the marginalized, it has faltered when interpreting aspects of what the peasant or subaltern subject might have said when it came to issues of the divine. The secular and at times Marxian analyses of the early postcolonial iterations, in particular, did not make space for their subjects of study to rise up and take action on behalf of, or in conjunction with, their gods and goddesses. Consider Chakrabarty’s commentary: We need to move away from two of the ontological assumptions entailed in secular conceptions of the political and the social. The first is that the human exists in a frame of a single secular historical time that envelops other kinds of time. . . . The second assumption running through modern European political thought and the social sciences is that the human is ontologically singular, that gods and spirits are in the end “social facts,”

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

105

that the social somehow exists prior to them. . . . One empirically knows of no society in which humans have existed without gods and spirits accompanying them. (Chakrabarty 2000, 16)

The warning for us not to miss how our collaborators live their lives in dialogue and communion with the divine is one of the reasons that Chakrabarty deliberately refrains from reproducing any sociology of religion nor attempts to (over)analyze the motivations of the subjects he explores in his work. Indeed, he feels that the weakness of such efforts has been an inability to allow or honor the subaltern’s understandings of the need to act in response to direction by a god or goddess. The underlying message is a challenge: Are we ready to truly hear the subaltern speak about the relationships they have with their gods and goddesses?3 In a move to think further with these two lenses, political ontology and postcolonial politics, I turn to an illustrative encounter demonstrating the ways that the divine guides how people interpret climatic change in the Garhwal Himalaya. Encou n t er s w it h a De vata i n Ga r h wa l The Garhwal Himalaya are part of the world’s “third pole” and are a hotspot of climate-change phenomena. This mountainous terrain is also home to a variety of people who draw from their Hindu-influence beliefs and relationships with the divine to make sense of the changes at hand. Hindi and Garhwali speakers, in fact, characterize the region of Garhwal as a dev bhoomi—a land populated by numerous gods and goddesses. Residents living within this landscape in India’s central Himalaya often say that these entities are so populous that there is a god (devata) or a goddess (devi) living on each hilltop, on numerous mountain ridges, and in the vicinity of the region’s many villages. In the district of Uttarkashi, the goddess Ganga is a source of spiritual sustenance for these minor gods and goddesses as well as for human residents. Flowing through this district from a glacial source upstream in the form of the River Ganga, the goddess provides physically and spiritually cleansing waters that humans as well as regional gods and goddesses visit from time to time for their own purification rituals. When the mountain gods need to access the Ganga’s waters, residents help by bringing them to the riverside in a palanquin (dholi) hung from two long wooden poles that must be carried on the shoulders of men. In a context in which the continuity of the River Ganga’s flow is threatened by glacial melt and a changing monsoon (Immerzeel et al. 2010; UNEP 2009),

106

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

we might anticipate that, along with humans, the gods and goddesses might be concerned with their ability to access the energizing powers of the goddess Ganga in her liquid form. With that query in mind—which, beyond the regional particularities, is ultimately a question about perceptions and responses to climatic change—I sought out interactions with one of Garhwal’s devata in July 2012. I wanted to understand more about how relationships with the devata and devi influence interpretations of change. My main guide for my encounters with a particular devata, which I will describe shortly, was a shopkeeper from Uttarkashi whom I will call Manmeet in order to flag his familial origins in the Indian plains of Panjab. I knew Manmeet through mutual friends and frequent visits to a main market in the district capital of Uttarkashi, which was often a home base for my extended stays in Garhwal. Manmeet was, and is, a college-educated businessman who volunteers for Red Cross International and is involved in water-sanitation programs. Manmeet and I had exchanged many pleasantries during the 2008–9 year that I lived full-time in Uttarkashi, but it was during the course of a rather remarkable interview with Manmeet in the summer of 2012 that I came to know that Manmeet was an ardent devotee of Uttarkashi’s patron god. Known as Kandar Devata, this entity is said to know all comings and goings of Uttarkashi residents. He is also said to be a rainmaker who helps maintain the region’s hydrological balance. As I discovered in our 2012 interview, Manmeet took pride in his personal connection with this regional god. Because he is a firstgeneration migrant to Garhwal, he considered it a special honor to experience a connection with a divine mountain entity, for these relationships are often passed down through the family lineage. Of course, he commented, nowadays not everyone in the mountains believes in the devata, especially not in this modern age of technical advancements. He shared that “this is a very common dialogue. . . . They say ‘America has reached the moon and you are talking about devatas only? What rubbish!’” Chuckling as he finished this statement, he went on to say in a more somber tone that this position was foolhardy, because there was a lot to learn from the devata. I was familiar with Kandar Devata, so there was no need to stop Manmeet’s train of thought when he mentioned this god. The devata is well known within Uttarkashi and surrounding areas. He has shrines and temples spread across the Garhwal Himalaya, especially along regions through which the Ganga flows. There are, in fact, two principal temples to this devata in the environs of Uttarkashi: an older and substantial temple in the hills overlooking Uttarkashi and a newer temple that opened near the center of town. The market temple

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

107

was inaugurated when I first began fieldwork in the summer of 2007. In what my friends and neighbors considered an auspicious start to my residence, I attended a long ceremony that marked the opening of that temple, in which I received a blessing from the temple’s priests after making offerings. This, to their minds, meant I indirectly petitioned the devata for permission to work in Uttarkashi—much in the same way that a researcher working in a rural location might first go to a village leader to request permission to live among the villagers. Such a belief was reinforced whenever my fieldwork appeared to go well; people would comment that, if I did not have the devata’s blessing for my research, he would have put obstacles in my way. Residents held this conviction because people believe that Kandar Devata’s blessings are needed for the success of all activities that take place in the regions that he oversees. Devotees must seek his approval for success in education, business, love, marriage, and childbearing. As my discussion with Manmeet continued, I posed a series of questions about the relationship between religion, resource use, and climate change. Manmeet paused briefly before giving a lengthy response asserting the power of nature to provide “its own treatment” to the physical degradation that we are witnessing. If we really want to help nature, he argued, then we need to cooperate with nature. Our duty, for instance, is not to put plastics, wastes, and sewage into the sacred rivers such as the Ganga; our duty is to respect them as “ma” or mother. But, he cautioned, we cannot treat those divine waters even if we want to; we do not have the power, despite the advances in science. Rather, it is the role of the gods and goddesses—the devatas and devis—to see where nature is imbalanced and to make corrections. “When the time comes, they balance it.” And from time to time, they run awareness programs—sometimes in the form or earthquakes, landslides, and floods—to let people know that balance is needed. These events are telling us to wake up and be aware and are reminders of our lack of control in light of great natural and cosmic forces. Manmeet stressed that even though we may have visited the moon, we are still bound by our relationships to, and our dependence on, the gods. When I tried to push back on Manmeet’s perspective about long-term ecological change and the threats associated with climate change, he pronounced confidently, “Nature can heal itself.” This struck me as particularly interesting in light of Manmeet’s knowledge as an educated businessman who reads the news regularly. If there was anyone whom I expected would be concerned about the impacts of climate change, it was the kind of mountain resident that matched his profile. At the time of my research, I assumed that those with

108

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

knowledge of the term and its implications would speak readily about the proactive efforts needed to combat the disruptions climate change is causing. It was for this reason that the “nature can heal itself ” statement surprised me. Curious to know more about this perspective, as well as Manmeet’s belief in the powers of regional deities, I accepted an invitation to travel to one of abodes of Kandar Devata in the hills surrounding Uttarkashi. On the day of our trip—the foreboding preflood date of July 29—Manmeet’s car arrived at noon on the road above where I was staying. His wife and his nephew were with him for the journey. As we began the drive, Manmeet explained that we needed a car because our destination was a small temple in a distant village. When I asked why we did not visit one of the devata’s main temples near Uttarkashi, Manmeet and his wife explained that they resonate most with the mountain god’s spiritual force at the particular temple that was our destination. On the day of our journey, Manmeet and his wife wanted to ask the devata about a few family matters and some problems that were occurring in the house. Such a visit was typical for them; Manmeet consults the devata and requests guidance “before taking any decision whatsoever.” For this visit, he was particularly worried about his daughter’s education. It was an hour’s journey split between the car ride and a walk up a terraced mountainside. We took off our shoes after arriving at our destination and then proceeded barefoot onto the burnt-orange tiles that adorn the temple’s enclosed outdoor area. The temple, a square concrete structure painted white, was placed within the enclosure, but it was set to the back so as to leave room for worship (puja) and the movements that the god makes when in his palanquin (dholi). I was not able to go inside the small temple room, which Manmeet had an attendant unlock, because women are not allowed. Instead, Manmeet’s wife and I bowed our heads and offered folded hands from outside the square wooden door. As is customary, I lowered my head toward the ground. Manmeet’s wife touched her forehead on the first and only step that one must cross to enter the temple’s inner sanctum. Looking inside to the back of the tight enclosure, I caught a glimpse of the devata’s small metal statue, or murti, which in the dim light appeared to be a bronze color. To the right of the murti, I saw the dholi, which filled the length of the space. Atop two long wooden poles was a square box with a triangular top. It was dressed in red and saffron fabrics with thin white pieces of cloth crossing to the pyramidal point at the top of the structure. Soon after our greetings, the carriers arrived. As they went inside to retrieve the dholi, Manmeet explained that Kandar Devata personally selected these men to carry his palanquin. While Manmeet said a few mantras, the men picked up the dholi and brought it outside onto the tiled patio, where they

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

109

Figure 4.1. Manmeet greeting Kandar Devata at a hillside temple. Photo by author, July 2012.

placed it on their shoulders. Within a minute, and without the sound of the drums or other invocations I have experienced elsewhere, the dholi started to tilt and shake from side to side. The men’s shoulders barely moved as the dholi’s pyramidal top swayed back and forth like a pendulum. As the dholi moved energetically, the men let out utterances such as “Hai Ram” to release some of the tension from carrying the weight. At times, the left-hand pole would jump off a shoulder and move downward quickly, smashing the men on the chest as they deftly turned their torsos to the falling weight to absorb the shock. These signs were taken as divine utterances. Manmeet bowed down to the floor when he saw the dholi move (see fig. 4.1). Then he got up and, with folded hands, put his head on top of the dholi. The pyramidal top leaned toward him to offer a blessing. Next, Manmeet began to speak to the devata. The manner in which he addressed his god was striking. He had a way of asking questions and then speaking an answer soon thereafter in the form of a question. It was like an internal dialogue being spoken aloud. Or, as I wrote in my notebook: “Manmeet asked him (the devata) several questions, intuited part of the answer, asked if he was correct, posed follow up queries, and waited to see if the devata turned to the side or stood up in response.” If the

110

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

dholi bobbed from side to side, it meant yes in a rather casual sort of way. If the answer was more definitive, the same affirmation might involve a half tilt—or even a very rare full tilt that involved the pyramidal top sweeping down toward the floor. When the answer was no, by contrast, the dholi tended to stay still. When the devata appeared to not be sure, the dholi turned away from Manmeet toward the mandir (the temple) in order to seek guidance from the murti inside. As Manmeet explained earlier, this action happens because the devata resides in both the murti and the dholi—the dholi does not have to be carrying the murti, though it is equipped to do so and that is one of its main functions. The dholi is infused with divine power and it can speak for, and as, the devata. That said, there is sometimes a delay for contemplation or message transmission. Once a rapport was established, Manmeet asked about his daughter, wondering aloud whether she should seek a master’s degree. The devata stood still. Next he asked whether she should do something in law. In response, the devata tilted toward Manmeet and bobbed side to side. “Should she do it abroad?” The devata stood still. “Should she do it in India?” The devata nodded. “In Bangalore?” The devata nodded insistently. “In Bangalore? OK, Bangalore!” After conveying these pronouncements, Manmeet turned to his wife and conferred with her, saying that this confirmed his feeling that their daughter should not go abroad just yet. Then he asked: “If she studies in India, can she then go abroad later?” To this, the devata nodded adamantly. “See! Great,” said Manmeet, “that is just as I thought.” When Manmeet was done asking questions, he gestured for me to approach the dholi. As I did so, the dholi tilted toward him several times with slight bobs. Manmeet interpreted this and said, “She has been asking about you? Yes, she asked me about you the other day.” To this, the dholi tilted abundantly. Manmeet continued, “You were talking through me? Yes? Yes!” Turning to me, Manmeet recalled our earlier interview when he spoke “without thinking,” as if a force larger than him had taken hold of his body. “Whatever I said,” he explained, “it was the devata who was speaking through me. He was there with us in the shop that day!” When it was established that the devata knew what I was up to, including the names of people I recently interviewed, Manmeet announced that I could ask Kandar Devata my own questions. I was initially baffled for what to say; how does one speak directly with the divine? After some consideration, I decided to establish his origins, because it was a point of disagreement among some devotees. Facing the dholi, I queried, “Were you always a devata, or were you once a man?” To this, the dholi bobbed vigorously. Manmeet jumped in with

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

111

excitement: “You were a man? Yes? Yes! Were you a spiritual practitioner (sadhak) who did a great ritual penance (tapasya) here and left your energy in this place? Yes? Yes!” Enthralled by this exchange, Manmeet turned and thanked me for asking this question, which he had been wanting to pose for some time. Then he instructed me to continue. Repeating the rumor I had heard, I asked, “And do you give rains when people ask for them?” Again came an insistent yes in the form of a deep nod. I then tried to verify the stories I had heard about the devata’s powers to give but also to withhold rains when humans misbehave. “But to receive the rains, people first have to do the rituals you tell them to, right? And people don’t always obey you, they do not always do as you say?” To this, the devata nodded. “And do you get mad—do you punish them?” The devata replied with vigorous nodding. These questions and their answers helped to establish the relationship between Kandar Devata, the water cycle, and human conduct. I wanted to ask about climate change, but the term was not yet commonly used. In my previous efforts to shadow researchers working on climate change in the region, I noticed that the generic phrasing of “weather change” (mausam badalna) was more commonly used. Employing this science-neutral language, I inquired about his thoughts. “In the future,” I asked, “if the weather changes (bhavishya mein agar mausam badalta hai)—” Before I could even finish the sentence, the dholi began to lurch with fury at a 150-degree angle. The pyramidal top nearly scrapped the ground as it dropped down only to swing back up to the ceiling before falling again toward the floor. The intensity of these movements sent a chill up my spine. I continued: “When the weather changes, will you continue to give rain?” In response, the range of the tilting got even bigger. Still thinking about the climate-change projections, including the predictions I had read that the Ganga’s glacial source could melt by the end of the twenty-first century, I inquired about the river’s fate. In what ended up being my final query, I asked, “And what about Ganga—will she remain in the future?” The intensity of the movements persisted in response to this question. I stepped back instinctively, bewildered by the wild movements the dholi was making. Interpreting these signs, Manmeet added enthusiastic commentary. “See, see, I told you! He was there in the shop with us!” Then he asked the devata, “Is it like I said, Maharaj, that nature takes care of itself?”4 When this query was met by vigorous nodding, he added, “And you will take care of us (in our time of need)?” When Manmeet received a positive response, he exclaimed, “See, Gina [Georgina], that is what I said, isn’t it!”

112

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Cli m at e s of Ch a nge a n d t h e De vata’s Om n isci ence The encounter with the devata proved ominous. A week after the exchange with Kandar Devata on that rural hillside, disaster struck Uttarkashi District in the form of a major flash flood. I had left the region roughly forty-eight hours previously, and so it was to my great surprise when I awoke in New Delhi on August 4, 2012, to a call from my research assistant. Breathing heavily as if he had been running, my assistant informed me that a massive wave of water hit the Assi Ganga and Bhagirathi Ganga valleys, washing away tracks of land as well as numerous bridges, homes, and buildings. Dozens, if not hundreds, of lives had been lost. Many of the main roads were now gone and the residents of Uttarkashi were effectively trapped within their town. As I turned on the television to a national news station, I saw videos of rushing waters and heavy rains moving through a landscape vastly different from the one I had just left. Along with this montage was an ostentatious replay of buildings toppling into a swollen Ganga. Horrified, I started calling friends and contacts. Many phones were unreachable or switched off. The people I managed to reach spoke of their incomprehension in the face of the devastation. Uttarkashi is not recognizable, they told me. Looking at the footage that continued to loop on the television, I had the double sensation of understanding what they meant and also knowing that I could not understand what they meant without actually being there. What I did know was that in the coming days, the power would be off for an indeterminate amount of time, fresh water would be in short supply because some of the municipal lines had been washed away in the floods, and everyone who was able would be involved in the rescue and emergency relief operations. Just before the battery in his cell phone died, I reached Manmeet. He asked me whether I had heard the news. I offered a lament for the devastation in place of an affirmation. He then quickly stated what is on his mind. “The devata,” he said, “this is what he was trying to tell us. He knew what was about to happen—remember when you asked about Gangaji?5 I had never seen him move like that before.” Hearing this, I recalled the chill that went up my spine when the dholi tilted furiously from floor to ceiling only a week earlier. The words I said to prompt this were “In the future, if the weather changes.” As with other flooding and extreme weather events, it is difficult to definitively determine whether a specific incident can be associated with climate change (Schiermeier 2011). The early news reports on the topic certainly tried to inquire, and suggest, that there was a correlation. As news commentators suggested, other human-made problems—such as deforestation and land

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

113

destabilizing development activities—also likely played a role in exacerbating the floods. Regardless of the cause, public and online commentary pleaded for action while requesting that the government of India accelerate the implementation of its National Action Plan on Climate Change, which includes a section dedicated to sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem and another section pertaining to the impacts of climate change on Himalayan glaciers (Minister’s Council 2008, 4, 15). After the 2012 floods, the possible correlation with climate change was further underscored by an even more extreme incident of flooding in the summer of 2013 that devastated large tracts of land along the Bhagirathi and Alakananda Valleys. Those floods, the worst in fifty years, caused destruction on a much larger scale than those in 2012 and took at least fifty-seven hundred lives (Qiu 2013, 14). Along with the devastating loss, the back-to-back flooding events left residents feeling on edge in anticipation of subsequent floods. Commenting on the risks of more extreme events in Uttarakhand and surrounding areas, an article in Nature argued that the emerging snapshot of weather-related disasters in the Himalaya suggests that “things are amiss on the roof of the world” (Qiu 2013, 14). The text drew from the caution of scientists to argue that “as climate change tightens its grip,” disasters will become increasingly frequent. Citing emerging studies of Himalayan climate change, the text continued: “The Himalayas are getting warmer at a rate of 0.6 C each decade, three times the global average. Rainfall there is increasing at a rate of 65 millimetres per decade and the monsoon season is getting warmer. However, winters are getting drier. . . . As a result of the warming, most Himalayan glaciers are retreating rapidly. Glacier lakes are becoming more and more numerous, inundating pastures and threatening downstream communities” (14). Similarly commenting on the threats at hand, a policy brief declared that although “climatic disasters like these [Uttarakhand] floods are projected to increase because of climate change,” the developing countries most immediately affected are “ill prepared to deal with them effectively” (Azhar 2013, E135). The commentary included the following suggestion: “Measures to ensure the success of . . . climate-compatible development strategies include an appropriate framework that incorporates legislative and regulatory measures; that integrates resilience building, developmental risk reduction, and low emissions growth strategies; that ensures the transition to resilient low emissions growth is beneficial to poor people; and checks that the processes for planning for threats and opportunities are in line with international frameworks” (E135). Manmeet was not necessarily opposed to the kinds of measures suggested by such commentators. In our postflood conversations, he concurred that

114

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

preparation for the changes ahead are needed. He also agreed that deforestation and development activities have to be better managed. This did not change his belief, however, that “nature can heal itself.” His conviction was deeply aligned with his interpretation of Kandar Devata’s omniscience of the impending disaster(s). As he would later explain to me, the people living under the devata’s reign are at his mercy. “Everything that happens,” Manmeet declared, “is by his grace only.” To be clear, Manmeet was not sure who or what caused the floods. His point was that it was only through a return to lives spent in communion and obedience to the gods that the scope of the disasters could be brought into greater balance. As a result, a subsequent visit to Uttarkashi found him increasing the scope of his practices of devotion to Kandar Devata. This ritual response to climate-change phenomena is something that Ehud Halperin (2017) similarly found in play during his long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the neighboring mountains of Himachal Pradesh. Manmeet’s comments show us instances in which the agency of the divine is seen to be as significant for devotees as the science on environmental change. This is not to say that people like Manmeet do not believe in climate change— in some cases, Manmeet and other residents did say they think there is good evidence that human ecological footprints are causing the temperatures and the earth’s cycles to change. The point is that from some standpoints the omniscience and omnipotence of the divine is seen as predominant. According to the comments of several mountain residents, in fact, the gods are allowing humans to destroy the planet in order to teach us a lesson about proper conduct and the repercussions of sin and moral degeneracy. If we are able to turn the tide of physical pollution and the internal states of corruption that it signals, then the gods have the ultimate power to take back the reigns and restore ecological balance. The implication puts the onus on us all to collectively adopt the upstanding behavior that could bring about such a change. This internal redirection, as some commented, cannot be forced through policy alone; we must also look to, and seek guidance from, the gods. Such statements are strong demands for what in the scholarship we often term the need for “ontological inclusion” within a scholarly move known as the ontological turn (Apffel-Marglin 2011; Goslinga 2012; Szerszynski 2017). (Cli m at e) Ch a nge a s a Mor a lit y Ta l e In January 2014, I returned to Uttarkashi to see how my acquaintances, friends, and colleagues were faring in the aftermath of the floods. The landscape that I encountered was still in a state of devastation. Gone were two of

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

115

the main bridges that people had daily used to cross the Bhagirathi Ganga. Gone too was an entire row of housing; the buildings that had bordered the river’s banks, erstwhile availing of sweeping scenic vistas, had crumbled into oblivion during the worst onslaught of the 2013 floods. The repair works, which ostensibly had been underway for more than six months prior to my arrival, seemed to be moving slowly. When I mentioned my impression during the course of the month, nearly all my contacts were quick to lament the rampant corruption that they claimed was the cause of the anemic disaster relief and reconstruction efforts. To other mountain residents, it seemed that along with possible misdeeds in official quarters the response from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society could also be considered circumspect. Conceding that the NGOs may have had the best of intentions, residents criticized the lack of oversight and coordination in the dissemination of supplies in the mountains. The truck drivers they hired, for instance, were accused of dumping cargo full of food rations and medical supplies “at the first convenient location” in the mountains. This meant that those most needing the supplies—the people cut off from the main roads—received very little of the relief that had been raised on their behalf. One long-time interlocutor, a middle-aged woman whom I would claim as a personal friend, also lamented the “brashness” of the district’s well-do-do residents, who lined up for relief supplies even when it reduced the supplies meant to keep alive the populations that the floods had rendered destitute. These people, she claimed, publicly stood in ration lines even though their neighbors and friends knew them to earn salaries high for the region because of the fixed rates determined nationally for their chosen professions. Commenting on this, my friend shared that she eventually told her family and social media contacts “not to give to the relief efforts” because the goods and money were squandered. During my January 2014 discussions with Uttarkashi residents, the results were mixed on whether people thought that the floods were related to extreme (but not exceptional) monsoon events, the forces that we might term climate change, or the disciplining power of the gods who might be displeased with the current state of human conduct. When sharing the latter perspective, my collaborators pointed to the moral decay already outlined to say that the backto-back summers of flooding had to be signs of divine displeasure. One of my long-time collaborators, for instance, attributed the floods to the anger that the goddess Ganga must be feeling for what she saw as misguided efforts to build large hydroelectric dams on the last of her free-flowing tributaries. “Mother really scolded us,” this woman said with awe, for treating her so badly.

116

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Other collaborators pointed beyond the questionable development practices and other instances of bad behavior to say that the gods were also displeased with the way that mountain residents across the landscape of Garhwal were abandoning ritual practices and turning away from a spiritual-religious dependence on the regional devata. A Hindu swami I interviewed, for instance, lamented that even when people conduct the rituals that they are meant to perform, many of these practices are now done “without a soul.” Equating this with blind faith, or andha vishwas, he criticized what he saw as the rote enactment of rites, rituals, and religious acts without knowing the deeper meaning behind the acts themselves. And, he cautioned, much of Hindu religious ritual in modern society was beginning to fall into the category of unmoored and ill-understood practice. This impression that the ritual- and faith-based elements of everyday life are in decline is something that I also documented prior to the floods, as a 2012 interview with the priest (pandit) of a village overlooking Uttarkashi attests. This man, who lives near and works in the main temple to Kandar Devata, spoke of the changes that he has seen over the years. In addition to a degraded environment—his evidence for which was the village’s water-security problems and the “pollution” of Uttarkashi town—he said that people are doing less puja because they now have less faith (aastha). The following exchange between the pandit and an assistant illustrates this position: Pa ndit People had more faith in the devata in the past. Now, they don’t believe from the heart. . . . Our coming generations will have even less faith, in accordance with the yug [a cyclical period of time within Hindu cosmologies]. Assista nt Why do you think this is happening? Pa ndit It is because of our [impure] thinking. Assista nt Is it because people think that the devata can’t do anything now?

Pa ndit We haven’t thought that. It is something in ourselves that is wrong, which is why the faith has diminished. It is related to kali yug [the final of four cycles of time marked by moral and physical deterioration]. This is the first turn of kali yug.

In sharing these remarks about the decline of faith and ritual practices, the pandit also pointed out that some things had gotten better. Villagers’ lives are more comfortable, he said, and they no longer have to struggle for basic items like milk and ghee because they can buy them from the market with the wages they earn from service (cash employment). It is not that the pandit felt

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

117

things would continue to improve. As he commented, “The future is not bright” (bhavisya sahin nahin hai). Even as he expressed a desire for “everything to be clean, safe, and for life to be good,” he shared his doubts that this would be achieved anytime soon; in fact, he stated, it would take the end of the current cycle of time and the start of a new one for things to improve. In the meantime, he said, all that people could do is work hard. The emphasis on the decline of moral character within the age of spiritual and physical degeneration that is kali yug is one that I have highlighted elsewhere (Drew 2012, 2017). The issue of moral degeneration and the cosmic and ecological repercussions of human error and sin is also one that other scholars operating in parallel parts of the Himalaya have documented (Gergan 2016). Ehud Halperin (2017), for instance, has observed that “while villagers interpret climate changes as the outcome of their abandonment of older ways and values, this interpretation is still rooted in the traditional holistic perception of reality: moral decay has cosmic effects. Similarly the agency of goddesses and gods and their absolute power to control the weather is unquestioned in this line of reasoning, as is the agency of humans” (86). The correlation also has a converse result. As Halperin comments, “Theoretically, at least, one can infer that if humans mended their ways, the climate could return to normal” (86). Conclu di ng R e m a r k s: Ch a ngi ng Pr act ice s i n Ecol ogi e s of Ch a nge As Sarah J. King (2015) writes, “The study of human experience—of culture and religion—helps us to understand how and why we are stuck, and then to see how to create movement, to bring change” (427). Hers is a renewed affirmation for the ongoing role of religious studies for grappling with the challenges associated with climate change and climate-change “apocalypse.” She ends her statement by suggesting that “the apocalypse is no closer than it ever was—nor is any miraculous salvation” (431). Instead, she cautions, we must engage in the messy, undisciplined, interdisciplinary work of understanding the world as it is and the complicated stories humans tell to make sense of it. Although the overall call is useful, we can also reflect critically on the claim that no miraculous salvation is near. If this is the stance that we take, then how clearly are we listening to the stories that we tell ourselves? Or, more important, how open are we to listening, to hearing the stories that our collaborators are trying to tell us? I want to end this discussion with this point of caution and by returning to Manmeet’s story, along with other morals shared by mountain residents.

118

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

It is both because of the potency of political ontological insights and postcolonial politics that Manmeet’s experiences and interpretations are compelling. His example shows how some people look for and interpret environmental disruptions through encounters with the divine. In his presentation, the gods are in constant communication with us whether we seek them out or not. Although it is our duty to adhere to upstanding conduct, which can include the sound treatment of resources, it is their duty to check and correct external imbalance and disturbance. These may occur naturally or be caused by our hubris. His example demonstrates how religion is lived through relationships and encounters with the divine that shape perceptions of human conduct and possibility. It also serves as a reminder that, for many of our collaborators, the presence of the divine in their lives is a social fact (Chakrabarty 2000). If we miss or dismiss the presence of their god(s), then we fail to understand the key sources of motivation of our collaborators (de la Cadena 2010; Szerszynski 2017). Furthermore, we would risk replicating the inflexible dichotomy between an us and a them that was a vital intellectual strategy of early colonial and postcolonial scholarship (Goslinga 2012, 389). This would have profound consequences for the vital need to share knowledge, power, and ontological possibility through encounter with our collaborators (Goslinga 2012, 393). By contrast, providing more space (discursive, emotional, and even metaphysical) for appreciating what is really real for the people experiencing change through their prisms of belief and experience, we allow for a more revelatory and empowering exchange with the populations that were formerly referred to as subalterns. Reflection on the human capacity to recognize various metaphysical potentialities is important, but it does not mean that people are incapable of revising their understandings of the wider set of forces that they perceive as powerful. In the Garhwal Himalaya, for instance, people are starting to consider more of the climate science even as they simultaneously continue to believe in the sentient beings that animate the landscapes in which they live. When I nowadays talk with people in Uttarkashi, they increasingly indicate nuance in the ways that they learn about and express concern for their embedded ecosystem. What appears to be an increasingly strong motivation for the kinds of actions that we might call mitigation or sustainable resource management are the livelihood concerns that people continually navigate in everyday life.6 In many ways, the 2012 and 2013 Uttarakhand floods have resoundingly underscored the significance of longer-term rather than short-term planning and development. In the interim, the sense of heightened precariousness that many feel is contributing to a “politics of urgency” that Mabel Gergan (2016) has similarly observed in the eastern Indian Himalaya. To underscore a main point, however, such

119

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

practical socioeconomic and environmental concerns continue to be joined with religious beliefs. It is in this way that we see the utility of an insight made by Manuel A. Vásquez (2009), who reminds us that religious flows are always “produced by individuals” (441) embedded in sociocultural and ecological networks and relationships that shape, and are shaped by, a confluence of phenomena. Although climate change continues to complicate the form and scope of the confluences at hand, personal and individual encounters and interpretations will remain significant in influencing how people respond. Georgina Dr ew is a Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia. She is author of River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga. Not e s 1. To explore just a few of the relevant texts, readers might refer to the work of Kelly Alley (2002), Evan Berry (2015), David Gosling (2001), David Haberman (2006, 2013), Pankaj Jain (2011); Bron Taylor (2010, 2016); Lynn White (1967). Also relevant are a series of edited volumes published by Harvard University Press on the topic religions of the world and ecology (see http://www.hup .harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1057). 2. Three seminal texts come to mind in this regard within the discipline of anthropology. Two of them are the long-term efforts of Susan A. Crate (2008) to understand the impacts of climate change on the livelihood-maintaining Siberian deity known as the “bull of winter” and the subsequent efforts of Crate and Mark Nuttall to compile a series of empirical and ethnographic chapters on cultural responses to climate change their 2009 book Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. The third is the work by Orlove, Wiegandt, and Luckman (2008) to understand how melting glaciers affect cultural and religious practices in the Andean mountains. 3. The phrasing of this query is a nod toward the landmark provocation for subaltern studies posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988). 4. Maharaj means “Your Holiness” and is a respectful way of addressing a deity. 5. In Hindi, the suffix –ji is often added to proper names to express deference and respect.

120

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

6. Lionel Obadia (2011), for instance, argues that despite top-down calls to protect the flora and fauna of the Himalaya, numerous pragmatic concerns have encouraged mountain residents to engage in environmentally sound activities.

R efer ence s Agarwal, Anil. 2000. “Can Hindu Beliefs and Values Help India Meet Its Ecological Crisis?” In Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, edited by Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker, 165–79. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alley, Kelly D. 2000. “Separate Domains: Hinduism, Politics, and Environmental Pollution.” In Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, edited by Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker, 355–88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. On the Banks of the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Apffel-Marglin, Frédérique. 2011. Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. Azhar, Gulrez Shah. 2013. “The Need for Climate-Compatible Development: A Reminder from the Uttarakhand Floods.” Lancet: Global Health 1 (3): e135. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214–109X(13)70063–9. Berry, Evan. 2015. Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Oakland: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crate, Susan A. 2008. “Gone the Bull of Winter: Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change.” Current Anthropology 49 (4): 569–95. Crate, Susan A., and Mark Nuttall, eds. 2009. Introduction to Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. New York: Routledge. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–70. ———. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Drew, Georgina. 2012. “A Retreating Goddess? Conflicting Perceptions of Ecological Change near the Gangotri-Gaumukh Glacier.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6 (3): 344–62. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsmc .v6i3.344.

“Nat u r e C a n H e a l Itse l f”

121

———. 2017. River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Gergan, Mabel Denzin. 2016. “Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (2): 490–98. Gosling, David L. 2001. Religion and Ecology in India and Southeast Asia. New York: Verso. Goslinga, Gillian. 2012. “Spirited Encounters: Notes on the Politics and Poetics of Representing the Uncanny in Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 12 (4): 386–406. Haberman, David L. 2006. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2013. People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. New York: Oxford University Press. Halperin, Ehud. 2017. “Winds of Change: Religion and Climate in the Western Himalayas.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85 (1): 64–111. Immerzeel, Walter W., Ludovicus Ph. H. van Beek, and Marc. F. P. Bierkens. 2010. “Climate Change Will Affect the Asian Water Towers.” Science 328 (5984): 1382–85. Jain, Pankaj. 2011. Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Jenkins, Willis, and Christopher Key Chapple. 2011. “Religion and Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36:441–63. King, Sarah J. 2015. “The End of the World as We Know It? Apocalypticism, Interdisciplinarity, and the Study of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83 (2): 422–31. Minister’s Council on Climate Change, Government of India. 2008. National Action Plan on Climate Change. New Delhi: Government of India, Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change. http://moef.gov.in/wp-content/uploads /2018/04/Pg0152.pdf. Nagaranjan, Vijaya Rettakudi. 1998. “The Earth as Goddess Bhu Devi: Toward a Theory of Embedded Ecologies in Folk Hinduism.” In Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India, edited by Lance E. Nelson, 269–96. Albany: State University of New York Press. Obadia, Lionel. 2011. “Political Ecology and Buddhism: An Ambivalent Relationship.” International Social Science Journal 62 (205–6): 313–23. Orlove, Ben, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman. 2008. “The Place of Glaciers in Natural and Cultural Landscapes. In Darkening Peaks: Glacial Retreat,

122

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Science, and Society, edited by Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman, 3–19. Berkeley: University of California Press. Qiu, Jane. 2013. “Floods Spur Mountain Study: Himalayan Nations Take Action in Response to Changing Climate and Its Deadly Effects.” Nature 501 (September 5): 14–15. Schielke, Samuli, and Liza Debevec. 2012. Introduction to Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion. New York: Berghahn. Schiermeier, Quirin. 2011. “Extreme Measures: Can Violent Hurricanes, Floods, and Droughts Be Pinned on Climate Change? Scientists Are Beginning to Say Yes.” Nature 477 (September 8): 148–49. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2017. “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch.” Theory, Culture and Society 34 (2–3): 253–75. Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2016. “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part One): From Lynn White, Jr and Claims That Religions Can Promote Environmentally Destructive Attitudes and Behaviors to Assertions They Are Becoming Environmentally Friendly.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 10 (3): 268–305. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v10i3.29010. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). 2009. Recent Trends in Melting Glaciers, Tropospheric Temperatures over the Himalayas and Summer Monsoon Rainfall over India. Nairobi, Kenya: UNEP. https://wedocs.unep.org /bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8536/-Recent%20trends%20in%20melting %20glaciers,%20tropospheric%20temperatures%20over%20the%20Himalayas %20and%20Summer%20Monsoon%20Rainfall%20over%20India%20–2009 Himalayas.pdf?sequence=3&%3BisAllowed=. Vásquez, Manuel A. 2009. “The Limits and Hydrodynamics of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (2): 434–45. Veldman, Robin Globus, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-Delay. 2014. “Social Science, Religions, and Climate Change.” In How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Science Investigations, edited by Robin Globus Veldman, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-Delay, 3–19. New York: Routledge. White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–7.

five

k

MAYA COSMOLOGY AND CONTESTING CLIMATE CHANGE IN MESOAMERICA

C. Mathews (Matt) Samson, Davidson College

In his wor k Why We Disagree about Climate Change, human geographer Mike Hulme argues for creativity in responding to an era of rapid environmental change: The world’s climates will keep on changing, with human influences on these physical properties of climate now inextricably entangled with those of Nature. Global climate is simply one new domain which reveals our embeddedness in Nature . . . . We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical boundary condition for human action, we now must come to terms with climate change operating as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.

This essay considers climate change from the perspective of a reforestation project grounded in local community efforts to preserve water sources in the Guatemalan highlands and how it reproduces the ties between ecological and identity constructs embedded in Maya cosmovision or worldviews.1 The 1995 “Agreement on the Rights and Identity of the Indigenous Peoples” (Cabrera and Cifuentes 1997, 79–100) completed in the runup to the definitive 1996 peace agreement that ended Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil conflict, connected Maya identity to “a cosmovision based on the harmonious relation between all the elements of the universe, in which the human being is only one element more, the earth is the mother that gives life, and maize is the sacred sign, the way of its culture. This cosmovision has been transmitted from generation to

123

124

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

generation through material production and writing and through oral tradition, in which women have played a determinative role” (81, my translation; compare Molesky-Poz 2006; MacNeill 2014). Maya cosmovision views humans as integrally tied to the natural landscape, and if reforestation itself is representative of a type of direct environmental activism, such activism can no longer be framed without reference to broader discussions of the impact of climate change on local and regional economies. Both awareness of climate change and on-the-ground responses are evolving, so the case reported on here provides only a preliminary glimpse into efforts seeking to promote understanding of the issue in Guatemala at scales from the personal to the planetary—with the epistemology underlying Maya cosmovision at the center of the analysis. Specifically, I focus on the Proyecto de Reforestación Chico Mendes in the K’iche’ Maya aldea of Pachaj in the municipio of Cantel in the western Guatemalan department of Quetzaltenango as an example of local environmental activism rooted in Maya culture and sustained by a Maya cosmovision with antecedents extending some three thousand years into the past.2 Pachaj lies on the Guatemalan altiplano with an elevation of eight thousand feet and includes largely forested communal lands on mountain ridges surrounding the community, some rising above ten thousand feet (see fig. 5.1). Named for the Brazilian rubber tapper and activist who was murdered in 1988 (Hecht and Cockburn 1989), the project responds directly to deforestation and water issues as the community grows and natural resources are put under increasing stress from local and national development projects, in addition to changing weather patterns such as more intense rains, longer and hotter dry seasons, and catastrophic extreme weather events. I first met Proyecto Chico Mendes’s organizer, Armando Lopez, in the summer of 2010 after learning about the project in a volunteer magazine published in the departmental capital. He agreed to meet me on one of my last days in the country that summer, and when I arrived in Pachaj, he met me on his bicycle not far from his home. He first took me to the tree nursery where he and a small work crew prepared seedlings for planting on some of the communal lands above the village. He showed me a small house at the nursery that was home to the Ixim Ulew (land of maize) Spanish school that was founded to contribute some financial resources to a project that Armando founded with two friends twenty-three years ago. For most of its history, the project has depended on Armando’s energy and what his vision and enthusiasm for reforestation has inspired visitors to contribute. With its grounding in environmental activism tied to a discourse of Maya cultural identity, the project is particularly appealing to volunteers (tourists and language-school students) who pass through

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

125

Cantel and Aldea Pachaj

Figure 5.1. Cantel with Pachaj and Mountain Forests. Source: © OpenStreetMap, license: www.openstreetmap.org/copyright; Guatemala map embedded by author.

Quetzaltenango, as well as to organizations from Europe and North America who promote experiential education and put the project on their travel itineraries when working with students on immersion experiences in Guatemala. Despite his training as an ajq’ij, a Maya daykeeper or spiritual guide, Armando’s religious language is not as forthright as his environmental discourse.3 From the beginning, he identified himself as an ecologist and told me that the goal of the project was to “rescatar nuestros nacimientos de agua, y generar oxígeno para todo el mundo” (“to rescue our springs of water and to generate oxygen for the world”). He was passionate about trees and clearly had a gift for weaving his discourse about the role of trees in the natural world and the objectives of Proyecto Chico Mendes to work “against the injustices in our environment and [injustices] against indigenous peoples.” In retrospect, although an accurate reflection of the state of climate discourse at the community level in those days, climate change as such was notably absent from his discourse. During the last five years of my annual fieldwork, references to climate change in relation to other social changes have increased in personal conversations as well as in

126

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

the media. My interest in Proyecto Chico Mendes is informed by studies emphasizing the local impacts of climate change and the manner in which people in particular places respond to environmental stress in their management of resources, production strategies, and forms of governance. This interest in climate change underlies the focus on trees and water resources that at times take center stage here. One ethnographic cue comes from recent work on water resources in the Peruvian Andes, where the argument is made that the “focus on how climate change is adapted to human lives rather than how humans adapt to climate change provides a better sense of the empirical realities of living with environmental change. . . . Rather than adaptation policies attending to a particular problem, thereby creating direct links between this problem and the solutions at hand, adapting climate change to human lives is a matter of making sense of the messiness of everyday life” (Rasmussen 2015, xv). This approach reflects a political ecology that considers how anthropogenic climate change is implicated in lifeways on the margins of national life, especially in contexts with majority indigenous populations. In this regard, Proyecto Chico Mendes provides a standpoint for considering how local-level experiences of climate change are interpreted from within a worldview that values reciprocity and centeredness both in human-environment relations and in human relationships across ethnic and other cultural boundaries. T h e En v ironm en t a n d M aya I den t it y i n Guat e m a l a By some accounts, Guatemala is one of the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change (Kreft, Eckstein, and Melchior 2016). Although the country produces less than 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases (USAID 2015), total emissions are rising, and the larger Mesoamerican region in which Guatemala lies has long been known for its vulnerability to natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Roughly the size of the state of Tennessee and with coasts on both the Pacific and Atlantic, Guatemala is exposed to changing weather patterns such as El Niño and La Niña, sea-level rise, and catastrophic weather events. In the past two decades, such events have included not only Hurricane Mitch (1998), tropical storms Stan (2005) and Agatha (2010), and Tropical Depression Twelve-E (2011), but also drought in the area known as the Corridor Seco (Dry Corridor) that extends through much of the eastern part of the country and southward into Honduras and El Salvador (FAO 2015; Ruano and Milan 2014). These environmental disruptions have caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage and contributed to the sense of vulnerability in the so-called

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

127

Northern Triangle of Central America, whose three countries are also wracked by violent social conditions, even as they rank in the lower-middle section of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (UNEP 2019). This vulnerability usually makes headlines in North America when migrants from the region flee social and economic conditions that make life difficult or unbearable. Although there are few references to climate refugees from Central America, climate change certainly interacts with extreme violence and poverty to create push factors, including health concerns and food insecurity, that contribute to the number of emigrants seeking a better life in el Norte (Markham 2018). Increasingly, climate change is included among the factors contributing to what is now termed forced migration from the region (Lilliston 2019). Guatemala is also part of the Mesoamerican biodiversity hotspot that stretches from Mexico in the north to Panama at the southern extreme (Myers et al. 2000; Maass 2005). Threats to the rich biodiversity in the region include not only extreme climate events but also population growth and the concomitant industrialization, deforestation, and historical patterns of monocrop and plantation agriculture tied to development agendas emanating far from the local communities affected by schemes of progress and modernization. Vulnerability is indexed by both environmental degradation and socioeconomic inequity that poses problems for disaster preparation and limits the ability to respond to environmental stress, especially in rural areas. During my 2018 field season, a prevalent concern during the rainy Mesoamerican invierno winter season was the extended period of dry hot, dry weather of the annual canícula (“dog days” or respite from the rains) that typically lasts for a couple of weeks in July in Guatemala but had lasted nearly a month. Both in casual conversation and in the daily newspapers, there was considerable concern about the damage to the year’s maize crop and the impact on campesino livelihoods—and little doubt was expressed about the impact of climate change (AFP 2018). This conforms with an early report of the Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (MARN 2001) that was highlighted in Ruano and Milan’s (2014) analysis of climate change and climate variability in the western highlands, with the comment that the MARN report was produced “under the framework of the First National Communication on Climate Change” and “concluded that Guatemala was vulnerable in the following areas: 1) human health, 2) forest resources, 3) water and 4) agriculture (grain production)” (23). War and cultural activism frame the consideration of religion in this essay because the emphasis on Maya cosmology as a resource for responding to climate change has to be understood within Guatemala’s history of ethnic

128

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

discrimination. The contemporary Maya population speaks some twenty-two languages dispersed throughout the country, and the Maya make up 40 to 50 percent of the nation’s inhabitants, often comprising 90 to virtually 100 percent of the residents of some highland communities.4 By the time the civil conflict ended in 1996, it had claimed the lives of at least 150,000 Guatemalans. As the conflict wound down in the late 1980s and 1990s, space for cultural activism in the Maya Movement (Fischer and Brown 1996), fueled in part by the accord on indigenous rights and identity cited at the beginning of this essay, led to more visible Maya demands for a nation that was multiethnic, pluricultural, and multilingual. Such a nation would simultaneously recognize the extant diversity among the Guatemalan populace and combat the historical dismissal of indigenous lifeways amid attempts to blanquear (whiten) the ethnic landscape, a persistent theme from the time of the Spanish incursion into Guatemala in 1524, after independence from Spain in 1824, and up to the present (Díaz 2010). From the standpoint of the Maya Movement for cultural renewal beginning in the mid-1980s, the Maya as a people have been systematically excluded from the reins of political power and materially excluded from the benefits of citizenship, particularly in the rural areas where the majority live, for some five hundred years. The United Nations truth commission (Commission for Historical Clarification), set in motion after the signing of the final accord, concluded that, during the thirty-six-year civil conflict that lasted from 1960 until 1996, the Maya had been targeted for actual genocide in at least four areas of the country (CEH 1999). The movement is not as visible as it was in the years preceding and immediately after the peace accords, although the desire for cultural reivindicación continues in the efforts to establish Maya universities and the so-far-unsuccessful attempts to establish a Maya-based political party, an effort hindered by localism and the fragmentation within the movement itself, according to at least one analysis (Pallister 2013). At the national level, entering the third decade after the end of the conflict, some reports, and even former political leaders themselves, raise the specter of Guatemala as a failed state (San Diego Union-Tribune, July 27, 2016). In fact, the peace accords have never been fully implemented (Jonas 2000, 189–216; Warren 2002), and one result has been a weakened state apparatus in which corruption scandals have wracked consecutive administrations at the executive level. A new generation of citizen activism seems to have taken hold, however, in the urban areas of the capital, and rural protests against environmental injustice and land issues have not relented (Montenegro Mejía and Gutíerrez 2016; Deonandan, Tatham, and Field 2017). Nevertheless, responses to social

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

129

vulnerability, including those exacerbated by climate change, are hindered by political fragility. Within this context, Proyecto Chico Mendes provides an example of local activism grounded in ethnic identity that engages the management of local forest resources simultaneously with creating a discourse that addresses climate change at the global level. The analysis is framed by a political ecology approach that considers environmental degradation and climate change in multiscalar perspectives that require “shifting emphasis from biophysical characteristics of human life, analyzed through theories of evolution and adaptation, toward the study of the social and shifting dimensions of human life embedded in historical contexts” (Paulson, Gezon, and Watts 2005, 27). The emphasis on Maya cosmovision (and cosmology) reflects the persistence of local forms of indigenous religiosity wherein religion and cultural identity are integrally related in the daily lives of community members—lifeways wherein the sacred and secular realms of existence are neither distinguished nor easily delineated in the context of increasing religious pluralism and the pressures of modernity. Environmental degradation compounded by the effects of climate change situate religion and identity as resources in the work of adaptation grounded in the exigencies of everyday life where modes of provisioning, religion, and climate change intersect. One scholar has used the term climate ethnography (Crate 2011) to refer to efforts to investigate processes of individual and community adaptation in an era of changing weather patterns. From the Maya perspective, any consideration of religiosity in Guatemala needs to take seriously the interplay between Catholic, evangelical, and indigenous forms of religious practice in local communities and in the nation. Studies of Guatemalan religion sometimes overlook what the literature often refers to as costumbre, the syncretism of practices of Maya spirituality and sixteenthcentury Catholicism that came with the Spaniards, and the way in which such practices sustain community identity in much of contemporary Mesoamerica (Warren 1989; Watanabe 1992). Costumbre underpins much village identity and associated religious practices: local ceremony, the veneration of saints, and the integration of Catholic traditions with Maya lifeways since the Europeans arrived.5 Beyond pluralism, the emphasis here is on cosmovision and the manner in which the symbolic valence of worldviews shaped by costumbre persist in Maya communities as a fundamental aspect of Maya identity.6 In invoking the term cosmovision, I am following Catharine Good Eshelman’s (2015) definition of the term as “a broad concept that postulates a structured and coherent vision of the natural world, the supernatural world, the

130

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

human social world, and the interrelation between [these worlds]” (141, my translation). Eshelman’s is a phenomenological definition in which a cosmovision “arises in a specific historical and social context and is modified through time in distinct sociopolitical junctures” (141, my translation). Anthropologically, such framing points to modes of subsistence or lifeways in which the ideational and material aspects of reality are maintained in relationship. As can be seen in Darrel Posey’s (2001) work in the Brazilian Amazon, this relationship is marked among indigenous peoples throughout Latin America: “indigenous and traditional peoples frequently view themselves as guardians and stewards of nature. Harmony and equilibrium among components of the cosmos are central concepts in most cosmologies. . . . Local knowledge embraces information about location, movements, and other factors explaining spatial patterns and timing in the ecosystem, including sequences of events, cycles, and trends. Direct links with the land are fundamental, and obligations to maintain those connections form the core of individual and group identity” (4) Practically, political ecology perspectives centered on what has been referred indigenous knowledge (IK) integrally tie knowledge of the local environment to resource management and worldview (Maass 2005, 321–24), “which includes belief systems and cultural ethics that shape environmental perceptions.”7 Moreover, the connection with the land evokes ideas of place and place attachment, a stance consistent with Maya perspectives on human embeddedness in the landscape. Maya identity and lifeways in Guatemala provide a standpoint for making sense of and responding to immediate environmental preoccupations such as the management of water and forest resources, as well as preoccupations defined at the global scale with terms such as climate change. The emphasis on transmitting knowledge between the generations highlights continuity in the face of change and disjuncture. Because Maya identity is predicated on the relationship one has with the antepasados, ancestors who resided in the same place and practiced similar lifeways, “land thus acts in part as a symbolic medium through which individuals connect with their ancestors, carrying on the traditions their families have practiced for generations” (Fischer and Hendrickson 2003, 132–33). M aya Cosmov ision a n d Cli m at e Ch a nge i n M e soa m er ica The incremental increase in references to climate change by activists and even the news media over the last couple of years is notable. Climate change, while certainly not denied, is seen not so much as the presenting problem as an aspect

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

131

of a complex of issues that need to be dealt with in community life and the search for environmental well-being that affects the life of community members. In one interview, Armando articulated his approach to his work from a perspective of communal responsibility, especially in work with local schoolchildren: We’ve got right[s], but we also have obligations. This is something I have always managed (manejado) with the 380 students at the Choquiac school where my wife works, saying to them, “We have rights, young people, to drink water, to breathe, to receive all the benefits the trees give us, but we also have obligations to reforest.” But [this is] a voluntary reforestation, a conscientious reforestation in which we believe that if we say that we have three thousand trees planted, large trees, then we have rights to fight and not see our mountains [given away?] in concessions to the mining companies.

This commentary reflects frameworks such as environmental citizenship wherein “debates have rejuvenated perennial discussions about the links between ecology and democracy, as well as the socio-political conditions required to cultivate sustainable development” (Latta and Wittman 2012, 4). Although citizenship language has its own limitations in the context of a discriminatory state apparatus like Guatemala, environmental education and activism provide grounding for what appears to be a more abstract concern like climate change. Beyond notions of citizenship rooted in Western sensibilities, a more nuanced interpretation from the vantage of Maya worldviews is the affirmation that conscientious action requires knowledge of the place where one lives and an obligation to that place that transcends preservation or conservation (read: management) in the sense common to North American environmental discourse. The tenor of the discourse is a manifestation of the reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment embedded in Maya cosmology and ritual practice, yet the issue is clearly not one of simply returning to traditional practices. Rather, it is a case of embracing the present with the intent of contributing to what sometimes in Latin America is referred to as a coyuntura, the configuration of current events demanding participation in a social or political sense. Conceptually, this requires immediate engagement with the vagaries of modernity or neoliberal economic and social policies—embodied here in mining concessions (which at the time of the interview only netted the Guatemalan government some 1 percent of total revenues)—and a vision of the future that brings costumbre into this unfolding present through concrete actions. Although the point of departure is the life of the local community, the horizon is

132

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

global. Armando’s work depends on transnational support from volunteers and donors who have learned of his work in Pachaj, yet he looks at his own traditions and brings them to a conversation that transcends the boundaries of Guatemala and projects his vision and voice into other parts of Mesoamerica and beyond. Perhaps I only want to say that Chico Mendes is a project that isn’t going to resolve all the problems throughout the country. What we’re trying to do in Chico Mendes and what has been learned is this: We want to be an example, we want there to be more Chico Mendeses in Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, to have organizations that follow the example of Chico Mendes. Looking for funds isn’t difficult. When I began, I saw it as difficult, but looking for funds makes it possible to work, possible to have our own autonomy as indigenous people, to fight for our rights to leave a good inheritance [herencia]. As it says in our sacred book the Pop Vuh, we all have to work together so that no one remains behind. What does this mean? It means that the churches—Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons, Zapatistas, Mayas need to come together as it says in our book. We have to unite, to become as one, because this is what God wants for us, that we work together as one so that we can solve the problems.

Here, Armando’s discourse appropriates his own spiritual tradition to make the linkages between the past and the struggles of the present moment. It is a present filled with tension—threats even—from those who strive to diminish the autonomy of indigenous peoples. This autonomy is again embodied in the Maya relationship with the land itself. The emphasis on inheritance embraces cultural continuity, including the worldview or communal ethic symbolized in the invocation of the Popol Vuh, the sacred text of the K’iche’ Maya that is often used symbolically as a touchstone for that which is authentically Maya.8 Yet the discourse intentionally embraces a shifting landscape where evangelical Christians take their place among Catholics and indigenous peoples who continue to struggle for some degree of cultural sovereignty. Environmental activism and coordinated responses to climate change require the ability to transcend cultural differences as they are signified by the diverse religious traditions that have found a place in the Mesoamerican imaginary. The result is a focus on unity in the face of common threats. For Proyecto Chico Mendes, activism begins with protecting the water resources of the community, but it is an extension of a model of work developed over the past two decades in Cantel, one in which thousands of trees have been planted on the high mountain ridges and 128 nacimientos (springs) of water are said to be present in the municipio.9

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

133

The discourse, however, moves beyond trees and oxygen to environmental consciousness related to mining concessions and the impact of megaprojects on local communities. This specter was also raised in an interview in 2016 with representatives of one of the oldest environmental organizations in Guatemala, Madre Selva. The representatives I spoke with were quite concerned with extractive industries that put stress on water resources, which were defined as sacred but diverted for other purposes such as agriculture and industry. In the same interview, I was also told that there were twelve hundred complaints of social conflict over environmental issues lodged in the Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos (PDH, Ombudsman for Human Rights). Again, climate change was not brought up in the interview, yet the notion of Maya identity in defense of the environment was addressed. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the disconnection between the local evidence for climate change and the lack of larger frameworks for addressing climate change systematically, but it is remarkable that activist organizations tend to remain focused on particular environmental issues rather than the overarching issue of cambio climático. With that reality in mind, Armando’s comments situate the experience of life in the local community within an analytical frame that highlights the distance between observable climate change and global climatic shifts. A disjuncture takes place on the experiential plane where issues like climate justice intersect with what Barbara Rose Johnston (2011) has referred to as human environmental rights. For Johnston, environmental rights are fundamentally “those rights that insure human survival, especially those universal rights pertaining to minimum biological requirements, necessities such as access to food, water, and shelter, as well as those rights that support and sustain life over months, years, and generations” (11). From the perspective of environmental anthropology, this pushes us in the direction of a kind of ecosystem analysis in which interconnectedness is the overriding framework (Moran 2010, 63–69), one that also takes into account how different stakeholders lay out their claims when faced with the need to address an environmental concern (Paulson and Gezon 2005). In a volume on religion and climate change, the resonance of these themes with the concept of “integral ecology” (paras. 137–62) in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ can hardly be overstated. The encyclical puts theology in conversation with science at the same time that it creates space for dialogue between different religious and spiritual traditions. The pope’s message is directed not simply at Catholics or at the religious community more broadly. Rather, it is presented as an invitation to participate in “a conversation

134

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all” (Francis I 2015, 10). Integral ecology frames the envisioned conversation so that it tracks with themes of interconnectedness in the search for a comprehensive response to lifeways threatened by climate change. For Francis, “Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature . . . faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” (86). In Guatemala and other parts of Mesoamerica, this interconnectedness is punctuated by the perceptions of threats to livelihoods and lifeways arising from climate change and the environmental degradation imposed by megaprojects or unequal landholding patterns. When combined with other social factors such as the lack of employment opportunities and the population increase in recent decades, the intersections with climate change emerge as factors contributing to emigration from rural communities. Guatemalans remarked on these events in recent conversations about the separation of families at the US border that Sergio Ruano and Andrea Milan (2014) presaged in one of the few studies that has assessed the direct impact of regional climate change in Guatemala, in this case the community of Cabricán only a little more than twenty miles from Cantel on the altiplano. The authors forcefully emphasize the dilemma for community residents by noting both “the attachment of people in Cabricán to their communities and their strong willingness to remain there” and how “migration from Cabricán is driven by livelihood risks in the communities of origin (which are often related to damaging rains) more than by the ‘pull’ factors associated with a particular destination” (57). The pope’s emphasis on integration acknowledges at the outset such systemic connections between humans and the environment—and the incredible powers of human influence on the natural systems on which human life depends. As in the epigraph to this chapter, the call to attention, however, is also a call to look for creative solutions to the problems created by our actions.10 Pl ace , R eciprocit y, a n d R e sponse s to Cli m at e Ch a nge In the Mesoamerican context, one point of response is the idea of reciprocity that emerges from Maya ways of knowing. Several people with whom I have interacted over the last two decades have emphasized the Maya concern for “balance, harmony, and equilibrium” in human self-awareness, as well as

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

135

between people and their community of residence and with transcendent or animating forces in the cosmos. Although many in the Maya Movement prefer to refer to a Maya spirituality as an autonomous reflection of Maya identity and worldview, costumbre is more tightly connected to identity in place than what was often referred to in past literature as folk religion or folk Catholicism.11 This focus on balance and harmony is embodied linguistically in Maya languages, such as Mam, where the focus is on centeredness, which Wes Collins (2005) describes as “pervasive in how the Mam conceive of relationships, how they define their presence in the world, how they construct their homes, cornfields and towns, how they conceive of health and illness, how they bury their dead, and how they think of life beyond the grave” (2). In turn, balance is understood “to be a strategy for attaining centeredness” (19), and Collins elsewhere (2010) cites other studies in which the person’s k’u’ j, or stomach, might be translated as “stomach-heart” in the context of Maya worldviews (26). In this analysis, the word “nuk’b’il is used to denote a center space of peace and balance, not only between humans and the gods, but among people themselves, as they live out their relationships from day-to-day. They also use the term for one at peace with himself or herself. An individual is toj b’a’n ‘in goodness’ when she lives with this center as characteristic of her relationships with the gods, others, and herself ” (27). Among the K’iche’, numerically the largest Maya linguistic community, Edward Fischer (2001) refers to the idea of reciprocal balance as an “axiomatic feature” of aspects of Maya culture so that “human existence is predicated on the maintenance of a cosmic balance that both affects and reflects earthly conditions, maintaining cyclic accumulation, agricultural rejuvenation, and procreation” (147). In daily life, the intent is to find a balance between human anima (will) and the k’u’ j (heart or center) in order to maintain order in both the cosmos and the individual person (151–57). At Proyecto Chico Mendes, the project’s modus vivendi is tied to reforestation, and Armando views trees as essential for understanding the human connection with the environment in Pachaj. There is a direct symbolic valence in Maya cosmology with the ceiba (Ceiba pentandra) or world tree that permeates aspects of the Maya worldview and animates the idea of connectedness between the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.12 Even in the sugarcane fields near the Pacific coast region, these massive examples of “charismatic mega-flora” (Anderson 2003, 149) are often left after field clearing and become sites even for ceremonial rituals at their base. Collins (2005) examines a tree growing out of a sacrificial victim in one of the extant pre-Columbian Maya documents to show how “the tree’s

136

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Figure 5.2. The Vision of Proyecto Chico Mendes. Photo by author.

branches reach to the heavens; its roots go down into the underworld of death; and its trunk is firmly planted in the literal and ritual center of the religious system, the human heart” (152). Beginning with Armando’s initial commentary that trees provide oxygen for the world, there is a connection between identity and community, and there is a notion of reciprocity in human-environment relations. The message in the work of Proyecto Chico Mendes is a dual one of earth care and the affirmation of Maya identity. The first thing one sees painted on the side of Armando’s home, which doubles as the project headquarters, is a tree. Perhaps it is not as tall and lean as the ceiba, but words are embedded in its bushy branches, beginning at the roots and moving upward: amor, conciencia, sombra, nubes, agua, vida, futuro, oxigeno—love, consciousness, shade, clouds, water, life, future, oxygen (see fig. 5.2). The ceiba is not present in the altiplano, but the imaginary grounds reforestation activities in the interface between culture, community, and environmental change. In both the Mam and K’iche’ contexts, Maya cosmovision is directed toward cultivating a sense of right relationship as a sign of centeredness and even

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

137

prosperity. Centeredness, in turn, shifts the focus to sustainability of lifeways and the reciprocity that nurtures them in making concrete responses to climate change. John Early (2006) discusses Maya ritual activity in covenantal terms and as underlain by the idea that “the gods will protect and sustain humans in return for humans praising and nurturing them” (69). This sense of reciprocity embedded in Maya worldviews is reinforced by participation in a number of Maya ceremonial rituals marking the days of the 260-day divinatory calendar, which is still used by spiritual guides to make sense of the fate or destiny of those who live in highland Maya communities. In these ceremonies, sometimes called sacrificios, but more often simply called quema or burning (Chiappari 1999), a fire built on a base of sugar with flower petals marking the four cardinal directions is fed offerings of copal incense, candles, tobacco, chocolate, and other items of value as a sign of connection to life-giving energies in a kind of animatism in which such forces are acknowledged and nurtured by human beings whose work keeps the world moving (see also Chiappari 2015). In Maya cosmovision, these forces are frequently referred to as the Heart of the Heaven and the Heart of the Earth. This intimate sky-earth connection is the essence of reciprocity, and Allen Christenson (2017) argues that the Maya see themselves as connected to the natural world in such a way that nature itself depends on human activity. In his view, we’re dealing with a particular kind of anthropocentrism in which nature—and the gods themselves—“require human mediation for their existence” (93). Moreover, human lifeways in the Guatemalan highlands are intimately tied to the life cycle of maize, which is the very flesh of human beings in the Popol Vuh (Christenson 2007, 193–95). When modes of subsistence are threatened by a changing climate, pressure is also put on community identity as people search for adaptive strategies, which might come in the form of new seed varieties, changing crop regimes, or migration. For Armando, adaptation comes in the form of reforestation activities that aim to restore the balance between human activity and the environment in a comprehensive way, beginning, as always, with life in the local community. Climate change is part of a string of evidence that the contemporary world is off center, and Armando’s discourse points toward the range of issues to be addressed on the broader landscape of Guatemalan environmentalism. The earliest overview of this landscape highlights the largely urban base of the Maya Movement (Berger 1998), yet nearly half Guatemala’s population is rural, although national development agendas are still enacted from the capital outward. There is ferment around environmentalism on the local level—and increasing academic research to document such activity—but there also seems to be little coordination between groups in any kind of overarching

138

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

environmental agenda. At the national level, Guatemala ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1995 and has since enacted legislation such as the Política Nacional de Cambio Climático (MARN 2009).13 Nevertheless, without losing sight of the continental and global scales, local projects like Proyecto Chico Mendes provide the most helpful window onto the interplay between religion and questions about the nature of environmental citizenship in the Americas (Latta and Wittman 2012; compare MacNeill 2014). Such citizenship demands respect for the dignity of Maya and rural lifeways even as it claims space for creativity in resisting the impacts of megaprojects like mining and dam construction, energy monoculture and environmental degradation connected to the production of commodity species such as the African palm (Vijay et al. 2016; Zepada 2017), and the impact of global temperature rise, usually associated with climate change, on disease in coffee plants or the viability of coffee production itself in situations of water scarcity (Haggar and Schepp 2012). Approaches grounded in standards of environmental citizenship directly call out the political tensions in the preservation of biodiversity, the conservation and management of forest resources, and activism directed toward resisting extractive activities or “development” models that tend to “enclose” or “contain” local populations within agendas that conflict with the needs of local communities (Grandia 2012). Moreover, environmental activism in Latin America is particularly dangerous at a time when environmental activists globally are threatened by powers that seek to continue the colonial and extractive relationships that historically have defined relationships between nation-states and indigenous peoples.14 I n t er pr et i ng t h e Signs of t h e T i m e s In one of the few volumes to date that has specifically addressed religious responses to climate change in a comprehensive fashion, the editors of How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change (Veldman, Szasz, and Haluza-DeLay 2014) conclude that religious responses to climate change have “to be understood in contexts” (298) that reflect in part positioning in the global economy between the global North and the global South. At the same time, they reflect on the way religion and social life are compartmentalized in societies where religion has multiple meanings and where it makes sense “to separate ‘culture’ and ‘religion’” (298). Such a separation is not as easily accomplished in Maya cosmology, where sacredness is imbued in the landscape and where subsistence patterns are linked to what it means to be human. When I ask about visible impacts of

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

139

climate change, the immediate response might simply be a comment about lower water levels in local springs. Yet the signs are there in extreme weather events, in environmental degradation that contributes to droughts, and also in landslides in mountain communities that might otherwise exhibit fewer signs of environmental stress. One friend in his sixties from the environs of the Mam-speaking community of San Juan Ostuncalco, which is only twelve miles as the crow flies from Cantel, commented directly about how potato producers in his experience used to count on seasonal variations with six months of a dry season and six months of a rainy season, which defined the rhythms of agricultural life. He now sees a lack of consistency in weather patterns, and far too much rain from time to time causes detrimental consequences for production in the area. Others have noted that plants typical of tropical regions down the Pacific escarpment from Ostuncalco now not only grow but sometimes bear fruit in the altiplano. In Cantel, when I asked Armando about the lack references to climate change in our earliest conversations, he noted the usual lack of information before referring to the presence of lime trees, chiles (chiltepes), and even orange trees in the highlands when before their presence was limited to the southern coast. “Here, [the idea of seeing] an orange? Oranges weren’t produced. . . . But, actually now if you plant oranges, you get oranges. . . . So the question is, Why? . . . And because of this, one goes about discovering, understanding that a lot of things have changed, are changing.” This is the fruit of daily observation living with climate change, and it is one of the reasons that some focus more on the possibilities of adapting to climate change than on remaining in full-blown resistance. In Guatemala, people with different worldviews do interpret the words of their traditions in reading the environmental signs of the times. In a study conducted in Mam community of San Martín Sacatepéquez, itself only fifteen miles west miles from Cantel, Julie Hermesse (2013) considered the role of prophecy among Maya traditionalist and Protestant, largely Pentecostal, inhabitants of the town in the wake of devastation by landslides after Hurricane (then Tropical Storm) Stan in October 2005. She notes how residents of the town do consider “climate change as being the cause of weather events and climate disturbances” and examines the causes of the changes. Essentially, residents who were evangelicals had millenarian theological perspectives that also embraced apocalyptic views of the future. In the words of one pastor she interviewed, “The end of the world is written in the word of God. God says that the sky and the earth will disappear but only his words will remain” (Hermesse 2013, 115). She traces some of this way of thinking to the 1976 earthquake that killed more than twenty thousand people in Guatemala and the message of

140

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

North American Protestants in the wake of the disaster emphasizing the need to trust in God, come what may—and regardless of the impact human activity might have on nature (117–18).15 The specter of divine punishment for sin and the possibility of salvation hang over environmental disaster and environmental change even though evangelicals view the outcome as a matter clearly in God’s hands. This is a point of contrast with Maya cosmogony that insists that humans are an integral part of the cosmos—and where the cosmos itself responds to human activity. From the perspective of Maya religious traditions, the concern with prophecy was, at the time of Hermesse’s research, to some degree conflated with Maya calendrics and New Age speculation about the end of those cycles in December of 2012. What exactly would happen at that point was less clear, although the people she interviewed who identified with Maya spirituality did not see climate change as “divine punishment for sin” but as a call for attention “to the misdeeds of humanity” (Hermesse 2013, 121). Here, sin might reflect a more existential, or even individualistic, state of right relationship with one’s God, or perhaps it points to a propensity to violate the principles of neighborliness within the community. Humanity’s misdeeds relate to the global scale where such misdeeds reflect the anthropogenic nature of climate change even as they violate the sense of reciprocity at the heart of Maya cosmology. In the words of one spiritual guide, “I think we men are enormously lacking in respect for Mother Nature in cutting down forests, and polluting the air and waters. That has brought on global warming . . . which is the problem of [Hurricane] Stan. . . . I think it’s not a question of a call from God because of our sins, but of what we’ve done with God’s work, with Mother Nature” (121). In this sense, human destiny is shaped by the violation of Maya conventions of balance and harmony with the creation. Western traditions associated with Christianity would evoke the sense of stewardship often associated with the debated term translated as “dominion” in some versions of Genesis 1:28, but Maya understandings of centeredness and reciprocity posit an integrated sense of the connections between humans and the environment.16 In one interview, Armando contrasted the nature of these broken connections with the former reactions of the elders when the rain clouds appeared on the horizon: “‘It’s getting cloudy. Oh, yes, we have to light the candles’ (or place the candles in the four cardinal directions). ‘We have to call out, to tell the rain that it is welcome.’ . . . So it is a very, very difficult system now. And I also think, in the way all these changes that have occurred affect Maya cosmovision, that really we have lost our principles, and our values, and the respect toward all of these principles that our parents have left us in the past.”

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

141

Hermesse’s conclusion, even in light of the radically different construction of reality undergirded by the respective worldviews, is that farming practices hardly vary between the practitioners of Maya spirituality and Pentecostals in light of the need to survive from day to day (123). In terms of social change and available resources, the options apparently available do not translate into overt activity that reflects the kind of environmental consciousness practiced in Proyecto Chico Mendes. There, making sense of change—environmental, religious, economic, political—requires local action based on Maya worldviews that challenge notions of development, progress, modernity, and even conceptualizations of sustainability and justice. The cosmovision embedded in the work of Proyecto Chico Mendes demonstrates how the project operates both epistemologically and practically, so that acting to protect water sources for the community has an impact on providing oxygen (literally and metaphorically) to local residents and to the world. Armando’s words in this regard are poignant: I am saddened because it hasn’t rained much, and this is because of the destruction of the planet. There is a lot of mining, for example, in the department of San Marcos. What is the use of a hospital? They’ve made investments in a hospital. But, really, it hasn’t rained much, it hasn’t rained much. So, I call on the American and European governments, and anyone who has to read this, [to say] that we have to change. We have to do the studies of environmental impact—[as well as] avoid corruption. We live in a very, very difficult era, and the predictions of our ancestors are coming to pass when they said that there would be a change, a radical change in the planet. It’s not destruction as people imagine, but little by little we’re losing water [quedando sin agua] because of the destruction of the trees.

There is concern here, but Armando’s is not an apocalyptic discourse. Rather, it is an invitation to participate in the construction of lifeways that bear within them a sense of reciprocity, invoking Maya identity in continuity with the ancestors while recognizing social pluralism and the need for environmental activism. The climate is changing, lifeways are threatened by changes that are directly experienced on the landscape, and so a response is demanded. Beyond human environmental rights, an emphasis on climate justice calls attention to how negative impacts of climate change are borne more fully in the lives of marginalized groups “affected by compromised health, financial burdens, and social and cultural disruptions” and who “have the fewest resources to adapt to climate change” even as they “are also the least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions” (Environmental Center n.d.). Evocative is

142

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Armando’s description of members of churches of different denominations, schoolchildren, and people from the local water committees working together to plant trees on Pachaj’s mountainsides. Bringing disparate groups in the community together to plant trees represents a form of conscientization or empowerment that results in concrete action in response to stress on local resources. It is work that incorporates climate change with a mode of contesting consumeristic modernity based on the strength of a Maya cosmovision underpinned by notions of reciprocity in human and human-environment relations. Conclusion In the end, the presentation here might seem decidedly anthropocentric. In Maya cosmovision through time, both the maize plant and the ceiba, Guatemala’s national tree, are conceptualized as representations of the axis mundi in an integrated cosmos wherein human life is situated between yet linked with the underworld and the heavenly realm (Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993, 53–58). Underlying Proyecto Chico Mendes’s reforestation activities is the idea that maize, trees, and human beings exist in an interdependent relationship. If contemporary academic attention given to the coevolution of human culture with other species or multispecies networks draws our attention to the disjuncture between Western systems of knowledge and the worldview of indigenous worldviews, Maya cosmovision, beyond any theological or environmental apocalypticism, emphasizes continuity and renewal through the generations—the ancestors have a marked relationship with those who are to come. Likewise, the continuity of this relationship itself is interwoven with other beings. Whether or not one accepts the notion of the Anthropocene, a term designed to draw attention to the impact of human beings (and human culture) on other species and on ecological cycles more generally, Maya cosmovision in both theory and practice calls our attention to interdependent ecosystems— or perhaps to creation itself as a single ecosystem. Ecological anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011) employs the term meshwork to describe the world as a place of “entangled lines of life, growth, and movement” (63). In contrast to a basic network of points on a line, Ingold contends “that what is commonly known as the ‘web of life’ is precisely that: not a network of connected points, but a meshwork of interwoven lines” (63). He links this contention to the way some indigenous religions have been labeled as animistic, a label he nuances with the insistence that “peoples are united not in their belief but in a way of being that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth” (63).

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

143

The notion of interwoven reality through space and time is informative in the continuing effort to make sense of how to talk across different lifeworlds in our experiences of adapting to climate change. I’m reminded of the morning I arrived at Proyecto Chico Mendes while the members of a local water committee arrived to collect some trees they were going to plant around the spring, which they were charged with taking care of on the mountains. The leader of the committee took a few moments to give thanks for the trees and remarked on how “the forests need us because we depend on them” (“bosques necesitan nosotros porque dependemos en ellos”). If the trees bring water, they also require attention, and later he said, “Cada árbol es como un ser humano” (“every tree is like a human being”). The encounter was brief, but the words point to an enmeshment in which human subsistence, and being itself, is inextricably connected with beings that bring water, beings that need us even as we need them. The misdeeds of not responding to their needs may well return to haunt not only us but also future generations in a system that is off center, in which balance and equilibrium—as well as reciprocity—have been lost. In many ways, the work of Proyecto Chico Mendes is the embodiment of a family commitment—or better put anthropologically—a commitment of the household, in which affective ties and provisioning for the present and the future come together. Perhaps Armando’s wife, Claudia, a schoolteacher, even more clearly describes the tension in holding these commitments together over the long term: “It costs a lot; it is a very difficult process. But I think that Armando’s work, if he keeps doing it, will bring consciousness to many others, just as it did with us. This is a work that doesn’t benefit nature alone, nor only Cantel, but it extends to many other places that also need oxygen, water, and educational consciousness in itself. And more than anything, the care of our resources that now are in danger of extinction at the global level.” This discourse reflects rootedness in a particular place—yet the sensibility sustained in the cosmovision nurtured there does indeed extend into the life of a world where the known and unknown impacts of climate change, in turn, extend into the future. C. M athews (M att) Sa mson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Latin American Studies of Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. He is author of Re-enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands.

144

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Not e s 1. I thank my colleague and fellow Mesoamericanist Bill Ringle for substantive commentary on an earlier draft of this essay. 2. Municipios (municipalities) are like counties in the United States. Aldeas are population groups with some degree of autonomy and self-recognized identity with a municipal structure. The municipio of Cantel had 42,142 inhabitants in the 2018 census, (INE 2019, Cuadro A1.2), more than 88 percent identifying as K’iche’ Maya (INE 2019, Cuadro A5.2; compare “Geografía del Municipio de Cantel,” https://www.deguate.com/municipios/pages/quetzaltenango/cantel /geografia.php). 3. Loosely translated as “worker of the days,” the ajq’ij is also referred to as the counter of days in the 260-day Maya divinatory calendar (cholq’ij), in which one’s birth date and destiny are linked to the structure of the cosmos, including the forces or energies associated with each day. 4. There are twenty-five ethnic groups in Guatemala, including the Spanishspeaking and politically dominant Mestizo (Ladino) population. The 2018 national census put the Maya population at 41.7 percent of the population (INE 2019, 25), although activists and scholars argue for figures of between 50 and 60 percent on the basis of historical undercounts in rural areas and other cultural factors. 5. See the introduction in Cook and Offit (2013) for a helpful overview of how Maya religion is situated in several recent studies. 6. The rise of Protestant or evangelical traditions has received considerable attention in the last three decades (Annis 1987; Stoll 1993; Cantón Delgado 1998; Garrard-Burnett 1998, 2010; Gooren 2001; Steigenga 2001; Samson 2007). The changes have included renewalist practices in the context of Pentecostalism and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Pew 2006; Thorsen 2016) and both the persistence of Maya practices (Carlsen 1997; Christenson 2016; Cook and Offit 2013; Tedlock 1992) and Maya cultural and religious revitalization (Molesky-Poz 2006; Montejo 2005; Morales Sic 2007). Other studies have addressed the interface between traditions or identities (Althoff 2014; Chiappari 1999; Mackenzie 2016; Samson 2012), particularly in the period following the worst period of the civil conflict, la violencia, between 1978 and1983, with the institution of the peace process. 7. Maass is reading the work of Berkes (1999) and includes a brief discussion of “the landscape approach” to the issues of biodiversity conservation (2005, 324). My shift to place attachment to some extent extends that emphasis. 8. The work is a manuscript from the mid-sixteenth century written in a “modified Latin script” by authors from the ascendant K’iche’ lineage who

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

145

“described the text as an ib’al (instrument of sight) by which the reader may ‘envision’ the thoughts and actions of the gods and sacred ancestors from the beginning of time and into the future” (Christenson 2007, 21). Based on pre-Colombian sources—most of which, especially in the highlands, were destroyed by the Spanish—and oral tradition, it remains a primary document for the apprehension of Maya cosmology in contemporary ethnic renewal efforts. The earliest extant version is a bilingual transcription and translation from the earliest part of the eighteenth century by the Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez. 9. See “Recursos Naturales de Cantel” at http://www.deguate.com /municipios/pages/quetzaltenango/cantel/recursos-naturales.php. 10. In his reading of the biblical book of Genesis, Reformed theologian Douglas Ottati (2013) refers to ours as a species with “distinctive and rather impressive capabilities, and. . . that, with these capabilities come distinctive responsibilities” (190). As examples of Protestant attempts to address global environmental issues, see Ottati’s outline of what he refers to as a “creation piety” (177–79) and William Greenway’s (2015) analysis of “primeval history” in the Genesis creation narrative. 11. I have long since forgotten the reference, but the idea that “people are as people do” permeates the cultural relativism that underlies anthropological approaches to religion and ethnic identity. We take for granted that traditions are constructed in procedural fashion, and the issue of authenticity or purity is always bracketed as part of larger considerations. For an insightful discussion of costumbre in Mesoamerica and how it relates to systems of knowledge, including perspectivism, see Mackenzie (2016, 61–69). 12. The ceiba is also known as the kapok in other parts of the world. 13. The website of the Convention on Biodiversity (https://www.cbd.int/) is owned and managed by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity. According to the convention’s “List of Parties” web page (https://www.cbd.int /information/parties.shtml), as of this writing, the United States is the only nation-state entity listed that still had neither ratified nor become a party to the convention. 14. The nature of the relationship became particularly evident in the Mesoamerican region most recently with the assassination of Berta Cáceres in Honduras in 2016. Cáceres was active as the leader of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras and had won the Goldman Environmental Prize for fighting the damming of a river that had a sacred value for the Lenca population that had long inhabited the region of the proposed project (Fendt 2016).

146

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

15. Certainly, the intensity and visceral nature of this strain of evangelical discourse picks up strength at the time of the earthquake, but the wave of missionary activity at that time also connected with earlier theological streams in the history of Guatemalan Protestantism (Annis 1987; compare Bogenschild 1992). I often refer to the Protestantisms in Guatemala because of the diversity within the movement itself. 16. In the broader field of indigenous impact on national discourse in Latin America, recent additions to both the Bolivian and Ecuadoran constitutions have given rights to nature as a way of recognizing the interconnections between human life and the natural world. Even in those contexts, however, these legislative steps have come into conflict with national development agendas focused on resource extraction as opposed to buen vivir (living well).

R efer ence s Agence France-Presse (AFP). 2018. “Cambio climático amenaza disponibilidad de agua en Guatemala.” El Periódico, July 27. https://elperiodico.com.gt /nacion/2018/07/27/cambio-climatico-amenaza-disponibilidad-de-agua-en -guatemala/. Althoff, Andrea. 2014. Divided by Faith and Ethnicity: Religious Pluralism and the Problem of Race in Guatemala. Berlin: De Gruyter. Anderson, Kit. 2003. Nature, Culture, and Big Old Trees. Austin: University of Texas Press. Annis, Sheldon. 1987. God and Production in a Guatemalan Town. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berger, Susan A. 1998. “Environmentalism in Guatemala: When Fish Have Ears.” Latin American Research Review 32 (2): 99–116. Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis. Bogenschild, Thomas Edward. 1992. “The Roots of Fundamentalism in Liberal Guatemala: Missionary Ideologies and Local Response, 1882–1944.” PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley. Cabrera, Mario Rolando, and Arlena D. Cifuentes. 1997. El proceso de negociaciones de paz. Guatemala City: Nueva Era. Cantón Delgado, Manuela. 1998. Bautizados en fuego: Protestantes, discursos de conversión y política en Guatemala (1989–1993). La Antigua, Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA); South Woodstock, VT: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies. Carlsen, Robert S. 1997. The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town. Austin: University of Texas Press.

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

147

Chiappari, Christopher Louis. 1999. “Rethinking Religious Practice in Highland Guatemala: An Ethnography of Protestantism.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota. ———. 2015. “De ánimas al animismo: Subjetividad y poder en la espiritualidad Maya y la religión evangélica en Guatemala.” Revista Sendas 3:113–51. Christenson, Allen J., trans. 2007. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2016. The Burden of the Ancients: Maya Ceremonies of World Renewal from the Pre-Columbian Period to the Present. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2017. “‘Who Shall Be a Sustainer?’: Maize and Human Mediation in the Maya Popol Vuh.” In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, edited by John Parham and Louise Westling, 93–106. New York: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Wesley M. 2005. “Centeredness as a Cultural and Grammatical Theme in Maya-Mam.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. ———. 2010. “The Center as Cultural and Grammatical Theme.” Space and Culture 13 (1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331209353683. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH). 1999. Guatemala, memoria del silencio/Tz’inil na’tab’al: Conclusiones y recomendaciones del informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Guatemala: CEH. Cook, Garrett W., and Thomas A. Offit. 2013. Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Crate, Susan A. 2011. “Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 175–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104925. Deonandan, Kalowatie, Rebecca Tatham, and Brennan Field. 2017. “Indigenous Women’s Anti-mining Activism: A Gendered Analysis of the El Estor Struggle in Guatemala.” Gender and Development 25 (3): 405–19. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13552074.2017.1379779. Díaz, David. 2010. “Entre la guerra de castas y la ladinización: La imagen del indígena en la Centroamérica liberal (1870–1944).” In Historias de raza y nación en América Latina, edited by Claudia Leal and Carl Langebaek, 135–70. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes. www.jstor.org/stable/10.7440/j.ctt18z4gc4.7. Early, John D. 2006. The Maya and Catholicism: An Encounter of Worldviews. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Environmental Center, University of Colorado, Boulder. n.d. “Climate Justice.” Accessed August 18, 2019. https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/energyclimate -justice/general-energy-climate-info/climate-change/climate-justice. Eshelman, Catharine Good. 2015. “Las cosmovisiones, la historia y la tradición intelectual en Mesoamérica.” In Cosmovisión mesoamericana: Reflexiones,

148

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

polémicas y etnografías, edited by Alejandra Gámez Espinosa and Alfredo López Austin, 139–60. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), El Colegio de México (Colmex), Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas (FHA), Benemérita Universidad Autónama de Puebla (BUAP). Fendt, Lindsay. 2016. “In Latin America, Environmentalists Are an Endangered Species.” Mongabay, August 11. https://news.mongabay.com/2016/08/in-latin -america-environmentalists-are-an-endangered-species/. Fischer, Edward F. 2001. Cultural Logics and Global Economics: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fischer, Edward F., and R. McKenna Brown, eds. 1996. Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fischer, Edward F., and Carol Hendrickson. 2003. Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Global and Local Context. Boulder, CO: Westview. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2015. Disaster Risk Programme to Strengthen Resilience in the Dry Corridor in Central America. Rome: FAO. www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/emergencies/docs /Corredor_Seco_Breve_EN.pdf. Francis I, Pope. 2015. Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home (Laudato Si’). Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Freidel, David, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker. 1993. Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. New York: William Morrow. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. 1998. Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2010. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983. New York: Oxford University Press. Gooren, Henri. 2001. “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900– 1995.” In Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, edited by James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom, 169–203. Westport, CT: Praeger. Graddy, T. Garrett. 2013. “Regarding Biocultural Heritage: In Situ Political Ecology of Agricultural Biodiversity in the Peruvian Andes.” Agriculture and Human Values 30 (4): 587–604. Grandia, Lisa. 2012. Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce among the Qéqchi’ Maya Lowlanders. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Greenway, William. 2015. For the Love of All Creatures: The Story of Grace in Genesis. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Haggar, Jeremy, and Kathleen Schepp. 2012. “Coffee and Climate Change. Impacts and Options for Adaption in Brazil, Guatemala, Tanzania and Vietnam.” National Resources Institute Working Paper Series, No. 4. Kent, UK: Univer-

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

149

sity of Greenwich. https://www.nri.org/publications/working-paper-series/4 -coffee-and-climate-change/file. Hecht, Susanna, and Alexander Cockburn. 1989. The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon. London: Verso. Hermesse, Julie. 2013. “Prophecies and Climate Change in the Mam Altiplano of Guatemala.” In How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations, edited by Robin Globus Veldman, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-DeLay, 111–25. Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research. London: Routledge. Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Instituto Nacional de Estadística Guatemala (INE). 2019. “Resultados Censo 2018.” Resultados del XII Censo Nacional de Población y VII de Vivienda. Guatemala City, Guatemala. https://www.censopoblacion.gt/archivos /resultados_censo2018.pdf. Johnston, Barbara Rose. 2011. “Human Rights, Environmental Quality, and Social Justice.” In Life and Death Matters: Human Rights, Environment, and Social Justice, edited by Barbara Rose Johnston, 9–27. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Jonas, Susanne. 2000. Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemala’s Peace Process. Boulder, CO: Westview. Kreft, Sönke, David Eckstein, and Inga Melchior. 2016. “Global Climate Risk Index 2017.” Briefing paper. Bonn, Ger.: Germanwatch. https://germanwatch.org /sites/germanwatch.org/files/publication/16411.pdf. Latta, Alex, and Hannah Wittman. 2012. “Citizens, Society and Nature: Sites of Inquiry, Points of Departure.” In Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles, edited by Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman, 1–20. New York: Berghahn. Lilliston, Ben. 2019. “Climate Change, CAFTA, and Forced Migration.” Minneapolis, MN: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. https://www.iatp.org /blog/201908/climate-change-cafta-and-forced-migration. Maass, Petra. 2005. “The Cultural Context of Biodiversity Conservation.” In Valuation and Conservation of Biodiversity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Convention on Biological Diversity, edited by Michael Markussen, Ralph Buse, Heiko Garrelts, María A. Máñez Costa, Susanne Menzel, and Rainer Marggraf, 315–42. Berlin: Springer. ———. 2008. The Cultural Context of Biodiversity Conservation: Seen and Unseen Dimensions of Indigenous Knowledge among Q’eqchi’ Communities in Guatemala.

150

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Göttinger Beiträge zur Ethnologie No. 2. Göttingen, Ger.: University of Göttingen Press. Mackenzie, C. James. 2016. Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds: Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K’iche’ Community. Boulder: University Press of Colorado; Albany, NY: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies. MacNeill, Tim. 2014. “Environmental Citizenship, Maya Cosmovision, and Cultural Rights.” International Journal of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies 7 (4):17–30. Markham, Lauren. 2018. “A Warming World Creates Desperate People.” New York Times, June 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/opinion/sunday /immigration-climate-change-trump.html. Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (MARN). 2001. “Primera comunicación nacional sobre cambio climático.” Guatemala: Unidad de Cambio Climático, Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, Guatemala. ———. 2009. “Política Nacional de Cambio Climático.” Acuerdo Gubernativo 329–2009. Guatemala. https://www.marn.gob.gt/Multimedios/573.pdf. Molesky-Poz, Jean. 2006. Contemporary Maya Spirituality: The Old Ways Are Not Lost. Austin: University of Texas Press. Montejo, Victor D. 2005. Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership. Austin: University of Texas Press. Montenegro Mejía, Silvia Sofía, and Edgar Gutiérrez. 2016. “The Awakening of Guatemalan Society: Explaining the Appearance of the Social Movement of 2015.” Encuentro Latinoamericano 3 (1): 63–81. Morales Sic, José Roberto. 2007. “Religión y espiritualidad maya.” In Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca. Vol. 3, Analisis específicos, edited by Santiago Bastos and Aura Cumes, 247–81. Guatemala: La Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA), and Cholsamaj. Moran, Emilio F. 2010. Environmental Social Science: Human-Environment Interactions and Sustainability. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Myers, Norman, Russell A. Mittermeier, Cristina G. Mittermeier, Gustavo A. B. da Fonseca, and Jennifer Kent. 2000. “Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities.” Nature 403 (6772): 853–58. https://doi.org/10.1038/35002501. Ottati, Douglas F. 2013. Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Pallister, Kevin. 2013. “Why No Mayan Party? Indigenous Movements and National Politics in Guatemala.” Latin American Politics and Society 55 (3): 117–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548–2456.2013.00205.x.

M aya Cosmol ogy a n d Con t e st i ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge

151

Paulson, Susan, Lisa L. Gezon, and Michael Watts. 2005. “Politics, Ecologies, Genealogies.” In Political Ecology across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups, edited by Susan Paulson and Lisa L. Gezon, 17–37. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pew Forum of Religion and Public Life. 2006. Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. http://assets .pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2006/10/pentecostals-08.pdf. Posey, Darrell Addison. 2001. “Intellectual Property Rights and the Sacred Balance: Some Spiritual Consequences from the Commercialization of Traditional Resources.” In Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, edited by John A. Grim, 3–23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rasmussen, Mattias Borg. 2015. Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Reuveny, Rafael. 2007. Climate Change–Induced Migration and Violent Conflict. Political Geography 26 (6): 656–67. Ruano, Sergio, and Andrea Milan. 2014. Climate Change, Rainfall Patterns, Livelihoods and Migration in Cabricán, Guatemala. Report No. 14. Bonn, Ger.: United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security. Samson, C. Mathews. 2007. Re-enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ———. 2012. “Conversion at the Boundaries of Religion, Identity, and Politics in Pluricultural Guatemala.” In Beyond Syncretism and Conversion: Indigenous Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 1800–2000, edited by David Lindenfeld and Miles Richardson, 51–77. New York: Berghahn. Steigenga, Timothy J. 2001. The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Stoll, David. 1993. Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press. Tedlock, Barbara. 1992. Time and the Highland Maya. Rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Thorsen, Jakob Egeris. 2016. “El impacto de la Renovación Carismática en la Iglesia Católica de Guatemala.” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 42:213–36. United Nations Development Programme (UNEP). 2019. Human Development Report 2019: Beyond Income, Beyond Averages, Beyond Today:Inequalities in Human Development in the 21st Century. New York: United Nations Development Programme. USAID. 2015. Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Guatemala. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf _docs/pa00msm3.pdf.

152

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Veldman, Robin Globus, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-DeLay. 2014. “Climate Change and Religion as Global Phenomena: Summing Up and Direction for Further Research.” In How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations, edited by Robin Globus Veldman, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-DeLay, 297–315. Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research. London: Routledge. Vijay, Varsha, Stuart L. Pimm, Clinton N. Jenkins, and Sharon J. Smith. 2016. “The Impacts of Oil Palm on Recent Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss.” PLoS ONE 11 (7): e0159668. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0159668. Warren, Kay B. 1989. Symbols of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2002. “Voting against Indigenous Rights in Guatemala: Lessons from the 1999 Referendum.” In Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America, edited by Kay B. Warren and Jean E. Jackson, 149–80. Austin: University of Texas Press. Watanabe, John. 1992. Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World. Austin: University of Texas Press. Zepada, Ricardo. 2017. Human Rights and Environmental Impacts of Palm Oil in Sayaxché, Guatemala. Boston: Oxfam America. https://www.oxfamamerica .org/static/media/files/Impact_of_palm_oil_in_Sayaxche_FINAL _ENGLISH.pdf.

six

k

ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE, ANXIET Y, AND THE SACRED The Role of Ecological Calendars in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia

K arim-Aly S. K assam, Cor nell University I n t roduct ion In mountain environments, biophysical features such as trees, glaciers, streams, and rock formations have clear spiritual and revered significance; as a result, climate change affects the core of ecological and sacred spaces of communities (Allison 2015; Byg and Sallick 2009; Ceruti 2013; Sakakibara 2010; Teye, Yaro, and Bawakyillenuo 2015; Verschuuren, McNeely, and Oviedo 2010). In the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, the sacred is bound to the ecological. Although sacred and ecological spaces are conceptually distinct notions, in these mountain societies, the former is embedded in the latter. Impetus for this chapter arises out of conversations and reflections at the Mountains as Sacred Landscapes Conference held at the New School in New York City in 2017, to which I was invited. Sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture and the India China Institute at the New School, the aims were to explore (1) how sacred landscapes are manifested in diverse communities and geographies and (2) how sacred landscapes are being affected by extreme environmental events such as anthropogenic climate change. Arguably, in applied research among indigenous communities in the circumpolar Arctic, boreal forest, and mountain regions, the notion of the sacred is often not discussed because of its loaded connotations within the scientific community. In the communities where we work, however, the nexus of practice and belief are not divorced from each other, which compelled me to engage the notion. In the past thirty-three years of my engagement with indigenous and mountain societies, it has been clear to me that the sacred is fundamental to their food

153

154

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

and livelihood systems. The sacred extends into human action, behavior, and even what and how one eats, works, or rests. It is entwined into human activity, linking the sociocultural with the ecological. This chapter is an exploration of the historical use of ecological calendars as they express the intimate connection between livelihood activities and the sacred through biophysical processes. The relationship is practical, deep, and broadly encompassing. We will be engaging the idea of sacredness as an ecological process imbued with sociocultural dimensions and as a space where human activities take place. The idea of sacredness as both a time-oriented process and a spatially defined feature will be important for understanding its significance in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. The aim is to approach the emergent and increasingly urgent question of how the sacred is affecting and is being affected by anthropogenic climate change. Building on applied research with indigenous communities in the circumpolar Arctic, boreal forest, and the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, we will engage human relationship with the sacred as affected by climate change through a discussion of ecological calendars. Ecological calendars, which are found among diverse human societies worldwide (Cochran et al. 2016; Mondragón 2004; Prober, O’Connor, and Walsh 2011), are context specific. I will discuss a particular embodied expression of ecological calendars, the calendar of the human body, found in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia (Kassam, Bulbulshoev, and Ruelle 2011; Kassam et al. 2018). Before describing ecological calendars, particularly the sacred in the calendar of the human body, the issue of anxiety caused by climatic variation will be addressed. Because anthropogenic climate change is an emergent phenomenon riddled with uncertainty, the resultant stress has become a significant factor in addition to the direct impacts of unpredictable weather events. Anthropogenic climate change defies easy singular formulations; because of its complexity, it is difficult to understand. The effects of human-induced climate change are context dependent and highly contingent on other factors, and the discourse is wrought with conflicting perceptions and values (Balint et al. 2011; Latour 2002; Ritchey 2005). Directly engaging anxiety will ground our discussion of the sacred in the current predicament of mountain societies. After that discussion, the characteristics of ecological calendars in the Pamir Mountains will be described. How ecological calendars reflect the sacred will be considered, and the essay will conclude with reasons for hope through the promise of active engagement with one’s habitat that ecological calendars provide.

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

155

Sacr e d L a n dsca pe s, t h e A n t h ropocen e , a n d A n x i et y Mountain societies that engage in ecological professions such as farming, gathering, herding, hunting, orcharding, and so on are not only aware of climatic variation but depend fundamentally on the predictability of climate for their livelihood and food systems. For instance, seasonal climatic variation is not only an accepted part of life, it is welcomed. By climatic variation, I am not referring to anthropogenic climate change but to the seasonal changes in weather that are necessary for the health of an ecosystem and the organisms that exist within it. The changing rhythms of the land and atmosphere not only nourish and maintain food and livelihood systems of mountain communities but also contribute to the well-being of the more populated towns and cities in the lowlands. The complex connectivity among sociocultural, economic, and ecological systems has recently been reiterated with respect to the seasonal role of grasslands in contributing to the development of the historical trade routes known as the Silk Road in Central Asia (Frachetti et al. 2017; Harrower and Dumitru 2017). The Silk Road, which was a network of pathways for food systems and trade of goods, movement of peoples, and exchange of ideas, was significantly enhanced in its utility by seasonal change. Ecological professions such as farming, herding, fishing, hunting, orcharding, beekeeping, and even tourism fundamentally depend on seasonal changes. The fact that seasonal variation is optimized by mountain societies for their well-being and sustainability is often neglected and not explicitly considered; yet it is essential for developing an adaptation strategy to anthropogenic climate change. First, keeping this in mind prevents us from viewing mountain societies as passive victims of anthropogenic climate change. Taking it into account facilitates a perspective that may engender creative and locally grounded responses in which communities have agency. Second, it illustrates that environmental change is not the issue, but the rapidity of change, the accompanying uncertainty, and the frequency of extreme weather events are the causes of anxiety and concern (Kassam 2009a, b; Kassam et al. 2011). Attributes of Sacred Landscapes Features of land and water are sacred because people perceive them as such (Ovieda and Jeanrenaud 2007; Verschuuren et al. 2010). A landscape is of specific significance to a community that engages and protects it (Saunders 1994). These spaces are human constructs and part of the ecological system. They are

156

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

vested with identity in the supernatural, ecological, and sociocultural spheres. Over time, such spaces undergo change while retaining essential characteristics, much as their custodians, the community that utilizes it, do. It is a living system. These spaces are governed by rules requiring specific behavior to reflect human ecological relations. More and more, industrial societies have sought to put boundaries of both time and space around the sacred. The idea of the sacred is not bordered or constrained among many indigenous peoples because it permeates all aspects of human existence. An important aspect of the phenomenological domain of indigenous and mountain cultures is that the animated world not only includes other life such as plants and animals but extends to streams, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, glaciers, and other physical features that modern science would consider inanimate. Therefore, the sense of the sacred extends to the whole ecosystem (Bateson 2002, Berkes 2012, Hubert 1994, Kassam 2009a; Leopold 1949). It is unwise to present a universal notion of the sacred because it will fail to include the diversity of cultures and the particular ways in which different peoples fruitfully engage it (Descola 2013; Verschuuren et al. 2010). A singular monolithic representation of the sacred reveals more about the epistemological enterprise of the definer than about the people to whose beliefs she or he may be trying to give expression. For instance, the Oxford Dictionary (2018), which normally provides robust definitions, in this case gives narrow sets of definitions of the sacred that have an Abrahamic bias reflecting a Euro-Mediterranean orientation that myopically ignores the presence of such notions before the Christian era in their own history. Engagement with the sacred in an applied research context requires sensitivity to ontological pluralism. Elsewhere, we have shown how the conservation of sacred spaces is fundamentally driven by local values (Kassam and Herring 2012). In addition to biophysical features such as mountains, deserts, forest groves, streams, and caverns, these spaces provide refuge to rare animal and plant species. Therefore, plants and animals are central to these spaces and their symbolism (Ruelle, Kassam, and Asfaw 2017). At best, we can describe the attributes of the sacred for our purposes because they are context specific and contingent on the diverse cultures of the Pamir. First, the sacred is a process wherein the ecological is imbued with sociocultural meaning in which human relations with the transcendent are grounded in one’s habitat. Second, because the sacred is a process, diverse elements of the biophysical environment are animated and endowed with mind or spirit and therefore have agency. Third, the process of the sacred takes place within time and is in tune with seasonal rhythms. Therefore seasonal climatic variation is

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

157

important, which is why anthropogenic climate change can dramatically and intimately affect the very foundation of the sociocultural and ecological fabric of mountain societies. Fourth, the sacred also has spatially defined biophysical features, it is a location in the mountains, something that both extreme secularists and religious fanatics have sought to diminish or destroy because they find such a pluralistic perception of agency located in geographical space threatening to their inflexible outlook. In essence, the sacred has both a time dimension (i.e., history) and spatial orientation (i.e., place) in the Pamir Mountains. Finally, the human engages in a reciprocal relationship with the sacred that has both a history and a place. Humans are custodians of the sacred and, in turn, the sacred cares for the human. In this sense, the notion of stewardship is relevant here, where the human has responsibility for the care of the space and is simultaneously the recipient of benevolence from the sacred. It is about mutual agency and engagement where the boundaries of the ecological and sociocultural are simply dissolved. Humans exist in, and actively participate with, their habitat. Anthropocene The term Anthropocene,1 meaning “the age of humanity,” is not a compliment to human achievement. It is an admission of culpability for historically destructive human behavior. The term Anthropocene, introduced by physical scientists and widely used by their colleagues in the biological sciences, directly expresses the realization that not only is Homo sapiens a sociocultural manifestation, but also that the impact of collective actions of the species is at a planetary scale and affects entire ecosystems and geological time. Humanity is simultaneously a sociocultural, ecological, and geological force. Therefore, biological and physical scientists are anxiously struggling to find a similar or corresponding epoch in earth history from which to draw insight to respond to the Anthropocene. They admit in dismay, however, that humanity has entered a no-analogue state (Crutzen and Steffen 2003; Sayre 2012; Sayre et al. 2013). The Anthropocene is uneven in its origins and impacts. A particular cultural mindset gave rise to the Industrial Revolution; the emergence of the Anthropocene is traced to this point in northern European history. All humanity, and particularly indigenous and mountain societies in Central Asia, are not responsible. Nonetheless, the Industrial Revolution resonates today in its long-term environmental impacts as well as legacy effects of its chrematistic paradigm of short-term gain for a small portion of human society. The Anthropocene grows out of a frontier ethic of resource extraction and an economic system

158

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

that engenders inequity. At present, both communist and capitalist societies have embraced this outlook. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Anthropocene coincides with the height of colonization of human communities by the military and economic might of industrial nations. The effect has been and continues to be not only to alienate diverse human cultures from each other but also to alienate them from the landscapes they inhabit. Land and its people are “othered” by this mindset, causing a rupture in conceptions of the environment as sacred (Chakrabarty 2009; Haraway 2015; Kassam 2009a; Ogden et al. 2015). The very educational system and academic institutions that coined the term and utilize the notion of the Anthropocene are entrenched in and supported by the industrial infrastructure that caused the crisis (Greenwood 2014). Biological, physical, and social scientists and the field of humanities are not dispassionate and detached observers but active participants in this historic moment. Therefore, the idea of “sacred landscapes”2 is a decolonizing response to a mindset of extraction and exploitation. Latour (2017) resurrects the Greek goddess Gaia as a way to ground or, as he says, “return to earth” the sciences, politics, and religions of our epoch. He argues that the Anthropocene demands the engagement of geology with anthropology. It is the epoch of hybrid knowledge systems. It is noteworthy that in both geology and anthropology, context fundamentally informs our understanding, where location is the basis of a history of relations. Natural history and ethnography combine to provide grounded understanding in the age of the humanity. As will be illustrated shortly, ecological calendars in the Pamirs reflect this context specificity and complex connectivity. Latour (2017) maintains that religion, and by extension the sacred, is not “a thing of the past” (150). Furthermore, science does not offer “unquestioned certainty”; in fact, it is the opposite, and the problems it seeks to address are emergent, like anthropogenic climate change. It is facile to separate religion from science. The conversation must include space for both while grounding them in the reality of the planet. It is a modus vivendi, a way of life that enables agreement between conflicting parties to exist in a mutually arranged peace. The Anthropocene demands such a pluralistic outlook. The circumstance of the Anthropocene invites the scholar to engage in diplomacy and conduct negotiations with differing parties in a language of respect. Creation of a vocabulary for conversation requires acknowledgment of diversity of peoples and places and their distinctive yet mutually overlapping histories. It requires recognizing an animated earth, Gaia, and acknowledging agency of its component parts. Under anthropogenic climate change, there is a mortality to the people and what they consider sacred. If the habitat of people is altered, then sacred

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

159

landscapes may also be altered or, worse, irrevocably damaged. Furthermore, as different ways of knowing are affected by willful genocide of indigenous peoples by industrial societies, so are sacred spaces erased. This realization has startling implications and may be a source of debilitating anxiety. In the final analysis, the term Anthropocene masks responsibility, because not all of humanity was responsible for this predicament. The sectors of human society that have faced a history of colonization and marginalization, and who contributed the least to destructive forces of industrial development, are at the vanguard of its consequences. They did not trigger the looming catastrophes. Furthermore, because these environmental changes can have an impact on what is sacred within their habitat, they are paying the cost for the negligence of others on multiple levels, not just with their physical space, but also with their spiritual integrity. Anxiety Anxiety generated by the Anthropocene is not limited to the pervasive fear “will humanity act in time?” (Chakrabarty 2009) and if not, “how will the collapse affect us?” (Bendell 2018). The word anxiety accurately conveys the unseen but very real effects of anthropogenically induced climate change, in that immediate impacts are already being felt in communities that are at the forefront. It reflects the worry of an uncertain future. Arguably, this troubled state of mind is having damaging psychological and related physical effects on communities where we are undertaking research. That the consequences of more and more frequent extreme weather events resulting from anthropogenic climate change have clear harmful psychological effects is amply documented (Carroll et al. 2009; Coyle and Van Sustern 2012; UN-HRC 2016; Watts et al. 2015). Furthermore, these climatic changes exacerbate existing inequities in indigenous societies resulting from a long history of exploitation through colonialism and war, thus additionally affecting mental and physical health (Cunsolo Willox, Harper et al. 2012; Cunsolo Willox, Stephenson et al. 2014; Kassam et al. 2018; Palsson et al. 2013). This requires continual investigation for longstanding impact. Mountain peoples face additional uncertainties related to planning for the next seasonal cycle, which contributes to even greater anxiety. The ability to anticipate future scenarios is central to their livelihoods and food systems, as illustrated earlier with the development of the Silk Roads. Furthermore, as already noted, the well-being of relatively large populations in the lowlands is tied to mountain societies. The UN Human Rights Commission has pointed out that deleterious psychological health impacts begin with disruptions to food

160

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

systems (UN-HRC 2016). In fact, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, approximately 70–80 percent of the world’s food is produced by family farms (FAO 2014; Graeuba et al. 2016). Reiterating the significance of this statistic and approaching it from the amount of land utilized, another estimate shows 70–80 percent of the globe’s food system continues to depend on small (less than two hectares) landholders (Lowder, Skoet, and Raney 2016). More recent studies suggest that these numbers may be inflated (Ricciardi et al. 2018), but there is no question that at the emergence of the third millennium, farmers and herders in mountain societies are central to their regional food systems. Disruption and anxiety caused by anthropogenic climate change affects not only their well-being but also the food security of larger populations in the lowlands. Small landholders will continue to be food insecure in the uneven Anthropocene. The injustice is doubly halting because the poorest nations are producers of the lowest carbon emissions and yet are the most vulnerable to climate change (Ware and Kramer 2019; IPCC 2019). Therefore, it is no coincidence that research on ecological calendars, which already have embedded in them ideas of the sacred, may represent a culturally and ecologically grounded adaptive mechanism to anthropogenic climate change. Ecol ogica l Ca l en da r s i n t h e Pa m ir Mou n ta i ns Communities in the Pamir Mountains have historically been able to adapt to climatic variation precisely because their food systems and livelihoods depend on the changing rhythms of the land and weather. Their recent vulnerability, however, arises from the frequency of extreme weather events, the rapidity and scale of climatic variation, and their inability to anticipate the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Building anticipatory capacity—being able to visualize diverse futures—is at the core of being able to address the anxieties caused by unpredictable weather changes. In comparison with a standardized and inflexible method of measuring time such as the Gregorian calendar, a reconceptualization of temporal relations, by being sensitive to discrete idiosyncratic weather patterns and their connectivity to agropastoral activities, may provide an ecologically and socioculturally grounded response to anthropogenic climate change. The solar calendar should not be abandoned altogether, but rather it should be combined with an organic view of time from a place-centered ecological perspective (Kassam et al. 2018).

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

161

What If? Let us engage in a series of interconnected what-if questions to consider the sociocultural and ecological dimensions of time. First, what if time is experienced uniquely? For instance, the initial moments marking the arrival of one’s firstborn child are imbued with meaning that is different from the possibly terrifying initial seconds of a root canal at a recent dental appointment. Both are highly intense experiences, but the two moments in time are different because of the significance they carry for the individual. These moments generate memorable experiences in comparison with the rather routine and mundane activities of brushing one’s teeth. Therefore, time is not a fungible or easily tradable commodity as it is asserted in our industrial economic system. We view time as if each hour is the same as any other hour without taking into account the variety and intensity of distinct experiences gained in those moments of being alive. In other words, certain things are possible only at specific periods of time. For instance, despite technological achievements, for the vast majority of animal species (including humans), this biological view of time is reflected in reproduction cycles. Similarly, even with anthropogenic climate change, plowing and seeding are not possible in Pamir Mountain communities at the height of winter, where the frozen ground limits such activities. Second, although recognizing the biophysical limitations of human activities in specific seasons, what if time is both flexible and relational? The possibility may seem counterintuitive, but let us for the moment consider the possibility. Intellectual pluralism allows for seeming contradictions to coexist. For instance, long before the less flexible written calendars, farmers in Japan looked for snow patterns to guide their seasonal activities. The dynamic relationship between snow and ground surface was the basis for a calendar. The pattern of snowmelt against the gray of a slope or peak caused different shapes called yukigata to appear, which indicated to farmers that it was time to plant their crops (Yasuaki et al. 2005; Sturm and Wagner 2010). As in the above example, livelihood activities such as farming, fishing, gathering, herding, hunting, orcharding, beekeeping, and so forth are connected to biophysical cues in their habitat. This conceptualization of time may enable us to anticipate the impact of climate change at the level of villages and communities. Such a context-based and organic framing of time embeds humans in their habitat by taking an intimate view in rather than a more detached view of their animated environment (Kassam 2009a; Latour 2017).

162

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

What Is an Ecological Calendar? Ecological calendars that arise from conceptualizing time as a unique experience that is relational and flexible emphasize the complex connectivity between the biophysical and the sociocultural. Such calendars have been documented in diverse indigenous societies across the globe, including the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia (Kassam et al. 2018). In the Pamirs, ecological calendars have been in use for several centuries and were adaptive because they were continuously being refined and recalibrated from season to season and generation after generation (Bobrinsky 1908; Lentz 1939; Andreev 1958). Imposition of Soviet rule and specifically the impact of the command industrial economy on livelihood strategies in Tajikistan, more than forty years of a global war localized in Afghanistan, and more recently linkages to the global industrial economy have combined to suppress, and thereby erode, the use of such calendars. The memory of ecological calendars has not been completely lost, however. On the contrary, the intellectual and cultural infrastructure remains, thus providing the potential for rebuilding, recalibrating, and revitalizing them in the twenty-first century (Kassam 2009b; Kassam et al. 2011; Kassam et al. 2018). Our current research indicates that concepts and specific words that belong to the calendar of the human body remain in use. Ecological calendars reflect key attributes of indigenous or local knowledge systems such as context specificity, diversity and plurality, complex connectivity, empirical tendency, and cumulative adaptive knowledge. We will consider each of these five aspects of ecological calendars in turn. Context Specificity The people of the Pamirs developed ecological calendars that they called calendars of the human body. The calendar of the human body measures time with respect to ecological cues in relation to human experience. Time, as such, was not seen as a commodity to be controlled by humans. Instead, humans were discerning and active participants in the passage of seasons. These calendars are context specific, related to and unique to a group of people who live in defined mountain regions in direct relation to their ecological professions, such as farming, herding, hunting, gathering, orcharding, and so on. Calendars of the human body emerge from a web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, spirits, and land forms (Kassam 2009a, 85). For instance, local topography in relation to sunlight, the vernal equinox, and cues

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

163

such as the germination of a plant, the arrival of a migratory bird, appearance of an insect, snow cover, or breakup of ice indicate the start or conclusion of specific livelihood activities that bind human sociocultural endeavor with the biophysical (Kassam et al. 2011, 161–62). Ongoing research shows that these cues are not simply visual; they include the other senses, such as the soundscape of birds singing or of the breakup of ice as well as the feel of heat from the soil. All the senses are engaged in a dynamic process of telling time in order to make a living. Diversity and Plurality The ecological calendars of the Pamirs differed from village to village and valley to valley (Kassam et al. 2011). Individual communities had a keeper of time called a hisobdon. We do not have a complete understanding of their role, but archival evidence indicates that hisobdons decided when to begin marking time. Having been told to start counting, individual agropastoralists would then determine the best times for plowing, sowing, harvesting, or migrating animals to seasonal pasture in specific locations in the mountain habitat. Therefore, knowledge about the calendars could not be homogeneous or standardized between hisobdons. Furthermore, each agropastoralist then implemented the ecological calendar suited to specific ecological conditions, microclimates, and livelihood requirements. The complete sensory involvement of farmers and herders with their habitat, by perceiving subtle changes in their surroundings, informed and enabled timely recalibration and regular seasonal implementation of the ecological calendars (Kassam 2009a, 68–69, 88; Kassam et al. 2011, 158–59). Complex Connectivity In ecological calendars, segments of the year are counted with reference to human body parts. An annual cycle of the calendar generally includes two periods of counting on body parts and two periods of chillas, the latter being periods when the counting ceases. At the beginning of spring, counting begins on the human body starting at the sole of the foot or the toenail and moves up toward the head. Counting is described as the movement of the sun to a body part that is relevant at a particular period in time. For instance, in the early spring, “the sun is in” the toenail or the sole of the foot. A majority of the calendars include the ankle, shin, knee, thigh, and penis prior to the sun arriving in the heart.

164

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Often, when the sun is in the heart, it coincides with the vernal equinox. This is the time when Pamiri villagers celebrate Navruz, marking the new year, at the start of the spring season. Navruz is a Persian word for a celebration common to many and diverse central Asian cultures, meaning “new day.” More local words for the new year reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of this mountainous region. For example, in Yazgulam it is called Ghravash, in Rushan it is called Zhamund, and in Shugnan it has several names, such as Khidir Ayom (“great celebration”), Shogun Ayom (“good omen celebration” or “good sign celebration”), and Baat or Boj Ayom. It is noteworthy that these latter two make reference to a specific food that is served to mark the arrival of spring or new year, reinforcing the sociocultural relations that underlie ecological calendars. Baat is a porridge made from wheat flour and oil; boj is made from cracked wheat. Continuing with the description of the calendar of the human body, the chest and throat follow the heart, often culminating at a part of the forehead, crown, or brain. Then the calendars enter the spring and summer chillas. When these chillas end, counting of the human body begins from the head and moves toward the toes, using the same body parts and divisions of days in reverse order. Again, the sun passes back through the heart commonly during the autumnal equinox. Another festival is celebrated linking it to agropastoral activities. At the toenail, the calendar of the human body enters the period of autumn and winter chillas. The periods known as chillas are moments when counting does not take place. There is evidence that suggests these periods have a distinct significance, to which we will return shortly. Empirical Tendency These ecological calendars clearly played a practical function in securing the food and livelihood of the Pamiris. They depend on the keen observational and analytical skills of Pamiris in order to be useful and practical. Our research suggests that the longevity of such calendars reflects their effectiveness in meeting the needs of mountain societies. More generally, they provide detailed insights into how plants and animals (including humans) develop, behave, and interact with each other through the seasons (Kassam 2009a, 86–87). This suggests an autonomy, relationality, and flexibility necessary for adapting calendars from season to season to harmonize livelihood activities with the specific biophysical phenomena that individuals observe. The shared responsibility of keeping time by the hisobdon and keen sensitivity to context-specific ecological cues by farmers, herders, hunters, gatherers, and so on simultaneously reflect the

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

165

universality and particularity that make ecological calendars a potential means of anticipating anthropogenic climate change more widely. Cumulative Adaptive Knowledge Calendars of the body became effective over a long period of time, building on the empirical observations of each generation, which contributed by fine-tuning and adapting them to their specific variable temporal and spatial ecological context (Kassam 2009a, 87–88). There is ample evidence that, even when this knowledge is diminished or lost because of the ravages of colonization or alienation resulting from industrialization, collaborative efforts can rebuild and revitalize the knowledge base. The cumulative and adaptive characteristics of ecological calendars contributes to collective brain power that enables innovation through integration of knowledge sources (Henrich 2016). Our research seeks to revitalize these calendars through cogeneration of new knowledge and through commensurability of contemporary climate and ecological sciences with the indigenous ecological knowledge of the people of the Pamirs (Kassam et al. 2018). R efl ect ions on t h e Sacr e d i n T er ms of T i m e a n d Space Biological and physical phenomena in which communities engage are imbued with the sacred; it is manifest in their cultural values and affects their social institutions. In order for us to engage in a conversation about the sacred and climate change with respect to indigenous mountains societies, we must recognize that to them the biophysical world is imbued with life. Human ecological relations are simultaneously a function and narrative of human beings’ developing a sociocultural system on an ecological foundation. Social institutions, including those engaged in political decision making or sacred activities, have crucial links to their habitat (Kassam 2009a). Ecology affects human diet, disease, demography, and economic development. Therefore, in the context of the mountains, the sociocultural dimension of the sacred cannot be divorced from the ecological; they are intertwined because they are mutually reinforcing. Ecological calendars in the Pamir Mountains, as we have described, reveal an interconnectedness of relationships within the ecosystem, and therefore these relationships must be viewed as part of greater whole in which the human being is a participant. This perspective recognizes a fundamental relationship between cultural diversity, including the variety of ways the sacred is expressed in biological diversity and the relationships human beings have in an animated

166

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

world. Furthermore, relations are not simply linearly determined genealogical notions of relatedness, as in kinship, but rather progenerative conceptions of an all-encompassing connectedness of relationships, as in kindred (Kassam 2009a). Here I use the word animated not unlike Latour’s (2017) reference to Gaia. It is important to remind ourselves that the word animal comes from animus, meaning “endowed with mind or spirit” (Bateson 2002, 5; see also Kassam 2009a). Arising from closeness to the land and relationships with living things, ecological calendars are fundamentally derived from the labor of living in or experiencing the Pamir Mountains. Therefore, in the paradigmatic framework of ecological calendars, there is no separation between the biotic and abiotic—such categories do not emerge because of the complex connectivity of interrelationship between all forces and forms within the natural world. Our ethnographic research suggests that these calendars were woven into the spiritual and ethical fabric of Pamiris and had practical consequences for their livelihood activities (Kassam 2009a). This is effectively expressed by the late khalifa of Porshinev, Shohi-Kalon, who said the calendars were “mixed with our skin, with our muscle, with our bone and our brain” (Kassam et al. 2011, 165). Such an ontological framework enables active engagement of humans with their habitat and a potential openness to adaptation strategies arising from anthropogenic climate change. The Search: The Role of Chillas Chillas were periods in the calendar of the human body set aside for spiritual contemplation and reflection. We do not know enough about the chillas, and more research is needed to shed light on their role as new ethnographic and archival sources are found. Extant ethnographic sources are silent on their roles. One can only speculate on the reasons for this silence; perhaps researchers did not understand the meaning of the period of chillas for the people of the Pamir within the wider cultural history of Sufi practice in Islam. Further, in the tradition of colonial anthropology, they may have simply sought to extract information on the calendar system without understanding the complex connectivity of the sociocultural with the ecological. Finally, it is important to note that the most informative ethnographic research (Andreev 1958) was conducted in the Soviet period during the reign of Joseph Stalin (1922–53). Stalin had effectively generated fear among scholars if their research did not neatly fit into Soviet secularist dogma with the threat of imprisonment in labor camps under horrendous conditions, often resulting in death. Some of the more renowned scholars of the Arctic and the Pamir that engaged indigenous communities of

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

167

these regions met such a fate3 because their work encompassed both cultural and biological diversity. These concepts tend to be antithetical to monolithic conceptions of reality such as communism, fascism, predatory capitalism, and religious fanaticism. It is understandable that these ethnographic sources remained silent on the sacred, which is nonetheless an intimate and essential part of the ecological calendar. In our research were narratives describing individuals using the chillas as a period of personal search through seclusion and meditation (Kassam et al. 2011). Hisobdons have also described chillas as periods known as biyabon (in Farsi, biābān) or “desert.” It is when one is not conscious of the passage of time, “being lost” in the desert and in search for an oasis both ecologically and spiritually. In essence, the chilla is a period in time when the individual farmer, gatherer, herder, or hunter contemplates his or her relation to the greater whole using their habitat as the basis to mark the time for seclusion. In many of these calendars in the Pamirs Mountains, the chilla could last more or less than forty days, according to ecological contexts. In our ongoing research, we are finding that nearly all the villages in the four research sites of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang4 have a concept of the greater and shorter chilla extending the winter period from forty to ninety days. This is continuing evidence of the historic efficacy of the ecological calendar as it resonates in the lives of villagers in the twenty-first century. Significance of Forty It is worth exploring the significance of the number forty as conveyed by the idea of chilla, because it explicitly engages the idea of sacred time in a sacred space. According to Muslim tradition, at the age of forty, the Prophet Muhammad experienced transcendence beyond known reality while in seclusion in a cave in Mount Hirā on the outskirts of Mecca. It is at this point he became the Prophet of Islam (Armstrong 1992; Watt 1953). Similarly, Moses was summoned by God at that age and he remained on Mount Sinai for forty days. The covenant with Noah involved a flood for forty days (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1996). In biblical narrative, the people of Israel during the Exodus after leaving Mount Sinai wandered the desert for forty years (Numbers 32:13). In the life of Jesus, the number forty is also significant. He was taken to the Temple forty days after his birth. He had risen again to his disciples after the crucifixion for forty days living and preaching among them (Acts 1:3). Jesus spent forty days and nights fasting5 in the Judean desert to overcome temptation. In fact, the final temptation takes place in a mountainous landscape or high place (Matthew 4:1–11). It

168

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

is important to note that Jesus is accepted by Muslims as divinely inspired and in Sufism is held in reverence. The symbolic significances of the number forty, of the desert, of the physical space of the mountain, of the search and subsequent transcendence have a marked resemblance to both Sufi thought and description of the chilla in the calendar of the human body. In Sufi symbolism of the Arabic numerical system, the number forty is associated with patience, maturing, suffering, and preparation (Schimmel 1983). In Sufi literature, the idea of chilla has more to do with the quality of experience in the individual’s seclusion rather than the quantity of time in some specific number of days (Ridgeon 2012). The key point is that the individual in search of enlightenment retreats to the mountains for solitude (Graham 1999). The objective of the search is to seek a treasure that was always there but could be found only through a spiritual voyage populated by afflictions characterized by the vagaries of life (Safi 2012). In this journey, seekers encounter spiritual and physical challenges defined by their habitat. So far, I have provided examples of the significance of forty from Abrahamic traditions, yet this region of the world has a history of human civilization that predates monotheistic influences. The Buddha, like Moses and Muhammad, began his mission at the age of forty. Buddhist and Zoroastrian sacred sites continue to have resonances in the Pamirs, albeit transformed with Sufi significance. In fact, the festival of Navruz, whose origins are hard to date because of its universal human significance relating to the vernal equinox, spring, and livelihood activities arising from agropastoralism, was first formalized as a religious festival in a solar calendar under Zoroastrianism. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that indigenous human societies in other parts of Asia (Friedl 1997; Jensen 1974) and in Africa (Field 1970; Ottenberg 1989), North and South America (Brundage 1972; Durán 1975), and Polynesia (Beckwith and Loumala 1970) have rituals and observations related to forty days involving physical challenges, spiritual journeys, and enlightenment that are not dissimilar to the narratives provided here, suggesting a human awareness that preceded and most likely influenced Abrahamic traditions. Returning to the calendar of the human body, it is clear that the Pamiris had already built in a mechanism through the chillas to deal with anxiety arising from uncertainties due to seasonal change and the vicissitudes of life itself. With respect to the sacred, it is the particular human ecological relations of the people of the Pamir Mountains as illustrated by ecological time that address broader human concerns. Highly context-specific ecological calendars unlock a vista into the universal human search for transcendence and meaning. The

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

169

continual use of the notion attest that it is not unreasonable to suggest that in the future, chillas may be just as relevant in the context of anthropogenic climate change as they were historically important to the people of the Pamirs in the past. Sacred Sites Ecological calendars not only reflect the complex connectivity of material relations. They go beyond material needs, linking relations based on cultural and ethical values, concepts of sacred spaces, and aesthetic experience. Specific celebrations observed in the course of an ecological year, such as the marking of the vernal and autumnal equinox in relation to agropastoral activities, would be carried out at a sacred site. Sacred places include gravesites, streams, sacred stones, trees, and groves. Even the search or journey characterized by the ecological notion of the chilla takes place at one of these sacred sites. Almost all sacred sites are intimately connected to the land, linking the culture to its biophysical surroundings. Like the ecological calendar, sacred sites require sustained human engagement to remain relevant. Ironically, invading mujahideen in some regions of the Afghan Pamirs violated sacred sites with the same fanatical commitment as that of the secular communists in Tajikistan under Soviet rule.6 Some of these sites were rebuilt, are protected, and remain significant to the people of the Pamirs in both Afghanistan and Tajikistan. These sacred places, some of which may be more than one thousand years old, are connected to folk stories that may also provide valuable information on climatic change and local conservation strategies (Ruelle, Kassam, and Asfaw 2017). For instance, the only Juniper shugnanica at the sacred site in Langar in the Tajik Pamir is said to be more than one thousand years old, not unlike the tree of Saint Francis in Assisi, which illustrates the conservation impulse found in sacred places (Kassam and Herring 2012). Further research related to these sites may provide valuable information on adapting to environmental change. Their continued presence is informative because they are a testimony to the resilience of the people of the Pamirs as they have endured sociocultural as well as environmental changes. The people tend to the sites’ care, protect them, and believe in them; in turn, the sacred sites have provided meaning, continuity, and hope to the people of the Pamirs in periods of rapid change and uncertainty. It is a relationship of mutual dependence (Kassam 2009b; Kassam and Herring 2012). The people of the Pamirs recognize that a site is sacred because their relationship with their habitat makes it so.

170

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

A place is sacred also because the people of the Pamir are aware that the entire phenomenological environment is pervaded by life. Their narratives about these designated sites convey the ethical and spiritual significance of their dependence on the fundamental life force imbued in their habitat. It is a relationship in which the entire habitat has agency, including the reciprocal relationship between the sacred space and the humans who engage it. It is not unlike the ecological calendars because they represent a similar intimate connectivity with the phenomenological environment. Sacred sites and ecological calendars are how people of the Pamirs engage their habitat and give meaning to their agropastoral livelihood activities. Human agency through stewardship is central to the care and upkeep of sacred sites. Similarly, meticulous human observation and recalibration of the habitat are important for maintaining the usefulness and relevance of ecological calendars. This quantum engagement with the phenomenological environment through sacred sites and ecological calendars provides continuity and stability in the midst of sociocultural, political, and ecological change, thus mitigating the deleterious effects of weather variation and the anxiety caused by anthropogenic climate change. This is because the ecological calendar directly engages time—a sense of the past, its presence, and future possibilities. In addition, sacred space provides a context—an enabling environment for that engagement. Neither can be effective without the other. Flourishing sacred spaces are important for the revitalization of ecological calendars. Conclu di ng T houghts How is the sacred affecting and being affected by anthropogenic climate change? Despite observing changes in their own habitat, some mountain communities in other parts of the world are finding it challenging to accept the impacts of anthropogenic climate change (Drew 2012; Nunn et al. 2016; Paerregaard 2013). Alternatively, in the mountains of Afghanistan, villagers believe it is because of the will of God that they are being punished for ongoing violence, war, and environmental disturbance. They blame themselves even though Afghanistan, as a mountainous country, is responsible for only 0.06 percent of the total global greenhouse emissions (Saifullah 2017). As we have indicated earlier, there is clear evidence that poorer nations have the lowest carbon emissions. During our 2018 field season, while in the village Sary Mogul in the Alai valley of Kyrgyzstan, after having given an explanation of our research during a sermon (khutba) at the main village mosque at the Friday

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

171

noon prayers, a villager holding an open Qur’an in his hands stopped me for a discussion. Referring to verses of the Qur’an with a Kyrgyz language translation of the Arabic, he explained that current environmental change is a result of human greed and avarice. He was blaming his own village’s behavior. The sentiment was often echoed in conversation by village elders during our research work. What is commonly not understood is that their specific behavior has not put the whole of humanity in such a perilous situation. It is the behavior of the industrialized nations, whose greed, avarice, and shortsightedness hold all life hostage on the planet. Farmer suicides are viewed across the world as isolated individual events, yet it is quite possible that increasingly their fatal actions are overdetermined, resulting from effects of anthropogenic climate change as it exacerbates existing inequities. Small landholding farmers in growing numbers may start to lose hope and take action that is not only self-destructive but also deleterious to entire regional food systems. Long-term mental and physical health effects of prolonged anxiety resulting from anthropogenic climate change remain to be considered and addressed. Understanding the vulnerability of sacred spaces, livelihoods, and mountain habitats under the effects of anthropogenic climate change is a necessary part of any adaptive response. Here, directly engaging ecological stewardship values, which are pregnant with spiritual content, reflects an ethical framework of local communities that is essential for collaborative action and policy. Revitalization of ecological calendars fundamentally and pragmatically represents such a stewardship approach to climate-change adaptation. Therefore, the participation of communities in developing long-term strategies is central to the process. With respect to time, sacred spaces are enduring evidence of a commitment to ecological stewardship. There are certain parallels in the practice of ecological calendars and use of sacred sites in the Pamir Mountains. Historically, both have witnessed dramatic sociocultural and ecological change. The omnipresent political vagaries and the legacy effects of the brutality of colonialism continue to be felt in this region, not to mention the leeching effect of war on the vibrancy of the human psyche. In addition to all this, this mountainous region is on the frontlines of anthropogenic climate change. Global is not a new concept; this area is the historical home of the Silk Road. The Pamirs were at the crossroads of the Cold War, which has now been reconstituted as a so-called Clash of Civilizations. Ill-informed external powers impose their self-serving motives and fears on the peoples of this region while seeking access to strategic natural resources. This is a region of seismic activity, which further exacerbates the impacts of climate change. Despite all these challenges, the region is endowed

172

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

with significant biological and cultural diversity, which has facilitated its resilience (Kassam 2009b, 2010). The people of the Pamirs have sought to revitalize both their sacred sites and the practice of ecological calendars. In the case of sacred sites, they have achieved revitalization without outside assistance. With respect to ecological calendars, they seek to cogenerate new knowledge with the most current biophysical and social scientific knowledge available (Kassam et al. 2018). These communities were not the primary contributors to anthropogenic climate change, whereas the transdisciplinary group of climate, ecological, and social scientists who have knowledge that can benefit these communities either comes from or has directly benefited from the industrial civilizations that caused anthropogenic climate change. At a dismal moment in planetary history characterized as the Anthropocene, the age of humankind, we are also at a moment of justly informed action, an opportunity to contribute intellectually and ethically, a moment for hope. I cannot think of anything more useful than ecologically informed and ethically grounded action that makes humanity aware that we are inextricably rooted to the planet. Applied research on ecological calendars not only provides this promise to societies in the Pamir Mountains, it also inspires scientists and their home communities to generate similar ecological calendars to guide and inform their daily actions and livelihoods. Context-specific ecological calendars for the twenty-first century may have significant meaning and practical relevance, not only for rural mountain communities but also for urban societies as they seek meaning from the changing environments they inhabit. This may be an opportunity for humanity to recognize seasonal rhythms as they affect sacred spaces on a planetary scale. In the Anthropocene, under current circumstances of considerable and incalculable hazards of climate change, through collaborative applied research with diverse human societies, scholars may also contribute in small but effective ways to developing a pedagogy and a methodology of hope. K a r im-A ly S. K assa m is Professor of Environmental and Indigenous Studies jointly appointed in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. He is author of Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic and articles in Human Ecology.

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

173

Not e s 1. The March 2015 issue of the journal Nature was devoted to making a case for accepting Anthropocene as a new division of geological time. 2. Like the conference that gave impetus to this essay. 3. Nikolay Volkov (1996), who undertook ethnographic research among the Sami on the Kola Peninsula, and Nikolay Vavilov (Vavilov 1992; Nabhan 2009), who began his research in the Pamir Mountains on plant genetic diversity in a quest to end famine, tragically suffered similar fates. Both undertook innovative and applied research that contributed to humanity as a whole and not just the Soviet state. 4. This paper concentrates on empirical evidence of ethnographic and climate-change research in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan; we also have found evidence of the use of chilla in our research sites in Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang. In the Alai valley of Kyrgyzstan, it is referred to as childe. 5. In fact, the etymology of the noun quarantine in English comes from the ninth-century Latin quarentena in reference to the fasting by Jesus for a period of forty days. In the eleventh century, quarentena was used in English to refer to Lent. From the thirteenth century, is also denoted a period of penance and fasting. Only since the mid-fifteenth century do we see this word used for a period of imposed isolation to avoid the spread of disease (Oxford Dictionary 2018). In any case, quarantine whether voluntary or imposed isolation, represents the “cycle of being or non being” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1996, 402). 6. Protection and development of some hot springs by the Soviet government that have sacred significance to the people of the Tajik Pamir are not examples of cultural sensitivity but rather were seen as holiday destinations for occupying Soviet administrators. Soviet policy was largely hostile to sacred places and indigenous knowledge. Similarly, despite a palpable fear of military occupation, in Xinjiang (China), these sites continue to be relevant to mountain peoples. The presence of sacred places is not openly discussed with outsiders, including government representatives, because of dangerous consequences for local communities. It is noteworthy that the impact of extreme secularism is not distinguishable from religious fanaticism. Both have the same outcomes for indigenous peoples and their complex relations with their habitat.

R efer ence s Allison, E. A. 2015. “The Spiritual Significance of Glaciers in an Age of Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change, 6:493–508.

174

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Andreev, MS. 1958. Tadzhiki Doliny Khuf: Verkhovyev Amu-Daryi, edited by A. K. Pisarchik. 2nd ed. Stalinabad, Tajikistan: Academy of Science of SSR Tajikistan. Armstrong, Karen. 1992. Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. New York: Harper Collins. Balint, P. J., R. E. Stewart, A. Desai, and L. C. Walters. 2011. Wicked Environmental Problems: Managing Uncertainty and Conflict. Washington, DC: Island Press. Bateson, Gregory. 2002. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Beckwith, M. W., and K. Loumala. 1970. Hawaiian Mythology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ov05 –003. Bendell, Jem. 2018. Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) Occasional Papers, vol. 2. Ambleside, UK: University of Cumbria. http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id /eprint/4166/. Berkes, Fikret. 2012. Sacred Ecology. New York: Routledge. Bobrinsky, A. A. 1908. Gortsy Verkhov’ev Pyanja: Wakhantsy i Ishkashimtsy. Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences. Brundage, Burr Cartwright. 1972. Rain of Darts: The Mexica Aztecs. Texas PanAmerican Series. Austin: University of Texas Press. Byg, Anja, and Jan Salick. 2009. “Local Perspectives on a Global Phenomenon— Climate Change in Eastern Tibetan Villages.” Global Environmental Change 19 (2): 156–66. Carroll B., H. Morbey, R. Balogh, and G. Araoz. 2009. “Flooded Homes, Broken Bonds, the Meaning of Home, Psychological Processes and Their Impact on Psychological Health in a Disaster.” Health & Place 15 (2): 540–547. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2008.08.009. Ceruti, Constanza. 2013. “Sacred Ice Melting Away: Lessons from the Impact of Climate Change on Andean Cultural Heritage.” Journal of Sustainability Education 4:1–9. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. 1996. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. London: Penguin. Cochran, F. V., N. A. Brunsell, A. Cabalzar, P. J. van der Veld, E. Azevedo, R. A. Pedrosa, and L. J. Winegar. 2016. “Indigenous Ecological Calendars Define

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

175

Scales for Climate Change and Sustainability Assessments.” Sustainability Science 11 (1): 69–89. Coyle, Kevin J., and Lise Van Susteren. 2012. “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System Is Not Adequately Prepared.” National Forum & Research Report: National Wildlife Federation Climate Education Program. https://nwf.org/~ /media/PDFs/Global-Warming/Reports/Psych_effects_Climate_Change _Ex_Sum_3_23.ashx. Crutzen, P. J., and W. Steffen. 2003. “How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?” Climatic Change 61:251–57. Cunsolo Willox, Ashlee, Sherilee L. Harper, James D. Ford, Karen Landman, Karen Houle, and Victoria L. Edge. 2012. “‘From This Place and of This Place’: Climate Change, Sense of Place, and Health in Nunatsiavut, Canada.” Social Science and Medicine 75 (3): 538–47. https://doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2012 .03.043. Cunsolo Willox, Ashlee, Eleanor Stephenson, Jim Allen, François Bourque, Alexander Drossos, Sigmund Elgarøy, Michael J. Kral, Ian Mauro, Joshua Moses, Tristan Pearce, et al. 2014. “Examining Relationships between Climate Change and Mental Health in the Circumpolar North.” Regional Environmental Change 15 (1): 169–82. https://doi:10.1007/s10113–014–0630-z. Descola, Phillipe. 2013. “Presence, Attachment, Origin: Ontologies of ‘Incarnates.’” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek, 33–49. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Drew, Georgina. 2012. “A Retreating Goddess? Conflicting Perceptions of Ecological Change near the Gangotri-Gaumukh Glacier.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6 (3): 344–62. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsmc.v6i3 .344. Durán, Diego. 1975. Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar. Civilization of the American Indian Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nu07–022. Field, M. J. 1970. Search for Security: An Ethno-Psychiatric Study of Rural Ghana. New York: W. W. Norton. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture. Rome: United Nations, FAO. Frachetti, M. D., C. E. Smith, and C. M. Traub. 2017. “Nomadic Ecology Shaped the Highland Geography of Asia’s Silk Roads.” Nature 543:193–198. Friedl, Erika. 1997. Children of Deh Koh: Young Life in an Iranian Village. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

176

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Graeuba, Benjamin E., M. Jahi Chappell, Hannah Wittmand, Samuel Ledermann, Rachel Bezner Kerr, and Barbara Gemmill-Herren. 2016. “The State of Family Farms in the World.” World Development 87:1–15. Graham, Terry. 1999. “Shāh Ni`matullāh Walī: Founder of the Ni`matullāhī Sufi Order.” In The Heritage of Sufism. Vol. 2, The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (1150–1500), edited by Leonard Lewisohn, 173–90. Oxford, UK: Oneworld. Greenwood, David A. 2014. “Culture, Environment, and Education in the Anthropocene.: In Assessing Schools for Generation R (Responsibility), edited by M. P. Mueller, D. Tippins, and A. Stewart, 279–92. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer. Haraway, Donna J. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–65. Harrower, M., and I. Dumitru. 2017. “Digital Maps Illuminate Ancient Trade Routes.” Nature 543:188–189. Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hubert, Jane. 1994. “Sacred Beliefs and Beliefs of Sacredness.” In Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, edited by David L Carmichael, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves, and Audhid Schanche, 9–19. One World Archaeology, vol. 23. London: Routledge. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2019. Climate Change and Land: Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems. Geneva, Switz.: IPCC. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/. Jensen, E. 1974. The Iban and Their Religion. Oxford Monographs on Social Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kassam, Karim-Aly. 2009a. Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic. Calgary, Can.: University of Calgary Press/Arctic Institute of North America. ———. 2009b. “Viewing Change through the Prism of Indigenous Human Ecology: Findings from the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs.” Human Ecology 37 (6): 377–90. ———. 2010. “Pluralism, Resilience, and the Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan.” Ecology and Society 15 (2). http:// www.ecologyandsociety.org/vo115/iss2/art8/. Kassam, Karim-Aly, U. Bulbulshoev, and M. Ruelle. 2011. “Ecology of Time: Calendar of the Human Body in the Pamir Mountains.” Journal of Persianate Studies, 4 (2): 146–70. Kassam, Karim-Aly, and R. J. Herring, dirs. 2012. Protecting the Sacred: The Conservation of Three Sacred Sites in the Pamir Mountains. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Conservation Bridge. https://youtu.be/b-MNQR5HNTk.

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

177

Kassam, Karim-Aly, M. L. Ruelle, C. Samimi, A. Trabucco, and J. Xu. 2018. “Anticipating Climatic Variability: The Potential of Ecological Calendars.” Human Ecology 46 (2): 249–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745–018–9970–5. Latour, Bruno. 2002. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Lentz, Wolfgang. 1939. Zeitrechnung in Nuristan und am Pamir. Abhandlungen der preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, no. 7. Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften. Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 (7542): 171–80. Lowder, Sarah K., Jakob Skoet, and Terri Raney. 2016. “The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide.” World Development 87:16–29. Mondragón, C. 2004. “Of Winds, Worms and Mana: The Traditional Calendar of the Torres Islands, Vanuatu.” Oceania 74 (4): 289–309. Nabhan, Gary Paul. 2009. Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine. Washington, DC: Island Press. Nunn, P. D., K. Mulgrew, B. Scott-Parker, D. W. Hine, A. D. G. Marks, D. Mahar, and J. Maebuta. 2016. “Spirituality and Attitudes towards Nature in the Pacific Islands: Insights for Enabling Climate-Change Adaptation.” Climatic Change 136:477–96. Ogden, L., N. Heynen, U. Oslender, P. West, K-A. Kassam, P. Robbins, F. Massardo, and R. Rozzi. 2015. “The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene.” In Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice, edited by Ricardo Rozzi, F. Stuart Chapin III, J. Baird Callicott, S. T. A. Pickett, Mary E. Power, Juan J. Armesto, Roy H. May Jr, 137–57. New York: Springer. Ottenberg, Simon. 1989. Boyhood Rituals in An African Society: An Interpretation. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Oviedo, G., and S. Jeanrenaud. 2007. “Protecting Sacred Natural Sites of Indigenous and Traditional Peoples.” In Protected Areas and Spirituality, edited by J. M. Mallarach and T. Papayannis, 1–21. Glalnd, Switz.: International Union for Conservation of Nature; Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat.

178

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Oxford Dictionary. 2018. “Quarantine.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com /definition/quarantine. ———. 2018. “Sacred.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sacred. Paerregaard, Karsten. 2013. “Bare Rocks and Fallen Angels: Environmental Change, Climate Perceptions and Ritual Practice in the Peruvian Andes.” Religions 4 (2): 290–305. https://doi.org/10.3390/re14020290. Palsson, G., B. Szerszynski, S. Sörlin, J. Marks, B. Avril, C. Crumley, H. Hackmann, P. Holm, J. Ingram, A. Kirman, et al. 2012. “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene : Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environmental Change Research.” Environmental Science and Policy 28:3–13. Prober, S. M., M. H. O’Connor, and F. J. Walsh. 2011. “Australian Aboriginal Peoples’ Seasonal Knowledge: A Potential Basis for Shared Understanding in Environmental Management.” Ecology and Society 16 (2): 12. Ricciardi, V., N. Ramankutty, Z. Mehrabi, and L. Jarvis. 2018. “How Much of the World’s Food Do Smallholders Produce?” Global Food Security 17:64–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2018.05.002. Ridgeon, Lloyd. 2012. “῾Azīz al-Dīn al-Nasafī.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1163/1573–3912_ei3 _COM_23982. Ritchey, T. 2005. Wicked Problems: Structuring Social Messes with Morphological Analysis. Stockholm: Swedish Morphological Society. www.swemorph.com. Ruelle, Morgan, Karim-Aly Kassam, and Zemede Asfaw. 2017. “Human Ecology of Sacred Space: Church Forests in the Highlands of Northwestern Ethiopia.” Environmental Conservation 45:1–10. Safi, Omid. 2012. “Att .. ār, Farīd al-Dīn.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1163/1573–3912_ei3_COM _23976. Saifulla, Masood. 2017. “For Afghan Farmers, Climate Change Is ‘God’s Will.’” Deutsche Welle, November 7, 2017. http://www.dw.com/en/for-afghan-farmers -climate-change-is-gods-will/a-41253973. Sakakibara, Chie. 2010. “Kiavallakkikput Agviq (Into the Whaling Cycle): Cetaceousness and Climate Change Among the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (4): 1003–12. Saunders, N. J. 1994. “At the Mouth of the Obsidian Cave: Deity and Place in Aztec Religion.” In Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, edited by David L Carmichael, Jane

A n t h ropoge n ic Cl i m at e Ch a nge , A n x i et y, a n d t h e Sacr e d

179

Hubert, Brian Reeves, and Audhid Schanche, 172–83. One World Archaeology, vol. 23. London: Routledge. Sayre, Nathan F. 2012. “The Politics of the Anthropogenic.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:57–70. Sayre, N. F., R. R. McAllister, B. T. Bestelmeyer, M. Moritz, and M. D. Turner. 2013. “Earth Stewardship of Rangelands: Coping with Ecological, Economic, and Political Marginality.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11 (7): 348–54. Schimmel, Annemarie. 1983. And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sturm, M., and A. M. Wagner. 2010. “Using Repeated Patterns in Snow Distribution Modeling: An Arctic Example.” Water Resources Research 46 (12): 1–15. Teye, Joseph Kofi, Joseph Awetori Yaro, and Simon Bawakyillenuo. 2015. “Local Farmers’ Experiences and Perceptions of Climate Change in the Northern Savannah Zone of Ghana.” International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management 7 (3): 327–47. UN-HRC (UN Human Rights Council). 2016. “Analytical Study on the Relationship between Climate Change and the Human Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health.” Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, vol. 32. UN Doc. E/CN.4/2006/97. Vavilov, Nikolay I. 1992. Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants. Translated by Doris Löve. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Verschuuren, B., R. Wild, J. A. McNeely, and G. Oviedo, eds. 2010. Sacred Natural Sites: Conserving Nature and Culture. London: Earthscan. Volkov, Nikolay N. 1996. The Russian Sami: Historical-Ethnographic Essays. Translated by Lars-Nila Lasko and Chuner Taksami. Kautokeino, Norway: Nordic Sami Institute. Ware, J., and K. Kramer. 2019. Hunger Strike: The Climate and Food Vulnerability Index. London: Christian Aid. Watt, W. Montgomery. 1953. Muhammad at Mecca. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watts, Nick, W. Neil Adger, Paolo Agnolucci, Jason Blackstock, Peter Byass, and Wenjia Cai. 2015. “Health and Climate Change: Policy Responses to Protect Public Health.” Lancet 386 (10006): 1861–914. Yasuaki, N., I. Kaoru, E. Yasoichi, K. Katsuhisa, and K. Toshiichi. 2005. “Do You Know Yukigata?” Journal of the Visualization Society of Japan 25 (suppl. 2): 121–22. https://doi.org/10.3154/jvs.25.Supplement2_121.

Part III

LOSS, ANXIET Y, AND DOUBT

seven

k

THE VANISHING OF FATHER WHITE GL ACIER Ritual Revival and Temporalities of Climate Change in the Himalayas

K arine Gagné, University of Guelph The spr ing of 2013 in Ladakh felt cold. In May, agricultural work in the field was in full swing in this part of the Indian Himalayas.1 In the village of Tingmosgang in the Sham area, fields are located at an altitude of about thirtysix hundred meters, therefore yielding, as in most of Ladakh, only one harvest per year. Trapped in the inexorable cycle of the seasons, Ladakhis have to maximize the benefits of their arid land during a few brief months of warm weather before winter sets in again. During the warmest months of the year, there is not a day to spare. As the old Ladakhi saying goes, “Summer is the slave of winter.” For Lhadol, this cold weather was inauspicious; she already had enough work and stress to bear.2 A mother of four, she had to tend to the needs of her family and her land in the absence of her husband. Working for the Indian army, he is posted in a far-flung corner of Ladakh and is unable to return to the village at this crucial time of the year when people join forces to prepare their fields for a new growing season. “Farming has become so difficult these days,” she laments while peeling potatoes in her winter kitchen, where the family has spent most of the past several months, trying to stay warm around the wood stove. Normally, she would have reopened the summer kitchen by now, but she felt the weather was still a bit too cold. “We continually have bad luck with the weather and the water, and few people are interested in this work anymore”— alluding to the strain farmers are feeling from having to accomplish much of the farmwork while many family members are absent. Ladakh is a region of North India. It is flanked by the two highest mountain ranges in the world, the Himalayas to the south and the Karakoram to the north. Ladakh lies in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, which prevents the

183

184

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

entry of the monsoon, leaving the region with scant annual precipitation of less than 100 millimeters (Dame and Nüsser 2011, 181). Most fields are supplied by glacier meltwater and accumulated snow. In this high-altitude region, water stored in glaciers is of fundamental importance for crop irrigation and, thus, for food security (Schmidt and Nüsser 2012, 108).3 After India’s independence and successive wars with both China and Pakistan, Ladakh became a sensitive border area. The resulting military production of the Indian state brought an economic restructuring of the region and new aspirations. The ensuing work opportunities in military service and employment related to the military, along with the ever-increasing presence of state institutions in the region, all have contributed to the decentering of the agropastoralist economy and significant demographic changes characterized by rural outmigration. Younger generations increasingly conceive the rural area as an outer fringe with few opportunities. According to many, life is no longer the same in the villages. Communities are becoming fragmented, which compromises the continuity of communal activities, for instance, shared work or traditional rituals held at the village level. Besides the lack of workers, farming in Ladakh today is complicated by the receding glaciers, which, according to Shammas, as the inhabitant of Sham are known, affects the water flow. Ladakh, like the rest of the Himalayas, is at the forefront of climate change, and glacial recession in the region is documented in several studies (Kamp, Byrne, and Bolch 2011; Schmidt and Nüsser 2017; Pandey, Gosh, and Nathawat 2011). Changes in the weather have also been observed (Banerji and Basu 2010; Tundup and Heiniger 2009). Reduced snowfall precipitations cause drier streams and bring water stress, especially during spring planting. Moreover, according to many, spring used to bring light rainfall that would help germinate the seeds. But rain is said to have become unpredictable. As Lhadol puts it, “in the past we could rely on this rain, because it would eventually come. But today there is no way of understanding what this sky will bring.” This chapter examines how villagers of the Tibetan Buddhist community of Tingmosgang have sought to address the problem of water supply during the spring of 2013, or, in other words, how they attempted to respond to climate change. In the past decade, climate change has emerged as one of the most critical questions in both natural and social sciences. In particular, climatechange adaptation, or how to lower the risks posed by its consequences, now infuses discussions in different circles. But how does climate change affect human lives and local social, cultural, and economic worlds? At the local level, climate change may exacerbate the stress a community already experiences.

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

185

Social scientists have shown in their explorations of climate-change stress that discussions about climate change cannot be the sole purview of climate science, whose normative discourse leaves little space for the rich complexity of human life in understanding climate change. A comprehensive understanding of climate change, and therefore of climate-change adaptation, requires an understanding of how its impacts are mediated by societies, their culture, and their institutions (Barnes et al. 2013; Castree et al. 2014; Crate and Nuttal 2009; Orlove 2009). Climate change, when experienced at the local level, is about how different societies encounter the state, or how changing water availability often adds to a series of predicaments already experienced by farmers. In Ladakh, climate change brings water anxiety that coincides with important changes taking place in the region since the independence of India. In this context, anxiety about a future where the sustainability of agriculture is questioned is exacerbated by a sense of loss for a traditional way of being, when farming activities occupied a central role in people’s lives, when villagers strived for the preservation of an ethical relationship with divine beings, and when ritual activities used to be carefully observed. As the grieving for the loss of glaciers takes place for many alongside the grieving for a traditional way of being, climate change therefore adds a new dimension to the feeling of cultural and social loss already prevailing, contributing to growing vulnerability. In some parts of Ladakh, villagers are tackling water-supply problems through ingenious technological initiatives, including the building of artificial glaciers (Clouse 2014) and the construction of irrigation canals (Mingle 2015). But emotions also play a significant role in the ways humans are responding to climate change (Brugger et al. 2012). As the uncertainty about the weather generated anxiety for farmers during the spring of 2013, religion emerged as a key institution for addressing the situation. Jenkins, Berry, and Kreider (2018) argue that understanding the cultural dimensions of climate change requires attention to its religious aspects. In particular, local interpretations of climate change often reveal a mutuality between religion and of climate change (Jenkins et al. 2018, 97–99). Scholars who have examined perceptions of climate change in Tibetan Buddhist areas have highlighted this mutuality and the salience of religion as a framework through which changes in the environment are interpreted. For instance, changes in the environment are seen by communities of the Himalayas as either the result of an offense against divine beings or a decline in moral order (Butcher 2013a; Coggins and Yeh 2014; Gagné 2019; Salick, Byg, and Bauer 2012; Sherpa 2014; Yeh 2014). But religion and beliefs are mobilized not only to interpret climate change but also to respond and adapt to the challenges it poses. This was the case in

186

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Tingmosgang, when villagers sought a solution in a ritual: the revival of skyin jug, a ritual meant to propitiate the zhidak (gzhi bdag), the protector of the main glacier of the village, known to be stubborn.4 But in their attempt to resort to a traditional mode of interaction with divine beings as a means of dealing with the anxiety caused by climate change, they were confronted with another challenge: conflicting perceptions of agrarian time. The economic restructuring of Ladakh, as mentioned earlier, translates into a critical lack of workers (Dawa 1999; Gagné 2019). But it also alters social time, with implications for the respect of an ethics of the land and for farming that takes into consideration a sacred geography. Drawing on Durkheim’s insights into the distinction between personal experiences of time and social time, “that is, a person’s sense of temporal orientation from his or her awareness of time as a category” (Greenhouse 1996, 27), anthropologists have argued that time is a culturally flexible and socially manipulable resource (Gell 1992; Munn 1992). At the macro level, manipulations of time have become a salient feature of modernity, bringing about a “time-space compression” (Harvey 1989) and changing the horizon of time, or the conjunction between time and anticipated scenarios, thus generating uncertainty (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). In order to capture the complexity of the experience of modern time, we need to focus on the encounters between regimes of time and temporal representations. Institutions have become central actors in the contemporary mediation of time. For instance, the public rhetoric of macroeconomics and state planning contributes to shape people’s relationship to time, with the past being lamented, the present described as fluid, and the future as uncertain (Abram 2014; Knight and Stewart 2016; Mathur 2014). Albeit largely focused on economic, political, and bureaucratic social time, perspectives on temporality generate insights into the coexistence of divergent regimes of time, its affective dimensions, and its flexible nature, which shed light on the changing agrarian timescape of Ladakh. As I examine in this chapter, climate change and the new economic reality are both contributing to define the horizon of time in Ladakh: for many farmers, the present is troubled by a lack of an agrarian workforce and repeated problems of water supply. This sometimes leads to bleak prognoses for the future, which imbue the horizon of time with uncertainty. Yet, as much as time is manipulated and shaped by institutions, people attempt to take control over time. The act of labor mediates temporal rhythms, representations, and technologies. But the mediation, according to Laura Bear (2015), has become increasingly difficult to achieve under contemporary global capitalism. Ladakhi farmers are among those who have to negotiate with and mediate temporal regimes. Capitalism increasingly dictates the rhythm of

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

187

farmwork, not so much because subsistence farming has been replaced by cash crops, but because the significance of farming activities has been superseded by other economic activities that take place outside the villages. For those who rely on the support of family members who live outside the villages for participation in labor, farming has to be accomplished as quickly as possible, often preventing the observation of the rituals that traditionally punctuate the stages of the farming season. Consideration for a sacred geography, which used to dictate the rhythm of farming activities, has become challenging for many families. As I examine herein, it is thus amid this changing agrarian timescape that villagers of Tingmosgang are attempting to revive the ritual skyin jug, adding to a series of predicaments that today characterize religious and farming activities. C ycl e s of I n t er depen dence In Ladakh, the farming season runs roughly from April to September. In this relatively short window of time, villagers typically plan only one harvest, consisting of a few vegetable and grain crops. Each yearly cycle sees villagers trying to maximize the yield of this arid land before frost and low temperatures prevent all agricultural activity. Not only is farming in Ladakh about physically working the land, it also is about a relationship with divine beings. In traditional Ladakhi cosmology, agriculture requires not only the labor of laypeople but also the prayers and rituals of the monastic community. The land is the domain of the sadak (sa bdag), the lord of the soil, who has the final word on its use. The sadak is said to be quite capricious, punishing harshly those who fail to pay their due in the form of regular offerings (Dollfus 1996, 31–32). The prosperity of the community therefore requires more than cohesiveness and hard work, for the cooperation of the deities is crucial. According to Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, spirits and deities are believed to inhabit various places in villages and their vicinity, in particular the surrounding mountains and water sources (Huber and Pedersen 1997; Salick et al. 2012, 451). These “gods and spirits of the landscape” are the “gods of this world” who oversee the connection between moral values and the environment (Samuel 1993, 161–66). The sadak, together with the yul lha, the lu (klu), and the zhidak,5 are all territorial deities that feature in both Bon and Buddhist traditions and are seen as inhabiting the landscape of Ladakh (Butcher 2013a; Dollfus 1997, 2003; Mills 2003; Riaboff 1996, Wangchok 2009).6 These deities, which Geoffrey Samuel (1993, 166) refers to as the “gods of this world,” are associated with geographical features and provide a critical set of symbolic associations through which a landscape is perceived. For Tibetan Buddhists, they are guardians of

188

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

the connection between moral values and the environment. They form part of a complex of ideas about divination, spirit mediums, and good and bad fortune, thus playing a central role in the pragmatic matters of their world. Although the local gods are generally benevolent, they are also easily offended. Keeping on good terms with them and rectifying relationships when needed is the domain of ritual specialists. Rituals that aim at placating these deities have long been a central preoccupation of villagers in Tibetan Buddhist territories. And for good reason: it is believed that an unbalanced relationship with the deities can bring about diseases or natural catastrophes of various kinds (Kapstein 2006, 209–11; Samuel 1993, 179–92; Snellgrove 1967, 12–13). Fundamental to achieving prosperity, acknowledgment of the interconnection between local spirits, human beings, and the environment is periodically enacted in ritual practices that bring together members of the community and specialists, such as monks, who engage the realms of the deities of the land.7 Each spring in Ladakh, one such ritual, sa kha phye, marks the onset of the farming season and authorizes the villagers to start working the land and perform other farm-related activities. Literally meaning “the opening of the mouth of the earth,” the ritual consists of symbolically opening the land with the plow. The date and time of the ritual are set in each village by the onpo (dbon po), or local astrologer, who, through various calculations, establishes the minute details of the ritual (Dollfus 1996). During the inauguration ceremony of the first plowing, deities are solicited to guard the earth and seeds, while forgiveness is asked of the earth spirits, since their ground will be plowed. In assigning specific roles to the members of the community, and in requiring the participation of every member, the ritual also serves to reiterate the importance of community cohesion. At the basis of the ritual, as with many others in Ladakh, is a worldview that integrates society and nature. Such has long been the rhythm of agrarian life in Ladakh: a succession of tasks that engage people with the environment, intertwined throughout with community arrangements and permeated with religious beliefs. Each of these “cycles of interdependence” (Bastien 1983) is dictated by the immutable changes in the seasons. In the past years, however, in many villages, sa kha phye has become less elaborate (Dollfus 2008, 136). But if the rituals are increasingly losing their significance, many villagers in Tingmosgang are clear: the date set by the onpo to start the plowing has to be followed. In Tibetan Buddhist areas, beliefs in reciprocity between humans and the deities of the land have strongly infused nature with a sense of morality. This, in turn, informs perceptions of climate change, as is the case for one of its iconic

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

189

manifestations: receding glaciers. More than distant elements in the landscape, glaciers are intimately connected throughout the world to local cosmologies (Gagné, Rasmussen, and Orlove 2014). These various forms of intimacy depart from scientific discourses on climate change, which tend to objectify glaciers as barometers of global warming only, obscuring the fact that communities often relate to glacier through intimacies that are far removed from the abstract formulations of scientists. In Tibetan Buddhist areas, this intimacy is anchored in a sense of belonging to a place and reflected in and shaped by various beliefs and practices: in songs and rituals that depict glaciers as fulfilling a protective and life-giving role (Dinnerstein 2013a, 2013b; Ribbach 1985, 65–66; Rabgias 1970–2003; Tucci 1966, 61); in embodied knowledge about glaciers developed through pastoral work or in attributing names to glaciers (Gagné 2019, 139–62); as the embodiment of childhood memories (Norbu and Harrer 1986, 49); as central elements in ethnoclimatology (Norbu and Harrer 1986, 48–49); and as mirrors of human’s morality and devotion to deities (Gagné 2019; Moseley 2006, 217; Salick et al. 2012; Sherpa 2014; Yeh 2014). The kind of intimacy with glaciers found in the community of Tingmosgang is one of filial love and obligations, in which life is possible only within a reciprocity between villagers and a glacier that is enacted along the lines of respect, of recognition, and of nurturing. But this intimacy should not be seen as contradictory to rational observations; as Salick et al. (2012) explain, Tibetan Buddhist cosmology coexists with many principles of scientific rationalism. Therefore, although many Ladakhis link melting glaciers to warmer temperatures and decreased snowfall, such explanations do not account for the root cause of the problem. The Tibetan Buddhist ontology does not segregate humans from the natural environment and, in fact, postulates the interdependence and reciprocity between the human and nonhuman world, including plants, animals, and glaciers (Salick et al. 2012; Samuel 1993). Accordingly, glaciers are regarded as reflecting a moral order, wherein their decaying state signals a lack of proper social conduct (Gagné 2020). This belief is not unique to Ladakh and indeed has a long genealogy in Tibetan Buddhist areas (Diemberger 2013, 102–3). Hence, it is common for Ladakhis to attribute the recession of glaciers to a changing moral order, manifest in the feeling that “people have become really empty at heart,” “have become selfish,” or “have become careless.” Indeed, Ladakhis are not alone in their interpretation, and linking climate to the behavior of morally accountable humans has a long trajectory in various philosophical traditions (Hulme 2018). One of the ways to address the dissatisfaction of deities with human behavior

190

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

is by performing rituals and prayers, as villagers of Tingmosgang attempted to do during the spring of 2013, when meteorological conditions remained unfavorable. A Ch a ngi ng Agr a r i a n T i m e In the field in front of her house, Lhadol and her relatives are busy preparing the soil for sowing. The previous day, Lhadol had worked on her husband’s brother’s land. Today, the family group moved to her fields. Farming in Ladakh is a family affair that offers opportunities to celebrate, to gossip, to tease, and to reunite. It is as much about celebrating family as it is about getting work done in the field. Although hard work is clearly being accomplished, the scene has a festive feel. Increasingly today, it is also a time for reunions, as farmers rely for labor in the field on the support of visiting family members who have relocated to the city for paid work. A team of two dzos (cow-yak hybrids) plow the field. The men take turns pulling them across the field using a rope that passes through rings in their noses. At the rear, a plowman strains to maneuver the harrow while expertly directing the dzos with specific vocal commands. Plowing is also hard work for the dzos; throughout the day, they are thanked for their effort with affectionate names. Once a section of the field is completed, the women level the soil with wooden rakes before the men sow the seeds. Now the field needs water, sun, and mild temperatures to prosper. In what seems like the performance of a musical fugue in which the same melody overlaps itself continuously, people in one field begin to sing; they are followed by others in another field, and so the performance goes. It is a beautifully sonorous expression of cooperative farmwork and a striking counterpoint to the sputtering of tractor engines that could be heard in the village a few days before. Lhadol’s family has not yet resorted to the use of machinery, but an increasing number of villagers have. In the face of the shrinking agrarian workforce, some are resorting to renting tractors to plow their fields. The tractors are generally owned by entrepreneurial Ladakhis who are now pensioned from the army or the civil service and who have decided to invest in machinery they can rent to villagers. The presence of this technology, however, does not make everyone happy. As one farmer told me, “Isn’t it a shame, using tractors instead of dzos?” His remark encompasses so much of the turmoil that exudes from the villages of Ladakh today. Significantly, replacing dzos by tractors often means rejecting the constellation of religious and community arrangements embedded

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

191

in Ladakhi agrarian activities. When people who own tractors rent out their plowing services from one village to another, it is often the tractors’ availability that determines the timing of agricultural activities, rather than the traditional, astrologically based agrarian calendar. As a result, along with the increasing reliance on a labor force that lives outside the village, the trend away from a cooperative economy has altered the traditional cadence of farming and contributed to change in the agrarian timescape. Although they rely on the support of family members coming from outside, unlike other villagers, Lhadol and her relatives have been waiting for the date set by the onpo before plowing their land. But because family members coming from outside have their own work constraints, many cannot wait for a fixed date to be established before they arrange to come and help. Many see this as a lack of community solidarity and a result of “people being in a hurry for everything.” As one elderly Ladakhi woman told me, “Today, people are farming just for the sake of farming,” implying the erosion of the social values and religious arrangements once attached to agrarian work. In the evening, after a hard day of work, everybody gathered at the house of Lhadol’s sister-in-law, Dolma. Her husband, too, works outside the village. But fortunately, Dolma’s two sons were able to free themselves from their jobs in order to work the land. Chang, the locally brewed barley beer, is flowing steadily. The onset of the farming season is, after all, a reason to celebrate, although people often stress that such festivities are more modest nowadays. After some time, conversations are suddenly interrupted by Dolma’s sons announcing their departure. The melancholy Dolma feels is apparent as she watches her sons go. Plowing is over, and gone are the reminders of the life as it once was when subsistence united family members rather than keeping them at a distance. Both her sons are returning to Leh, where one is a taxi driver and the other a government-employed engineer. Their time in the village, spent tending to agrarian work, meant days of lost business for one and requests to supervisors for a leave of absence for the other. This is what farming means for many families in Ladakh today—trying to maintain a balance between work obligations, family responsibilities, and the moral obligation to farm the land. More broadly, it is also about balancing individual aspirations and moral duties. Many agrarian families in Ladakh today share the difficulties of agrarian life that Dolma and her relatives experience, older and younger generations alike. For some families, farming is the main source of subsistence and the replacement of what previously has been unpaid cooperative work among family members with paid labor is becoming a pressing issue. Others like Lhadol and Dolma must adjust with off-farm employment. But farming the land remains a

192

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

moral obligation. Many villagers express discontentment when they see people “abandoning their land” when they stop cultivating some of their plots. The way Ladakhis speak about this lack of care for the land is often framed as an ethical responsibility: the land is depicted as a mother who cares for the subsistence of her children, whose duty in turn is to reciprocate by providing care through farming. The community stigma associated with the lack of interest in one’s land is such that some villagers believe that today “people are farming just not to be looked down on by others.” But the reality is that for many farmers today, especially for those who lack the support of their immediate family, farming has become problematic; for this reason, many have stopped cultivating the lands that are in the upper part of the village, which are less productive and more labor-intensive to work (see also Yamaguchi et al. 2016). Fi x i ng t h e Cli m at e t h rough R it ua l s One day ominous clouds cover the sky. Here and there, timid rays of sun barely pierce the heavy blanket. The temperature had dropped below zero Celsius during the night, freezing all traces of moisture, including the puddles that line the path passing in front of Lhadol’s house. These meteorological conditions are obviously relatively adverse early in the farming season, but for farmers, the cold temperature and cloud cover are not so much a concern about crops freezing, because crops such as barley resist frost quite well. Rather, the concern is that the turn in the weather signals a delay of the seasonal melting of the glacier and, without a marked improvement in the weather, the seeds would lack water, thus jeopardizing the whole farming season.8 Tingmosgang is laid out along a Y shape that follows the branches of the local stream. On the west side, leading toward Tia village, the stream connects to two large glaciers, Onpo Kangri (Gangs Ri) and Shali Kangri (Gangs Ri). To the east, it is fed by two considerably smaller glaciers, Kangri Nyingpa (Gangs Ri Rnying Pa), or old glacier, and Kangri Soma (Gangs Ri So Ma), or new glacier. Water scarcity has always been an issue on the eastern side. Perhaps for this reason, Tingmosgang villagers have traditionally performed a number of practices that aim to monitor and nurture the eastern glaciers. In Tingmosgang, many elders remember how, when they were young, villagers would bring bags full of charcoal into the mountains in order to grow Kangri Soma, which stands next to the much larger Kangri Nyingpa. They would do this “when there was a fear that the glacier would go,” as one woman explained. As a young girl, this woman had enjoyed going around with other villagers collecting residual charcoal from the fireplaces of every household. Villagers would then throw the charcoal on

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

193

the glacier “to make it grow.”9 Glacier growing was a community responsibility. Everyone had to provide charcoal for Kangri Soma. Whether or not such practices were effective in growing glaciers and maintaining water supplies, it probably helped relieve a farmer’s anxiety. Important also is that it reflected a form of intimacy between the villagers and their glaciers. Villager’s responses to the difficulties posed by water supply in Tingmosgang have also long involved interactions with the deities. The water problems facing the villagers are not unusual, for being located in the shade of the mountains, the glaciers of Tingmosgang are prone to melting slowly in spring. But geography alone does not explain the enduring problems of water supply in Tingmosgang. Villagers believe that the zhidak of Tingmosgang, the guardian of its main glacier, is a stubborn deity who refuses to let villagers carry out their farming activities unless they pay the necessary tribute of skyin jug.10 The belief that water problems are the result of a zhidak’s stubbornness is a way of rationalizing that assumes an interconnection between the realms of humans and the gods, as well as an interrelation between the sacred, environmental, and human realms. In this worldview, the zhidak does not hand out favors: the deity is obstinate and requires that villagers acknowledge that interdependence through rituals. Many elders of Tingmosgang remember how in earlier days skyin jug was systematically performed as a preventive measure in order to appease the protector. But for the past two decades, such cautionary practices have gradually been abandoned. Several factors explain this. The very nature of the ritual requires mobilizing many community members (more on this point in what follows). But with rural outmigration, communities are no longer the same, for farming families now include part-time members, making it impossible to maintain traditional community responsibilities. Therefore, as with throwing charcoal on Kangri Soma, the failure of a community to mobilize contributes to the growing difficulty of organizing the ritual. The monetary aspect also is a factor. Like all Buddhist weather-making ceremonies, skyin jug is financed locally by people who want to protect their fields (see Mills, Huber, and Pedersen 1998).11 Taking a functionalist perspective on the ritual, we could link its unsuccessful revival to the displacement of agriculture as a central economic activity. Such a perspective needs to be considered with caution, for, regardless of the major economic changes the region has undergone, family farms remain the primary producers of food (Dame and Nüsser 2011, 186). Moreover, despite the availability of imported and subsidized foods, winter in Ladakh without access to farm produce does not make for a nourishing diet and can become quite costly.

194

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

In recent years, as insecurity about the water supply has increased, some villagers—among them elders and “those who don’t benefit from salaries,” as Nawang Gyaltson put it when I met him, suggesting a class divide among farming families—are seeking to revive the ritual. Most of these people are of the older generation because, in the words of the old man who is actively involved in the skyin jug project, “young people have no interest in this type of activity.” It is the same lack of interest, in his view, that has apparently led to the abandonment of the ritual over the years. “See this steep mountain,” says Nawang Gyaltson, pointing at the landform that bounds the village. “How can old folks like us climb this?” he asks. Skyin jug has to be performed on the top of this summit, from which it is possible to see the glacier. It is no doubt a challenge to ascend. In the days that follow, the weather remains rather inclement. According to the lotho (le tho; the Tibetan almanacs used to foretell weather), no rainfall was to come any time soon, so that the skyin jug as a potential fix is now being considered seriously. Even a sparse rain would at least dampen the soil until a more generous amount water was in the stream. The lack of rain does not compel farmers to stop their work in the fields, but in conversations, many continue to express concern about the weather conditions. The villagers are still unsure if skyin jug is going to be performed. Indeed, gathering information on the ritual proves difficult. Not only can no one tell whether it is going to be performed at all, but detailed knowledge of the ritual also seems scarce. Skyin jug has not been performed for a few years and villagers’ memories of the practice seem to have become hazy. If most elders are categorical about the virtues of skyin jug, younger ones mainly spoke of it as belonging to elders’ knowledge, without interrogating its relevance. As Lhadol told me, “whether it works or not, trying cannot hurt.” But it is clear to Lhadol that it is the elders’ key responsibility to organize skyin jug, for only they have knowledge about the ritual. Problems of organization and a lack of expertise in ritualistic matters are thus obstacles to the revival of skyin jug. This translates into a clear dissonance among villagers over who will perform the ritual. Many allude to the fact that only elders know about such matters, but Nawang Gyaltson and a few other elders make it clear in their conversations that at this stage the idea of reviving skyin jug only remains a proposition. Among those most interested in the ritual, nobody wants to take the initiative to do something that they feel is the responsibility of the younger folks. After all, the performance of skyin jug entails extensive physical exertion by climbing the mountain, and as it goes for many community

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

195

activities nowadays, elders would like to see a greater commitment from all members. Thus, if the performance of skyin jug requires the cooperation of villagers of all generations—elders, with their knowledge and its transmission and younger generations, with their capacity to help with the logistics of performing the ritual—the dissonance in the understanding of who has the responsibility to organize the ritual suggests prevailing tensions that infuse the ritual with emotions that ultimately exacerbate the anxiety already generated by the water stress. The lack of ritual expertise also constitutes a major obstacle. The current caretaker of the monastery of Tingmosgang, a man in his late thirties, does not have the necessary knowledge to perform the ritual. In Ladakh, as in other parts of the Himalayas, high lamas have for many years been pushing for an agenda of orthodox Buddhism and sometimes suggest that some rituals deemed heretical be abandoned (Butcher 2013b, 111–12; Pirie 2007, 106). Today, the study of philosophical approaches to Buddhism is much more accessible to aspiring monks, and ancient rituals are now seen as deviating from Buddhist orthodoxy and no longer form a central concern of religious curricula. According to Nawang Gyaltson, one monk could perhaps help overcome this impasse. “If meme (grandfather) Nyima was still here, things might be different,” he said while reflecting on how difficult it has become to organize the ritual. “Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er”: T h e Obst i nat e Prot ector The old section of the monastery of Likir, some forty kilometers away from Tingmosgang, houses elderly monks’ rooms. Like their occupants, the monks’ living quarters are well advanced in age. The staircase is in disrepair and the walls are crumbling. It is here that meme Nyima lives, having retired from his monk’s life, years spent in the role of caretaker for the monastery of Tingmosgang. In his eighties, the monk wears a threadbare maroon robe and gray stubble covers his face. Meme Nyima once occupied a central place in the lives of the Tingmosgang villagers, where for years he was in charge of conducting skyin jug. Old age has not dulled his verve and meme Nyima energetically recalls his exploits while we drink tea in the courtyard of the monastery of Likir. Because the zhidak, the glacier guardian of Tingmosgang, is reputed to be stubborn, in the past skyin jug was systematically performed in spring to ensure that there would be sufficient water for the crops. The skyin jug is a complex ritual apparatus requiring the participation of monks, musicians, children, and lay people, all of whom would climb the steep mountain at the upper part

196

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

of Tingmosgang village. The ritual, which meme Nyima describes as being intensely affectively charged, unfolded on the summit, which allows a full view of Kangri Nyingpa, the main glacier of Tingmosgang village, and which is the abode of the local zhidak. At some point, entranced worshippers appeal to the zhidak by repeatedly shouting the following incantation: Father white glacier, ju hey!12 Mother, mapam lake, ju hey! Zhidak of the village, sacred owner of the land, ju hey!

Mapam refers to Lake Manasarovar in Tibet, at the foot of Mount Kailash, the holiest peak for Tibetan Buddhists. The lyrics, which remind us that Buddhist Ladakhis see glaciers as male and lakes as female, are a form of respectful salutation to the father, the mother, and the zhidak, the guardian of the glacier. The skyin jug ritual appealing to the zhidak of Tingmosgang mimics the ritual of the same name performed during Ladakhi wedding ceremonies.13 Expressing a bride’s lament at leaving her family, skyin jug is a form of poetry normally performed almost exclusively by women (Aggarwal 2004, 133). It is performed during the elaborate leave-taking ceremony that marks a bride’s departure from her home as she leaves with the groom’s party.14 As her departure becomes imminent, the bride wails hysterically, accompanied by her friends. After a series of highly codified rituals that span a few hours, the bride performs the last part of the ceremony, during which she recites stock phrases and cries loudly. The verses of skyin jug are partly improvised by each performer. Overall, however, the chants reflect Ladakh’s predominantly patrilocal postmarital residence patterns. As a general rule, a bride performing the ritual sings about her family members and the pain of leaving her natal home. Her relatives and friends accompany her in her sobs, making for a chorus of wails that fills a house with the sounds of lament. It is said that the daughter cries out of sadness over leaving her close ones and because she wants her family to remember her, while her kin cry to implore the family-in-law to take good care of her. The skyin jug traditionally performed on the mountaintop in Tingmosgang echoes these rituals. The community takes on the role of the bride leaving her natal home and respectfully salutes her father and mother. In affirming their filiation with a glacier and a lake, the villagers are affirming their filiation with the broader natural world. Because they are sources of fresh water, life’s most fundamental resource, the glacier and the lake symbolize a father and a mother who take care of their children. Through the ritual, villagers acknowledge that they live under the patronage of the local zhidak, without whom they would be

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

197

at a loss.15 Thus, traditionally, skyin jug for the zhidak of Tingmosgang would reiterate one of the fundamental dispositions of Ladakhi society, which in the Tibetan Buddhist cultural construction of order, posits that human beings live under the patronage of glaciers and the benevolence of the deities associated with them that provide life-giving water. But, according to Nawang Gyaltson, today many villagers fail to recognize this sense of order. The disregard for the deities is seen by some, elders in particular, as rendering villagers increasingly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change today. As the old man asked during our conversation the previous day, “How can we have good weather if we don’t pay attention to the lha, the lu, and all the other deities?” It is in this context that skyin jug is a way for farmers to address water stress through the restoration of their ties with the zhidak. According to meme Nyima, the skyin jug ritual would conclude by having all the participants shout, “Kiki so so lhargyalo!” (“Victory to the mountain gods!”). While discussing skyin jug, meme Nyima extolled the virtues of the ritual, as had many farmers I talked with in Tingmosgang, insisting that water flows from the mountains within a few days of the performance and sometimes within just a few hours. “I did it myself, I swear, I truly brought water along with me from the glacier!” exclaims meme Nyima proudly. He is taking a real pleasure in reviving memories of the past, when he was a central figure in a practice that villagers believed was saving them from unfavorable harvests, thus ensuring their prosperity. Notwithstanding his ardent insistence on the ritual’s effectiveness, meme Nyima confides that skyin jug for the zhidak of Tingmosgang has not taken place for several years. The problem, he explains, is that to be effective, the ritual requires the mobilization of the whole community. “But if only old people are interested, who is there to climb to the top of the mountain?” he asks, adding, “And me, I am old.” Although it may be easy to doubt the efficacy of skyin jug, it is worth mentioning that weather-making specialists can be seen as ethnoclimatologists— that is, they have great skill at reading the sky and the stars and anticipating the weather to come. Accordingly, they decide the right date on which to perform the ritual.16 But for the family members who are only part-time dwellers of Tingmosgang and who must take a break from their current employment to help with farming, waiting for the right day to perform the ritual is not an option. The organization of skyin jug is also complicated by the fact that today, ritual specialists like meme Nyima are disappearing in the face of the orthodoxization of Buddhism. Since meme Nyima has no successor, finding an expert to conduct skyin jug proves problematic.

198

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Conclusion The skyin jug ritual was never performed. The villagers waited anxiously for days for the rain to come or for the weather to get warmer. This tension lasted until the end of May, and fortunately, the crop was not terribly compromised, although according to many, it did not make for a good year. A few days after my visit to meme Nyima, I again meet Nawang Gyaltson, one of the most knowledgeable persons on skyin jug in Tingmosgang. During our conversation, Nawang Gyaltson praises meme Nyima’s talent for entreating the zhidak: “Some years the water would flow down into the stream the same evening, by the time the monk was down from the mountain,” he explains. “But why is skyin jug not being performed this year despite the water problems?” I ask. Nawang Gyaltson’s response evokes disparate reasons that suggest that overall organizing the ritual has not been the object of concerted effort among villagers. “Some people talk about it here and there, but it seems as if it is becoming as much a headache to organize it as is the lack of water itself! In any case, where do you find someone like meme Nyima these days?” he asks. In a cynical tone, Nawang Gyaltson laments, “Young folks always expect us to do everything, but they don’t realize that doing skyin jug is also paying respect to the zhidak. With this attitude, it is not surprising that we have water problems!” he exclaims. His comment illustrates the profound malaise of a generation in the face of discontinuity in traditional social responsibility: if there was some trouble in organizing skyin jug, in Nawang Gyaltson’s view, it should be taken care of by young, able bodies—yet, as highlighted earlier, the organization of skyin jug was compromised by more than an assumed lack of will. Moreover, if, for Nawang Gyaltson, the performance of skyin jug is a form of moral recognition toward the zhidak, others in the community do not recognize this moral imperative. Rather, skyin jug was seen by some as a solution to problematic weather, devoid of its moral context. Lhadol’s comment exemplifies this when she says, “Whether it works or not, trying cannot hurt,” a perspective that is typical of what I encountered among the villagers of her generation. The uncertainty that characterizes the present and the future brought an additional layer of intent behind the desire to revive skyin jug. Although in the past, the ritual was systematically performed as a preventive measure, this time it acquired a new dimension. Its function was not limited to acknowledging a cosmological order, but for many, the ritual was a means of addressing the problem of water supply, likely attributable to climate change. The ritual was seen by many as a potential means of mediating time by putting an end to a period of cold temperatures. In this context, skyin jug was a “technological fix”

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

199

(Bear 2014) or a collective “time-tricking” device (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016), aimed at countering the effect of climate change. The experience of water stress in Tingmosgang reveals the multiple temporalities of climate change. Besides generating ideas about the manipulation of time, in contributing toward making agrarian work an increasingly difficult enterprise, climate change, together with the new economic reality of the region, has changed the horizons of time for many Ladakhis. Farmers increasingly lack confidence in the present, which has become unpredictable, and in what life will become in the future. As Nawang Gyaltson asks, “What future will come? If we have a hard time farming the land, what will it be for our grandchildren?” The anxiety about the future expressed by Nawang Gyaltson and other villagers may also be aggravated by the loss of traditional ways of being, including the careful performance of rituals, in Ladakh. The placation of deities could provide villagers with a sense of control in the face of uncertainty, as satisfied deities reciprocate villager’s attention by providing them with the conditions for prosperous farming seasons. During the spring of 2013 in Tingmosgang, it is perhaps this possibility of a sense of control over the present through ritual practices, which was most needed in the face of water stress. But instead, farmers interested in reviving skyin jug faced a series of predicaments that foregrounded the extent of the loss of traditional ways of being, with the erosion of community values and of an ethics of care for divine beings, at the very time when they are perhaps more needed than ever. The possibility for skyin jug to relieve anxiety met with several obstacles. Besides the lack of expertise in ritual matters, the failure to mobilize to perform skyin jug reveals the implications of conflicting perspectives on agrarian time for the revival of local practices as a means of responding to climate change. Traditionally, agrarian time was informed by an acknowledgment of the interdependence between the villagers and the deities. But for family members, farming today is increasingly superseded by other economic activities, so that the labor-intensive work of the farming season, such as plowing and sowing, must be accomplished quickly. As a result, the rhythm of capitalism and the rhythm of the sacred geography prove to be incommensurable temporalities. For farmers like Lhadol who are increasingly isolated in their work and who must cope with family responsibilities, taking care of the farm, including attending to the daily needs of animals, leaves precious little time to contribute toward organizing a ritual, let alone the logistics of its revival. Time is equally scarce for family members who work in urban centers and outside the village. They must struggle to balance a schedule between the need to support farming family members and meeting their own work obligations. This compromises

200

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

their capacity to organize skyin jug, to search for a ritual expert, and to participate in the ritual itself. Ultimately, the failure to revive the skyin jug ritual for the zhidak of Tingmosgang signals the erosion of the filial link that Ladakhis have long believed unites them to glaciers. Skyin jug traditionally reiterated one of the fundamental dispositions of Ladakhi society, which in the Tibetan Buddhist cultural construction of order posits that human beings live under the patronage of glaciers and the benevolence of their associated deities, which provide life-giving water. Perhaps more tellingly for a consideration of the intimacy between people and glaciers, skyin jug used to be based on “landscape kinship,” that is, the belief that the landscape of Ladakh is inhabited by a deity with whom villagers have a filial link. Kinship as a system has its own temporal dimension, which rests in the sequentiality of generational reproduction (Feuchtwang 2013, 284). The fact that the ritual had been abandoned and that its revival was unsuccessful signals the rupture of the filial bond between the villagers and the deity and suggests the erosion of ideas about the hierarchy of glaciers and human beings. This leads villagers to an impasse: as long as the deities are being ignored, their unfavorable response will continue to bring challenging weather conditions for villagers. But as the attempt to revive skyin jug during the spring of 2013 demonstrates, the disruption of the community constitutes a major obstacle to rectify their relationship with the zhidak and therefore to alleviate anxieties in the face of climate change. K a r ine Gagné is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph. She is author of Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas. Not e s 1. Some material from this chapter has been published in Karine Gagné, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). 2. To maintain the privacy of my interlocutors, I use pseudonyms throughout the chapter. I have also changed the house names, a common form of identification in Ladakh. 3. Rivers sustain only 10–15 percent of Ladakh’s agriculture farming (Shaheen et al. 2013, 240).

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

201

4. I render Ladakhi words as they are spoken in the Sham dialect, transcribed here as they would be pronounced by English speakers. At first mention of a word, I also provide the Tibetan spelling (when relevant) following the Wylie (1959) transliteration system, in parentheses (unless the two pronunciations are identical). 5. Beliefs and interpretations about local gods vary in Tibetan Buddhist areas. Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1993) defines the gzhi bdag as the “country god” (475), who is supposed to rule a particular place or province. Nebesky-Wojkowitz recorded a list of gzhi bdag, none of which he associates with glaciers per se; he nevertheless states that “most seem to be personifications of mountains.” Working in Ladakh, Pascale Dollfus (1996) translates gzhi bdag into French as “maître du lieu,” literally “master of the place,” or, when writing in English, as “owner of the land,” a formulation I often heard myself. 6. Buddhist religious life in the Himalayas embraces a broad range of beliefs and practices, including those performed by specialist practitioners that do not pertain to orthodox Buddhism, and which Stein (1972) terms “nameless religion,” and which Salick et al. (2012) name “pre-Buddhist Shamanism.” These practices are centered on the “cults of local divinities and spirits, the harmony or conflict between human and the invisible forces with which they must interact” (Kapstein 2006, 205–6). Salick et al. (2012) are providing a review of the various interpretations of climate change according to Buddhist and shamanistic beliefs. 7. This interrelatedness is rooted in the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, according to which the world is divided between sentient beings, namely all living beings who have the ability to experience and to suffer, and the nonsentient environment, or the “receptacle-world” (Kapstein 2013). 8. The regular seasonal melt of a glacier should not be confused with glacier retreat. 9. See Gagné (2016, 2019) for more information on this practice and Tveiten (2007) for similar practices in neighboring Baltistan. 10. I have never encountered any other instances in Sham of the performance of skyin jug for the same deity. It should be noted that although there is a common core to beliefs in local deities, practices and rituals are known to vary widely in Tibetan Buddhist territories. 11. This refers to the money that must be paid to the monastery that will organize the ritual. 12. “Ju hey” is a salutation, another form of the most commonly encountered “julley.” 13. Aggarwal (2004), whose work is based in the village of Achinathang in the Sham area of Ladakh, explains that skyin jug comes from the words skyin, which

202

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

means “exchange,” and jug pa, which means “to enter” (133). As suggested by a reviewer, skyin jug may rather be a combination of skyid sdug which, according to Jäschke (1881, 26) means “happiness and misery,” or “good and ill luck.” In Tibetan contexts, skyid sdug is described as mutual aid groups (Brox 2016; Gerke 2012; Miller 1956); in monastic context, skyid sdug is a form of punishment (Waddell 1895, 192); as a concept, it is used in religion instructions, as in skyid sdug lam khyer, or “turning suffering and happiness into enlightenment.” Although my interlocutors do not link the term skyin jug to any elements other than a ritual performed by a bride, the significance of skyid sdug can equally have resonance here: a marriage is a time of happiness but is also, in a patrilocal context, a difficult moment. 14. For a study of wedding ceremonies in other Tibetan areas, including Zanskar in Ladakh, see Childs (2004, 100–104), Gutschow (2004, 148–56), and Skal Bzang Nor Bu and Stuart (1996). All these authors report a phase of overt weeping during the leave-taking ceremony. 15. In Nepal, Childs (2004, 101–2) reports how mountain imagery is evoked throughout wedding ceremonies among Tibetans of Sama. As with skyin jug, the verses reported by Childs associate elements of the mountains with family relations. 16. As a weather-making ritual, the skyin jug ritual echoes diverse Buddhist weather-making ceremonies. See Klein and Sangpo (2007); Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1993, chapter 24); Mills et al. (1998).

R efer ence s Abram, Simone. 2014. “The Time It Takes: Temporalities of Planning.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (S1): 129–47. Aggarwal, Ravina. 2004. Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Banerji, Gargi, and Sejuti Basu. 2010. “Adapting to Climate Change in Himalayan Cold Deserts.” International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management 2 (4): 426–28. Barnes, Jessica, Michael Dove, Myanna Lahsen, Andrew Mathews, Pamela McElwee, Roderick McIntosh, Frances Moore, Jessica O’Reilly, Ben Orlove, Rajindra Puri, et al. 2013. “Contribution of Anthropology to the Study of Climate Change.” Nature Climate Change 3:541–44. Bastien, Edward W., dir. 1983. Tibetan Buddhism: Cycles of Interdependence. DVD. Madison: University of Wisconsin, South Asia Area Center. Bear, Laura. 2014. “For Labour: Ajeet’s Accident and the Ethics of Technological Fixes in Time.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (S1): 71–88.

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

203

———. 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brox, Trine. 2016. Tibetan Democracy: Governance, Leadership, and Conflict In Exile. New York: I. B. Tauris. Brugger, Julie, Katherine W. Dunbar, Christine Jurt, and Ben Orlove. 2012. “Climates of Anxiety: Comparing Experience of Glacier Retreat across Three Mountain Regions.” Emotion, Space and Society 6:4–13. Butcher, Andrea. 2013a. “Keeping the Faith: An Investigation into the Ways That Tibetan Buddhist Ethics and Practice Inform and Direct Development Activity in Ladakh, North-West India.” PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, Scotland. ———. 2013b. “Keeping the Faith: Divine Protection and Flood Prevention in Modern Buddhist Ladakh.” Worldviews 17 (2): 103–14. Castree, Noel, William M. Adams, John Barry, Daniel Brockington, Bram Büscher, Esteve Corbera, David Demeritt, et al. 2014. “Changing the Intellectual Climate.” Nature Climate Change 4:763–68. https://doi.org/10.1038 /nclimate2339. Childs, Geoff. 2004. Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clouse, Carey. 2014. “Learning from Artificial Glaciers in the Himalaya: Design for Climate Change through Low-Tech Infrastructural Devices.” Journal of Landscape Architecture 9 (3): 6–19. Coggins, Christopher, and Emily T. Yeh. 2014. Introduction to Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, edited by Emily T. Yeh and Christopher Coggins, 3–18. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, eds. 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crate, Susan A., and Mark Nuttall, eds. 2009. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Dame, Juliane, and Marcus Nüsser. 2011. “Food Security in High Mountain Regions: Agricultural Production and the Impact of Food Subsidies in Ladakh, Northern India.” Food Security 3 (2): 179–94. Dawa, Sonam. 1999. “Economic Development of Ladakh: Need for a New Strategy.” In Ladakh: Culture, History, and Development between Himalaya and Karakoram, edited by Martijn van Beek, Kristoffer Brix Bertelsen, and Poul Pedersen, 369–78. Århus, Denmark: Århus University Press. Diemberger, Hildegard. 2013. “Deciding the Future in the Land of Snow: Tibet as an Arena for Conflicting Forms of Knowledge and Policy.” In The Social Life of Climate Change Models, edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Martin Skrydstrup, 100–127. New York: Routledge.

204

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Dinnerstein, Noé. 2013a. “Ladakhi Traditional Songs: A Cultural, Musical, and Literary Study.” PhD diss., City University of New York. ———. 2013b. “Songs, Cultural Representation and Hybridity in Ladakh.” Himalaya 32 (1): 73–84. Dollfus, Pascale. 1996. “Maîtres du sol et dieux du territoire au Ladakh.” Études rurales, nos. 143–44, 27–44. ———. 1997. “Mountain Deities among the Nomadic Community of Khamak (Eastern Ladakh).” In Ladakh: Culture, History, and Development between Himalaya and Karakoram, edited by M. van Beek, K. B. Bertelsen, and P. Pedersen, 92–118. Recent Research on Ladakh 8, 8th Colloquium of the International Association for Ladakh Studies, Moesgaard. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. ———. 2003. “De quelques histoires de klu et de btsan.” In “Lha srin sde brgyad.” Special issue, Revue d’études tibétaines 2:5–39. ———. 2008. “Calcul pour l’ouverture de la bouche de la terre.” In Modern Ladakh: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuity and Change, edited by Fernanda Pirie and Martijn Van Beek, 119–37. Leiden, Neth.: Brill Academic. Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2013. “What Is Kinship?” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 281–84. Gagné, Karine. 2016. “Cultivating Ice over Time: On the Idea of Timeless Knowledge and Places in the Himalayas.” Anthropologica 58 (2): 193–210. ———. 2019. Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2020. “The Materiality of Ethics: Perspectives on Water and Reciprocity in a Himalayan Anthropocene.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 7 (4): 1–18. Gagné, Karine, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, and Benjamin Orlove. 2014. “Glaciers and Society: Attributions, Perceptions, and Valuations.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5 (6): 793–808. Gell, Alfred. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford, UK: Berg. Gerke, Barbara. 2012. Long Lives and Untimely Deaths. Leiden, Neth.: Brill Academic. Greenhouse, Carol J. 1996. A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gutschow, Kim. 2004. Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

205

Huber, Toni, and Poul Pedersen. 1997. “Meteorological Knowledge and Environmental Ideas in Traditional and Modern Societies: The Case of Tibet.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3 (3): 577–98. Hulme, Mike. 2018. “‘We Always Get the Climate We Deserve’: The Tenacious Grip of Moral Accountability.” Gnosis 3:49–55. Jäschke, Heinrich August. 1881. A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Special References to the Prevailing Dialects. London: Secretary of State for India in Council. Jenkins, Willis, Evan Berry, and Luke Beck Kreider. 2018. “Religion and Climate Change.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43:85–108. Kamp, Ulrich, Martin Byrne, and Tobias Bolch. 2011. “Glacier Fluctuations between 1975 and 2008 in the Greater Himalaya Range of Zanskar, Southern Ladakh.” Journal of Mountain Science 8:374–89. Kapstein, Matthew T. 2006. The Tibetans. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ———. 2013. Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, Anne C., and Khetsun Sangpo. 2007. “Hail Protection.” In Religion of Tibet in Practice, abridged ed., edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., 400–409. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Knight, Daniel M., and Charles Stewart. 2016. “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe.” History and Anthropology 27 (1): 1–18. Mathur, Nayanika. 2014. “The Reign of Terror of the Big Cat: Bureaucracy and the Mediation of Social Times in the Indian Himalaya.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (S1): 148–65. Miller, Beatrice D. 1956. “Ganye and Kidu: Two Formalized Systems of Mutual Aid among the Tibetans.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 12 (2): 157–70. Mills, Martin A. 2003. Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism. London: Routledge. Mills, Martin A., Toni Huber, and Poul Pedersen. 1998. “Ecological Knowledge in Tibet.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (4): 783–86. Mingle, Jonathan. 2015. Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World. New York: St. Martin’s. Moroşanu, Roxana, and Felix Ringel. 2016. “Time-Tricking: A General Introduction.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 34 (1): 17–21. Moseley, Robert K. 2006. “Historical Landscape Change in North-Western Yunnan, China.” Mountain Research and Development 26 (3): 214–19. Munn, Nancy D. 1992. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21:93–123. Nebesky-Wojkowitz, René de. 1993. Oracles and Demons of Tibet: The Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective Deities. Delhi, India: Book Faith.

206

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Norbu, Thubten Jigme, and Heinrich Harrer. 1986. Tibet Is My Country: Autobiography of Thubten Jigme Norbu, Brother of the Dalai Lama, as Told to Heinrich Harrer. London: Wisdom. Orlove, Ben. 2009. “The Past, the Present and Some Possible Futures of Adaptation.” In Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, edited by W. Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni, and Karen L. O’Brien, 131–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pandey, Arvind. C., Swagata Gosh, and M. S. Nathawat. 2011. “Evaluating Patterns of Temporal Glacier Changes in Greater Himalayan Range, Jammu and Kashmir, India.” Geocarto International 26 (4): 321–38. Pirie, Fernanda. 2007. Peace and Conflict in Ladakh: The Construction of a Fragile Web of Order. Leiden, Neth.: Brill. Rabgias, Tashi, ed. 1970–2003. Ladvags gyi yul glu [Ladakhi folk songs]. Leh, India: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages. Riaboff, Isabelle. 1996. “gZhon Nu Mdung Laf, Mountain God of Zanskar: A Regional Scale Divinity and Its Cult’s Territorial Ordering.” In Reflections of the Mountain: Essays on the History and Social Meaning of the Mountain Cult in Tibet and the Himalaya, edited by Anne-Marie Blondeau and Ernst Steinkellner, 23–37. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ribbach, Samuel. 1986. Culture and Society in Ladakh. Translated by John Bray. Delhi, India: Ess Ess. Salick, Jan, Anja Byg, and Kenneth Bauer. 2012. “Contemporary Tibetan Cosmology of Climate Change.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6 (4): 447–76. Samuel, Geoffrey. 1993. Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Schmidt, Susanne, and Marcus Nüsser. 2012. “Changes of High Altitude Glaciers from 1969 to 2010 in the Trans-Himalayan Kang Yatze Massif, Ladakh, Northwest India.” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 44 (4): 107–21. ———. 2017. “Changes of High Altitude Glaciers in the Trans-Himalaya of Ladakh over the Past Five Decades (1969–2016).” Geosciences 7 (2): 1–15. Shaheen, F. A., M. H. Wani, S. A. Wani, and Chewang Norphel. 2013. “Climate Change Impact in Cold Arid Desert of North-Western Himalaya: Community Based Adaptations and Mitigations.” In Knowledge Systems of Societies for Adaptation and Mitigation of Impacts of Climate Change, edited by Sunil Nautiyal, K. S. Rao, Harald Kaechele, K. V. Raju, and Ruediger Schaldach, 239–56. Berlin: Springer. Sherpa, Pasang Yangjee. 2014. “Climate Change, Perceptions, and Social Heterogeneity in Pharak, Mount Everest Region of Nepal.” Human Organization 73(2): 153–61.

T h e Va n ish i ng of Fat h er W h it e Gl aci er

207

Skal Bzang Nor Bu, and Kevin Stuart. 1996. “The Rdo Sbis Tibetan Wedding Ceremonies.” Anthropos 91 (4–6): 441–55. Snellgrove, David L. 1967. The Nine Ways of Bon: Excerpts from gZi brjid. London: Oxford University Press. Stein, Rolf Alfred. 1972. Tibetan Civilization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tucci, Giuseppe. 1966. Tibetan Folk Songs from Gyantse and Western Tibet. Asconae, Switz.: Artibus Asiae. Tundup, Angmo, and Leo Philipp Heiniger. 2009. Impacts of Climate Change on Local Livelihoods in the Cold Deserts of the Western Indian Himalayan Region of Ladakh and Lahaul and Spiti. New Delhi, India: Groupe Energies Renouvelables, Environnement et Solidarités. Tveiten, Ingvar Nørstegard. 2007. Glacier Growing: A Local Response to Water Scarcity in Baltistan and Gilgit, Pakistan. Oslo, Norway: Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Science. Waddell, Laurence Austine. 1895. The Buddhism of Tibet. London: W. H. Allen. Wangchok, Sonam. 2009. “Sacred Landscapes in the Nubra Valley.” In Mountains, Monasteries and Mosques: Recent Research on Ladakh and the Western Himalaya, edited by John Bray and Elena de Rossi Filibeck, 271–83. Rome: Fabrizio Serra. Wylie, Turrell. 1959. “A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 22:261–67. Yamaguchi, Takayoshi, Sonam Ngodup, Mitsuhiro Nose, and Shinya Takeda. 2016. “Community-Scale Analysis of the Farmland Abandonment Occurrence Process in the Mountain Region of Ladakh, India.” Journal of Land Use Science 11 (4): 401–16. Yeh, Emily T. 2014. “Reverse Environmentalism: Contemporary Articulations of Tibetan Buddhism, Culture, and Environmental Protection.” In Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China, edited by Peter Miller, Dan Smyer Yu, and Peter Van der Veer, 194–219. New York: Routledge.

eight

k

LOSS AND RECOVERY IN THE HIMAL AYAS Climate-Change Anxieties and the Case of Large Cardamom in North Sikkim

Mabel Denzin Gergan, Vander bilt University

It h as now been mor e than a decade since large cardamom (amomum subulatum, known colloquially as elaichi), Sikkim’s prized cash crop, was struck by a devastating soil-borne fungal blight.1 Large cardamom is not the first crop species in Sikkim to be threatened by climate change, but it is indisputably the one with the most economic value.2 Before the blight, most households in Dzongu, a reserve of the Indigenous Lepcha tribe in North Sikkim, derived a major part of their livelihood from large cardamom. The blight, which turns the dark green cardamom leaves into a melancholy yellowish-brown color, coupled with local viral diseases and climatic shifts like unseasonal winter droughts and more frequent hailstorms, left more than half of Sikkim’s cardamom plantations with drastically reduced productivity (Sharma et al. 2016). Because the blight interacts with a whole host of bio-geographic and ecological conditions, regional scientists have been unable to determine whether climate change merely acted as an intensifier or was the primary catalyst for the dormant fungal spores in the soil.3 Although the blight is the most visible evidence of this tragedy, other factors exacerbating the loss of large cardamom, such as pests and other diseases (Priyadarshani 2014) and increasing crop predation by Himalayan black bears and wild boars4 (Jamwal 2018), have also been linked to climate change. Tsering, a twenty-eight-year-old cardamom farmer who resides in Dzongu, explained how he understood the crop’s decline: “People say maybe we used too much fertilizer and reduced the productivity [of large cardamom]. Others say that it doesn’t rain on time anymore, like it used to earlier. Then some say we mixed our crops with other species from Bhutan and Nepal, and those

208

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

209

other species brought the diseases. Then many people say we didn’t work hard, we got lazy because of all the money, and that’s why it died. But no one knows for sure what is the main reason.” The scientific uncertainty and multiplicity of threats—a characteristic feature of climate change (Brown and Damery 2009)—also pervade Tsering’s account of the loss, which brings with it a litany of anxieties, implicating the weather, fertilizers, suspect species of cardamom from Bhutan and Nepal, other cardamom cultivators, and possibly even himself. The use of anxieties here, while understood as catalyzed by climate change, refers also to a response to the collapse of a broad set of relationships. In the wake of declining cardamom productivity, Tsering and others like him find themselves unmoored from a landscape whose ebbs and flows were once familiar, and the resultant uncertainty can perhaps be understood only as a multiplicity, escaping any clean single diagnosis. The chapter contributes an understanding of how Indigenous minorities’ religious and cultural responses to heightened precarity generated by climate change cannot be disentangled from colonial and postcolonial histories of intervention that have disrupted their relationship with the environment, other ethnic groups, and their selves. I use the decline of cardamom as an entry point to understand a larger set of ecological and cultural transformations across time and space, operating at multiple scales, that have made this region and its people especially susceptible to threats from climate change. I approach Indigenous responses to climate change by centering Lepcha cardamom cultivators’ narratives of loss and recovery—that is, their explanations for the declining cash crop and how they recover their livelihoods and sense of self in the aftermath of the cardamom crisis. Climate change has been described as a “wicked problem,” as our understandings of this phenomenon is plagued with paralyzing uncertainties that leave a lot of room for speculation in both scientific and public domains (Brown and Damery 2009). I demonstrate how in the absence of clear causal links, Lepcha narratives of loss and recovery become a maelstrom, dragging in political and religious histories of their marginalization, religious and ethnic tensions, cosmological anxieties, and intergenerational tensions. Recent threats from climate change therefore interact within a tightly bound set of relationships that are already strained from historical and ongoing sociopolitical and cosmological uncertainties. My primary focus is on Lepcha cardamom cultivators, but I also demonstrate how global and national climate-change anxieties have disrupted the livelihoods and religious lifeworlds of forest-dependent Indigenous tribes and other marginalized groups. More broadly, I seek to dispel the newness of the crisis implicit in climate-change discourse (Whyte 2018) by placing the responses of Indigenous

210

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

minorities to climate change in their historical and structural conditions of exclusion and vulnerability. The chapter is structured as follows: I begin by demonstrating how colonial and postcolonial ecological interventions in the Himalayas viewed local communities and their livelihood practices as obstacles to the efficient and profitable organization of ecological resources. I argue that heightened vulnerability to climate change in the Himalayas is a product of this legacy, and state-led climate mitigation programs and technological fixes reproduce colonial tendencies that place the blame and burden of fixing environmental crisis on the most vulnerable populations. I then build on literature that demonstrates how religious and cosmological anxieties of Indigenous and minority groups stem from an alienation from their environments—a product of state-led conservation, neoliberal logics, and unpredictable climatic shifts. Next, I provide a brief religious-political context for Sikkim and Dzongu to historicize the pervasive sense of loss and the reproach of self and others present in Lepcha cardamom cultivators’ narratives. I contextualize how colonial legacies of racialized ethnic hierarchies inform this relationship with self and others and Lepcha narratives of loss and recovery. The two ethnographic sections that follow draw on interviews with cardamom cultivators, panchayat members, and Lepcha shamans within Dzongu whose narratives reflect the spiritual and cultural anxieties of an Indigenous minority struggling to cope with growing ecological and economic stress. Weaving between the past and the present, these narratives demonstrate the continuity between older histories of colonial and postcolonial interventions and the more recent threats from climate change. I then close with a discussion of how religious and cultural responses of Indigenous minorities faced with heightened ecological and economic precarity often uncritically reproduce troubling colonial and state neoliberal logics that place the blame and burden of fixing ecological crisis on the most marginalized groups and point to the flexibility within Indigenous lifeworlds as a possibility for building a collaborative future. This chapter builds on more extensive research on hydropower development and Indigenous youth activism in Sikkim, a former Buddhist kingdom bordering Nepal, China, and Bhutan that was annexed to India in 1975. Even as the cardamom crisis was slowly unfolding in Dzongu, a more dramatic crisis was planned and underway. The Indian Power Ministry’s new hydropower initiative—part of a national climate-change mitigation strategy—envisioned the Indian Himalayan region, a climate-change hotspot, as the country’s new powerhouse with nearly three hundred proposed projects across major Himalayan rivers and their tributaries. In Sikkim, if all its share of twenty-nine proposed

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

211

projects are constructed, it will become the Himalayan state with the highest density of dams (Pandit 2017). Since 2007, Dzongu has been the site of a wellknown antidam movement led by the younger, more educated generation who eventually stopped four of seven proposed projects planned with the Dzongu reserve. The movement fractured relationships, however, between the young activists and the elders and cardamom farmers who saw an opportunity to liquidate their blight-ridden, unproductive cardamom fields by selling them to hydropower developers (McDuie-Ra 2011). I discuss these intergenerational tensions in more detail elsewhere (Gergan 2014) but toward the end, I briefly touch on how generational differences due to education and out-migration are shifting relationships with the landscape and responses to climate-change threats. Then, in 2011, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake, whose epicenter was in Dzongu and close to a dam under construction, dramatically shifted public opinion within both the reserve and Sikkim. The conversations herein take place within the context of these dramatic ecological transformations. Through a focus on the cardamom crisis—a slow-moving but drastic economic loss— I illustrate how the violence wrought by climate change had been decades in the making. The arguments I make in this chapter are drawn from fifteen months of fieldwork in Sikkim between 2011 and 2014, when I divided my time between Sikkim’s capital Gangtok and the Dzongu reserve in North Sikkim; all interviews quoted here were conducted in Dzongu. I am a native speaker of Hindi and Nepali, and most of the interviews were conducted in Nepali. A few interviews with Lepcha elders were conducted in Lepcha and translated with the help of a native speaker. Cu lt i vat i ng Product i v e L a n dsca pe s a n d Cit iz ens For the British, India’s eastern frontier was its “Mongolian fringe,” distinct from the “people of India proper” because of its difficult mountainous terrain and its ethnolinguistic and cultural affinity to neighboring Tibet, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Nepal (Baruah 2013). Colonial ecological and territorial interventions in the eastern Himalayas were therefore also attempts at enrolling frontier citizens and landscapes in projects of legibility, projects that allowed central authorities to more effectively surveil them (Scott 1998). The British viewed local livelihood practices like swidden agriculture and integrated agricultural systems as unprofitable (Besky 2013; Scott 2009) and slowly replaced them with more profitable ventures such as timber and monoculture cash-crop plantations such as tea and large cardamom (Sharma et al. 2000; Harris et al. 2016). Writing in the North American context, Potawatomi scholar-activist

212

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Kyle Whyte (2017) has argued that climate change needs to be understood as “intensified colonialism,” because “colonially-induced environmental changes altered the ecological conditions that supported Indigenous peoples’ cultures, health, economies, and political self-determination” (154). This colonial legacy continues in the postcolonial Himalayan context, where monoculture plantations—the Indian state’s inheritance—although vital to the region’s economy, have drastically reduced soil fertility, and tea plantations in particular have been linked to hillslope destabilization and landslides in the region (Besky 2013; Drew and Rai 2016). This colonial logic carried over into conservation and forestry policies in the eastern Himalayas, which were also heavily influenced by the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation, popularized by Erik Eckholm (1976) in the 1970s. Emerging from the Nepal Himalayas, the theory identified overpopulation and people’s overextraction of forest resources on steep areas as the primary cause of environmental degradation. Within academic circles, the theory came under intense scrutiny for its colonial Malthusian overtones and oversimplification of complex ecological problems (Ives 1987; Forsyth 1996), but on the ground, it shaped decades of conservation policies across the Himalayas that scapegoated local communities. In India, elements of the theory were enshrined in three important acts—the Wildlife Protection Act (1972), the Forest Conservation Act (1986), and the Environment Protection Act (1980). Coupled with global climate-change goals, these acts led to the creation of national parks and biodiversity and conservation zones (Ascher 1995; Fairhead and Leach 2003)—often referred to as fortress conservation. Although well intentioned, the acts resulted in the expulsion of Indigenous and nomadic groups from forest areas. Forest-dense states like Sikkim have also had to bear the burden of assuaging national climate-change anxieties through international programs like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, which led to the creation of carbon sinks and exclusive conservation zones, further disrupting human-forest interdependencies. At present, hydropower infrastructure—also part of a national green initiative—is having a detrimental impact on Himalayan ecosystems and biodiversity, making the region even more susceptible to climatic variations and disasters (Kohli 2011). Climatic unpredictability in the Himalayas, home to many of India’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities, is inducing vulnerabilities in environments that have been at the receiving end of state-led interventions that have severely weakened the resilience of forest-dependent livelihoods and cultural practices. The view of local communities as obstacles to the efficient and rational organization of environmental resources is still pervasive within Indian

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

213

conservation circles (Ives and Messerli 1990; Agrawal and Gibson 1999). Today, however, this antagonistic view coexists with efforts to involve local communities as stakeholders in conservation and resource management programs (Agrawal and Gibson 1999), aiming to empower them through their involvement in decision making. But, as scholars have noted, such projects enroll rural citizens in forms of neoliberal governmentality (Agrawal 2005), producing self-disciplining subjects fueled by their “will to improve” (Li 2007). In mountainous environments where cultivable land is scarce to begin with, the hardening of boundaries between forest and farm in conservation initiatives, coupled with the neoliberal logic of improvement and competition, is also fueling tensions between ethnic groups. Writing in the context of northern Thailand, Forsyth and Walker (2008) noted that the ethnic stereotyping of upland ethnic minorities, such as the Hmong and Karen as “forest destroyers” and that of the lowland majority Thai as “forest guardians,” was the product of conservation narratives rooted in historic power-knowledge asymmetries between these groups. Ecological precarity induced by climate change coupled with neoliberal governmentality deepens existing ethnic and social rifts, with communities viewing each other as competitors for scarce resources. Copi ng w it h Ecol ogica l a n d Cu lt u r a l L oss At present, capitalist expansion plans are transforming frontier regions in South Asia, already (mis)shaped by colonial and postcolonial regimes of ecological governance that effectively erased “pre-existing environments” (Dove 2011). As we approach the end of cheap nature (Moore 2015) and perhaps the Holocene, Tsing argues that we are also facing the end of a long period of refugia, the end of “places of refuge that . . . sustain re-worlding in rich cultural and biological diversity” (Tsing 2015, quoted in Haraway 2015, 160). Perhaps in response to this, Tolia-Kelly (2016, 789) pushes us to expand our notion of loss in the Anthropocene, arguing that affective accounts of loss often privilege ecological loss over cultural loss, drawing attention to the epistemic violence resulting from an imperialist lens that “cannot tolerate (bio)diverse sensibilities, societies, and cultures.” Across the Himalayas, important harvest rituals tied to shifting agricultural practices gradually disappeared as their landscapes were diverted to monoculture plantations. Even as the ecological resilience of these spaces is slowly being chipped away, integrated livelihoods, cultural ways of being, and collaborative relationships with human and nonhuman others are also under threat. Furthermore, as patterns of education and out-migration are pushing Indigenous youth away from their homes, there is growing anxiety

214

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

about how ecological and cultural knowledge systems will be passed on to the next generation. In the Indian Himalayas, the lack of educational and employment infrastructure is pushing Indigenous youth to leave hill and mountain states in search of better opportunities in nearby towns and plains (Brown, Scrase, and Ganguly-Scrase 2017; Karlsson and Kikon 2017). In the settler colonial context, Whyte (2018) argues that most Indigenous tribes are now living their ancestors’ dystopia, implying that the ecological crisis is not impending for most marginalized populations but is an already unfolding process. Indigenous scholars and allies5 are therefore critical of notions of newness implicit in narratives of ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. Therefore, even as we lament the loss of diverse ecosystems, we must also be attuned to the extrahuman and cosmological worlds that are tightly bound up with these landscapes and biotas. In the Peruvian Andes, Paerregaard (2013) demonstrates how ritual offerings to glaciers were understood as a symbolic gift in exchange for allowing humans to extract and exploit natural resources. Unpredictable climatic shifts coupled with state intervention have disrupted contractual agreements with extrahuman forces, however, and the result has been broken cosmologies, forcing Andean people to reinterpret their relationship with the landscape and the state. Shifting our focus beyond overt political responses to people’s religious and spiritual responses to climate change can illuminate important networks of responsibility and relationality with nonhuman and extrahuman worlds that are under threat of erasure (Tolia-Kelly 2016; Blaser 2014). Writing in the context of the gold rush in Mongolia, High (2013) examines people’s reports of immense wealth being coupled with rumors of dangerous spirit beings that raised “profound doubts about how humans and spirits can co-exist when human desires threaten to disrupt the fragile cosmological balance” (61). In post-Soviet Mongolia, Pedersen (2011) describes the emergence of “half-shamans,” young unemployed men whose unpredictable bouts of violence and drunkenness “seem occult in their excess,” and argues that these half-shamans embody the chaotic nature of the free market and neoliberal reform in the wake of postsocialist economic transformations. Although such accounts don’t explicitly refer to climate change, they illustrate how drastic ecological and economic shifts interact with complex political histories, cosmological worlds, and neoliberal state expansion. For religious and ethnic minorities in the eastern Himalayas, as their livelihoods and territories are threatened by climate change, so are their spiritual and cultural practices. Religions like Buddhism and Hinduism in the Indian context have coexisted with Indigenous religions but often subsumed their territorial deities and ritual practices (Shneiderman 2013; Gergan 2017). For

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

215

instance, throughout the Himalayas one finds mythological accounts of Guru Padmasambhava, the eighth-century Buddhist master, subjugating local deities and entities, and most scholars agree that this alludes to the conversion of native populations to Tibetan Buddhism (Balikci-Denjongpa 2008). Indigenous minorities therefore have to navigate deep-seated anxieties about loss of authenticity and self, a collective symptom of the disorienting nature of the postcolonial condition (Nandy 1989a, 1989b) that leaves the colonized with “someone else’s present as their future” (264). For Indigenous minorities like the Lepchas, the vulnerability produced by climate change is always entangled with narratives of loss and erasure (Gergan 2017). But often such narratives reinforce notions of ethnic purity and the exclusion of non-Indigenous marginalized groups (Li 2000). As Tsing (2015) notes, “We are contaminated by our encounters. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option” (27). Therefore, as we turn a critical eye to how intensified colonialism marginalizes Indigenous minorities and their specific histories, we must be mindful not to reiterate exclusionary narratives of purity (Shotwell 2016). In the section that follows, I historicize the pervasive sense of religious and cultural loss and ethnic tensions present in Lepcha cardamom cultivators’ narratives. Polit ica l a n d R e ligious H istor i e s of L oss a n d Er a su r e The twelfth Chogyal (Monarch) Palden Thondup Namgyal to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, April 9, 1975 (Datta-Ray 1984, 24): “I have no words when [the] Indian army was sent today in a surprise attack on Sikkim Guards who are less than 300 strong and were trained, equipped and officered by [the] Indian army who looked upon each other as comrades. . . . This is a most treacherous and black day in the history of democratic India in solving the survival of our little country by use of arms.” This quote briefly and dramatically encapsulates how the kingdom of Sikkim was annexed to India in 1975. Although not part of British India, Sikkim was a protectorate of the East India Company and would later become a protectorate of India, after its independence in 1947. The stage for this surprise attack and Sikkim’s annexation had been set decades earlier through British and Indian interventions that resulted in a deeply fractured Sikkimese polity. In the 1850s, the British encouraged the settlement of people from Nepal in Sikkim,6 which served both a geopolitical and an economic function. In addition to providing a crucial labor force, the pro–British India Nepalis resolved British anxieties about the pro-Tibetan Sikkimese population (Hiltz 2003). Nepalis, however, were forbidden to purchase land belonging to the Indigenous Bhutia-Lepchas,

216

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

many of whom belonged to the feudal class and were kazis (landlords) who exercised considerable control in regional and local affairs (Chakrabarti 2012). Although intended to protect Indigenous rights to land, the policy left a large landless population of Nepalis who were exploited by both the British and the Namgyal dynasty despite the invaluable labor they performed (Chakrabarti 2012). Decades later, the Indian state would exploit these divisions by splitting the electorate into a single Bhutia7-Lepcha constituency and a separate Nepali constituency. The predominantly Hindu Nepali constituency would later vote in favor of abolishing the Buddhist monarchy in a referendum orchestrated by the Indian military (Datta-Ray 1984). British and Indian interventions in Sikkim, indistinguishable in their colonizing intent, then laid the ground for perennial divisions among the Indigenous Bhutia-Lepcha and Nepali groups. Even as colonial plantations made the region’s ecology more susceptible to present-day climate-change effects (Besky 2013), Indian state conservation and forestry policies replicated colonial logic by hardening boundaries between farm and forest, influencing not just people’s mobility but also their freedom to grow and procure their own food. For instance, the implementation of the 1972 Wildlife Protection Act and the 1980 Sikkim Forest Conservation Act made hunting illegal, a consequence of which was that Lepcha hunting practices in Dzongu and rituals associated with Pong Rum, the hunting deity, saw a rapid decline (Little 2007). Climate change (not just in the Himalayas) should therefore be analyzed as a multifaceted and multiscalar process operating across time and space; and the more recent threat presented by climatic unpredictability is only the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Regional Lepcha scholars go beyond colonial history to the advent of the Namgyal dynasty in 1642 that brought with it Tibetan Buddhism as the starting point of their tribe’s marginalization (Foning 1987; Tamsang 1998). According to them, the Namgyal dynasty systematically discouraged the language and religious practices of Lepchas, who were left with no option but to adopt Buddhism. Because historical records are sparse, it is difficult to support these claims, but Foning and Tamsang point to the declining influence of Lepcha shamanism and the Lepcha language as a direct consequence of the tribe’s historical suppression. Indigenous minorities are therefore left with fractured histories tempered with popular mythology that evoke a diffuse sense of injustice and resentment toward dominant state powers and other ethnic groups. Furthermore, although many Lepcha families belonged to the feudal elite during the Namgyal dynasty, Lepchas in Dzongu were at the bottom of the hierarchy and even today Dzongu residents lag behind their urban counterparts in development indicators. Lepcha cardamom cultivators’ narratives cannot be

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

217

cleanly extracted from older histories of loss and erasure and are best understood as the most recent iteration of their long history of political and religious marginalization. Any attempt to grapple with religion in the context of climate change in the Himalayas must also contend with these histories—fractured or otherwise, real and mythological—and how minority groups understand their place within them. In the following ethnographic section, I detail how these religious and political histories get entangled with colonial tropes and ritual anxieties in the aftermath of the loss of cardamom in the Indigenous Lepcha reserve of Dzongu. R it ua l A n x i et i e s a n d Col on i a l T rope s According to Samdup, a sixty-eight-year-old village bongthing: People say we made mistakes during our rituals to the elaichi deities. When we make rituals offerings, we have to explain what those offerings are for. The Nepali laborers also had their own shamans and when we couldn’t find Lepcha shamans we would just use theirs. But we made the offerings in Nepali and these are Lepcha deities. They don’t understand Nepali, so maybe there was a “communication problem.” (laughs) So the bears came, the mice came, the insects came. They were possessed by the Lepcha deities and destroyed the crops.

With the exception of a few recent converts to Christianity, most Lepchas in Dzongu practice a syncretic blend of Tibetan Buddhism and Indigenous shamanism in which the worship of Mount Kanchenjunga is a central practice. Today only a handful of Lepcha ritual specialists like Samdup, referred to as bongthings and muns, are left in Dzongu. As we sat down to talk in his house in Dzongu’s Hye-Gyathang village, Samdup explained why he believed the crop was failing. His frequent use of maybe and perhaps indicates the speculative nature of his claims, a reflection of the larger scientific uncertainty about the crop’s failure; his concerns about the use of Nepali, however, are drawn from precirculating narratives of vanishing Lepcha culture (Foning 1987; Bentley 2007). In Dzongu the declining influence of shamanic rituals was largely understood to be a reflection of the growing influence of Tibetan Buddhism (Bentley 2007). I had previously encountered this reference to Lepcha deities’ inability to understand Tibetan, the language of Buddhist rituals, and therefore, Samdup’s reference to the “communication problem” involved with using Nepali shamans caught my attention. The inability to communicate with Lepcha deities, who are either unresponsive or vindictive, signals real anxieties for

218

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

minority groups who, along with climatic and ecological disruptions, are also losing their language and cultural traditions and therefore view other ethnic groups and their religious practices as threats. Because of its protected status, Dzongu occupies an important place in Lepcha spiritual discourse and is seen as a repository for “pure” Lepcha culture, a notion that gained further traction during the antidam protests in 2007. Revered as Nye Mayal Lyang—the sacred motherland—Dzongu is where Lepchas, the Mutanchi Rongkup, translating loosely as “beloved children of the creator goddess, Itbu-Debu-Rum,” are said have originated. Reserves earmarked for specific tribes are rare in India and it is believed that even before the Namgyal dynasty, Dzongu was inhabited exclusively by Lepchas. A royal proclamation in 1956 by the Chogyal gave it official protected status and forbade the settlement of outsiders, including even other Lepchas from Sikkim. After annexation, the status was upheld under article 371(f) of the Indian constitution, which protects the old laws of Sikkim. By the late nineteenth century, as the British encouraged settlement of Nepalis in Sikkim, many reserve residents began employing Nepali sharecroppers to work in their cardamom fields, providing them temporary residence within the reserve (Bentley 2007). With the demographics in Sikkim skewed in favor of the Nepalis and the Nepali language slowly becoming Sikkim’s lingua franca, the anxieties of the Indigenous Bhutia and Lepcha feudal class reverberated even within Dzongu. As the cardamom crop started failing, these anxieties resurfaced but were ironically linked to Nepali sharecroppers leaving Dzongu: “The Nepali laborers stayed here (Dzongu) for around twenty years. They would take care of the elaichi and they became very rich. Then they took all the money back with them to Nepal and built huge homes for themselves. And when it started dying, they left and went back to their homes in Nepal. They are living comfortable lives there with the money they earned here” (Thendup, thirty-four years old, cardamom cultivator). In this interview, Thendup juxtaposed tropes of the shrewd Nepali with those of the naive Lepcha to explain how Nepali sharecroppers made huge profits by taking undue advantage of them. Thendup’s claims regarding the exploitation of Lepcha cardamom farmers are not exaggerated, but Nepali sharecroppers had little, if anything, to do with it. The real culprits were the third component of the cardamom trade, the Indian merchants who started settling in North Sikkim as early as 1895 and who were notorious for taking advantage of cardamom farmers from Dzongu, who knew little about prevailing market rates (Balikci-Denjongpa 2008; Bentley 2007).8 These problematic tropes, though reflecting real material grievances of Dzongu Lepchas (Yeh 2007), are in fact drawn from an orientalist colonial categorization of Himalayan ethnic groups,

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

219

where each was assigned specific racialized and essential qualities (Cohn 1996; Kennedy 1991). Nepalis appear in early colonial accounts as hardworking and industrious yet aggressive and warlike (Kennedy 1991). The British saw these traits as admirable, but in effect they were an antithesis to the amiability and deference of the Lepchas (Hooker 1854, quoted in Kennedy 1991). These characterizations might appear harmless, but they have a pernicious effect when internalized by either community. An early ethnography of Lingthem, a village in Dzongu, noted that Nepali sharecroppers introduced “alien ceremonies” such as the “Nepali ban on menstruating women” entering the fields (Gorer 1938), a belief drawn from Hindu notions of purity and pollution. British missionaries and ethnographers were much more sympathetic to the Lepchas and feared that Nepalis would exploit and take advantage of them (Kennedy 1991)—never mind that it was a British policy to encourage Nepali settlement in Sikkim. Indigenous religious responses to climate change in the postcolonial context are deeply entangled in these colonial legacies of racialized ethnic hierarchies (Forsyth and Walker 2008) that are reproduced even today by scholars, state officials, and even Indigenous groups themselves (Po’dar and Subba 1991). From ethnographic records, however, it is clear that Lepcha cardamom owners also recognized that Nepali labor was indispensable and ritual practices were adapted to accommodate them (Balikci-Denjongpa 2009–10). In Dzongu, cardamom farmers and Nepali sharecroppers together performed a ritual known as langee rum faat, in which offerings were made to Lenji Nikung,9 the grandmother spirit and owner of the cardamom plant, to seek permission to harvest her crops (Balikci-Denjongpa 2009–10). When cardamom was abundant, Nepali and Indigenous ritual practices coexisted with ease, despite their different cosmological orientations. This flexibility within Lepcha shamanism is evident even in its relationship with Tibetan Buddhism, despite a fundamental tension between the two practices. Buddhism forbids animal sacrifice, and the ritual spilling of blood is considered sinful, practices that are crucial in Lepcha shamanic rituals (Bentley 2007). During fieldwork, I happened to be present during one such ritual and was asked by the host family to film it, including the part where a few chickens were bludgeoned for the sacrifice. Later, as we sat down to watch the video at my host’s house, some people winced at the chicken-bludgeoning scene and commented, half-jokingly, “Look at all that blood. Gosh, we’re such bad Buddhists!” Despite this ritual tension, because agriculture is still central to collective life within Dzongu, even today cirim and satap rum faat, two important shamanic rituals, are performed within villages. Cirim, performed before the monsoon rains, is meant for the safety and protection of villagers from illnesses and other harm, and satap rum faat is meant to

220

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

regulate rainfall and prevent hail from destroying crops to ensure a bountiful harvest (Bentley 2007). The ongoing practice of these rituals alongside Tibetan Buddhist practices demonstrates the enduring significance of Lepcha shamanism and its practitioners, especially their role in appeasing deities who control the weather. The growing influence of Tibetan Buddhism, however, was a cause of concern for many interested in preserving Lepcha shamanism, but its decline was also a consequence of shrinking access to forests and the ban on hunting under stringent conservation laws put in place after Sikkim’s annexation. Today shamanic rituals associated with dry rice cultivation and hunting have all but disappeared (Bentley 2007; Little 2007). More recently, the growing unpredictability of weather events like hailstorms, droughts, and rainfall have provoked doubts about the remaining efficacy of shamanic rituals like cirim and satap rum faat—specifically, whether the use of blood in these rituals has drawn the ire of Buddhist gods (Gergan 2017). More recently, the drying of springs and streams in Dzongu, linked to both climatic shifts and nearby hydropower construction, also presents a threat to agricultural livelihoods. Under ordinary circumstances, different spiritual interpretations offered by Buddhist, Nepali Hindu, and Lepcha shamanism coexist with ease, but in times of crisis, they grate on each other. Ritual uncertainty, promoted by shifting environmental regimes and livelihood patterns prompted by climate change and infrastructural development, also shores up historical prejudices and anxieties about other ethnic groups. For Indigenous minorities like Lepchas, struggling to build livelihoods in the aftermath of the cardamom crisis, these “broken cosmologies” (Paerregaard 2013)—although brought to the surface as a result of recent climatic shifts—derive from much older histories. No L onger t h e “I dl e , L a z y Nat i v e” Sonam, a forty-year-old panchayat member (a village governance official) and cardamom cultivator, says, “Around ten years ago we had so much cardamom, it was growing everywhere, not just in the fields, but even right outside our house, in the garden . . . just everywhere.” According to Pempo, a fifty-eight-year-old cardamom cultivator, “Earlier, we would grow other things like maize, millet but we were told by the forest department we can’t just grow things wherever we feel like. Then people stopped growing other crops because there was so much money coming from cardamom.”

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

221

Tales of a golden era that Sonam and Pempo are alluding to were echoed by others, who reminisced how growing the cardamom plant was effortless and required minimal care, with the profits more than sufficient for all household needs. Because Dzongu borders the Kanchendzonga (Kanchenjunga) Biosphere Reserve (declared a world heritage site in 2016), people’s access to forest areas has become severely restricted. As Mechung, a thirty-eight-yearold panchayat member and cardamom cultivator, explains, the steady income from cardamom combined with these restrictions shifted people into a dependence on a single cash crop, which in its heyday was celebrated as a “boon for mountain populations” (Sharma et al. 2000). North Sikkim’s higher altitude and difficult terrain presented a challenge to large-scale farming practices, but they were ideal for large cardamom plantations that require a cool, humid climate and thrive at altitudes of 800–2000 meters above sea level. Up till the 1990s, Sikkim contributed to more than half the world’s production of large cardamom (Sharma et al. 2016), and it appeared that this cash crop had finally disciplined (Scott 2009) the “unruly” and difficult mountainous environment. Such optimism was short-lived. At first, as the climate warmed and new diseases and pests emerged, they were held at bay with pesticides and fertilizers,10 but the soil-borne Colletotrichum gloeosporioides blight proved to be particularly resistant to all such remedies. As the blight spread, shrinking the cultivated area of the prized cash crop dramatically, Sikkim was overtaken by Nepal as the world’s largest cardamom producer. In Sikkim, monoculture plantations, conservation zones, and climatic unpredictability have gradually and insidiously endangered the economic and spiritual ties of Indigenous groups to their surrounding environments. In Dzongu, local livelihoods were entirely enmeshed in cardamom plantations, and with greatly diminished regional agricultural biodiversity, the loss of cardamom as a dependable cash crop devastated small and marginal farmers (Sharma et al. 2016). Today, cardamom cultivators are shifting to higher altitudes, diversifying their livelihoods, and growing climate-resilient crops (Priyadarshani 2014), but the profits pale in comparison to those of large cardamom. For Sonam and Pempo, quoted earlier, the finger of suspicion pointed squarely back at them and the older generations. Pempo The forest department told us you can’t just grow it (cardamom) anywhere. We didn’t listen and grew it everywhere. And then the prices kept going up and that’s when it started declining. Sona m People in those days didn’t have any savings. Whatever money they got, they would spend it. They didn’t think, “Oh, we should

222

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

put some of this money aside in the bank.” But when elaichi died, our people they underwent a “mind change.” Now that elaichi has died, how do we pass our days and years, right? How will we stretch our money now? Manchey ko buddhi ayo (people started using their brains). That no, it won’t do for us to just sit idly like this.

At the beginning of the twentieth century when cardamom production was still in its early days, it was noted that people in Dzongu feared the prosperity it would bring, which though desirable was seen as “fraught with supernatural danger” (Gorer 1938). Along with ritual anxieties, Sonam and Pempo believed the carelessness, indolence, and financial imprudence of Dzongu Lepchas had worsened the effects of the loss of cardamom. They argued that the older generation had become complacent because of the easy revenue from cardamom. This can be read as a straightforward critique, but it draws on a pernicious colonial stereotype of the idle, lazy Lepcha that has also been inherited by state officials in Sikkim (Gergan 2014). Early colonial and Indian ethnographies were replete with stereotypes of Lepchas being a “a merry, free-hearted, careless race, with but little thought of the morrow[,] . . . racing, scampering and playing like children,” who wandered “merrily about the forests inhaling health, and plucking wild fruits during almost all the seasons” (Das 1896, 1; Avery 1878, 69, quoted in Plaisier 2007, 28). In an unmistakable reiteration of this stereotype, Pempo explained later in the interview that Lepchas were known to waste their cardamom money on alcohol and would give away more than half their share to the Nepali sharecroppers. Further into our conversation, Sonam noted that although state horticultural officials would bring up shifting climatic conditions, they believed Dzongu Lepchas’ lack of industry and improper farming techniques had worsened the blight. In coping with ecological precarity that escapes any easy classification, Sonam and others attempt to make sense of these disruptions by more thoroughly embodying a neoliberal logic of self-improvement that places the blame and burden of fixing ecological crisis squarely on those most vulnerable to it. Many other interlocutors, like Sonam, saw the blight as a “blessing in disguise,” in that it forced Dzongu Lepchas to undergo a “mind change,” as Sonam put it, and become productive and prudent members of society who must now participate in economic activities like banking and income diversification. These narratives of loss and recovery are therefore infused with a pervasive neoliberal ideal of improvement (Li 2007; Agrawal 2005) that are the result of decades of state-led rural development programs in “backward” places like Dzongu, seen

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

223

as behind the times. As a panchayat member, Sonam was well versed with this official discourse and perhaps embodied the state as he looked at himself and his fellow tribe members being transformed into more productive citizens. Others, like Mechung, expressed anxieties about the next generation and their lack of interest in agriculture: “What I feel is that its [cardamom’s] time had come. In terms of changes, how has this affected the young people? See, initially there was elaichi, so money used to come. Now elaichi has died, but people will always look for a way to survive. Perhaps if our youth had shown an interest in agriculture earlier it might have made a difference, that’s what I feel.” Climatic stress also interacts with shifting sociopolitical realities, including in this case a generational shift away from agriculture. Ironically, it was the revenue from cardamom that made the current generation’s educational aspirations possible, but because Sikkim has one of the highest rates of educated unemployed youth in India, many educated Dzongu youth unable to find jobs in urban parts of the state have found their way back to the reserve. Panchayat members like Sonam and Mechung, however, were not very hopeful about this educated generation who are unwilling to take up agriculture. Such generational tensions, as I explained in the introduction, were exacerbated by the entry of hydroelectric power development that the Indian state was pushing to address national climate-change anxieties. For agriculture-dependent families in Dzongu, the declining revenue potential of reserve land coincided with the entry of hydroelectric power projects. Because property rights within the reserve disallowed the sale of reserve land to nonresidents, the loss of cardamom was all the more devastating. Although plantations across Sikkim suffered, the decline of cardamom was especially severe in Dzongu, converting once invaluable lands into a financial burden. For the younger generation who were not bound to agriculture and were influenced by the global discourse of indigeneity, the protection of Indigenous land—their future inheritance—took primacy. Even as claims of Lepchas’ territorial and spiritual rootedness in Dzongu gathered strength during the antidam movement, the declining revenue potential of the land (McDuie-Ra 2011) made it difficult for those attempting to eke out a living from the land to imagine a future in Dzongu. For Indigenous minorities, both drastic and slow ecological violence (Nixon 2011)—an undeniable reality of climate change—can disrupt territorial claims and spiritual practices rooted in idealized visions of past and future ties with ancestral lands. At present, an entire generation of Lepcha youth is attempting to cultivate a new relationship with Dzongu’s spiritual and material landscape through their activism, experimentation with new livelihood practices, and reclaiming of Indigenous religion (Gergan 2014). After the antidam protests, several

224

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

young activists set up ecotourism homestays, but others still attempted to learn farming in order to tap into the growing demand for organic crops in Sikkim. Although these young people are a minority in Dzongu, their ability to draw on national and international environmental networks builds alliances across the Himalayas with other marginalized groups, and their involvement in grassroots electoral politics represents a realignment in the relationship of Dzongu Lepchas with state and nonstate actors across multiple scales. For this generation, threats from hydroelectric power development, and not the cardamom crisis, have been the blessing in disguise that have forced a “mind change” among the Dzongu Lepchas, signaling a shift to more vocal criticism of the state and its interventions and a demand for equal representation in decisionmaking processes that have a direct bearing on the future of the Lepchas and Sikkim at large. Conclusion Throughout the Himalayas, as rural populations struggle to adapt their mountainous livelihoods to climatic shifts that are both drastic and subtle, Lepcha narratives of loss and recovery point us to older histories of colonial and postcolonial interventions in the region. Cash-crop plantations, conservation zones, and more recently hydropower projects must be analyzed as part of a broader state strategy to discipline frontier environments in service of national interests (Scott 1998, 2009; Baruah 2013). Conditions for the eastern Himalayas’ heightened vulnerability to climate change cannot be disentangled from colonial and postcolonial projects of legibility and their impoverished understandings of human-forest interdependencies. Such policies adversely affected soil fertility, biodiversity, and local agricultural and religious practices. For Indigenous minorities whose religious and cultural lifeworlds have borne the brunt of these policies, climatic unpredictability and the threats it presents to their livelihoods is the most recent iteration of ecological violence directed at them (Whyte 2017, 2018). In Dzongu, unpredictable weather patterns, crop predation by wild animals driven from the forests by climatic shifts, the emergence of pests and diseases—including the stubborn fungal blight—present a complex picture of the ecological transformations driving the decline of large cardamom. Narratives of Lepcha cardamom cultivators, who are subject to a multiplicity of threats, provide fertile ground for ritual and cultural anxieties. Racialized colonial hierarchies and a neoliberal logic of improvement propagate, feed, and strengthen their experience of marginalization. Powerful narratives of religious and economic subjugation by hegemonic state and nonstate power structure

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

225

the Lepcha experience of ecological precarity, and their own narratives of loss and recovery reveal how their understanding of other ethnic groups and themselves uncritically reproduces troubling colonial and neoliberal logic. Lepcha cardamom farmers’ collective anxieties about the loss of cardamom are directed at Nepali laborers and their shamans who angered Lepcha deities with their alien rituals and language, while internalized colonial racial stereotypes foster narratives of improvement that place blame on “idle, lazy natives,” who must transform themselves into financially prudent and productive neoliberal citizens. Although I have focused on Lepcha narratives, hidden in plain sight are the Nepali people who labored on these lands alongside them; their sweat and toil laid the foundation for the initial prosperity for the Lepchas. But as conditions grew strained, the Nepali laborers and their religious practices were cast as problematic and perhaps even understood as responsible for the blight. The cardamom crisis and the resultant “mind change” among Dzongu Lepchas also demonstrates how ecological crises present an opportunity for state powers to bring remote spaces into the fold of neoliberal governmentality (Agrawal 2005). These narratives, although grounded in the context of Dzongu, mirror how national and global climate-change anxieties operate through scapegoating and burdening marginalized groups. Religious lifeworlds have a lot of flexibility and room for adaptation, but when faced with heightened uncertainty, these same lifeworlds can also turn rigid and insular. Ritual adherence provides practitioners a sense of agency and control over the unpredictability of weather and climate, but they exist in a fragile network of relationships. There is no return to a pure, unadulterated past, a tendency we find in Lepcha cardamom farmers’ narratives of religiouscultural loss and climate-change anxieties. Alexis Shotwell (2016) suggests that we are all living in ethically compromised worlds, and that the idea of purity in such times can have dangerous implications. Ways of knowing and communicating with the extrahuman world, then, are also embedded in colonial histories and power-knowledge hierarchies. Even as we support communities in the frontlines of this struggle, we must be wary of insular, restrictive narratives that are prone to assuage collective anxiety through scapegoating. As researchers, we must therefore struggle with our interlocutors’ narratives, especially when they enact troubling ontologies (Blaser 2014), and we must also be cognizant of how “Indigenous ways of being are not neatly held in some complete alterity” (Sidaway, Woon, and Jacobs 2014, 10) but are in continual negotiation with underlying historical, political, and economic processes. On the other extreme, we must also be wary of the tendency to oversimplify Indigenous responses to threats from climate change and developmentalist

226

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

agendas through the narrow lens of economics, livelihood, or political posturing (Jackson 2014). Critiques of Indigenous posturing are also prone to mistake Indigenous subjects as a unanimous whole, erasing the many frictions and negotiations within tribes across gender, class, and generation. Young Lepcha antidam activists’ refusal to acquiesce to state demands represents a dramatic break from how Dzongu Lepchas have engaged with state powers and interventions—a product of this generation’s shifting economic and spiritual relationship with the landscape. The generational shift can also be seen in other contexts, for instance, in the Standing Rock #NODAPL protests (Whyte 2018), Indigenous youth were at the forefront on the ground and in social media, highlighting the shifting terrain of Indigenous activism. Climate-change anxieties, operating at national and regional levels, are therefore also shifting how indigeneity is being rearticulated in the light of multifaceted threats to Indigenous livelihoods and territories (Gergan 2014). More important, an attention to Indigenous ontological framings can trouble modern dualistic notions of nature and culture that were evident in colonial and postcolonial interventions that ignored how local communities derived both economic and spiritual sustenance from their environments. Lepcha ritual anxieties might uncritically reproduce colonial and neoliberal logics, but such broken cosmologies are also tied to the declining influence of Lepcha shamanism and the Lepcha language, which in turn is a product of the tribe’s historical marginalization as well as conservation polices that disrupted human-forest relationships. Lepcha religious practices, however—which incorporate both Buddhist and shamanic elements despite crucial contradictions in their ritual practices, and generations of political strife and ecological shifts—also display a flexibility and openness to collaboration. This is not to make a case for the resilience of Indigenous religious traditions; rather, it serves as a reminder that coexistence and collaboration can be negotiated. As we grapple with the real consequences of ecological and cultural loss, the challenge is to look for mutuality and collaborative relationships in these precarious times (Tsing 2015) while cultivating a more just narrative where we look on our neighbors not as opponents but as fellow sojourners. M a bel Denzin Gerga n is Assistant Professor in the Asian Studies Department at Vanderbilt University. She is author of the article “Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands.”

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

227

Not e s 1. Colletotrichum gloeosporioides strikes during the onset of the monsoon (April–May), and causes gray and brown patches to develop on the cardamom leaves, which then dry out, giving a burnt appearance. A soil-borne fungus, its spores stay in the soil for more than a decade, making it difficult to eradicate even after replanting (Sharma et al. 2016). 2. The gross income from large cardamom cultivation in Sikkim increased from US$1.9 million in 1975–76 to $6.4 million in 1995–96. The price of large cardamom is currently Rs. 1200 (roughly $20) per kilogram (Sharma et al. 2016). 3. There is broad consensus among regional scientists and local cultivators that climate-change-related factors in conjunction with the blight have led to the decline of large cardamom. The funding for climate-change-related agricultural research is meager in India, and as a result, crop scientists have struggled to diagnose the exact cause behind the blight and develop a cure (Priyadarshani 2014). 4. The shortage of food in forest areas due to long dry spells, forest fires, and erratic rainfall is pushing wild animals to human habitations in search of food. This has led to a dramatic rise in human-wildlife conflict, especially near protected conservation zones (Jamwal 2018). 5. I draw on Kyle Whyte’s (2018, 12) definition of allies: “to mean non-Indigenous identifying persons who do not share personally (or regarding their group membership) in precisely the same oppressions; yet they are deeply concerned for Indigenous well-being for diverse reasons, from justice to guilt. They seek to do what they understand as being in their power to support us in our struggles.” 6. In addition to British colonial policies, the rise of Prithviraj Narayan Shah is said to have pushed lower-caste small peasants, ethnic minorities, and even members of the merchant class to leave Nepal. “Nepali” therefore does not refer to a single ethnic group but is a conglomeration of diverse ethnic groups from various socioeconomic strata. 7. Present-day Bhutias are also recognized as Indigenous to Sikkim and are descendants of Tibetans who settled in Sikkim in the thirteenth century. 8. Balikci-Denjongpa (2008) notes that the same cardamom that was priced around 50–52 Indian rupees in 1907 was being bought from the Lepchas at 8 rupees and from the Bhutias at 16 rupees until the 1930s. 9. Lenji is a shortened form of elaichi and nikung is the Lepcha word for grandmother. 10. In 2003 Sikkim was declared an organic state and the use of all pesticides and fertilizers was banned, and farmers have now switched to organic treatments, but with limited success.

228

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

R efer ence s Agrawal, Arun. 2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Agrawal, Arun, and Clark C. Gibson. 1999. “Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation.” World Development 27 (4): 629–49. Ascher, William. 1995. Communities and Sustainable Forestry in Developing Countries. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies. Balikci-Denjongpa, Anna. 2008. Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors: Village Religion in Sikkim. Leiden, Neth.: Brill. ———. 2009–10. “The Lepcha Pandim of Lingko, Dzongu, North Sikkim.” Bulletin of Tibetology 45 (2) and 46 (1): 119–34. Baruah, Sanjib. 2013. “India: The Mongolian Fringe.” Himal Southasian 26 (1): 82–86. Bentley, Jenny. 2007. “‘Vanishing Lepcha’: Change and Cultural Revival in a Mountain Community of Sikkim.” Bulletin of Tibetology 43 (1–2): 59–79. ———. 2008. “Láso Múng Sung: Lepcha Oral Tradition as a Reflexion of Culture.” Bulletin of Tibetology 44 (1–2): 99–137. Besky, Sarah. 2013. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India. California Series in Food and Culture, edited by Kate Marshall, vol. 47. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blaser, Mario. 2014. “Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogeneous Assemblages.” Cultural Geographies 21 (1): 49–58. Brown, James D., and Sarah L. Damery. 2009. “Uncertainty and Risk.” In A Companion to Environmental Geography, edited by Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Diana Liverman, and Bruce Rhoads, 81–94. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Brown, Trent, Timothy J. Scrase, and Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase. 2017. “Globalised Dreams, Local Constraints: Migration and Youth Aspirations in an Indian Regional Town.” Children’s Geographies 15 (5): 531–44. Chakrabarti, Anjan. 2012. “Migration and Marginalisation in the ‘Himalayan Kingdom’ of Sikkim.” Journal of Exclusion Studies 2 (1): 30–36. Cohn, Bernard. S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cruikshank, Julie. 2014. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Datta Ray, Sunanda. K. 1984. Smash and Grab: The Annexation of Sikkim. New Delhi: Vikas.

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

229

Dove, Michael R. 2011. The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Drew, Georgina, and Roshan P. Rai. 2016. “Water Management in Post-colonial Darjeeling: The Promise and Limits of Decentralised Resource Provision.” Asian Studies Review 40 (3): 321–39. Eckholm, Erik. 1976. “Losing Ground.” Environment 18 (3): 6–11. Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 2003. Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities: Studies in West Africa. London: Routledge. Foning, Arthur. R. 1987. Lepcha, My Vanishing Tribe. New Delhi: Sterling. Forsyth, Timothy. 1996. “Science, Myth and Knowledge: Testing Himalayan Environmental Degradation in Thailand.” Geoforum 27 (3): 375–92. Forsyth, Timothy, and Andrew Walker. 2008. Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gergan, Mabel D. 2014. “Precarity and Possibility: On Being Young and Indigenous in Sikkim, India.” Himalaya 34 (2): 67–80. ———. 2017. “Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (2): 490–98. Gorer, Geoffrey. 1938. Himalayan Village: An Account of the Lepchas of Sikkim. London: Michael Joseph Ltd. Guthman, Julie. 1997. “Representing Crisis: The Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation and the Project of Development in Post‐Rana Nepal.” Development and Change 28 (1): 45–69. Haraway, Donna J. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–65. Harris, T., A. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, J. Sharma, and M. Viehbeck. 2016. “Global Encounters, Local Places: Connected Histories of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the Himalayas—An Introduction.” Transcultural Studies 7 (1): 43–53. High, Mette M. 2013. “Believing in Spirits, Doubting the Cosmos: Religious Reflexivity in the Mongolian Gold Mines.” In Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies, edited by M. E. Pelkmans, 59–84. London: I.B. Tauris. Hiltz, Julie. 2003. “Constructing Sikkimese National Identity in the 1960s and 1970s.” Bulletin of Tibetology 36 (2): 67–83. Ives, Jack D. 1987. “The Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation: Its Validity and Application Challenged by Recent Research.” Mountain Research and Development 7 (3): 189–99.

230

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Ives, Jack D., and Bruno Messerli. 1990. “Progress in Theoretical and Applied Mountain Research, 1973–1989, and Major Future Needs.” Mountain Research and Development: 10 (2): 101–27. Jackson, Michael. 2014. “Composing Postcolonial Geographies: Postconstructivism, Ecology and Overcoming Ontologies of Critique.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1): 72–87. Jamwal, Nidhi. 2018. “Climate Change Increases Human-Wildlife Conflict in Sikkim.” India Climate Dialogue, August 15. https://indiaclimatedialogue.net /2018/08/15/climate-change-increases-human-wildlife-conflict-in-sikkim/. Karlsson, Bengt G., and Dolly Kikon. 2017. “Wayfinding: Indigenous Migrants in the Service Sector of Metropolitan India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 (3): 447–62. Kennedy, Dane. 1991. “Guardians of Edenic Sanctuaries: Paharis, Lepchas, and Todas in the British Mind.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14 (2): 57–77. Kohli, Kanchi. 2011. “Inducing Vulnerabilities in a Fragile Landscape.” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 51 (December 17): 19–22. Li, Tania Murray. 2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (1): 149–79. ———. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Little, Kerry. 2007. “Lepcha Hunters’ Narratives of Their Hidden Landscapes.” Bulletin of Tibetology 43 (1–2): 81–98. McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2011. “The Dilemmas of Pro-development Actors: Viewing State–Ethnic Minority Relations and Intra-ethnic Dynamics through Contentious Development Projects.” Asian Ethnicity 12 (1): 77–100. Moore, Jason. W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso. Mullard, Saul. 2011. Opening the Hidden Land: State Formation and the Construction of Sikkimese History. Leiden, Neth.: Brill. Murton, Galen, Austin Lord, and Robert Beazley. 2016. “A Handshake across the Himalayas: Chinese Investment, Hydropower Development, and State Formation in Nepal.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57 (3): 403–32. Nandy, Ashis. 1989a. Intimate Enemy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989b. “Shamans, Savages and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilizations.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 14:263–77.

L oss a n d R ecov ery i n t h e H i m a l aya s

231

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paerregaard, Karsten. 2013. “Broken Cosmologies.” In Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, 196–210. New York: Routledge. Pandit, Maharaj K. 2017. Life in the Himalaya: An Ecosystem at Risk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Plaisier, Helen. 2007. “In Awe of So Many Múng: Halfdan Siiger in the Sikkim Himalayas.” Bulletin of Tibetology 43 (1–2): 15–32. Po’dar, Preym K., and Tanka B. Subba. 1991. “Demystifying Some Ethnographic Texts on the Himalayas.” Social Scientist 19, no. 8/9 (August–September): 78–84. Priyadarshani, Subhra. 2014. “Himalayas Losing Prized Crop to Climate Change, Poor Science.” Nature India, November 27. https://www.natureasia .com/en/nindia/article/10.1038/nindia.2014.162. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sharma, Eklabya, Rita Sharma, K. K. Singh, and G. Sharma. 2000. “A Boon for Mountain Populations: Large Cardamom Farming in the Sikkim Himalaya.” Mountain Research and Development 20 (2): 108–11. Sharma, Ghanashyam, Uma Partap, D. R. Dahal, Durga P. Sharma, and Eklabya Sharma. 2016. “Declining Large-Cardamom Production Systems in the Sikkim Himalayas: Climate Change Impacts, Agroeconomic Potential, and Revival Strategies.” Mountain Research and Development 36 (3): 286–98. Shneiderman, Sara B. 2013. “Himalayan Border Citizens: Sovereignty and Mobility in the Nepal–Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China Border Zone.” Political Geography 35:25–36. Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sidaway, James D., Chih Y. Woon, and Jane M. Jacobs. 2014. “Planetary Postcolonialism.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1): 4–21. Tamsang, Khárpú. 1998. The Unknown and Untold Reality about the Lepchas. Kalimpong, India: Lyangsong Tamsang. Tolia-Kelly, D. P. 2016. “Anthropocenic Culturecide: An Epitaph.” Social and Cultural Geography 17 (6): 786–92.

232

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2017. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55 (1–2): 152–62. ———. 2018. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2): 224–42. Yeh, Emily T. 2007. “Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (3): 593–612.

Part Iv

RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS

nine

k

ANGRY GODS AND RAGING RIVERS The Changing Climate of the Central Himalaya

David L. Haber man, Indiana University

This ch a pter ex a mines the place of religion in disasters related to rivers and glaciers in the increasingly changing climate of the central Himalaya.1 In particular, it features a horrific disaster that occurred at the pilgrimage site of Kedarnath during the summer of 2013. Unprecedented amounts of heavy rain combined with the rapid deterioration of a glacier led to a massive flood that killed thousands of people. Travelers have been following rivers into the central Himalaya for centuries in quest of life blessings and other religious benefits. The practice has given rise to a current form of pilgrimage known as the Char Dham Yatra, “Pilgrimage to Four Sacred Abodes,” one of the most popular and important pilgrimages for Hindus of northern India today. Many of the pilgrims I interviewed while conducting ethnographic research in the central Himalaya informed me that, as Hindus, they believe that they are to perform this pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime, often identifying it as the most essential pilgrimage they would ever undertake. Ethnographic research conducted in the central Himalaya from 1999 to 2001 on the Yamuna and Ganga2 Rivers confirmed a very benign view of these rivers as life-nurturing goddesses (Haberman 2006). Many people during that study referred to the rivers as “our mothers” because “all life comes from them,” and as such approached them for beneficial help with loving devotional trust. People I interviewed at Yamunotri, the Himalayan source of the Yamuna River, identified its river goddess as a lifegiving, life-purifying, and life-protecting mother who absolves sins, sustains life, provides abundance, and guards her children from harm. This view of river goddesses has been quite common in the Himalaya.

235

236

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

I spent the summer of 2014 in the upper Gangetic Valley and had the opportunity to visit Gangotri, the revered source of the Ganga River. Recent travelers to the pilgrimage town of Gangotri routinely were warned they may have to leave their cars as much as five kilometers from the town center because of a very long line of parked cars from the heavy vehicular traffic. Official estimates put the number of pilgrims who visited the Char Dham Yatra sites during the summer of 2012 near half a million people. Therefore, I was surprised when we were able to drive to the very center of Gangotri with ample space to park during the peak of the traditional pilgrimage season. What caused the decrease? In short, the answer is a new level of fear. The fear virtually shut down the Char Dham Yatra in the summer of 2014 and has left a lasting impact since is due to climate-change-related cataclysmic events now occurring with greater force and frequency in the central Himalaya, particularly the one that took place at the pilgrimage site of Kedarnath in June 2013. Recognizing that religious traditions have different perspectives on the natural environment, this chapter is concerned specifically with emerging Hindu responses to the increasingly threatening storms in the central Himalaya. While examining issues related to Hinduism, ecology, and nature, it is important to remember that Hinduism, like all major religions, is highly complex and multifaceted. Because of the variance from locale to locale, it is more accurate to speak not of a single Hinduism, but rather of a rich multiplicity of Hinduisms. Earlier overviews of Hinduism and ecology tended to be general, normative, and focused on the philosophical texts and practices of the ascetic traditions.3 Although these contributions have been significant, I find myself in agreement with Vasudha Narayanan (2001), who has pressed for a shift away from understanding Hinduism and ecology primarily through ascetic philosophical traditions to one including bhakti devotional expressions and rituals. This has often meant a concomitant shift away from strictly textual studies to investigations that involve considerable ethnographic research, a trend I have followed in my own recent work (Haberman 2006, 2013, 2020). In this chapter, I am particularly interested in examining the presence and changing nature of certain features of Hinduism within the context of recent weather-driven disasters in the Char Dham region of the Indian Himalaya. Pi l gr i m age to t h e Cen t r a l H i m a l aya For centuries, the central Himalaya has been identified as a sacred land, often called deva bhumi, “land of the gods.” The emergence of this region as a sacred space and pilgrimage destination for millions of people is a complex story that

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

237

took place over the last two millennia. Besides its height, the long history of the sacredness of the region is intimately tied to the purifying and life-blessing waters of the Ganga and its important tributaries. The central Himalaya has also been identified as the favored abode of the pan-Indian Hindu god Shiva, a major divinity for many of the groups of devotional ascetics who settled in the sacred forests of this mountainous region. In addition, the landscape of the locality is saturated with the presence of thousands of local deities that inhabit its natural features. The art historian Nachiket Chanchani (2019) has examined the history of the central Himalaya in detail, arguing that “the developments that occurred approximately between the third century BCE and the twelfth century CE emerge as being especially crucial in transforming this mountainous region from a distant ‘natural’ frontier to an exalted region and ultimately into a major locus of Hindu pilgrimage” (10). The concentration of surviving temples in this region is greater than in any other part of the Himalaya. Chanchani documents how, around the beginning of the first millennium CE, kings and ascetics began following the Ganga and Yamuna rivers upstream from the plains to their glacial sources. Pilgrimage became an increasingly popular form of religious practice accessible to a wide range of people, bringing greater numbers into the central Himalaya, often perceived as a stairway to heaven or a divine abode in its own right. From an early time, the central Himalaya became a prime place for the purification of sins and the pursuit of various religious benefits. One of several places that stood out for special attention is Kedarnath, a revered marshy meadow at an altitude of about twelve thousand feet at the base of the glacial source of the Mandakini River, a major tributary of the Ganga. In the middle of this meadow is a rock outcrop that was identified by at least the ninth century as the site of Shiva’s presence in the form of a natural stone lingam.4 This was to become the locale of the famous Kedarnath temple, a major pilgrimage site (see fig. 9.1). Today Kedarnath is distinguished as one of four locations, or “divine abodes,” of the Char Dham Yatra. During the last half century, India has undergone enormous changes. The population of India has tripled since the beginning of the 1960s, and the Indian economy globalized toward the end of the 1980s, bringing about a rapid capitalistic economic boom with dramatic consequences. After an unsuccessful border war with China in 1962, the government of India recognized the need to build modern roads into this mountainous region and develop the northern Himalayan border. These changes radically affected life in the central Himalaya. The globalized opening of India in the later 1980s that led to the speedy development of this region gained even greater momentum with the creation

238

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Figure 9.1. Kedarnath Temple. The scoured-out area on the left of the photo shows the pathway of the outburst flood. Photo by author, 2019.

of the mountainous state of Uttaranchal in 2000 out of the larger state of Uttar Pradesh; Uttaranchal was renamed Uttarakhand in 2006. Religious tourism was understood to be the very backbone of the expansion of the region’s economy, and greater numbers of pilgrims were encouraged to journey into the central Himalaya to visit the many sources of the Ganga River. Prior to the economic boom of the late 1990s the numbers of pilgrims were fewer and their expectation for middle-class comforts less, so that the Char Dham Yatra was more closely aligned with the environmental aspirations of the new state of Uttarakhand. Many regard more recent developments as a betrayal of the sustainable ideals that helped found the new state of Uttarakhand, which was part of an effort to resist the exploitation of the resources of this region by outsiders living on the plains. Nevertheless, the changes helped nurture an explosion of religious tourism and concomitant economic expansion in the central Himalaya. The Char Dham Yatra was to be the major centerpiece of this development. The increase in Char Dham pilgrimage activity, therefore, has occurred lockstep with the massive economic development of the region and the kinds of problems now being identified as the causes of climate-changerelated disasters.5

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

239

The general movement of the Char Dham pilgrimage is from west to east in the Himalayan range of the state of Uttarakhand. The four locations visited on the pilgrimage are, in order from west to east, Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath. All four sites are associated with the Ganga, in that they all are near the origins of rivers that eventually flow into it and assume its name. The first two sites are located in the district of Uttarkashi and the last two in the district of Chamoli, but the entire region is known as Garhwal and is identified by many Hindus as the deva bhumi, the “land of the gods.” Each site is related to a specific river: Yamunotri is the source of the Yamuna River, Gangotri is the source of the Bhagirathi River (considered to be the very source of the Ganga), Kedarnath is at the source of the Mandakini River, and Badrinath is near the source of the Alaknanda River. All four rivers are on the Char Dham pilgrimage route, with well-used roads following much of their length. The Yamuna merges with the Ganga far below on the plains, but the other three rivers are all major Himalayan tributaries that form the mighty Ganga by joining together while still in the mountains. Mountains, rivers, and forests make up the central Himalaya, but how is this sacred landscape and the deities who inhabit it conceived? Cen t r a l H i m a l aya n R e ligion Gods, nature, and humans are intimately interconnected in the Himalayan region. Although they are linked—as the deities of this region are all closely associated with the landscape itself—it might be useful to present the gods in three categories: river goddesses, most prominently the Ganga; the supreme mountain god Shiva; and local goddesses and gods known as devis and devatas. River worship has a long history in India. Archaeological evidence connects ancient pilgrimage activity with river worship that stretches back continuously to Vedic times (Bhardwaj 1983), and early religious texts express a reverent attitude toward rivers.6 Although river worship is found in many areas of the world, no religious culture has sustained river worship to the degree we find in Hindu India. The writer Bill Aitken (1992) claims, “India honors its rivers more than any other nation, seeing them as the manifest form of divine female powers sent to earth to assist humanity” (1). Aesthetic appreciation of rivers is certainly found in Western literature, in which rivers are often regarded as something to negotiate, explore, and provide recreation, but in India journeys to rivers are more typically undertaken to honor, worship, and make contact with them for spiritual benefits.

240

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Although any one of the many central Himalayan rivers may be considered an individual goddess in her own right—especially the Yamuna7—they tend to become absorbed into the identity of the renowned river goddess Ganga, often considered to be “the river of India” (Eck 2012, 131). Many Char Dham pilgrims see their journey as an opportunity for encountering the goddess Ganga in her many Himalayan forms, with Gangotri, the source of the Ganga, being the chief focus for their worship of this important goddess. Ganga has been revered for centuries throughout India as a vital aquatic form of divinity, and many of those residing in or visiting the central Himalaya today have a deep devotion to this river goddess as their sacred mother, Ma Ganga. In her recent book River Dialogues, Georgina Drew (2017) has done a wonderful job of portraying Garhwali women’s devotion to the Ganga. These women communicate that their success and well-being in life depends on Mother Ganga, and thus they approach her for a variety of life blessings. The women’s relationship with Mother Ganga, importantly, stresses a need for reciprocity. Drew records one as saying, “Since Ganga is helping us at each step then we should also be ready to save her” (79). The devotion to the Ganga includes concern for the health of the glaciers that feed this river. Aware that Himalayan glaciers are now receding rapidly, threatened by atmospheric changes and air pollution (especially from global warming and the toxic Asian brown cloud), this same woman recited a poem expressing her hopes and fears: As long as Ganga exists, as long as there is life in the glacier, Till then the glory of Ganga reigns; When the glaciers melt, Where will one find Ganga’s banks? (Drew 2017, 79)

The other divinity recognized throughout India as being powerfully present in the Himalaya is the supreme Shiva. Shiva has long been associated with the Himalaya, and several of the puranic scriptures identify this mountain range as Shiva’s abode. The Himalaya are not only identified as the place where Shiva resides for deep meditation, but he is profoundly embedded or even identified with the very landscape itself. There are well-known mountains in the Himalaya, such as Shivling towering above the river valley created by the receding Gangotri glacier, that are considered to be natural forms of Shiva. In addition to this, Shiva’s presence is understood to be pervasive throughout the Himalaya in a multiplicity of forms; thus, he is widely worshiped in shrines, temples, and natural sites throughout the region. For the Char Dham pilgrims, there is no place where Shiva is thought to be more present than at the pilgrimage

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

241

destination of Kedarnath. For this reason, it is the preeminent site for worshiping Shiva on the Char Dham Yatra. The site of Kedarnath consists of a marshy plain situated 11,800 feet above sea level just below several glaciers on its northern edge and is surrounded on three sides by towering 20,000-foot peaks. The Mandakini and Sarasvati Rivers—both tributaries of the Ganga—flow on both sides of the upper Kedarnath valley from two of the glaciers, the Mandakini on the western side from one of the two snouts of the Chorabari Glacier and the Sarasvati on eastern side from the Companion Glacier. The two rivers join just below the town of Kedarnath and descend as the Mandakini to eventually join with the Alaknanda River lower down the valley at Rudraprayag. In the middle of the marshy plain is a prominent rock outcropping. The tip of the rock is regarded as a naturally manifest (svayambhu) Shiva lingam, and as such is not different from the mountains themselves. This lithic form of Shiva is now housed within a stone temple that very likely dates back in some configuration to at least the eleventh century (fig. 9.1). That is, the pilgrimage destination of Kedarnath is simultaneously a special form of god, a temple, and a geographical area. Shiva is identified with the very landscape of Kedarnath and the wider environment of the central Himalaya, as previously noted. Here divinity and nature are intermingled. In his highly informative book titled Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore (2018) records a pilgrim in Kedarnath saying, “Lord Shiva and Kedarnath are the same thing” (20). Shiva is, therefore, both the embodied stone form in the temple and the whole environment around the temple in the Kedarnath valley. In addition to Shiva’s identification with the very landscape of the Himalaya and the riverine presence of the aquatic goddess Ganga in the terrain, divinity more broadly conceived in the region includes the pervasive presence of a multitude of local and regional deities (devatas). A common form of Hindu practice throughout the Himalayan range focuses on the worship of a great variety of these local deities, often referred to as the mountain system of “goddess-god culture” (devi-devata sanskriti; Sutherland 1998, 2006). Temples that house the deities associated with a wide circle of villagers are also found throughout the Himalaya, each involved in the religious, sociopolitical, economic, and agricultural life of a particular community. It is important to note that they are all deeply connected with the land; several religious residents of Gangotri informed me that “the gods are nature.” Residing in a temple, the devata may take the embodied form of a stone in this region, but another common temple form in which the deity is present is a metal masklike face (mohra) that is carried around in an elaborately decorated palanquin (dholi). Communication

242

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

takes place between the god and community members by means of assorted motions of the palanquin (see Drew’s article, chap. 4 in this volume) and a human medium who becomes possessed by and speaks for the devata in the portable shrine. In either case, the well-being of the community is felt to depend on the presence, blessings, and guidance of the local devi or devata. I learned that there are, in the area around Uttarkashi, a variety of devis and devatas whose reach varies: for example, a gram devata (village god) presides over a particular village, a sthan devata (place god) is identified with a special or wider space, and the reach of a kshetra devata (regional god) extends to include a larger area. Regardless of the scope of their influence, all types of devatas are deeply embedded in the natural environment and associated with the land. In his study of this system, Ehud Halperin (2019) stresses that it is through this system that divinity is distributed in its natural surrounding environment. A more universal conception of divinity, such as Kedarnath Shiva, is understood to be all-encompassing or pervasive. In the case of Kedarnath, Whitmore (2018) documents that this major divinity is considered to be a “charging station” for many of the local Garhwali devis and devatas that are periodically brought to the site. Although divine powers in this region are regarded as being geographically ubiquitous, they are also understood to be concentrated in special places like Kedarnath. The specialness of Kedarnath hinges on the recognition that—although Shiva is embedded in the entire landscape of the Himalaya—in this site in particular, the blessed power of Shiva and the associated power of the goddess Ganga in the form of her major tributary the Mandakini River (frequently called Mandakini Ganga) are profoundly present. In sum, although the whole central Himalayan region is pervaded with a sense of the mountainous presence of Shiva and the riverine presence of Ganga, their presence tends to be focused in places like Kedarnath and Gangotri. Therefore, it was all the more unnerving when both divinities decided to turn on visitors to these sites, especially in Kedarnath. W e at h er Disa st er s i n t h e Cen t r a l H i m a l aya The new level of fear that virtually shut down the Char Dham Yatra in the summer of 2014 and has remained for many since is due to weather-related cataclysmic events, particularly one that occurred at Kedarnath in June 2013. Although scientists are ever loath to express their findings with complete certainty, there is a general consensus that climate change played a decisive role in this disaster. After studying the scientific literature, Nayanika Mathur (2015) concludes,

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

243

“The Indian Himalaya is a precarious, ecological zone that is . . . extremely ‘vulnerable’ to the impact of climate change. . . . It is widely agreed that the . . . extreme weather event of the massive cloudburst in advance of the arrival of the monsoons is almost certainly conjoined to the processes that are covered by the term ‘climate change’” (88). It is undoubtedly the case that weather events like the one that caused the Himalayan floods of June 2013 are becoming more frequent because of climate destabilization and that, alongside traditional views, discourse about climate change is increasingly informing how people living in the central Himalaya are thinking about what they are experiencing. Glaciers worldwide are melting and retreating at an accelerated rate from the warming caused by anthropogenic climate change. Many believe that “climate change is affecting the Himalayas more than almost any region in the world” (Bhushal 2019). Himalayan glaciers—and associated rivers—are proving to be particularly vulnerable in this time of rapid climate change (Anthwal et al. 2006). Furthermore, a “shift from solid to liquid precipitation in one of the major concerns for change in climate patterns over the Indian Himalaya” (Dobhal 2009, 70), because snow clings to hillsides and melts gradually, whereas rain rushes down hillsides immediately, causing erosion, landslides, and floods. Dark soot settling onto the glaciers and the enhancement of lower atmospheric solar heating from the so-called Asian brown cloud caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other carbon-containing combustibles also accelerates the deterioration of Himalayan glaciers. A study published in the British journal Nature maintains that the Asian brown cloud is as much to blame as greenhouse gases for the warming observed in the Himalaya over the past half-century (Ramanathan et al. 2007). In addition, Himalayan glaciers are especially vulnerable in this time of global warming because of their latitude; the Chorabari Glacier above Kedarnath, for example, is at the same latitude as central Texas. The Himalayan climate scientist D. P. Dobhal (2009) presents the conclusion of a recent study of the condition of glaciers in the central Himalaya: “Direct observation of a few selected glaciers shrinking processes out of thousands of glaciers supports that Himalayan glaciers are in a general state of decline during recent times. . . . The study also suggests that the rate of retreat for the Gangotri Glacier over the last three decades was more than three times the rate during the preceding 200 years. Like Gangotri Glacier most of the glaciers in the region are retreating rapidly” (75). This study included an investigation of the Chorabari Glacier that sits above Kedarnath, and found that it too is quite vulnerable to climate change and is deteriorating rapidly.8 The catastrophe that occurred at Kedarnath on June 16 and 17, 2013, involved historically heavy and warm rain and an extreme flood caused by the erosion

244

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

of a key glacier. That led to an outburst flood from a glacial lake, which killed thousands of people in the region. All this followed the flash floods in the Gangetic Valley that killed hundreds of people during August and September 2012. The Char Dham Yatra was suspended toward the end of the pilgrimage season in 2012 as a result of the unusual weather that led to the floods, which many suspected was caused by climate change.9 Himanshu Thakkar (2013), coordinator of South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, wrote this about the 2013 tragedy: “Climate scientists have been warning that higher frequency and amplitude of the untimely and high intensity rainfall events that triggered the Uttarakhand disaster are likely consequences of climate change.” Unpredictable and unprecedentedly destructive rainstorms continue to plague the central Himalaya, but the Kedarnath event has remained foremost in the minds of the people who live in the region. Writing about the June 2013 incident, Dobhal and a team of Himalayan researchers (Dobhal et al. 2013) claim, “Recent climate changes have had significant impact on high-mountain glacial environment. Rapid melting of snow/ ice and heavy rainfall has resulted in the formation and expansion of morainedammed lakes, creating a potential danger from dammed lake outburst floods” (171). The Chorabari Glacier had receded considerably as a result of climate change, leaving an unstable lake in its path just above Kedarnath. On the morning of June 16, 2013, thousands of people in the town of Kedarnath were lodged in the many hotels, guesthouses, and pilgrimage shelters (dharamshalas) that had been constructed over the years to provide housing for visitors. Heavy rains had already been pouring down for three days. Normally, at this time of year, rain would quickly turn into snow at the twelve-thousand-foot elevation of Kedarnath, but during this event, researchers stationed at sixteen thousand feet reported warm rain falling.10 This caused the entire watershed above Kedarnath to fill with raging water as never before. Reports recorded that no one could remember rain anything like it.11 Things were to go from bad to worse. A pilgrim who completed the pilgrimage in April of the previous year wrote, “A trip to Chardham Yatra as every Hindu believes is the sole way to attain redemption and salvation. . . . If there is paradise on earth it is right here.”12 On this particular day, however, the rains increased and paradise turned into hell as the Mandakini River burst out of its banks and the mountain above the eastern side of Kedarnath began to give way in threatening landslides. A team of Himalayan researchers determined that it had rained in the area above Kedarnath more than a foot (325 mm) in a twentyfour-hour period on June 16 and 17 (Dobhal et al. 2013). Before the day was over,

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

245

thousands of people were swept away by the river or buried under mountain rubble. The first wave of floods washed away all bridges and razed much of the town. Raging waters carrying a huge load of rocks and debris flooded the temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva that had stood on its present site for around a thousand years. Many people within it died. As bad as this day was, the following one was to be even more catastrophic. Around seven in the morning a loud boom was heard high above Kedarnath, followed immediately by a crashing wall of water. The Himalayan glacier scientist Joseph Gergan explained to me in his home in Dehradun that the warm rainwater entered the Chorabari Glacier through crevasses and moulins, contributing to its rapid thawing and release of huge amounts of water, particularly in its subglacial zone.13 Reports estimated that Shiva’s famous Kedarnath temple was soon surrounded by fifteen meters of water (Joshi 2016, 51). Some called the massive flash flood that lasted about twenty minutes Shiva’s tandav—his “destructive dance of death” (Joshi 2016, 49); I found this explanation still quite common when I visited Kedarnath in June 2019. By the end of the day, an estimated five to ten thousand people were dead, though one of the leaders of the rescue operation set the number closer to thirty thousand. Miraculously, a huge thirty-foot-long boulder rolled down the mountain and stopped just before the Kedarnath Shiva temple, parting the waters and protecting the temple so that it remained standing. The rest of Kedarnath town was obliterated, unleashing a terror that reverberated throughout the Himalaya. Gergan notes that the “catastrophic Kedarnath floods of 16 and 17 June were one of the most destructive and massive flash floods witnessed in the Himalayan range in living memory” (Gergan 2018). The destruction regrettably did not stop at the town of Kedarnath; the river raged on down the Kedarnath Valley. Particularly affected were the towns of Rambara and Gaurikund. Hridayesh Joshi (2016) writes about this happening: “Further downstream from Kedarnath, another dance of destruction was playing out in Rambara and Gaurikund. The entire Kedarnath valley was caving in and the horror refused to end” (52). Rambara was a small town located seven kilometers below Kedarnath, halfway up the footpath from Gaurikund. One of the few survivors from Rambara recounted that, after a day of relentless rain, he observed during the late evening hours of June 16 “a huge sheet of water coming down from the mountains,” with the result that all the buildings in the town were completely washed away, causing many deaths and leaving little trace of the town that once stood on the site (Joshi 2016, 55). No sign of it remained when I visited the valley in 2019. The death and destruction continued

246

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

on downstream to Gaurikund, situated about 14 kilometers from Kedarnath and the farthest one can go by car on the way to Kedarnath. The raging river demolished many of the buildings in Gaurikund and killed scores of people, including more than three hundred who were trapped inside a collapsing sevenstory hotel. Furthermore, an estimated ten thousand mules perished in the Kedarnath disaster, a huge economic loss to their owners—and, I might add, a staggering loss of life to the mules themselves. Geologists later identified the loud boom survivors in Kedarnath reported as the burst and rapid disintegration of the gravel-moraine dam holding back the lake that formed at the base of the Chorabari Glacier—or what is called a GLOF, a glacial lake outburst flood. Glacier lakes are formed when a glacier melts and recedes, leaving a large lake behind a fragile wall of stony rubble functioning as an accidental dam. Ever-swelling glacial lakes are an increasingly menacing phenomenon in this time of anthropogenic climate change. The GLOF that destroyed the pilgrimage center of Kedarnath was a spectacular one; in a matter of fifteen minutes the entire contents of the Chorabari Lake was emptied, cresting over three-story buildings with a pounding flow that University of Calcutta scientists estimated was half the flow of Niagara Falls (Grossman 2015). Researchers at Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology concluded that global warming was a major factor in the Frankenstorm that caused this disaster and contributed significantly to the deterioration of the Chorabari Glacier (Grossman 2015). The Chorabari Glacier had already been receding rapidly in recent years, losing 11 percent of its surface area and contracting half a kilometer since 1962 (Dobhal 2009). Further melting of the Himalayan glaciers will mean increasing GLOFs and other kinds of floods in the short term, and droughts and water scarcity in the long term. The changing climate and increasing disasters in the Himalayas have also had a very negative economic impact on this region, for the pilgrimage trade is now the backbone of the economy for a great many of the people who live here. After the disaster of 2013, Kedarnath was completely shut down. Although there were no casualties in Gangotri itself, the marketplace there was mostly deserted when I visited it in 2014, and the jeep drivers stationed there had so little pilgrimage business that they resorted to passing the time playing cricket (Gusain 2014). The year 2014 witnessed the worst Char Dham Yatra season since the establishment of the state of Uttarakhand in 2000; the number of pilgrims coming to Gangotri this year was a mere 8 percent of previous years’ numbers. As a result of this poor turnout, half the hotels and lodges in Gangotri closed down for the year.

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

247

R e ligious R e sponse s So where is religion in this disaster? Besides getting many thousands of people into the central Himalaya seeking blessings through the popular religious practice of the Char Dham pilgrimage, I suggest that it is present in at least three more ways: (1) the way an understanding the disaster’s causes is articulated, (2) conceptions of the gods’ shifting moods, and (3) what solutions and moral imperatives are considered. I first became aware of an emerging explanatory narrative when I was in the Gangetic Valley in the summer of 2014. “The gods (devatas) are angry with us because of how we are now acting,” a resident of Gangotri explained to me.14 But, I asked, isn’t this deva bhumi, the land where people have been coming for a long time to receive the blessing from the gods? “Yes, but now they are angry with us. That is why this [Kedarnath disaster] has happened. And more will come if we do not change our ways.” This man voiced an explanation I was to hear from many others: that the weather-related disasters now occurring in the Himalaya are due to the immoral actions of human beings. “There is so much sin (pap) in the world today,” a resident of Uttarkashi explained. “People are making a lot of pollution. Because of this, the climate is changing and the gods are beginning to punish us.”15 A man I spoke with who lives above Uttarkashi identified the specific divine agents involved in the recent disasters: “The destructive floods that hit Uttarkashi in 2012 were because Ganga Maiya is angry with the way people are acting, and the disaster in Kedarnath in 2013 was due to the punishing anger of Kedar Mahadev [Shiva].” Why are they angry specifically? “Because people are not respecting the land (bhumi) or nature (prakriti).” This, however, was not the only explanation I heard in the central Himalaya. Some people told me that we humans alone are responsible for the increased storms, not the gods. A resident of Uttarkashi explained, “It is our karma for the way we are treating Nature. If you plant good seeds, you get good plants; if you plant bad seeds, you get bad plants. It’s like this. We are treating nature badly; and so it is treating us badly. That is why the destructive storms are happening.” An owner of a sweet shop in Uttarkashi opposed the explanation that the gods are angry: “We ourselves are doing this and are the cause of the destructive storms. There is no anger in God (Ishwar). There is only compassion.” Several others accounted for the cause of the storms in terms of climate change. Though there are Hindi words for climate change—jalavayu parivartan—most Hindi speakers used the English words. A man who teaches chemistry in the local intercollege in Uttarkashi, for example, used the English words climate change as

248

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

he told me in Hindi that “the destructive storms are increasing due to ‘climate change’ caused by what humans are doing to nature.” I was struck by the way a few people I spoke with managed to combine all three of these explanations. A schoolteacher from the plains town of Meerut I talked with in Kedarnath, where he was visiting as a Char Dham pilgrim, told me, “The increasing storms around here are caused by ‘climate change.’ This is our responsibility; it is a result of our karma. We are doing it. All of us!” He then went on to say that “the gods are angry with us because of the way we are treating the environment.” I asked him, Do these different explanations go together? “Yes,” he said, “all of it.” Nonetheless, I found the narrative that related the destructive storms to the anger of the gods to be the most common and widespread. A man living in Kedarnath for the pilgrimage season said, “Bholenath [Shiva] became very angry because of the way people are treating his Kedarnath abode. They created a lot of pollution. Because of this Bholenath became angry and caused the disaster (apda).” During my 2019 visit to Kedarnath, I found that the 2013 disaster was much more on the minds of people living there for the pilgrimage season, or living permanently in the towns downstream, than the pilgrims who came up from the distant plains for a few days. Although some pilgrims expressed grave concerns, many I spoke with said that they didn’t really think much about the Himalayan disasters. A woman from Delhi put it this way: “Why think about that? We just come here to meet our God.” A category of people much more focused on environmental changes in the Himalaya and the increasingly destructive storms now occurring there are the wandering babas (renunciants), who have witnessed firsthand the dramatic changes during their years of travel in the mountains. I met one such wanderer during my visit to Gangotri in 2019. He told me that the destructive storms and melting glaciers are a “major topic” of conversation among what he called the “wandering monks” and had this to say: “Nature is in trouble everywhere. This is what I see. The trees are being cut, the rivers are being polluted, the glaciers are disappearing, and the climate is changing. Why? Because of the way people are treating nature. They are selfish and care only about money. They don’t respect nature. For this reason, the gods (devatas) are angry. The destructive storms are a warning to humanity. But people are not listening. So the gods will punish us with even greater storms.” This was the persistent refrain I heard from a wide variety of people in the Char Dham region: “The gods are angry with us because of the way we are behaving.” It is important to note that from this perspective, there is a very close conceptual relationship between the gods and nature. I had the occasion to speak with Swami Sundarananda when I visited Gangotri in May 2019. He was ninety-four years old at the time and living in a hut he had occupied since

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

249

1948. He has traveled throughout the Himalaya and has been involved in many environmental issues in this region over the years. He explained, “The gods are nature (devata to prakriti hai). When we disrespect nature, we disrespect the gods. They are now angry because of what we are doing to nature. This is why the destructive storms are increasing.” The close relationship between the gods and nature was brought home to me in another conversation, this time with a woman who lives in the forest above Uttarkashi. “When people respect (samman) the land they respect the devata of that place, and when they abuse the land, they abuse the devata of that land. The devatas are the divine personality of a particular place or entity. Ganga Devi, for example, is the personification of the Ganga River, and Mahadev [Shiva] is the personification of the mountains—especially mountainous places like Kedarnath. This is why the devatas are getting angry—because people today are abusing the land and environment.” In some ways, there is nothing new in the assertion that human morality and the environment are intimately linked. The natural world and the moral condition of humans have long been associated in Hindu India. Humans and nature are deeply connected in reciprocal causal relationships, with changes in one bringing about changes in the other. Halperin (2017) identifies the intertwined relationship between the gods, humans, and nature as a “holistic worldview” (68), which many regard as the very hallmark of the Hindu worldview. Although the notion that human morality affects the natural world is not new, the changes that have occurred in India over the past couple decades from rapid economic development, growing consumption and materialism, the escalations in the burning of carbon fuels, and the increasingly apparent results of global warming have introduced a new level of concern. The central Himalayan sacred space of deva bhumi is thought to have been desecrated by a new kind of greed in some local residents, the decline in older ways of life, and the promiscuous behavior of outsiders. A famous religious leader, the Shakaracharya of Dwarka, for example, was recorded attributing the cause of the Kedarnath disaster to the moral depravity he associated with “honey-mooning couples” reveling in the upscale modern hotels built there by local entrepreneurs.16 A toy manufacturer from Delhi I met while he was on pilgrimage in Kedarnath blamed the disaster on the anger of Kedarnath Mahadev “because of the politicians partying in Kedarnath with alcohol.” But more important, there is a sense that this climate-change-related disaster was the result of people acting improperly toward each other, toward the natural world, and toward the divine powers of this region. Many of the people I spoke with about the severe weather in the central Himalaya referred to divine agency

250

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

simply as the “gods” or devatas, but since Kedarnath is an important center for the worship of the supreme god Shiva, some identified it with this particular divinity, who is often associated with destruction. A priest in Gangotri explained, “Mahadev is very angry with us. That is why he performed his tandav [destructive dance] in Kedarnath.” A man residing in Gangotri had more to say: “Shiva danced the tandav in Kedarnath because of the way we have been acting. Mahadev caused a big rock to stop just before his temple and saved it, but all the other buildings were destroyed. Bad things were going on in the big hotels that only care about money. They are destroying our mountains and because of this Shiva punished them. He will punish more if we do not change our ways.” The notion that the 2013 disaster was the result of Shiva’s displeasure with human faults and ill treatment of the environment remains common in the Char Dham region. One of the names for Shiva is Gangadhara, the “Bearer of Ganga,” and Shiva is typically pictured with Ganga entangled in his locks. In many ways, Ganga is Shiva’s constant companion, and the two are closely related in the central Himalaya. She is considered by many to be the liquid form of his Shakti—the energy that creates and nourishes the world. Because the waters of Ganga mingle with Shiva’s mountainous presence, some people regard her as the divine agent behind the wrathful actions that took the form of the disasters. A resident of Uttarkashi said to me when I was there after the deadly floods of 2012 and 2013, “Ganga Ma came raging through here and did a lot of damage. Now she is angry with us for what we are doing and is punishing us.” To give a better sense of the degree to which this indicates an emerging change in the theology of this river goddess, I cite the religious studies scholar Diana Eck (2012), who has studied Ganga for several decades. She writes in her book India: A Sacred Geography, “The river is most universally known to Hindus as ‘Mother Ganga.’ She is embracing, nourishing, and forgiving, without a trace of anger” (161). In her study of the pollution of the Ganga conducted in the 1990s, the anthropologist Kelly Alley (2002) further attests this feminine theology that views the river goddess as a good mother who pardons all abuses. Her worshipers claim that Ma Ganga absolves all human immorality; she “cleans up the messes her children make and forgives them lovingly. In this way, she cleans up other kinds of dirtiness people bring to her and excuses dirty behavior with maternal kindness. Ganga is forgiving rather than angry about human dirtiness” (98). All this, however, seems to be changing in the context of the weather disasters now occurring with greater force and frequency in the Himalaya, where Ganga is starting to show an unforgiving anger.

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

251

Because the threats to the health of the Ganga, including her glaciers and many tributaries, are connected to the moral degeneracy of humans in the minds of the devotees of this river goddess in the central Himalaya of Garhwal, the solution they promote to the precarious climate situation is a return to righteous action. Here too in the Garhwali relational devotion to Mother Ganga we see a close link between environmental conditions and human moral behavior. If humans ignore the call to resume virtuous action, the women Drew (2017) interviewed assured her that Ganga will “save herself ” and will respond by showing her “furious side” in the form of floods and landslides (80). I heard expression of many similar notions. A man in Uttarkashi told me, “The destructive storms and floods we have been experiencing are Ma Ganga’s punishment for the way we have been behaving.” Ganga, then, regarded as a powerful divinity yet one increasing vulnerable to human abuse, is recognized to be a formidable agent who can inflict punishment.17 This includes the Gangotri Glacier. Drew (2017) was told that immoral human behavior “angered the goddess Ganga, and caused her to recede out of displeasure with human conduct” (194). The moral challenge for devotees of Ganga is to adopt upstanding behavior anew, particularly in relation to the environment. Such an interpretation, however, does not necessarily exclude recognition of climate science. I had an instructive conversation with a young policeman in Kedarnath. I began by asking him whether he thinks about the Kedarnath disaster of 2013. “Yes, I think about it all the time,” he responded. I asked him what he thought caused it. He began with a very impressive and detailed explanation of the atmospheric causes of the storm and the effect its warm rains had on the rapid deterioration of the Chorabari Glacier. This, however, was followed by an explanation of how Bholenath Shiva was angry because of the way people are treating his mountain abode. “People are not respecting the place. They throw garbage in the rivers. They create much pollution in the air and on the ground. For this reason, Bholenath was angry and caused the disaster.” I had other conversations with residents of Uttarakhand in which they moved seamlessly between discourse on climate change and considerations of the current mood of Mother Ganga. Drew (2014) also found that Garhwalis are beginning to consider more climate science while simultaneously holding onto beliefs in the divine beings that animate the landscapes in which they live. This leads her to regard the blending of climate-change science and local ways of knowing as “promising, as it signals the evolution and the potential hybridization of epistemologies about climate change phenomena that are beginning to compel people to action” (35).

252

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

In my earlier study of religious responses (Haberman 2006) to the pollution of the Yamuna River, I found that some of Mother Yamuna’s devotees were beginning to acknowledge limits to the goddess’s willingness to forgive environmental transgressions and suggested that she may now be punishing people with horrible diseases like cancer caused by the human-generated pollutants being dumped into the river. Likewise, some of the people I spoke with in the Char Dham region in 2019 made the connection between punishable human behavior and the increase in severe weather: “We are now being punished by the gods with bad weather because of all the bad things we are putting into the air,” a man in Gangotri explained. Similarly, a man in Kedarnath told me, “We are putting harmful gases into the atmosphere, and now the gods are making the atmosphere give us back destructive storms.” Because of the strong identification between divinity and the land, the punishment of the gods also comes in the form of punishment from the mountains (landslides), glaciers (GLOFs), and rivers (raging floods). The extreme weather and concomitant disasters caused by the gods is a direct response to the changes caused by the burning of fossil fuels to support new extravagant lifestyles. The recent capitalistic materialism of globalization has led to an obsession with money and the erosion of traditional values, perceived to be important in a lifestyle of just restraint. “People used to act with love, but nowadays everyone is crazy for money. They cut down the forests and treat the land very badly. The water in the river is becoming less and less because the glaciers are melting,” a taxi driver in Uttarkashi complained to me one day. Excessive lifestyles and the concomitant rising level of human sin have enraged the gods and made them create devastating storms and burst glacial dams as punishment. Whitmore (2018) quotes a Garhwali man as saying, “In Uttarakhand the building of roads, digging, sand extraction, electricity projects, etc. happened so fast, and in such an abnormal way, that the rivers decided to assume their dreadful manifestation. . . . Now the rivers are saying that we are more powerful than your government, your planning commissions, your real estate agents, and your contractors” (171). The increasingly erratic weather in the central Himalaya, then, is understood to be both the indication and result of moral decline; furthermore, it is a warning of divine anger. Some speculate that the gods’ anger toward humans that manifests as extreme weather has gotten to be so great that it is a clear sign of the looming apocalyptic end of the age of decadence known as kaliyug.18 In his work on the devi-devata system in the western Himalayan region of Kullu Valley, Halperin (2019) found reference to deities and the concept of kaliyug in the discourse around the changing climate there. A woman in

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

253

Manali tells him, “Look at these new leaves [on a nearby tree]. It is autumn now, the time of falling leaves, and yet new leaves are sprouting on this tree. That’s the way it is. It is Kaliyug now, everything is upside-down (194).”19 Rising temperatures, less snowfall, disturbed and extreme precipitation patterns are becoming the norm as villagers in this area of the Himalaya struggle to make sense of the changes. Here too humans, gods, and environment are connected in interrelated, reciprocal relationships. Human behavior is deeply implicated in the deterioration of the environment in which the gods are embedded. A priest assisting pilgrims with their worship of the Ganga in Gangotri informed me that the destructive storms were happening “because of the sins (pap) that are in our hearts.” What kind of sins? “Pollution is our sin! This has made the gods very angry.” Human ways of being in the world are degenerating, and the gods have become angry, altering the weather as a punishment. Many see this as a divine warning, but believe that humans have strayed so far that mass destruction is inevitable. During my conversation with Swami Sundarananda of Gangotri, I asked him what he thinks the future holds. “The gods are angry and people are not paying attention to the warnings. All will be destroyed. A great destruction (maha-vinash) is coming.” Halperin (2019) documents how such pessimistic views have led people in the nearby western Himalaya to express “creeping doubts regarding the very fundamentals of villagers’ holistic worldview—the degree of agency they and their goddess actually possess in controlling their region’s weather and the validity of their traditional understanding of the whole system” (204). New global environmental changes have produced challenges on a scale that test the very power of the gods; Halperin found a growing fear that global warming may even be beyond the powers of the gods to influence. “The gods of Kullu, and by implication their local devotees, are slowly losing control of their ecology” (211). While reflecting on the new apparent limitations of the gods, some villagers even expressed fear of “divine desertion.” For others, however, not all is lost and there is some hope for a better outcome. There is a sense that things can still be turned around and the worse avoided if humans are willing to change their ways. Specifically, hope lies in a return to a more respectful relationship with the gods of the land. I asked a number of people how to please the gods and turn things around. One man in Ukhimath, the winter home of Kedarnath, put it simply: “To once again respect the land and nature.” An elderly man who has lived his whole life around Uttarkashi said, “To stop this we need to respect the gods more.” (As we have seen, in a sense there is no real difference between treating the gods with respect and nature well.) A woman I spoke with in Uttarkashi who has been involved for

254

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

years in efforts to restore the health of the Ganga River elaborated: “The gods and the land are the same (Devata aur bhumi ek hi hai). And we are mistreating both. The floods are like a warning slap to a child. They are a wake-up call telling us to change our ways. We need to respect (samman) the gods, the land, the rivers, the mountains, and sky. We need to stop our pollution, which is a great sin (maha-pap). If we do this the gods will be pleased and the destructive storms will stop.” Although this is expressed in very different language, I am struck by a certain degree of overlap with the dire warnings and positive recommendations voiced by many climate-change scientists today. Human behavior remains a major factor in the holistic worldview that connects humans, gods, and environment, and a return to respectful relationships is the key to a sustainable future. A commonly articulated view pointedly involves both the mighty Shiva and Mother Ganga in considerations of the weather-related disasters in the Char Dham region of the central Himalaya. If humans return to a more harmonious way of interacting with the natural entities and ecosystems, then the anger of Shiva and Ganga will be appeased and the new level of destructive storms will cease. The extreme weather that results in melting glaciers and raging rivers from this perspective is regarded as the means the gods are using to make humans realize the consequences of our immoral behavior, particularly as it relates to the environment. Humans have the chance to return to a more mutually beneficial relationship with the natural world, but if the gods’ stormy warnings are not heeded, then kaliyug’s massive destruction and gruesome end is near. A woman I spoke with in Uttarkashi put it simply: “We need to return to a more caring attitude toward the land or we will continue to be punished. If this keeps up, there will be no place to live.” Conclusions The mountains and rivers of the central Himalaya have for centuries been destination sites in a quest for life blessings. The Char Dham pilgrimage is the most prominent form of this pursuit today. The point highlighted in this essay, however, is that the cultural climate is changing along with the environmental climate. One significant theological change that now appears to be underway within Himalayan Hinduism as a result of climate change is the transformation of the primary conception of the gods from those who bless to those who punish. This theological transformation is paralleled by a concomitant change in the assumed religious experience promised in the Char Dham pilgrimage. Whitmore (2018) notes, “When I spoke with visitors in Kedarnath in 2007 and 2008 about what they felt while present in Kedarnath, the answer would often

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

255

include the words peace (Hindi: shanti) and/or satisfaction (Hindi: santushti). Some reported experiencing shanti because by virtue of being in a place like Kedarnath they have left all the worries of their daily lives behind (this is a very common sentiment), and santushti because they had successfully arrived in Kedarnath and by doing so had affirmed their connection to the older layers of Hindu traditions of which yatra was an important emblem” (162). Those pilgrims involved in the floods of 2013, however, reported something dramatically different: a sense of dismay in the face of what appeared to be a reversal of what the Char Dham pilgrimage had formerly promised. Hindu gods, of course, have always punished as well as blessed humans, but now the scale seems to be tipping. While protecting his own abode of the Kedarnath temple with a huge boulder, Shiva performed his tandav dance of destruction on the rest of the pilgrimage town, causing the death of thousands. So too the devatas of the mountains and goddesses of the rivers are chastising people with landslides and raging floods. Fear of newly emerging divine retribution has had a lingering effect on the Char Dham pilgrimage. Although the number of pilgrims participating in the Char Dham Yatra since the Kedarnath disaster is again increasing,20 there is an enduring sense that peace and satisfaction may not be guaranteed and that the encounter with divinity in the central Himalaya may not be a beneficial one. Furthermore, the severe storms, deterioration of glaciers, and GLOFs brought about by climate change are understood by many in terms of religious sins and diminishing morality. Such events are often thought of in terms of pollution. The erosion of traditional ways that involve concern and reverence for the land are being replaced by more materialistic and utilitarian ways of thinking that accompany developmental globalization. As is happening throughout much of the world, population in the central Himalaya has soared, human habitation has expanded, consumption of material goods has exploded, plastics in expanding municipal garbage dumps are set on fire, and carbon fuels are burned at an alarming rate. Among the changes this has brought about is an increase in erratic weather. Here too religion comes into play, as current human behavior is understood as an offense against the gods. It appears that in immanent worldviews such as Himalayan Hinduism, wherein the gods are closely linked to the environment, climate change becomes more of a religious problem. The result is not only a religious interpretation of the effects of climate change as the rage of the gods, but also a moral imperative and incentive for behavioral change. If the erratic weather is heeded as a divine warning, all may yet be well; otherwise, some say, Shiva will inevitably dance his ultimate destructive maha-tandav and finish life for humans altogether.

256

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

David L. H a ber m a n is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He is author of River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India, and Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan. Not e s 1. This study represents my initial entry into issues related to religion and climate change in the central Himalaya, much of it instigated by conversations during a three-month stay in the region the summer of 2014. With the support of a short-term senior research grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies, I conducted more explicit and extensive research in the Char Dham region during May, June, and July 2019. 2. Commonly referred to as the Ganges in English. 3. In addition to numerous articles and several monographs, former studies of Hinduism and ecology include two useful volumes of essays written by various scholars (Chapple and Tucker 2000; Nelson 1998). The notable work of Christopher Chapple highlights the contributions that the Hindu renouncers’ value of minimal consumption might make toward an environmentally friendly ethic (Chapple 1998). 4. The lingam is an aniconic cylindrical shape; considered to be an embodied form of Shiva, it is commonly found at the center of a temple dedicated to this important Hindu god. Its literal meaning is an “indication” of that which is beyond all indication. 5. Luke Whitmore (2018) writes, “Valley spaces in the economic catchment area of the Char Dham Yatra and Hemkund Sahib became spaces primarily oriented around the yatra tourism of middle-class pilgrims, whose expectations for comfortable travel and whose sheer numbers far exceeded the long-term carrying capacity of the mountain environment” (103). 6. Early rigvedic hymns, for example, celebrate water for its life-blessing qualities, and many of the Puranas declare that, as “mothers of the world,” all rivers are sacred. 7. The Char Dham site Yamunotri is the major site for worship of the Goddess Yamuna in this region. For more on this river goddess, see Haberman 2006. 8. A recent study has shown that there has been a doubling of the average glacier loss in the Himalaya between the 2000–2016 and 1975–2000 periods as a result of accelerating effects of global warming. See Mauer et al. 2019.

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

257

9. Deadly floods also occurred in Uttarakhand during the summer of 2015, causing the Char Dham Yatra to be suspended and indicating that this is now a general pattern in the central Himalaya. See Basu and Singh (2015). 10. Personal conversation with Amod Panwar, leader of the team from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering who moved into Kedarnath immediately after the disaster for emergency care and rebuilding, June 6, 2019. 11. Much of my information for the events that occurred on June 16 and 17 was drawn from the journalist Hridayesh Joshi (2016). 12. Anon., “My Trip to Chardham Yatra,” April 3, 2012. http://www .mytripjournal.com/travel-668444. 13. Personal conversation, May 11, 2019. 14. This and the following conversations took place with residents of and visitors to the Bhagirathi-Ganga valley during May, June, and July 2014, and in the Bhagirathi-Ganga and Mandakini-Ganga valleys during May, June, and July 2019. The majority of these I translate from conversations in Hindi. 15. Halperin (2017) finds a similar understanding in his study of climate change in the western Himalaya, writing, “Almost everyone in Old Manali and Dhungri blames the changing climate on humans’ declining morals” (82). And from her ethnographic work in the central Himalaya, Drew (2014) reports, “Many of my informants conceived of pollution and environmental degradation to be a signifier of our moral corruption. We have lost respect for the world and the Gods that inhabit it, they argued, and these Gods have become angry” (34). 16. Aitken (2016, x). 17. Drew (2017) records one woman living in Uttarkashi as saying about those who would harm the river: “Now it is up to Mother Ganga; when the time is right, they’ll get their punishment” (127). 18. On a comparative note, Inge Bolin (2009) finds similar dire predictions for the future expressed by the Quechua people in the Peruvian Andes: “When all the snow is gone from the mountain tops, the end of the world as we know it is near, because there is no life without water” (228). They also share a sense with people living in the Himalaya that the changing climate may be sign of the wrath of the gods: “Pre-Columbian religions and the belief of today’s indigenous societies have been based on the benevolence of Mother Earth, and the sacred Apus, those mountains whose snow and ice fields provide the life-giving waters, and on the mountain lakes that retain it. As the snowfields melt due to global climate change, these deities lose their powers. . . . Some indigenous people have wondered what they have done wrong to deserve the wrath of the gods who began to restrict the water that flows from their mountainsides” (232).

258

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

19. Halperin (2014) also notes that people suggest that the pace of kaliyug is speeding up in face of the enormous changes occurring in the Himalaya. 20. The 2019 Char Dham Yatra may turn out to involve a record number of pilgrims; Kedarnath seems to have received the largest number of pilgrims ever.

R efer ence s Aitken, Bill. 2016. Foreword to Hridayesh Joshi, Rage of the River. Gurugram: Penguin Books India. ———. 1992. Seven Sacred Rivers. New Delhi: Penguin. Alley, Kelly D. 2002. On the Bank of the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Anthwal, Ashish, Varun Joshi, Archana Sharma, and Smriti Anthwal. 2006. “Retreat of Himalayan Glaciers—Indicator of Climate Change.” Nature and Science 4 (4): 53–59. Basu, Soma, and Jyotsna Singh. 2015. “Monsoon Arrives Early; Kills over 30 People in Uttarakhand.” Down to Earth, September 17. Bhardwaj, Surinder. 1983. Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bhushal, Ramesh. 2019. “Ignoring Climate Change in the Himalayas.” thirdpole. net, January 9. https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/2019/01/09/ignoring -climate-change-in-the-himalayas. Bolin, Inge. 2009. “The Glaciers of the Andes Are Melting: Indigenous and Anthropological Knowledge Merge in Restoring Water Resources.” In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, 228–39. New York: Routledge. Chanchani, Nachiket. 2019. Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Chapple, Christopher Key. 1998. “Toward an Indigenous Indian Environmentalism.” In Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India, edited by Lance Nelson, 3–37. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chapple, Christopher Key, and Mary Evelyn Tucker. 2000. Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dobhal, Dwarika P. 2009. “Climate Change and Glacier Retreat in the Indian Himalaya: An Overview.” In Climate Change at the Third Pole: The Impact of Climate Instability on Himalayan Ecosystems and Himalayan Communities, edited by Vandana Shiva and Vinod Kumar Bhatt, 67–76. New Delhi: Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

A ngry Gods a n d R agi ng R i v er s

259

Dobhal, Dwarika P., Anil K. Gupta, Manish Mehta, and Deen Dayal Khandelwal. 2013. “Kedarnath Disaster: Facts and Plausible Causes.” Current Science 105 (2): 171–74. Drew, Georgina. 2014. “A Retreating Goddess? Conflicting Perceptions of the Ecological Change near Gangotri-Gaumukh.” In How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change, edited by Robin Globus Veldman, Andrew Szasz, and Randolf Haluza-DeLay, 23–36. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Eck, Diana L. 2012. India: A Sacred Geography. New York: Harmony. Gergan, Joseph T. 2018. “Hypothetical Perspective on Kedarnath Floods 16th and 17th June 2013.” Unpublished manuscript. Grossman, Daniel. 2015. “Unnatural Disaster: How Global Warming Helped Cause India’s Catastrophic Flood.” Yale Environment 360, June 23. Gusain, Raju. 2014. “Pilgrims Desert Gangotri after Last Year’s Kedarnath Tragedy.” Daily Mail, June 28. Haberman, David L. 2006. River of Love in the Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2013. People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan. New York: Oxford University Press. Halperin, Ehud. 2014. “The Age of Kali: Contemporary Iterations of the Kaliyug in the Kullu Valley of the Western Himalayas.” Nidan 26 (1): 42–64. ———. 2017. “Winds of Change: Religion and Climate in the Western Himalayas.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85 (1): 64–111. ———. 2019. The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess: Hadimba, Her Devotees, and Religion in Rapid Change. New York: Oxford University Press. Joshi, Hridayesh. 2016. Rage of the River: The Untold Story of the Kedarnath Disaster. Gurugram: Penguin Books India. Mathur, Nayanika. 2015. “It’s a Conspiracy Theory and Climate Change: Of Beastly Encounters and Cervine Disappearances in Himalayan India.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 87–111. Mauer, J. M., J. M. Schaefer, S. Rupper, and A. Corley. 2019. “Acceleration of Ice Loss across the Himalayas over the Past 40 Years.” Science Advances 5 (6): 1–12. Narayanan, Vasudha. 2001. “Water, Wood, and Wisdom: Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Tradition.” Daedalus 130 (4): 179–206. Nelson, Lance, ed. 1998. Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India. Albany: State University of New York Press.

260

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Ramanathan, Veerbhadran, Muvva V. Ramana, Gregory Roberts, Dohyeong Kim, Craig Corrigan, Chul Chung, and David Winker. 2007. “Warming Trends in Asia Amplified by Brown Cloud Solar Absorption.” Nature 448 (7153): 575–78. Sutherland, Peter. 1998. Travelling Gods and Government by Deity: An Ethnohistory of Power, Representation and Agency in West Himalayan Polity. PhD diss., Oxford University. ———. 2006. “T(R)opologies of Rule (Raj): Ritual Sovereignty and Theistic Subjection.” European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 29–30:82–119. Thakkar, Himanshu. 2013. “India’s Himalayan Floods a Man-Made Disaster.” International Rivers, June 21. https://www.internationalrivers.org/resources /uttarakhand-floods-a-%E2%80%9Cman-made-disaster%E2%80%9D-8019. Whitmore, Luke. 2018. Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ten

k

RECASTING THE SACRED Offering Ceremonies, Glacier Melt, and Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes

K arsten Paerr ega ar d, University of Gothenburg The sun was ga ining str ength and the morning noise from Huancayo’s traffic signaled that the city was heading for another busy day. It was June 21, 2014, and I was waiting for Carlos, a Peruvian anthropologist and an acquaintance of mine for many years, who had promised to pick me up for a daylong ride to attend an offering ceremony at Huaytapallana (5,597 meters above sea level), the third-highest mountain in Peru’s central highlands located just outside Huancayo. At 8:00 a.m. Carlos turned up on a motorbike together with his son, Rolando, who was driving a four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle. On Rolando’s invitation, I joined the three other passengers already in the vehicle, and shortly afterward, we were making our way out of Huancayo, a city of almost half a million inhabitants and a regional hub for trade, smaller industries, education, and other economic activities in Peru’s central highlands. Once we had left Huancayo, the road changed from pavement to dirt and got narrower, which made the climb not only more strenuous but also more congested. During the week, it is mostly truck drivers who use the road to bring merchandise to and from Huancayo, but on this day the traffic included private cars and buses packed with people of all ages who all were going to Huaytapallana. None of my three fellow passengers knew the others before leaving Huancayo, but we soon got into a conversation about the trip and the expectations of the coming event. One of the passengers said she was born in Huancayo but had lived most of her life elsewhere, including a number of years in the United States. Nonetheless, she exclaimed, “I feel very Peruvian,” a feeling she said had grown stronger upon her return to Huancayo a few years ago. She said that this was her first trip to the mountain and stated, “By going to Huaytapallana

261

262

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

I express my feeling of being Peruvian,” adding, “but it also makes me feel Huanka, so Huanka [the ethnic term for Huancayo’s pre-Hispanic ancestors].” One of the two other passengers said that it was also her first trip to Huaytapallana. The woman claimed that she wanted to pay respect because it could bring her luck. “If I give the mountain something, it listens to my wishes and returns my offering,” she asserted. The third woman told us that she has been on Huaytapallana several times, though never on June 21. She said that it was the celebration of solstice and the welcoming of the Andean New Year that had incited her to visit Huaytapallana on this particular day. One of the women then inquired into my reasons for visiting Huaytapallana. “Plain curiosity,” I replied. And when the woman asked Rolando the same question, he responded, “I live off tourism and I go there whenever someone pays me. Sometimes I spend the night there with a group of tourists, so I know the mountain at day as well as at night.” Even though my travel companions and I were attending the same event, then, we were driven by very different motives. Our only stop between Huancayo and Huaytapallana was the community of Acopalca at the edge of the puna, the bleak Andean upland above four thousand meters above sea level. Officials from the regional government of Junín had made a roadblock in the community to inspect the passing vehicles and register the passengers. They also asked travelers to sign a declaration affirming their intention to protect the environment of Huaytapallana in accordance with the decree the Peruvian government issued in 2011, which declares the mountain an area of protected conservation and seeks to mitigate the environmental impact on its melting glacier. Rolando signed the declaration and returned it to the inspectors, who, after a quick look at me and the other passengers, told him to move on. Shortly afterward, we entered the puna, where an unsettling scene was taking place: a long line of vehicles struggling to make the last steep rise to Huaytapallana produced a thick smoke that disturbed the view of the mountain’s white glacier. The image of polluted mountain air generated a heated discussion among my fellow passengers about the visitors’ behavior and the authorities’ lack of control. Our outrage at other people’s carelessness only got worse when we saw the plastic plates, cups and bottles, and other kinds of litter that previous visitors had dropped along the road. One of my fellow passenger asked, “How can people behave like that? Imagine the damage they do to the environment!” Another declared, “Visitors who leave their garbage should be fined. Or even better. They should be banned from coming here.” We continued discussing different ways of alleviating the impact the growing tourism has on Huaytapallana for a while until as the last passenger rhetorically asked, “Well, we’re all part of the problem, aren’t we?” Her question brought the conversation

263

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

to a sudden close. Then Rolando cried, “We’re here. Isn’t it beautiful!” In front of us Huaytapallana’s ice-covered summit appeared between the blue sky and a turquoise-colored lake. A rgu m en t a n d Scope The research questions triggering this chapter depart from the conversation with my fellow passengers about the motives that drove us to participate in the offering ceremony and the consternation we felt when facing the troubling image of smoke and garbage on the way to Huaytapallana. Why has the offering ceremony become an important public event in Huancayo? Why does it gather such a variety of people? What is causing their concern for Huaytapallana and why did the visible evidence of other humans’ presence on the mountain cause my fellow passengers’ indignation? What do they expect in return for their offerings and how do they imagine their offerings will affect the mountain’s suffering from global warming? And finally, how do they account for and deal with the paradox that by visiting Huaytapallana and taking part in the offering ceremony they contribute to the very problem they intend to alleviate: the retreat of the mountain’s glacier? I answer these questions by exploring the material dimension of offering ceremonies in a context of climate change. More specifically, I investigate how the participants in the event at Huaytapallana on June 21, the solstice that its organizers identify with the Andean New Year, accounted for the physical impact of their own and other people’s presence on the mountain, which includes anything from the remains of the offering ceremony to car smoke and the cans, bottles, and plastic items that the visitors leave on the ground. The focus of my analysis is on how various actors in the ceremony interpret this impact and how such interpretations create tensions between its organizers of the event and the surrounding society. My argument is that global climate change brings to the forefront the material aspect of offering ceremonies by prompting the participants in the events to face the consequences of their activities and assume responsibility for the remains of the objects they offer. I also argue that climate change highlights a potential dichotomy in all sacrifice ceremonies: the giver’s material footprint on the site of the ceremony undermines its intended effect, which is to contribute to the well-being of the receiver. By instigating the giver to reflect on the environmental impact of her or his own agency and view the offering as not only a symbolic object that brings prosperity but also a physical item that may cause harm, climate change and glacier melt alter the meaning of the sacred and the idea of a divine power that sustains it and challenge the

264

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

concept’s definition in the classical literature on religion and sacrifice. Rather than referring to a distant, metaphysical being with the capacity to protect or punish humans, in an anthropogenic world the sacred represents the effort the giver makes in collaboration with the receiver to save planet Earth from moral degradation and environmental destruction. More specifically, in this chapter, I refer to the sacred as the image of human and nonhuman coexistence that pilgrims create in the offering ceremony. Fifteen years ago, it was mainly local livestock raisers who made offerings to the mountain, asking for permission to use its pastures, and because the objects they offered mostly were organic, the leftovers of the ceremony did not attract much attention. Today, the event has become a regional gathering for people from mostly urban areas who visit Huaytapallana for a variety of reasons, one being the concern for the environment and the mountain’s future, another the search for new (or old) social identities, as described in the opening scene. Many of the new visitors leave their nonorganic remains, including bottles and disposable tableware, on the offering site, which has made the ceremony a matter of dispute between the ritual specialists who conduct the offerings and the regional government that is responsible for Huaytapallana’s protection. The dilemma of making offerings and the tensions it causes are amplified by the participants’ perception of climate change, which many interpret as a local rather than global phenomenon (Paerregaard 2018a). Despite attributing the rising temperatures to the regional mining industry and Huancayo’s air pollution, they believe that Huaytapallana’s glacier melt is caused by the visitors’ energy, particularly when they engage in physical contact with the ice. Some even believe that humans’ growing presence on Huaytapallana eventually will lead to the mountain’s death. From this perspective, the offering ceremony threatens Huaytapallana’s prosperity as much as it contributes to it, which raises important ethnical questions about not only the pilgrims’ but also the fieldworker’s role in the event. Did we all take the necessary precautions to respect the mountain’s symbolic power and did we all make sure to protect its environment and not leave any items on the ground? This chapter has six sections. First, I offer a short introduction into mountain offerings in the Andes and their social and cultural importance in contemporary Peruvian society. Second, I discuss the anthropogenic effects of Andean offering practices. Third, I provide an ethnographic account of the June 21 event. Fourth, I explain Huaytapallana’s role in Huancayo’s water supply and its symbolic significance for the city’s political leaders, indigenous movements, and environmental activists. Fifth, I examine the tensions the offering ceremony

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

265

on June 21 causes both among the visitors and within the surrounding society. I conclude by discussing the implications of my insights for our understanding of sacrifice and the relation between climate change and the sacred. A n t h ropogen ic Effects of Offer i ngs Global climate change calls for a review of the classical theories of sacrifice that inquired into the symbolic meaning of offering rituals and their importance for the giver’s communication with the receiver but neglected their material aspects (Carter 2003; Childon 1995; Hubert and Mauss 1964). The growing awareness of anthropogenic change impels us to view the relinquishing of the offering objects as more than a symbolic act, as Hubert and Mauss (1964) did, and to explore the giver’s agency and the physical impact of the offerings on the environment with a particular focus on how they transform the human-nature relationship and the meaning of the sacred. To do so, I suggest, we need to examine not only how people’s cultural and religious ideas shape their climate perceptions, as several scholars have done (Crona et al. 2013; Green and Raygorodetskty 2010; Murphy et al. 2016; Orlove et al. 2010; Paerregaard 2013), but also how climate change challenges offering practices and the imaginaries of the sacred that inform them. As the opening scene showed, the participants in the event found others’ as well as their own agency disturbing, which suggests that the offering ceremony is an arena for action as well as for self-reflection on its consequences. At the heart of this self-reflection is the changing meaning of the offering once it is stripped of its sacred magic and defined as trash, and as the participants reflect on their personal contribution to global warming, which many perceive as produced by their own rather than others’ activities. Recent research highlights the contextuality of people’s perception of climate change that often is shaped by their own experiences and cultural ideas and therefore is at variance with the science-based and Western-generated global discourse on climate change (Crate 2011; Mathur 2015). As Jasanoff (2010) points out, climate science tends to separate the epistemic from the normative and detaches global facts from local value, destabilizing knowledge at the same time as it seeks to stabilize. She continues, “It thus cuts against the grain of ordinary experience, the basis for our social arrangements and ethical instincts” (237). Ethnographic studies bring home this point by showing how global discourses on climate change intertwine with indigenous cosmology, local morality, and national politics and how this merging of knowledge systems generates unexpected and controversial ideas about the human-nature

266

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

relationship and the cause of global warming (Paerregaard 2014). A similar blurring of climate perceptions, political tensions, and social and cultural change takes place in the offering ceremony on Huaytapallana. The current practice of visiting Huaytapallana dates back to 1994 when an Andean shaman gathered a small group of people to celebrate the Andean New Year and pay respect to the mountain. The shaman’s initiative was supported by some of Huancayo’s urban intellectuals, who saw the event as a pretext for reviving the city’s ethnic identity as Huanka in the wake of the political violence that had tormented it (and the rest of Peru) in the late 1980 and early 1990s. The attendance remained small for a number of years, but in the mid-2000s the ceremony gained momentum at a time when Huancayo experienced rapid economic growth and the introduction of modern consumer habits and lifestyles. Huancayo’s new prosperity has also created environmental problems, social insecurity, and political corruption, inducing many to question the meaning of modernity and turn toward the city’s shamans and its ethnic past in a search for moral guidelines and spiritual inspiration for conducting their lives. By centering the attention on nature’s sacredness and engaging in a dialogue with the nonhuman world, the offering ceremony and the shamans who organize it provide the participants with an answer to this quest. Moreover, as pointed out earlier, the ceremony prompts them to reflect on their own role in Huancayo’s environmental problems and the water shortage they create. In this event, Huaytapallana is consequently pictured not only as a symbol of Huancayo’s indigenous past and as a counterpoint to the city’s newly acquired modern lifestyle, but also as a bellwether of its current water crisis. My proposition, therefore, is that we examine the growing participation in the ceremony as a response to three recent developments in Huancayo: the revival of a regional indigenous identity, the emergence of modern lifestyles, and the concern for Huaytapallana’s melting glacier and the city’s deteriorating environment. A Day on t h e Mou n ta i n It was almost 11:00 a.m. when we reached Lazuntay, Huaytapallana’s glacier lake, where the offering ceremony was going to take place. Several hundred people had already arrived, and in the following hour the number of participants increased to more than five hundred. The bulk of the visitors were on the north side of the lake. They were mainly families and small groups of individuals from Huancayo and other cities in the region, many of whom were first-time visitors like myself and my travel companions. On the south side, around thirty members of a rural community from Huancavelica, a neighboring region, had

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

267

gathered. Finally, a small group representing a regional political party called Bloque Popular that aims to introduce socialist reforms inspired by the Inca society in Huancayo had set up their small camp at the main entrance to the lake. I visited the two latter groups, but I spent most of the day on the north side of the lake in the company of Carlos and the people he introduced me to. As is common in Andean offering rituals, many people had prepared mesas (tables), which consist of pieces of woven cloth on which all the items brought for the mountain are placed (Paerregaard 1989; Stensrud 2016). Among the objects to be offered were fresh and dried corn, flowers, a wide diversity of fruit, bread, biscuits, dried beans and lentils, sugar, chocolate, candies, fried chicken, plates of prepared food, herbs, chicha (corn beer), and spirits in plastic bottles, beer, soda, wine, whiskey (Chivas Regal in original cardboard boxes), cigarettes, coca leaves, and candles. Some mesas also included small figures of men and women engaged in sexual acts, toy cars and trucks, advertisements for electronic artifacts and wallets with identification papers, which suggested that the givers expected the offering to yield a return in the form of fertility, wealth, or legal status. Other visitors shared the expectation that the ceremony brings fortune. I saw a young couple who held a marriage ceremony in front of the mountain. I also spoke to several people who said that they had come to request Huaytapallana’s support to recover from illness or heal their physical incapacities. Driven by the hope that Huaytapallana’s meltwater has miraculous power, some even took a swim in Lazuntay or let relatives throw water from the lake onto their naked bodies. Shortly after noon, the organizers called people to assemble in a circle around the many mesas and offerings. Facing Huaytapallana’s glacier, a moderator introduced the event. In a mixture of Quechua and Spanish, he pointed out the importance of living in harmony with the apus (mountain deities) and pachamama (Mother Earth) as “our ancestors have taught us.” He also said that people must pay respect to Huaytapallana because it provides them with water and therefore is essential for their continual existence. The moderator, who was assisted by two flute players and two men dressed in yellow-and-red frocks and wearing masks of animals, then presented the ceremony’s three speakers. The first two were layas, a Quechua term for specialists conducting Andean offering ceremonies. The first laya to speak wore a long cotton gown partly covered by a woven cloth and with head and shoulders covered by a white cloth and delivered his speech in Quechua. He praised Huaytapallana for its spiritual power and expressed his gratitude for its generosity, after which he called out the names of not only the most important Andean mountains, but also the principal elements of the earth (pachamama and the oceans, for example) and

268

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

of the universe (the moon and the sun, for example). The man concluded by asking Huaytapallana to receive the many offerings people had brought. Wearing mundane clothing and dressed less spectacularly than the first speaker, the second laya also started by directly praising Huaytapallana’s sacred power in Quechua. He then turned to the audience, expressing in Spanish regret about the glacier melt and the harm it inflicts on the mountain, using Quechua terms such as yawarsonqo (his heart is bleeding), llaquikuyan (he is sad), and waqayan (he is crying) to emphasize its suffering. This laya also reminded the listeners that June 21 is the Andean New Year, a time to connect with their forefathers and learn to live in harmony with the apus and pachamama. After honoring Huaytapallana in Quechua, the third speaker, who wore a poncho and a stiff, wide round hat, switched to Spanish and urged listeners to collect all waste on the ground. He pointed out that the organizers had signed an agreement with the regional government that holds them responsible for keeping the protected area of Huaytapallana clean. The man said that the mountain’s current suffering is due to “the big transnational companies that exploit and hurt the earth” and to people living in the cities “who do not always understand how their contaminating habits damage the environment.” On the contrary, the speaker emphasized, the people who live in Andean communities and who worship Huaytapallana and pachamama know how to live in peace with the environment. Without Huaytapallana, Huancayo will die, he contended. Finally, a woman addressed the crowd in a mixture of Quechua and Spanish, underscoring the importance of such Andean values as respect for the environment and harmony between humans and their surroundings. The four speeches were accompanied by a small orchestra that played Andean flute music while two men, one standing on a rock close to Lazuntay and the other on the mountainside above the crowd, alternately blew a pututo (a big seashell used as instrument in Andean ceremonies to make a hollow sound). When the speeches were over, a man passed a bowl full of coca leaves, which he had gathered from the mesas, among the participants, asking people to pick the leaves that were intact for the offering ceremony.1 Once the bowl had been passed around, the moderator announced that the central moment of the ceremony had arrived: the greeting of Huaytapallana to welcome the Andean New Year. Looking toward the mountain, he raised his arms and said in Quechua: “Great apu, we have come here to greet you and show you respect.” In response, the crowd imitated his gesture, saluting Huaytapallana while the two men with pututos sounded their instruments. The solemn atmosphere lasted several minutes, after which people started to embrace and wish each other a

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

269

happy new year. The forceful noise of a piece of ice that broke off the glacier, however, interrupted the cheerful mood for a moment, reminding people not only of Huaytapallana’s spiritual power, but also of the physical power that global warming and glacier melt release. People reacted very differently to the sudden breaking off of piece from Huaytapallana’s glacier. A man next to me said, “Huaytapallana has heard our prayers.” Meanwhile, a woman asked, “What will happen to Huaytapallana when the ice is gone?” In the third and last part of the ceremony, people carried their offerings to the slope between the ice and the lake, where they settled in small groups and started to prepare the act of offering. Meanwhile, a brass band of around ten musicians who were dressed in suit and tie stood above the offering scene entertaining the crowd. I gathered with my travel companions Carlos and Rolando around a small fire that some of their acquaintances had started. To initiate the ceremony, Carlos lit the candles and incense and set fire to some of offering items (e.g., coca leaves), leaving the less flammable items (fruit, fresh corn, wine, chicha, and spirits) on the ground. The fact that only two matches were needed to light the candles and the fire, Carlos later told me, was a sign that the mountain had heard his prayers. He then opened the wine and the whiskey, poured them into some cups he had brought, and invited everybody to drink. Before each drink, we all dropped some of the wine and whiskey to the ground before saluting Huaytapallana. Afterward, Carlos asked us to empty the bottles by pouring the wine in a straight line below the fire and the whiskey in a circle around it. He also offered us cigarettes and coca leaves to protect us against dangerous spirits. Smoke was now coming up from other fires, and all around us people were standing with their arms lifted to greet Huaytapallana. Shortly afterward, I saw several individuals returning from the glacier with chunks of ice. I asked a young boy who held an icicle with his gloved hands why he had come to Huaytapallana and what he was going to do with the ice. The boy, who wore suit and tie, answered that his father was a musician in the brass brand and that he planned to take the ice with him to school the coming Monday. “It’ll will bring luck to me and my class,” he explained to me. At around 2:00 p.m., the offering ceremony was over and people began to descend from the mountainside. Some prepared for an immediate trip home, and others stayed to chat in informal groups. A few even took a late swim in the lake. Two women had put up small stalls and were selling hot food, and a group of five elderly men stood around three cases of beer drinking heavily, but without drawing much attention. I used this opportunity to mingle with people, asking them about Huaytapallana and the ceremony and, because time was short,

270

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

setting up a couple of interviews in Huancayo for the days to come. A woman said to me that she was very happy to attend the event but that Huaytapallana’s glacier retreat had taken her by surprise. A man next to her suggested that the mountain was growing old and that the disappearance of the ice will lead to its death, which he said could be seen as a pachakuti, a Quechua term for the turnaround of the world and the start of a new epoch in human history. “It’s something that has occurred in the Andean world before,” the man claimed. He also contended that “climate change is nothing new.” Another woman I talked with said that she was concerned about the wishes she had made. “I hope Huaytapallana has listened to my prayers,” she told me. Somewhat differently, a man in his late sixties who said that he had participated in the offering ceremony since it was initiated in the mid-1990s saw the ceremony as a political statement. He declared, “I’m here because I’m anti-minero, anti-maderero, and anti-petrolero.” That is, he is against the exploitation of minerals, wood, and oil—three essential export commodities in Peru’s economy. I later learned that the man is a judge in Huancayo renowned for his viewpoints on environmental contamination, neoliberalism, and Andean culture. Just before 4:00 p.m., the sun disappeared, and Rolando told my travel companions and me that it was time to leave. On our way back to Huancayo, we briefly exchanged experiences from the event. Then the day’s fatigue overwhelmed us and we stayed silent the rest of the trip. We entered Huancayo in the dark and became engulfed in the city’s evening traffic with its relentless noise and bad smoke. Huaytapallana’s sparkling ice now seemed like a remote dream. M a st er i ng t h e A rt of A n de a n Offer i ng I used the days that followed the ceremony to inquire more into the life-world of the ritual specialists who conduct the offerings. I started by interviewing Pedro Marticorena, the first of the three speakers at the event, who is laya mayor (principal ritual specialist) with a long record not only as a ritual specialist, but also an artist. During the interview, Pedro told me that, when he was young, his parents had sent him to Huancayo’s Bellas Artes, but rather than stimulating his curiosity for modern Western art, the school opened his eyes to Andean art, in particular, the cosmovisión andina (Andean cosmovision), which is a synonym for the cosmology of Andean people, and which the leaders of Peru’s indigenous movements use to refer to the revival of the country’s pre-Columbian religious world. Even though Pedro’s parents were both ritual specialists, he

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

271

believes it is his personal capacity to communicate with the nonhuman world that qualifies him as laya mayor. Pedro said, “You anthropologists want to understand the Andean world. I feel and sense it.” He continued, “It is the feeling that you connect with the apu and that it responds which proves you are able to establish dialogue.” Furthermore, layas must be capable of communicating with pachamama and other natural forces and feeling the magnetic vibrations of the earth, a capacity that enables them to mitigate the impact they have on humans in the form of stress. “A laya must be able to transmit this feeling to other people and in this way motivate them,” he told me. He also emphasized that the Andean cosmovision is very different from the Western worldview. “To become laya, I had to decolonize my way of thinking. You have to give up the idea of controlling the world. It is chaos. Instead of trying to change it, we must live in the present,” he explained. Pedro’s interest in Andean cosmology has also instigated him to revisit his notion of counting and to reverse the Western tradition of privileging even numbers. “It’s not the even, but the odd numbers that matter,” he pointed out to me. Finally, for Pedro, decolonizing his way of thinking implies revising the Western conception of global warming. Asked what he thinks about climate change and its impact on Huaytapallana, he replied, “Climate change is a political invention. The earth has its own evolution. If Huancayo runs out of water, people have to move or even die.” Life goes on, Pedro asserted, even if Huaytapallana dies. Pedro has been a practicing laya since the mid-1980s when he established Museo Wali Wasi, a ritual center located in his natal neighborhood of Umuto on the outskirts of Huancayo. The center figures in several tourist guides on Huancayo; it contains an altar to worship Andean deities and a collection of Pedro’s art pieces. It serves as a space for Pedro to meet his local followers, demonstrate his ritual talent, and extend his international network. “I have received people from all over the world and from all religions. From Tibet, Thailand, the Middle East, Israel, and North America. Once a couple of nuns from Huancayo even came to see me,” he told me. Peru’s politicians also have shown interest in Pedro. Ten years ago, the country’s first lady asked him to organize an offering ceremony. “I received an invitation by Eliana Karp to make an offering at Pachacamac [an important sacred place in the Inca empire].” He designates his vocation as laya, refusing labels such as sacerdote andino (Andean priest) that are often used to denote ritual specialists in the Peruvian Andes. “I’m laya, not shaman,” Pedro pointed out, using the Huanka rather than what he considers a Western term for ritual specialist. It is important to call him laya and not shaman, he contended, because some people regard him an associate of

272

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

evil forces. “Some years ago the church launched a campaign against me. They called me the devil. But I don’t mind. I take it as recognition of what I do,” Pedro declared. “I don’t have issues with other religions.” A decade ago, there were few layas in Huancayo, but today they count more than two hundred, among whom approximately 10 percent are women. Most of them speak both Spanish and Quechua, though not all of them are fluent in the latter. Moreover, some layas come from other regions of the Peruvian highlands and are unfamiliar with the Huanka dialect. Nevertheless, Pedro views the new layas as competitors. He said, “There is competition and you have to watch out. Once I had to ask someone who pretended to be laya to leave. I had called for a ceremony and there were many people here [in Wali Wasi]. Then the man started to distribute his business card. Imagine, competing here in my place.” As initiator and promoter of the June 21 offering ceremony at Huaytapallana, however, Pedro has carved out his own niche on Huancayo’s market for ritual specialists, an effort that he proudly recalls.2 “In 1987 I invited people to celebrate Andean New Year here in Wali Wasi, but they stayed all night and left it in a mess. The following year we did it somewhere else in Huancayo, and in 1994 we started to organize it at Huaytapallana,” Pedro recounted. “The first year we were less than ten persons. Now we are almost one thousand.” Although Pedro hopes that his pioneering role in the offering ceremony will ensure his future legacy as laya, he recognizes that the growing participation is a source of concern. In particular, he finds it troubling that many visitors regard the offering as a payment they make in exchange for a specific favor. Rather than calling the offering pagapu (a Quechua term derived from the Spanish word pago, meaning “payment,” and from the Quechua word apu shortened to pu), which is common in the Andes, Pedro prefers the Quechua term unkapaq, meaning “to give.” “You give the apu something to express your gratitude, not to ask for a favor,” Pedro insisted. When asked what might be done to change this misconception of offerings, he shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Nothing. It’s the way people are.” My next interviewee was Carlos, the anthropologist I introduced in the opening scene, who teaches anthropology at Huancayo’s major university (Universidad del Centro del Perú). Carlos has always emphasized his identity as Huanka since I first came to know him in the mid-1980s, and in the interview he revealed that for more than a decade he has been Pedro’s apprentice and attends the ceremony at Huaytapallana every year. Even though Carlos has learned a lot, he still has a long way to go before he will become laya. He told me that layas are recognizable by their discourse, their capacity to move people, and the effects of their offerings. “Only I can tell when I’m ready. That’s what

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

273

Pedro has told me,” he explained. To test Carlos, Pedro gives him examinations, one of which is to take ayahuasca (a brew of Amazonian plants that produces hallucinations). Some years ago, he went to Piura in northern Peru where a local shaman guided him through two ayahuasca séances. Carlos reported, “The first time I almost didn’t return, but I learned a lot about myself.” To prepare for the second examination, which is to ascend Huaytapallana on foot alone at night, a trip that takes five to six hours, Carlos walked to the mountain’s glacier with a group of students two years ago. He recounted the trip with excitement: “After a couple of hours, I asked the students to go ahead. While walking alone I felt I was flying, like a pheasant.” Carlos believes the experience is related to the fact that he descends from a family named Condor and that he has the blood of a condor in his veins. He said, “Very soon I’ll make the trip to Huaytapallana on my own. I’ve already spent the night up there several times. It’s incredible.” Even though the art of conducting offering ceremonies and teaching anthropology are two very different challenges, Carlos views them as complementary. Unlike other anthropology professors who lecture students on Peru’s social and political problems, Carlos encourages them to explore their cultural past. In particular, he instructs them in the Andean cosmovision and teaches them how to show respect to Huaytapallana, pachamama, and other nonhuman spirits. Several times he has even invited them to the offering ceremonies that he organizes at Ancalaya, a sacred place outside Huancayo. “Sometimes more than a hundred students come to Ancalaya. They are very interested in Andean cosmovision,” Carlos explained. He has also helped students organize a movement called Movimiento el Apu (the Apu Movement), which was formed in 2008 and won the elections to the university’s student board in 2010. As a university professor, Carlos thinks of himself as a mediator between the students and the Andean world. “I’m merely a bridge,” Carlos informed me. Politica l V iolence, Economic Grow th, a nd En v ironmenta l Conta mination When Pedro and his supporters began celebrating the Andean New Year at Huaytapallana in 1994, Peru was recovering after a decade of economic recession and political violence.3 The country’s crisis peaked in the late 1980s, when inflation and poverty rates reached unprecedented heights and the Peruvian military and the Shining Path, a revolutionary organization, got entrenched in a savage war that caused sixty-five thousand deaths, the majority of whom were civilians, and forced thousands of others to take refuge in Lima, Huancayo, and other cities in Peru (Starn 1995). The conflict peaked in 1992 when security

274

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

forces captured the Shining Path’s leader. Two years before, the newly elected president Alberto Fujimori had introduced a neoliberal program that deepened the country’s economic crisis and triggered massive emigration. Even though many disapproved of Fujimori’s economic policy, they gave him credit for the defeat of the Shining Path. Moreover, to alleviate the growing poverty, Fujimori launched a series of social programs that he used to generate a popular movement in favor of his government and break ground for new class alliances. In Huancayo, which was one of the areas most affected by the violence that haunted Peru (Paerregaard 2002), the economic and political crisis gave rise to an ethnic awareness and paved the way for the election of a new mayor, Pedro Morales Mansilla, who promised to regain people’s belief in the future by strengthening their Huanka identity. Among the mayor’s many initiatives was the construction of El Parque de Identidad, a park that exhibits Huanka culture in the form of sculptural and architectural installations and is today one of Huancayo’s allures. During his nine years in power, the mayor also supported a Huanka revival movement that was created by a group of urban intellectuals who seek inspiration in the same Andean cosmovision that Pedro and Carlos subscribe to and that gained momentum in the postconflict era and continues to grow in the 2000s. The reclaiming of the region’s ethnic identity still ranks high on the political agenda of Huancayo’s intellectuals, but the city’s recent modernization is now posing new challenges to the movement. Among the challenges are Huancayo’s many environmental problems and the uncertainty they create about the city’s future. In the past fifteen years, Peru has experienced rapid economic growth, which has led not only to raising living standards but also to traffic congestion, air pollution, mining contamination, social insecurity, and economic corruption. Moreover, Peru is now one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change (Bolin 2009; Oré et al. 2009; Paerregaard, Stensrud, and Andersen 2016). It contains 71 percent of all tropical glaciers and, because they are melting in an alarming speed, the country is losing its primary source of fresh water used for irrigation, consumption, and mining (ANA 2014; Gagné, Rasmussen, and Orlove 2014; Vuille et al. 2008). According to Peru’s Ministerio de Ambiente del Perú (2015), the country has already lost 22 percent of its glaciers and 12 percent of its freshwater volume.4 The situation is particularly critical in Huancayo because it relies primarily on fresh water from Huaytapallana and Shullcas, the river that flows from the mountain’s glacier (Altamirano 2014). Competition with the neighboring rural communities and towns over Huaytapallana’s freshwater supply adds more trouble to the city’s environmental crisis, which has forced its authorities to ration water since 2005 and is expected to cause water

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

275

shortages among one-third of its population by 2030 (Gomez and Santos 2012). The quality of the city’s water supply creates another environmental concern. Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mining has recently granted permission to a mining company to explore mining options in four places within Huaytapallana’s protected area. In a region that has a long history of mining, this comes as bad news for many. For years, effluent from the mines in nearby La Oroya has polluted the water of Mantaro, the biggest river of Peru’s central highlands. The mining company responsible for the pollution has recently stopped operating in response to pressure from a popular movement in Huancayo called Mesa de Diálogo Ambiemental Huancayo y Junín (Environmental Table of Dialogue Huancayo and Junín), but it will still take many years before the river recovers.5 Moreover, even though traditional mining in the Huancayo region now has been brought under control, pollution from illegal exploitation of natural resources such as marble and sand on Huaytapallana, and also from local fish farming along the Shullcas River, further endangers Huancayo’s freshwater supply, demanding new and more consistent environmental policies. But mining, fishing, and other exploitative activities are not the only causes of Huancayo’s environmental problems. Because of the pollution they cause on the mountain, Huaytapallana’s many visitors also represent a growing threat to the city’s freshwater supply, raising the concern of the regional government and Huancayo’s environmentalists. The organizers of the June 21 ceremony are increasingly taking the critique of its negative anthropogenic impact seriously, and during the event speakers recurrently appeal to the visitors to collect their disposable waste. Yet, even though some participants also are becoming aware of the environmental impact of their activities, as described in the opening scene, I saw people leaving nonorganic residue from the offering ceremony on the mountain and throwing offering disposals in the glacier lake. Several of the participants I spoke with recognized that the abandoned mesas constitute an environmental problem but told me not to worry. “The herders from the nearby communities always pick up the leftovers after we have left,” one man pointed out. To make the situation worse, rather than participating in the event Pedro organizes on June 21, many people contract layas to arrange individual offering ceremonies, asking the mountain for good fortune in their economic affairs, individual careers, and family activities. Such activity has not only generated a constant flow of visitors on Huaytapallana throughout the year but also created a commercial market for layas in Huancayo. Some of the new layas are linked to parties, such as the Bloque Popular referred to above that read the Andean cosmovision as a political ideology, and others represent business and restaurant owners or singers and dancers who hope the offerings will produce prosperity

276

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

or fame.6 The leftovers on Huaytapallana also indicate that many visitors view the offerings as a means of asking for specific favors—some tangible, others intangible. Quite a few leave alasitas (miniatures or toy models of their requests such as vehicles, houses, or professional certificates) on the mountain, and others leave half-burned black candles or used underwear and other belongings of people they wish to cause harm. Finally, many leave the disposable trash from the picnics they hold when organizing offering ceremonies on the mountain. According to the regional government, the total amount of trash left in the protected area of Huaytapallana every year amounts to more than four tons. To register Huancayo’s layas and instruct them how to mitigate the environmental impact of offering ceremonies on Huaytapallana, the regional government called for a public meeting in March 2015. About thirty of the city’s more than two hundred layas turned up at the meeting, which was also attended by members from Mesa de Diálogo Ambiemental Huancayo y Junín. The organization surveys the regional government’s protection of Huaytapallana’s environment and has helped it produce a master plan for conserving the mountain (Plan Maestro del Área de Conservación Regional Huaytapallana), which lists proposals for safeguarding Huaytapallana’s protected area, including a ban on bathing in the glacier lake and touching the ice. During an interview in 2014, the director of the office responsible for Huancayo’s environment,7 Isabel Cristina Menendez Moreno, said, “We need to control the growing number of visitors, and in particular, the waste of the offerings they make. We have asked the layas not to leave any trash, but they don’t always listen.” A member of Mesa de Diálogo (an anthropologist from Huancayo’s university) I interviewed in 2015 concurred with the director’s worry. She also pointed out, however, that the new regional government that came to power in January 2015 has done little to implement the master plan. In particular, she had asked for more control of the visitors and the layas they contract to conduct offerings. She explained to me that it is not only the trash that the visitors leave from their picnics (plastic bottles, cups, plates, cutlery, etc.) but also the offering objects, such glass bottles and candles that they abandon, that contaminate the mountain. In order to control this threat, she contended, the regional government must survey the offerings and, “to make this happen, we need to put pressure on the authorities.” T r a nsgr e ssi ng Pu r it y I returned to Huaytapallana in 2015 to attend the offering event on June 21, this time with Carlos as driver. It was interesting that the conversation in the car revolved around the same issues as in 2014, even though my travel companions

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

277

were new. Among them was a middle-aged woman who traveled with her teenage son. The woman opened the conversation by telling us that this was her first trip to Huaytapallana and that she had brought her son so that he could learn how to respect the mountain. “I sent my children to a school that values children’s individual qualities and teaches them to be independent and take responsibility. The school also organizes tours outside Huancayo to teach the children how to prepare their own food and take care of themselves.” The woman also said she deplores the consumer habits of today’s young people, who in her view eat unhealthy food and spend too much time watching television and playing video games. Visiting Huaytapallana and participating in the offering ceremony on June 21, the woman asserted, provide a new perspective on life and allow you to “reencounter yourself in a more authentic environment.” My third travel companion was a young woman who affirmed that she too wanted to “reestablish the balance in my life” by making contact with the mountain. The woman told us that she had left her two small children with their grandparents but that she hoped to take them to Huaytapallana when they are older. A common theme in the discussions with travel companions on my two trips to Huaytapallana has been their quest for alternative perspectives on Huancayo’s recent modernization and for inspiration to fuel their everyday lives with new energy. Examples of this quest were my fellow passengers’ affirmation of national and indigenous identities and their efforts to escape the city and establish contact with nature. By the same token, many of the visitors I talked with on both trips conceived of the mountain as a spirit with the capacity to influence its own and others’ lives and viewed the offering as a way to tap into its power to gain political capital, make economic profit, attain public notoriety, or in contrast, put a spell on someone they want to harm. More bluntly, they all tried to capitalize on Huaytapallana and its glacier, which yields life to the city by supplying it with fresh water, thereby symbolizing not only the continuity between its ethnic past and modern present but also the purity that will assure the life of its future generations. At the same time, visiting Huaytapallana was an occasion for concern. Years of environmental pollution have taught Huancayo’s habitants that economic growth and modernity come at a price and that natural resources such as water are scarce and vulnerable to contamination. The visit reminded many that the mountain is no exception to this tradeoff and offered them a firsthand view on how humans affect nature. More important, they saw the environmental consequences of their own and other visitors’ activities, which many interpret as the real cause of glacier melting. As described in the introduction, the disturbing view of car pollution and nonorganic trash on the road to the offering

278

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

site induced some of my travel companions not only to suggest stricter control of people’s access to Huaytapallana but also to question their own presence on the mountain. The visitors’ concern for the environment was complicated by their own part in the June 21 event, which exposed an inherent dichotomy in offerings to the deities left on the mountain that, on the one hand, contribute to their well-being and, on the other, litter the ceremony site and pollute the environment. Pedro’s and other layas’ role in the growing contamination of the mountain’s environment is especially problematic, for they find themselves competing on Huancayo’s regional market for ritual specialists and the regional government is trying to hold them accountable for the visitors’ activities within Huaytapallana’s protected area. Moreover, the utilitarian use of offerings for economic and political purposes has led to a commercialization of the ceremony and paved the way for a new generation of layas who act as entrepreneurial brokers rather than spiritual leaders. Finally, climate change compromises the layas’ task as stewards of the human-nonhuman relationships by foregrounding the material rather than symbolic meaning of the gift and highlighting an unresolved problem in the Andean cosmology they advocate: the offering’s negative anthropogenic effect. The environmental impact of the growing number of visitors generates a divide between established layas such as Pedro—who introduced the offering tradition at Huaytapallana twenty years ago and who makes an ecumenical reading of the Andean cosmovision—and the many new layas who use it as a vehicle for economic, political, and personal gain and who compete in the commercial market for ceremonies. By defining the offering as a gift rather than a payment, Pedro underscores his own authority as laya mayor and distances himself from this development. But by arguing that glacier melt is part of nature’s evolution and rejecting the global discourse of climate change, he not only disapproves of the new layas’ secularization of the offering ceremony but also positions himself as a climate-change denier and leaves open the door for other layas who subscribe to a politically charged interpretation of climate change that blames the extractive industry and capitalism for Huaytapallana’s sufferings. More important, by refusing to recognize Huancayo’s environmental problems and the everyday concerns that nurture his followers’ faith in Huaytapallana, Pedro neglects the meaning they ascribe to the mountain’s ice as a symbol of authenticity and purity (Paerregaard 2018b). Whereas Pedro transgresses the notion of purity, other layas and many of his followers objectify it by promoting an image of Huaytapallana’s ice as “pure nature” that epitomizes the sacred (Gremaud 2014). My travel companions’ (and my own) dissatisfaction with Huaytapallana’s contaminated air and

279

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

environment, then, was driven by the illusion of pure nature and the denial of the dangers that threaten the symbolic border between purity and pollution but that allow us to live with ambiguity and the compromises life requires. Yet, even though many visitors crave safety in the form of pure nature, their encounter with Huaytapallana and its threatened environment erodes the illusion of purity and provides them with a new perspective on the relation between humans and their surroundings. Conclusion The many economic interests, political viewpoints, and cultural perspectives that are at stake in the offering ceremony on Huaytapallana reveal the uncertainties that climate change and glacier melt are creating in Huancayo. In particular, they illuminate the confusion climate change causes in people’s perception of the city’s newly acquired prosperity and the role the participants in the offering ceremony play in its deteriorating environment. As in other parts of the world, many associate climate change with change at the local (or regional) rather than global level and attribute its cause either to their own agency or to nature’s own cycles. At the heart of this confusion, and more specifically, of my travel companions’ response to the contamination of Huaytapallana’s environment and their reflections on Huancayo’s future prospects, is a revision of the meaning of the sacred separable from the human realm, and the idea of religion as a discrete human activity unaffected by other social and cultural processes. Paradoxically, although climate change challenges conventional forms of belief, it also opens new doors for religious practices and imaginaries that are driven by people’s concern for the environmental change they are experiencing and the economic and political opportunities that emerge in the wake of the change. This chapter has suggested that in this brave new world affected by anthropogenic changes, mountain deities are still conceived as spirits with the capacity to influence the life of other beings, but rather than seeking their protection or fearing their anger, Andean pilgrims now regard them as victims of human activities and worry about their survival. In a similar vein, the offering ceremony has changed meaning. It previously aimed to appease the mountain deities and ensure the reproduction of human life; it now serves as an act to address the harm humans are inflicting on the rest of the world. As a result, the offering ceremony becomes an act of self-reflection and repentance in which the giver not only pays tribute to the deities but also redefines their mutual relationship. Rather than constituting a mere symbolic act to communicate with

280

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

the superior powers, as suggested by the classic academic theories, the offering has evolved into a setting where the giver shows concern for the receiver’s wellbeing and rethinks humans’ role in the planet’s future. By recognizing not only the footprints that the offering objects leave on the ground but also the consequences their physical remains have for the environment, the giver recasts the meaning of the sacred that becomes a referent to the shared effort humans and other beings make to save the planet from degradation and destruction. But the chapter also shows that, in a time of climate change and glacier retreat, the transformation of religious practice and thinking and the redefinition of the meaning of the sacred take place on a bumpy road where a variety of actors contest personal and economic interests and negotiate divergent social and cultural perspectives. Rather than giving the pilgrims a glimpse into Peru’s pre-Columbian past and uniting them in a homogeneous community of devotees, the pilgrimage’s multifaceted nature brings to the fore the conflicting concerns and viewpoints that are at stake in modern offering ceremonies. K a r sten Pa er r ega a r d is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He is author of Linking Separate Worlds: Urban Migrants and Rural Lives in Peru, Peruvians Dispersed: A Global Ethnography of Migration, and Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru’s Migrant Remittances. Not e s 1. In the Andes, chewing coca leaves is an everyday social habit that people practice, but at offering ceremonies they carefully select the intact from the broken leaves, for they are viewed as essential gifts for the mountain deities and other spiritual powers. 2. Pedro was one of the three men who spoke at the ceremony in 2014. The other two ritual specialists were the leader of a bilingual Spanish-Quechua school in Huancayo and a renowned intellectual who maintains an accountant office on the city’s main street. 3. Before Pedro established the tradition of celebrating the Andean New Year at Huaytapallana in 1994, it was mainly the nearby rural communities whose livelihoods (agriculture and husbandry) rely on its meltwater that conducted offering ceremonies on the mountain. The aim of the event that takes place at the end of July is to celebrate Santiago, a Catholic saint believed to protect the

281

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

animals. Today the event gathers thousands of people, but, even though the neighboring rural communities continue to participate, the majority come from Huancayo and other urban centers. 4. Glaciers are increasingly viewed as a symbol of climate change impact. In the words of Julie Cruikshank (2005), “Concerns about global climate change are giving glaciers new meaning for many people who may previously have considered them eternally frozen, safely distant, and largely inert. Most of the world’s glaciers now seem to be melting rather than reproducing themselves, becoming a new kind of endangered species” (6). 5. The movement is led by Huancayo’s bishop, who has received death threats. 6. People told me that famous singers such as Sonia Morales and Dina Paucar have visited Huaytapallana to ask for luck in their careers. 7. The director’s Spanish title is gerente regional de recursos naturales y gestión del medio ambiente de Junín.

R efer ence s Altamirano R., Teófilo. 2014. Refugiados ambientales: Cambio climático y migración forzada. Lima: Fondo Editorial de Pontifica Universidad Católica del Perú. Autoridad Nacional de Agua (ANA). 2014. Inventario de glaciares del Perú. http:// groundwater.sdsu.edu/INVENTARIO_GLACIARES_ANA.pdf. Bolin, Inge. 2009. “The Glaciers of the Andes Are Melting: Indigenous and Anthropological Knowledge Merge in Restoring Water Resources.” In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, 228–39. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Carey, Mark. 2010. In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, Jeffrey, ed. 2003. Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader. London: Continuum. Childon, Bruce. 1995. “The Hungry Knife: Toward a Sense of Sacrifice.” In The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honor of John Rogerson, edited by Mark Daniel Carroll, David J. A. Clines and Philip R. Davies, 122–38. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Crate, Susan A. 2011. “Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 175–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104925.

282

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Crona, Beatrice, Amber Wutich, Alexandra Brewis, and Meredith Gartin. 2013. “Perceptions of Climate Change: Linking Local and Global Perceptions through a Cultural Knowledge Approach.” Climatic Change 119 (2): 519–31. Cruikshank, Julie. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Gagné, Karine, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, and Benjamin Orlove. 2014. “Glaciers and Society: Attributions, Perceptions, and Valuations.” WIREs Climate Change 5 (6): 793–808. Gomez, Guillermo C., and Roy G. Santos. 2012. “Riesgos de escasez de agua en la ciudad de Huancayo al año 2030.” Apuntos Ciencias Sociales 2 (1): 15–26. Green, Donna, and Gleb Raygorodetskty. 2010. “Indigenous Knowledge of a Changing Climate.” Climatic Change 100 (2): 239–42. Gremaud, Ann-Sofie. 2014. “Power and Purity: Nature as Resource in a Troubled Society.” Environmental Humanities 5 (1): 77–100. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2010. “A New Climate for Society.” Theory, Culture and Society 27 (2–3): 233–53. Mathur, Nayanika. 2015. “It’s a Conspiracy Theory and Climate Change: Of Beastly Encounters and Cervine Disappearances in Himalayana India.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 87–111. Ministerio de Ambiente del Perú. 2015. Portal de cambio climático. http://bvs .minsa.gob.pe/local/MINSA/3688.pdf. Murphy, Conor, Mavuto Rempo, Adrian Phiri, Olusegun Yerokun, and Bernie Grumell. 2016. “Adapting to Climatic Change in Shifting Landscapes of Belief.” Climatic Change 134 (1–2): 101–34. Oré, María Teresa, Laureano del Castillo, Saskia Van Orsel, and Jeroen Vos. 2009. El agua, ante nuevos desafíos: Actores e iniciativas en Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia. Lima: Oxfam/Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Orlove, Ben, Carla Roncoli, Merit Kabugo, and Abushen Majugu. 2010. “Indigenous Climate Knowledge in Southern Uganda: The Multiple Components of a Dynamic System.” Climatic Change 100 (2): 243–65. Paerregaard, Karsten. 1989. “Exchanging with Nature: T’inka in an Andean Village.” Folk 31:53–73. ———. 2002. “The Vicissitudes of Politics and the Resilience of the Peasantry: The Contestation and Reconfiguration of Political Space in the Peruvian Andes.” In In the Name of the Poor: Contesting Political Space for Poverty Reduction, edited by Neil Webster and Lars Engberg-Pedersen, 52–77. London: Zed.

R ec a st i ng t h e Sacr e d

283

———. 2013. “Bare Rocks and Fallen Angels: Environmental Change, Climate Perceptions and Ritual Practices in the Peruvian Andes.” Religions 4 (2): 290–305. https://doi.org/10.3390/re14020290. ———. 2014. “Broken Cosmologies: Climate, Water and State in the Peruvian Andes.” In Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, 196–210. London: Routledge. ———. 2018a. “The Climate-Development Nexus: Using Climate Voices to Prepare Adaptation Initiatives in the Peruvian Andes.” Climate and Development 10 (4): 360–68. ———. 2018b. “Power as/in/of Water: Revisiting the Hydrologic Cycle in the Peruvian Andes.” WIREs Water 5 (2): 1–11. Paerregaard, Karsten, Astrid Stensrud, and Astrid Andersen. 2016. “Water Citizenship in Peru: Negotiating Water Rights and Contesting Water Culture in the Peruvian Andes.” Latin American Research Review 51 (1): 198–217. Starn, Orin. 1995. “To Revolt against the Revolution: War and Resistance in Peru’s Andes.” Cultural Anthropology 10(4): 547–80. Stensrud, Astrid. 2016. “Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds in the Andes.” Ethnos 81 (1): 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.9 29597. Vuille, Mathias, Bernard Francou, Patrick Wagnon, Irmgard Juen, Georg Kaser, Bryan Mark, and Raymond S. Bradley. 2008. “Climate Change and Tropical Andean Glaciers: Past, Present and Future.” Earth-Science Reviews 89 (3): 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2008.04.002.

Conclusion

k

RELIGION AND CLIMATE CHANGE An Emerging Research Agenda

Willis Jenkins, University of Virginia

This volume r epr esents a n importa nt milestone in the emergence of a new research field. Although connections between religion and climate have been made and studied for about as long as climate change has been a formal object of study, a recognized field for comparative, generalizing, and multidisciplinary exchange has emerged only in the past decade.1 The emergence of a research field of religion and climate change allows scholars to develop its central questions and organizing problems. This volume at once exemplifies the kind of exchange made possible by that field and also advances its possibilities. In appreciation, I respond to the chapters in this volume and the broader multiyear research project funded by the Luce Foundation to which they belong and build on them here to develop an agenda for future research. Of course, my summary reflects the predicaments of a North Atlantic climatic context and my particular training in religious studies. That may explain why, for example, the pattern of local responsibility, discussed in section 2, strikes me as so significant. And so this agenda represents only a provisional and partial beginning, which will expand as the field does. By drawing out from this volume questions, tensions, and problems that seem to me generative for future research, I hope to stimulate more and fuller lines of inquiry. A basic premise of the field of religion and climate change is that methods of studying religion can be useful for understanding the cultural contexts of climate change. Whereas early research tended to approach religion as either obstacle or resource in relation to political action on climate change, the emergent field cultivates more possibilities. Each of the essays in this volume illustrates in some way how religion (of some kind) shapes imaginations of climate

284

Conclusion

285

change. Many of the chapters also show how, in turn, ideas of climate change or practices of responding to its impacts enter into religious life. What is the relation of this subfield to the existing field of religion and ecology (or religion and nature)? On one hand, religion and climate change appears to be a subset of more general relations around which a field of research has developed over about thirty years. The field of religion and ecology has played an important role in advancing and institutionalizing research into cultural dimensions of many environmental issues. In that field, climate change has long been addressed as a specific instance of the general relations under investigation, as one issue among others. On the other hand, insofar as climate change overwhelms imaginations of ecology, nature, and environment, it may engulf the relations investigated in the field of religion and ecology. As a synecdoche of ecological crisis, it can reverse the lexical priority, so that the general biocultural relations are treated as instances of climate change. In fact, a question that arises for several of the contextual investigations in this volume is whether all local environmental interpretations must now appear in the conceptual space of climate change. At least we may say that the field of religion and climate change is unique for putting that problematic at its center: the relation of particular ecologies of human life to anthropogenic change in global systems. When Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009) explosive “Climate of History” argued that climate change renders obsolete his discipline’s division between human history and natural history, it compelled attention across the humanities to a difficult reckoning with actions that seem to belong to humanity as a species. Is it meaningful to talk at the species level of agency, narrative, responsibility, values? What then happens to the particularity of meaning-making contexts, the legibility of lives and critiques of power, when planetary agencies enter the researcher’s domain? Religion and climate change keeps that Anthropocene problematic at the center. Even when research focuses on a particular lifeworld, as all the chapters in this volume do, there is always hovering the question of its relation to humanity’s interaction with the planet. Climate change seems to challenge religion. Anthropocene questions illuminate and obfuscate religious lifeworlds. In these chapters, we are also engaged by interpretations of sacred landscape relations that challenge and reframe ideas of anthropogenic planetary change, sometimes rejecting that notion altogether. Religion seems to challenge climate change. Bringing the two terms together opens both to fecund, destabilizing inquiries.

286

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

R et h i n k i ng Cli m at e Ch a nge a n d R e ligion Connecting the terms climate change and religion opens new forms of critical reflection on both categories. Healthy research fields typically stimulate debate about their formal objects; indeed, the shared argument is often what sustains a shared sense of a field, especially in the humanities. Certainly that is true for the field of religion and ecology (Jenkins 2017b). This volume, however, gathers a variety of senses of religion and of climate change with little explicit debate about either—which slightly disconcerts the premise that these essays belong to a shared field. In this section, I show the variety and pose the questions, first for climate change and then for religion. What Is Climate Change? Climate change is used in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways in this volume. The conflict does not necessarily indicate incoherence but does point to the need for ongoing critical attention to how the concept functions to organize research questions. Multiple notions of climate at play across the chapters, but the most basic tension is this: sometimes climate change functions as proxy for specific ecological dynamics happening at regional scales (glacier retreat and sea-level rise especially) and sometimes it refers to the idea of anthropogenic global climate change circulating in global discourses. Local responses to different varieties of climate change might conflict with one another. Several accounts of deep concern about phenomena presented here by the researcher as climate-related are voiced by people who apparently reject the idea of anthropogenic global climate change. The multiplicity of meanings creates a research project of “climate ethnography” in itself (Crate 2011). But contributors are not always clear what they themselves mean by climate change, which can leave readers uncertain about what investigative work it is doing. Is it the researcher’s summary concept for local cultural or ecological phenomena, or is it explicitly part of the ongoing discourse and religious life she finds in context? Consider, for example, the tension in this programmatic sentence from Gagné in chapter 7: “This chapter examines how villagers of the Tibetan Buddhist community of Tingmosgang have sought to address the problem of water supply during the spring of 2013, or, in other words, how they attempted to respond to climate change” (emphasis mine). A water-supply problem is not obviously an impact of global climate change without supervening interpretation. Do the villagers of Tingmosgang think of their response to the water-supply problem as also a response to global climate

Conclusion

287

change, or does Gagné bring the supervening explanation in order to present their response to a water supply problem as one best understood by readers as a response to climate impacts? The context may well involve both senses, perhaps differing across residents, some of whom undoubtedly interact with people for whom climate change functions as an explanatory concept for local hydrology. For they interact at least with Gagné, who has a certain idea of climate change in mind and may or may not introduce the term explicitly. Sometimes researchers glimpse connections that seem to lead them into equivocation. Samson in chapter 5 discusses a reforestation effort as a response to climate change, making the connection initially as a biophysical sequestration mechanism; as a manifestation of a Mayan cosmovision that creates “a discourse that addresses climate change at the global level” from ethnically embedded ecological management; and as a context in which climate change is experienced, even if there is often “disconnection between the local evidence for climate change and the lack of larger frameworks for addressing climate change.” Samson rightly sees multiple and contradictory sense of climate change but it is unclear how he sees their connection. Kassam in chapter 6 sometimes equivocates between expected weather variations (which seems to me just another way of saying climate) and climatic variation (unpredicted expansion of the expected variation), which muddies his report of weatherrelated anxieties in Central Asia. Paerregaard’s interest in local waste disposal around a glacier in chapter 10 follows the pollution concerns of his informants, but it is unclear how he sees environmental cleanliness belonging to climate change. Those tensions may point the way to further inquiry, although I wonder whether they might also reveal the way climate discourse, especially in academic settings, can absorb other environment-related topics. Attentiveness to the multiple and sometimes conflicting notions of climate change at work in a context may help scholars include the effect of our own investigations on the field of research. The conceptions of climate change, along with those of religion, that we bring into a context unavoidably have some impact on what we find. Cecilie Rubow’s work in Oceania is exemplary here (see chapter 1). Instead of searching for cultural responses to a definite idea of climate change, Rubow works from Mol’s enactments and Galison’s trading zones to guide an investigation into the way various enactments of climate change meet and mix in arenas of cultural exchange. So, for example, she finds a pastor skeptical of global-climate discourse who nonetheless incorporates into his sermons ideas he picks up from environmental workshops where climate is discussed. Meanwhile, secular environmental professionals pick up the pastor’s stewardship language and interact with his prayers. In line

288

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

with the climate pluralism of Mike Hulme (whom she quotes at the outset), Rubow argues that climate change “not only takes place in new environments, it is reworked and continuously changed, resocialized, so to speak, in new enactments.” Even without religious influences, climate change is “constantly reworked in new versions, in different settings and with different repertoires.” In that view, ethnographers of climate change are doing something more fruitful than documenting local cultural interpretations of a definite object, as if collecting exotic translations of reality. Rather, they are investigating interactions of multiple lives of climate change, each enacted from some conjunction of cultural and ecological knowledges. And then, still harder, ethnographers seek to interpret how the multiple interactions may be affecting one another, reshaping themselves through both conflict and exchange (see Callison 2014). Rubow’s research thus makes explicit a question operating across this volume and the entire research field: what is climate change? Does this performative approach in which climate science and cultural stories combine in multiple ways concede too much to cultural constructivism? Are there criteria by which to judge better and worse enactments? That raises the question of evaluation, to which I turn in the section “Evaluation.” For now, note what the frame of enactments affords Rubow: she can turn a key research term—climate change—into a question in a way that brings out the multiplicity and internal conflicts sometimes missing from other accounts. To say, as Hulme (2009) does, that “the idea of climate exists as much in the human mind and in the matrices of cultural practices as it exists as an independent and objective physical category” (28) does not deny the reality of its biophysical dimensions. It simply affirms that those dimensions are not available outside matrices of cultural practice. Moreover, critical attentiveness to her terms of inquiry permits Rubow to treat herself as a participant in what she investigates. Rubow reports that she initially avoided using the terms climate change and religion in her conversations precisely because she was self-conscious of the way her research practices participate in the phenomena she seeks to understand. Because she was aware of how climate change already existed in her mind as an organizing concept when she arrived in Oceania, as well as of her desire to find people who would connect their beliefs with her understanding of climate change, Rubow was well disposed to notice the multiplicity and tensions of climate change, and also to enter them. At one point, in a workshop on Christianity and climate in which the stresses among multiple enactments seem to weigh on participants, Rubow intervenes by offering her theoretical framework of “repertoires” as a way of understanding differences.

289

Conclusion

All that complexity happens just within Oceania. Bertana’s research (chapter 3) confirms the multiple lives of climate change in Fiji. Indeed, across this volume, ethnographic research conducted within relatively discrete contexts show tensions within local enactments of environmental change and a range of interactions with the explicit term climate change. That diversity suggests that the question “what is climate change?” should at least remain an organizing question for research in the field. The question is critical for framing research with indigenous peoples. The number of chapters in this volume that involve indigenous peoples or traditions attests to their special significance for this field. It is especially important therefore to listen to how indigenous-studies scholars regard the key terms. When climate change is the practice and products of modern science, it may function to exclude indigenous environmental knowledges (Whyte, Brewer, and Johnson 2015). When climate change is presented as an unprecedented sustainability threat to all societies, it may conceal the way that settler colonialism has already imposed dystopic environmental change on indigenous peoples (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017). Yet, at the same time, recognition of serial climate-mediated threats to indigenous ways of life around the planet seems to have occasioned new forms of pan-indigenous political representation. Climate change may drive or intensify processes of global indigenous identity formation, cosmological construction, and political form (Dove 2006). It also seems to motivate new forms of interest from settler cultures, which, as doubts grow about their own forms of civilization, become increasingly interested in learning from the adaptive strategies of indigenous peoples—which raises questions about what settlers should learn from peoples who are attempting to resist and survive settler colonialism (Whyte, Caldwell, and Schaefer 2018). In that contextualizing those various senses involves matters of identity, political formation, and cosmology, researchers may find themselves approaching the territory of religion, only to find there another contested category. What Is Religion? There is no shared sense of religion across these essays. Diverse uses of an open concept may be both practical and generative, but it does a raise a question about the extent to which these investigations belong to a shared conversation, which in turn raises a central question for the field. What notion of religion governs the connection with climate change? Two expected notions of religion are largely absent from this project, which is the better for it. First, none of these scholars reduces religion to a binary

290

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

political factor, either impediment or aid to developing social support for climate policies. That is, no scholar here asks whether “being religious” in general exerts an influence on climate attitudes, even when they are asking how participating in a Bon/Buddhist rite, an indigenous Andean ceremony, or a Christian workshop interprets ideas of climate change. Second, there is little reference to religion as world traditions. All the religion in this volume is emplaced, and for that reason it nearly always appears as a complex negotiation undertaken with multiple versions and inheritances. When, for example, Buddhism appears in Gagné’s chapter 7, it inhabits a particular Himalayan landscape and appears tensely and precariously combined with a landscape-based spirituality and modern social habits. No one tries to research the impossibly general relation of Christianity and climate change; instead, we find multiple versions of Oceanic Christianity, themselves in tension with one another and participating in different flows of climate discourse. As Rubow puts it in chapter 1, “The diverse Christianities in Oceania not only involve beliefs, . . . they are ways of living.” Different contextual Christianities involve different repertoires for making sense of environmental change. In consequence, “climate-change stories will necessarily multiply in many awkward versions,” even within the same religion in the same geography. So what does the category of religion bring into view for this project? Attentiveness to nonmodern ways of knowing and being might name a thread running through several chapters. In this usage, religion stands as a category of exception, referring to forms of knowledge otherwise irrational to modern thought. Salas Carreño in chapter 2, for example, focuses on the mingling of modern and nonmodern worlds to frame his research on ritual veneration of a glacier. What the nonmodern affords, for Salas Carreño as for several other contributors, is interaction with nonhuman persons in the landscape—persons excluded from modernity’s “nature” but known nonetheless by locals as powerful presences and significant interlocutors. In Salas Carreño’s Andean context, it is the apu of the glacier; in Gagné’s Himalayan context, it is the zhidag who guards the landscape; in Haberman’s and Drew’s riparian India it is river divines. They are convened by the category of religion in a common domain. Here religion’s province is not the supernatural in the sense of a realm above and beyond material reality, but something more like the nonnatural—alternatively to a modernist sense of nature. Why pay attention to these exceptions? One reason, emphasized across these chapters, is simply to better understand how climate change is being experienced. Drew in chapter 4 explicitly calls for looking away from ideal accounts of climate change in order to pay attention to how it is actually experienced in

Conclusion

291

everyday life. “If we miss or dismiss the presence of their god(s), then we fail to understand the key sources of motivation of our collaborators.” Drew thus names a major part of the ongoing research agenda for the field: understand the sources and relations through which climate change is imagined, felt, and confronted. Yet there seems more to religion in those examples than a common heading for reports from field research beyond the empire of nature. Implicit across these projects is a sense that nonmodern contexts are especially valuable sites for attention; that modernized readers might find in them something important, maybe even salubrious, for how they should regard climate change. Recognizing that humans now shape planetary conditions destabilizes the idea of nature as a stable background to human history (Chakrabarty 2009, Purdy 2016), which drives skepticism in the modern schema to which it belongs and motivates interest in other ontologies, in nonmodern ways of being in the world (Descola 2013, Kohn 2013). Postnatural environmental inquiry forced open by climate change compels interest in premodern and nonmodern biocultural worlds—for which we might sometimes use the category of religion. In a related usage, religion also offers a category of inquiry into indigenous cosmovisions. Again we see that the way climate change is experienced in indigenous worlds, how it is confronted through indigenous politics, and what it means for indigenous futures will continue to constitute a major site of research for the field of religion and climate change. Just so, research on climate change in indigenous worlds can reshape important arguments over what religion does as an organizing concept. On one hand, the category of religion can help articulate the significance of climate for indigenous lifeworlds and underscore certain political rights that may otherwise be missed. Insofar as understanding impacts of climate change requires recognition of the cosmological relations and cultural practices that carry indigenous ecological knowledge and collective survival, religion can indicate the depth of meaning at stake and suggest that rights of religious freedom are at stake. It can also suggest that indigenous people’s political participation may require, as a matter of procedural justice, the right to speak in traditional or cosmological (i.e., religious) ways (Nelson 2017). On the other hand, as an idea born in colonial modernity, the category of religion may discriminate against indigenous ways of knowing. Indeed, with European Christianity as its template of a fully realized religion, contrasting animism as its primitive form, religion served settler colonialism as a classificatory and legitimating category. Moreover, insofar as the idea continues to carry structures of nature and supernature in its imaginary, religion may sustain

292

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

cultural schemata born in colonialism. In fact, the modern idea of nature was itself constructed in a Christian theological narrative of fall and redemption that was subsequently deployed to license displacement of indigenous peoples (Harrison 2015; Tinker 2008). That idea of religion, as dealing with the supernatural, is still used to isolate sacred practices from secular ones, to divide superstition from science—and thereby promote a classificatory scheme that discriminates against indigenous knowledges at every turn. Classifying knowledges as religious may marginalize indigenous ecological knowledges as sacred, thereby designating them as unscientific. Classifying indigenous landscape practices as religious experiences may render them, to the colonial mind, as outside politics and transportable to different lands (Weaver 2015; Howe 2016; Tsosie 2013). Thus, for a modern secular polity in which religion appears as private and subrational, one could dismiss indigenous claims to ecological sovereignty as mere religion, thereby keeping their lands open for resource exploitation by settler societies. Precisely that dynamic plays out in contemporary conflicts over fossil-fuel pipelines, which in North America seems to open the last best way to take land sacred to indigenous peoples. One way to recover the term religion is to suppose that it marks certain conflicts as running so deep that they help critique what the idea of religion means and how it has functioned. For example, Salas Carreño (chapter 2) and Drew (chapter 4) declare that their research shows ontological conflict between worlds. An important function of the idea of religion in liberal democracies has been to identify sites that carry deep, irreducible conflicts—and therefore political perils to pluralist comity. In conditions of climate change, however, those conflicts may be necessary and saving; indeed, greater peril may lie in avoiding religious conflict. Bruno Latour argues that climate change requires seeing geopolitical conflict between two cosmological memberships: “The Humans living in the epoch of the Holocene are in conflict with the Earthbound of the Anthropocene” (Latour 2017, 248). In his view, climate change makes for a world in which there is no possibility of avoiding religion by the liberal device of sequestering it as a domain of irreducible and therefore politically irrelevant conflict. Religion for Latour brings into view the time and territory of a collective shaped by its cosmology of care. The opposite of religious in this sense is not secular or atheist but rather negligent—not taking care, for example, by neglecting to specify the cosmology through which one sees matters of concern. Future research should investigate whether cosmological conflict is actually being experienced this way in various contexts. Salas Carreño (chapter 2) and Drew (chapter 4) use Marisol de la Cadena’s (2015) sense of cosmopolitics to explain the interface of modern and nonmodern ways of understanding the

Conclusion

293

world, but it is not clear whether their local interlocutors understand their own experience that way. Does environmental change fuel a sense of religious conflict (between or within persons)? Do interpretations of climate change rework cosmologies or create new openings for previously excluded cosmological possibilities? Notice how the idea of religion in this field begins to creep beyond the secular, as conventionally understood, by encompassing dimensions of science and politics conventionally secured against religious pressure. The field must therefore attend to renegotiations of the relations gathered under the rubrics religion and science and religion and politics. Furthermore, climate movements that take themselves to be secular may be aptly analyzed with tools of religious studies. Bron Taylor’s (2009) observation that environmental movements sometimes carry nature-based spiritualities holds for climate activism as well (Boudino and LeVasseur 2016). Secular climate movements sometimes invite participants into rituals or meditations (Fredericks 2014) and may sometimes carry, if inchoately, what Taylor (2009) calls “dark green” spirituality—“flowing from a deep sense of belonging to and connectedness in nature, while perceiving the earth and its living systems to be sacred and interconnected” (13). Such perceptions, Taylor emphasizes, do not require belief in a supernatural realm. Yet insofar as climate movements attempt to cultivate such belonging and connection or to establish the moral value of earth’s living systems, then it is possible to see them as doing a kind of religious work, in that they are involved with shifting cosmologies (see Duara 2015). That sort of work may happen not only in climate-focused groups but also within (for example) food movements, for they implicitly respond to the stress climate change exerts across a range of biocultural relations (Jenkins 2017a). In that case, religious engagements with climate change may happen without either term appearing. Finally, it is possible that religious may aptly describe the cultural magnitude of human experiences of climate change. Debates over geoengineering, for example, seem to raise questions of a religion-like depth—about humanity’s place in the cosmos and about purposeful action with the planet’s future (Clingerman 2015, Clingerman and O’Brien 2016). Related debates over whether climate change is a key marker of a new Anthropocene epoch show how interpretations of climate change shift imaginative construals of the human and its purposes for earth (Deane-Drummond, Bergmann, and Vogt 2017). Indeed, criticism of Anthropocene discourse often intervenes with alternative cosmological frames in part to criticize myth making in the guise of natural history (Crist 2013; Sideris 2017). The point is that climate change seems to raise fundamental questions about the meaning and purpose of humans, about the goods and

294

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

destiny of earth, about the role of both in a cosmology, and the unavoidability of cosmology in climate politics. Climate change may itself be religious, even as it bends ideas of what religion is. I m agi n i ng R e sponsi bi lit y Perhaps the most striking cumulative finding from this volume lies in a pattern it depicts across contexts: localization of moral responsibility for impacts of planetary environmental change. All three chapters focusing on high-mountain response to retreating glaciers (2, 7, 10) and both chapters on sea-level rise in Oceania (1, 3) describe communities attributing blame to local moral or ritual failures for phenomena whose material causes lie in dynamics of planetary warming. Furthermore, chapters 4 and 9 on river flooding in India, which has likely been intensified by planetary dynamics, also report local attributions of blame. Future research in the field must deepen our understanding of this pattern. Why does it show up across contexts? Is it due to the difficulty of incorporating planetary dynamics into a legible scale of morality and politics? Is it, as Mike Hulme (2018) suggests, a perennial human response to suppose that “we get the weather we deserve”? Does localization of responsibility occur more often in certain geographies, perhaps those—like high-mountain glacier loss and lowisland sea-level rise—with wide asymmetry between adversity of impact and proportion of global emissions? Does it occur more often in certain religious contexts, such that we can see certain kinds of religious or moral life as more inclined to localize responsibility? How does localized responsibility interact with national and global discourses of attribution? Is there a connection between localized ecological responsibility and climate denialism (Norgaard 2011)? All those questions are critical for understanding how responsibility for climate impacts is imagined and how it might change. The divergence of these local etiologies of environmental changes from the sciences of global environmental change does something more important than exhibit the diversity of climate cultures; it presents a problem of interpretation for the researcher. On the face of it, this pattern seems perverse: some of the least blameworthy communities take on themselves responsibility for impacts driven by distant (and mostly negligent) political powers. What conclusions should researchers draw from this? How should they interact with it? Gergan, who finds localization at work in her research on climate impacts in North Sikkim (chapter 8), argues that it should be understood as a manifestation of neoliberal redistributions of responsibility, in which the blame and

Conclusion

295

burden of social and ecological changes is borne by those most affected by it. Gergan’s hypothesis attributes the perversity to structural social changes, which researchers should then investigate as a cross-context source of the pattern. But it strikes me that the researcher might alternatively find in localized accounts of responsibility an attempt to hold together multiple scales of action, to preserve the role of gods in everyday life, or to protect notions of moral agency, or some combination of the three. Rubow, who observes several forms of localization in Oceania, thinks that sometimes islanders may simply focus on the scales at which they can act (chapter 1). “Climate change exceeds the scales of the present and is thus impossible to calibrate to local scales and take concrete action in preparation.” Only a few may attend global policy workshops, but focusing on lagoon health is something everyone can do. Moreover, notices Rubow, maintaining the quality of the local environment may well be the islanders’ best available adaptive policy, “the best way of preparing for the unknown future during accelerated global warming.” Haberman’s research, reported in chapter 9, finds localized responsibility combining with climate science in ambivalent ways. Haberman reports interpretations of a catastrophic flood at a shrine at the source of the divine River Ganga that seem to fall into the pattern: local spokespeople say the gods have been angered by the greed of local inhabitants, by a decline in the old ways of life, and by immoral sexual behavior of visitors. But moralizing nearby behavior and attributing floods to angry gods do not necessarily rule out thinking with climate science and global drivers of change. Some of Haberman’s informants combine the attributions: “The extreme weather and concomitant disasters caused by the gods is a direct response to the changes caused by the burning of fossil fuels to support new extravagant lifestyles.” That remarkable sentence bundles immoral lifestyles, anthropogenic climate forcing, and divine action. The view is not necessarily contradictory; religious thought may integrate multiple, noncompeting kinds of agency. The key question is, how do those interpretations orient responses? To what extent is the “immoral behavior” about climate-related bad action, such as burning fossil fuels and extravagant lifestyles? Haberman suggests it can go either way. “The extreme weather . . . is regarded as the means the gods are using to make humans realize the consequences of our immoral behavior, particularly as it relates to the environment” (emphasis added). Particularly—but not necessarily? Research should then track whether future floods are attributed to the impious sexuality of honeymooning couples or to something more plausibly related to anthropogenic drivers of flood intensification. Even then, when environmental bad behavior

296

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

is moralized in response to a climate impact, researchers must ask, should the localization be regarded as still distant from actual causes, or does it perhaps show an emerging ecological consciousness in which local practices orient themselves to goods at stake? For example, does concern about the wastedisposal problem that Paerregaard observes in chapter 10 lead into ecological inquiries that attribute glacial retreat to material environmental practices, or does it rather keep attention focused on behavior irrelevant to glaciers? A final line of inquiry on conceptions of responsibility turns toward climate-driven religious change. In the attributions of flooding to angry gods, Haberman observes a profound shift (chapter 9). Whereas the River Ganga, itself an aquatic form of divinity, has long been regarded as embracing and forgiving, now some talk of her as angry. Some say that because her health is being hurt by humans, Ganga is rising up to save herself and punish humans. That represents a major affective shift in everyday religious life, for the once all-embracing river divine, forgiver and purifier of all bad action, must now be approached more warily. Haberman reports a major drop-off in the number of pilgrims to Gangotri, who are frightened off by the floods. As scholars investigate climate-driven religious changes, we should ask how environmentally pressured changes in religious life reshape the contexts for imagining responsibility for climate change. Cli m at e-Dr i v en R e ligious Ch a nge Across these chapters researchers find environmental stress driving changes in ritual, mood, or belief. Tracking those changes will continue to shape a major part of the field’s research agenda. Bronislaw Szerszynski (2017b) puts the question this way: “As the flows of energy and matter around the world are altered, and a new geological epoch emerges, what will become of the sacred?” (253). Anthropogenic changes in planetary systems exert reflexive pressure on the religious systems through which, in turn, many persons interpret the meaning of global environmental change. That reflective interpretive spiral, Szerszynski thinks, may drive cosmological shifts analogous in scope to those of the Axial Age (Szerszynski 2017a). Even if the changes turn out to be smaller in magnitude, ecological changes of speed and scale without precedent in human history put significant pressure on religious formation to invent interpretive and practical responses, if only to secure their own future (Jenkins 2013). Climate-pressured religious shifts will not necessarily be benign, progressive, or aligned with climate science. Indeed, interpretation of those shifts should focus on important ambivalences. Attributing adverse weather to

Conclusion

297

immoral action of local residents, for example, creates strong ground for behavior change, but it may not be linked to accepted causal mechanisms that drive climate change. Yet, as moral systems internalize accepted causal mechanisms, doing so may erode the basis for moral agency and so take away ground for behavior change. Ehud Halperin (2017) records “creeping doubts” among his informants about the efficacy of traditional rituals to deal with local weather, and with that, doubt about the fundamentals of their entire worldview, about the agency they have with the gods, and about the ability of the gods to control the weather. As adherents sense that the gods may be losing control of their ecology, we may see global climate change eroding the trust people have in their inherited traditions. What will take the place of that trust remains to be seen—which thus presents a critical site for ongoing ethnographic attention. Several of the chapters in this volume suggest that such religious shifts may happen through alterations of rituals and shifts of mood. For example, Paerregaard’s chapter 10 argues that ritual practices around a glacier are challenged by perceptions of environmental change, which drives self-reflective criticism of how the ritual is performed. “We need to examine not only how people’s cultural and religious ideas shape climate perceptions,” he writes, “but also how climate change challenges offering practices and the imaginaries of the sacred that inform them.” Paerregaard suggestively argues that climate change puts such extraordinary pressure on the glacier ritual that it challenges classical theories of sacrifice. How religious studies and anthropology understand ritual may itself be challenged by the way communities adapt to climate pressures. Paerregaard captures in another way what is both compelling and obscure in religious responses to climate change. He reports that the ritual at the center of his research was invented in the 1990s in response to modernization changes and political trauma in Peru. It was not a continuous ancient ritual, then, but rather an invented retrieval permitting revivification of indigenous identity and reconnection with landscape. Many seemed to find in the ritual a way to search for meaning, morality, and spirituality by recentering attention on nature’s sacredness and recovering dialogue with the nonhuman world. The existence of the ritual thus exemplifies the way that nature-based and indigenous spiritualities take on new roles amid global ecosocial change. And then, in the time of global climate change, the ritual becomes at once more attractive, growing in popularity and significance, while also becoming ecologically suspect as it generates pollution that despoils the landscape around the glacier—recoil from which gives rise to self-conscious criticisms of the way the sacrifice is practiced. It does not seem fully accurate, then, to say that climate change is driving this ritual shift. Rather, it seems that the ritual exists in part as a response to a global

298

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

political ecology that has also produced climate change. The research question here then includes asking how perceptions of pollution (material and ritual) may be affected by ideas of climate change, and especially how climate change relates to the fundamental reasons for the ritual in the first place. It is important not to claim too much, that climate change upends everything. Salas Carreño in chapter 2 contests Elizabeth Allison’s (2015) claim that glacial retreat reverses relations of dependency, making the glaciers dependent on humans. Salas Carreño argues that his context shows the contrary: that the pilgrims of his research remain confident in the power represented by the glacier, holding that the power would remain even if the glacier disappears entirely. That too is a critical line of research: how climate change does not alter religion, even and especially in those instances when it seems to present a direct threat to its ongoing practice. Another example offers a different kind caution. Gagné (chapter 7) argues that, as participants attempt to “fix the climate through ritual revival,” they shift the posture of the ritual from preventive to restorative, which in turn provokes a conflict between Bon and Buddhism because the Bon-based “ethnoclimatological” ritual contravenes Buddhist globalization processes seeking to expunge local religious forms.2 Although that conflict is surely affected by pressures from climate change, the dynamic tension between pre-Buddhist landscape spiritualities and Buddhism is perennial, driven by multiple pressures with many cycles of integration, accommodation, and reseparation. The caution here is one familiar to historians: do not let isolation of one factor of change lead one into seeing it as the only factor. Nonetheless, Gagné’s basic premise is surely correct: climate change is involved in altering religious flows. Finding ways to investigate the correlation poses an important challenge for the field. As researchers begin to ask how climate change may have figured in major periods of religious change, they also revisit associations of climate and myth that shaped—and, in their racist entanglements, continue to haunt— the history of religions as a discipline (Lincoln 1999). Researchers are, for example, amassing evidence that the Little Ice Age may have intensified the stresses that led to the Protestant Reformation (Sonnabend 2012; Behringer 2010; Barnett 2015, Northcott 2013). What does that imply about the relation between environmental conditions and religious formations? Investigations of the complexity of historical climate-driven religious change can help us evaluate contemporary hypotheses that climate change is driving processes of ritualization and reinterpretation. For example, Prasenjit Duara (2015) argues that climate change is pushing Asian societies to break with the worldview of

299

Conclusion

global modernity in order to reconstruct with Asian religious inheritances a new cosmology that supports sustainability. Yet, again, if that is happening, it will not always appear as explicit reconstruction, for it will always be irreducibly coincident with other drivers and interests. Those examples suggest that climate-pressured religious change may not take consistent forms. It may not even explicitly thematize climate. Researchers need to look for this phenomenon not only in the most dramatic topographies of climate change (retreating glaciers and coastlines) but across the quotidian geographies of religious life. For example, Sarah Fredericks (2014) investigates online spaces as a terrain of confession in response to guilt, shame, and anxiety as they relate to anthropogenic environmental change. A next stage of research includes investigating how the oblique pressures of climate-mediated relations bear on aspects of religious life unthematized as environmental (Jenkins 2017a). An especially important arena for research will be dynamics of religion amid climate-intensified political violence and climate-pressured human migrations. As religious life takes shape within these dynamics and explains and copes with them, how might it change? And what do those changes then mean for the political and environmental stresses that they interpret? For example, how do climate-related displacements affect notions of diaspora and homeland, of pilgrimage and sanctuary? How do climate-pressured migrations affect religious geographies, as people carry their religious worlds into different watersheds? In sum, as research in the field continues to investigate how “the sacred is affecting and is being affected by anthropogenic climate change” (as Kassam puts it in chapter 6), it must also contextualize and complexify its accounts of causality. Cli m at e-M e di at e d I den t it i e s Closely related to the question of how climate change reshapes religion: how do cultural responses to climate change matter for dynamics of identity formation? Samson’s chapter on the interplay among Mayan, Catholic, and Evangelical practices within cultural interpretation of climate change is helpful for suggesting the fluidity and complexity researchers need to accommodate. Beyond the question of how attitudes to climate politics correlate with particular groups, we need to investigate how the political and environmental stresses created by climate change affect processes of forming religious, racial, and ethnic identities. Consider how, for example, holding a particular political stance on climate change seems to have become part of a racialized religious

300

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

identity for white US Evangelicals and then compare that with the emergence of a pan-indigenous identity forged in climate politics. Clearly, we need more research on how climate change figures in race, religion, and identity. In Samson’s chapter 5, we see again the ambivalence of relations between indigeneity and religion, which Samson helps to highlight by tracking across Mayan and Christian identities. Already the relation is difficult to conceptualize. Does Maya culture have a religion or is it better understood as a religion? Or is religion an impossible colonial category? Those questions, long argued in indigenous studies and religious studies, bear on how scholars make sense of the way climate politics becomes a space in which Maya people come to identify with (or sometimes reject) the global category of indigenous, perhaps while continuing to participate in Catholic Christianity—the official teachings of which are themselves changing to account for climate relations. In Gergan’s and Gagné’s chapters we see that dynamic at play between the landscape spiritualities of Nepali shamanism and Bon (respectively) in tension with Mahayana Buddhism. Both chapters show how affiliations with landscapes considered sacred or alive may strengthen, weaken, or otherwise alter in negotiation with complex cosmological inheritances, changing as they do the narratives told about the unity or disunity of local and global, indigenous and axial. Climate change may affect any set of cultural streams from which people make their identities, but indigenous traditions are especially significant because they typically include relations with other species, foodways, or landscapes. As global warming shifts habitats, drives extinctions, and alters foodways, sustaining indigenous ways of being therefore come under distinctive stress (Berkes and Jolly 2001; Berkes 2017; Crate 2012). Presumably, identities fashioned from traditions that do not understand themselves to have irrevocable connection with particular ways of inhabiting particular territories will be less vulnerable—although that too is a matter for further research. One way of conceptualizing the climate vulnerability of indigenous peoples, therefore, is as a threat to the free exercise of religion, because the religion in this case can be practiced only through particular biocultural practices (Weaver 2015). Finally, an important question for understanding how climate change affects identities asks how people, variously embedded in their contexts and inheritances, relate to action that humanity in the aggregate undertakes. Does a good human life, however imagined, shift in aspect when lived with climatemediated relations? How will religious cosmologies, many of which seem to have capacities for thinking of the human species as a mythic character,

301

Conclusion

incorporate the multiple scales of agency at work in climate change? How will that in turn affect enactments of identity? Com pa r ison The research in this volume affords comparative possibilities that were less possible before. The localization pattern is a compelling example. This important pattern, critical for understanding how people imagine responsibilities for climate change and how species-level actions bear on ordinary ideas of moral agency, would be less evident had these papers been published separately. It also illustrates the need for more research, quantitative and qualitative, to provide ground for comparison across traditions and geographies, as well as the need to advance methods of comparative analysis. The attention this volume gives to mountains and islands allows one to ask how topographies of climate change may matter across hemispheres and traditions. As we begin to ask, readers cannot help but want more research to allow for fuller comparison. For example, how is climate change interpreted within the same tradition across geographies (e.g., Buddhism in high mountains versus Buddhism on islands)? It would be especially helpful to know about intradition variations across the asymmetries that matter most to global climate change—global North and global South divides, high- and low-emitting societies, more and less climate-vulnerable regions. Where multiple religions inhabit the same geography, do variations in responses to climate correlate with the interpretive priority of particular religious traditions? Empirical social science investigation does not yet have sufficient data to pursue such questions. As imperfect as our understanding is of religion, politics, and climate change in the North Atlantic, much less research focuses on global South contexts. This volume represents a welcome advance of ethnographic attention to those questions, but quantitative research lags far behind. The lack of data from the global South not only leaves obscure relationships between religious affiliation and climate-policy attitudes in much of the world; it also impedes understanding of emerging global dynamics such as, for example, the way national and religious identities may interact in shaping attitudes toward climate policy. Especially important to know is how affiliation with a global religious tradition matters in contexts where ethnonationalist energies determine state stances toward climate policy. Comparative interpretation should also be brought to bear on how religious institutions secure futures for themselves by how they work with climate

302

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

change. The localization dynamic shows one way that might happen, as communities attribute environmental wrongs to decreasing investments (ritual, moral, financial, political) in religion. Institutions can use climate change to suggest that things can get better through recommitment to their religion. Chapters 1 and 3, on islands, show important divides within the same religion (Christianity) between global/elite and local/vernacular uses of climate change. That suggests that climate change may present different opportunities at different levels of religious discourse. For those with a sense of responsibility for the whole tradition, it may be more important to show how the tradition can support international action to address the global challenge than it is to fix the local impacts. For local leaders, the opportunity may seem exactly opposite. One could go on proliferating routes for comparison. Suffice it to say that comparison will only increase in significance as more data is created and capacities of analysis advance. Let me note in closing this section, however, that the activity of comparing across religious contexts is the subject of long argument in the field of religious studies. Some scholars object that the idea of comparative religion draws researchers to make distorted inferences about particular worlds by looking for patterns baked into a false generic idea of religion. Others insist that interpretation and understanding generally involves comparison, which is the implicit justification for doing religious studies at all. The tensions are perennial in the field. Comparative work in the space of climate change at once opens itself to those arguments and also reorients them. The “religion and climate change” frame can overdetermine description, and we see even in this volume instances in which particular biocultural phenomena are swept perhaps too quickly into an organizing category. Yet, insofar as climate change represents a problem for all humans, or experiences shared around the world, or vulnerabilities faced across contexts, its interpretation carries context-crossing ideas and interests. It cries out for comparison. E va luat ion An implicit rationale for undertaking this research project is that its phenomena matter for social responses to an important ecological challenge. Interest in the ethnographic dispatches of this volume may include the reader’s own search for fitting interpretations, moods, and changes. What makes this volume important, and what makes urgent the need for further research, therefore also raises a question about the relation between description and evaluation—another tension with a long pedigree of controversy in religious studies. As researchers present their work, what evaluative stances do they invite their readers to

Conclusion

303

take toward the relations they describe? Are those stances appropriate? What are relevant criteria for evaluating interpretive responses to environmental changes? What does a decent response to climate change entail? Authors in this volume navigate that tension in a variety of ways. Drew in chapter 4 appeals to the reader for openness to interpretations that they might find unreasonable. She first presents that appeal as a condition of understanding; “if we miss or dismiss the presence of their god(s), then we fail to understand key sources of motivation of our collaborators.” She closes her chapter by observing that people may revise their stories, and that, indeed, her informants increasingly “indicate nuance” by incorporating climate science with their sense of divinities in their accounts of ecological relations. By closing with that observation, it seems to me, Drew invites the reader to appreciate, and maybe even to emulate, this capacity for nuance and multiplicity. She implies that some responses to climate change may be illuminative and helpful beyond their immediate context. Other authors offer more explicit evaluations. Gagné in chapter 7 admires the capacity of landscape ritualists to function as “good ethnoclimatologists” and laments the way “orthodoxization of Buddhism” may suppress or displace that capacity. Something important would be lost, she seems to be telling us, were a more global stream of Buddhism to take priority in shaping this landscape’s response to climate change. Perhaps it would venture too far beyond her descriptive research frame to explain why that capacity is valuable for adequate responses to climate change, but her report certainly raises that normative question. Paerregaard takes the most critical stance toward his research context in chapter 10—and his way of doing so should raise all the alarms descriptivists have about incorporating evaluation into ethnographic research practice. He closes his chapter by “highlighting an unresolved problem in the Andean cosmology they advocate,” which is the “offering’s negative anthropogenic effect.” Yet one might wonder whether Paerregaard has become distracted by relatively insignificant normative criteria. The trash at the glacier may be unsightly but does not have significant effect on glacial melt or climate change. Paerregaard is concerned about a problem with purity and pollution in ritual practice, for which he proposes a solution—a solution that seems to protect a purity logic, but does not show how it leads the ritual to interpreting climate change better. Nonetheless, Paerregaard rightly draws attention to the task of evaluation, arguing that ethnographies show “how this merging of knowledge systems generates unexpected and controversial ideas about the human-nature relationship and the cause of global warming.” His work, like most of the chapters

304

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

in this volume, asks readers to attend to the unexpected and controversial, not only in order to better understand their fellow inhabitants of earth but also, I think, because those ideas may have something from which (mostly modernized) readers can learn. I have already noted how several contributors imply that nonmodern interpretations of human ecologies are especially significant. Perhaps they share a suspicion that climate change reveals the exhaustion of the modern schema and so point their attention (and readers’ attention) to cosmologies with more satisfying ontologies of relation. I have also noted apparent perversity, where some of the least blameworthy communities take on themselves all responsibility for impacts driven by planetary changes that distant political powers have caused. Denialism among white US Evangelicals represents a different kind of perversity in renouncing responsibility. What stance should researchers take toward these interpretive formations? We may look forward, then, to exchanges between ethnographic work in the field and constructive accounts of what good religious creativity does in relation to climate change. Maybe it should engage the epic imagination or perhaps it should help a community come to terms with anxieties associated with environmental change. Gergan’s chapter 8 shows her as valuing rich cultural and biological diversity, and especially the forms of action that protect the landscape conditions of cosmological worlds. Rubow’s self-critical interaction with her informants in chapter 1 may suggest that she appreciates capacities for meta-ethical reflection on forms of response to climate change. Maybe research should, as Kassam suggests in chapter 6, actively help people root themselves in their ecology and thereby participate in constructing and sustaining the sacred. In that case, climate change is not just a research task but itself a religious work. Conclusion: Ot h er Ways Forwa r d Let me observe in closing a few possibilities for future research not exemplified in the research of this volume. First, although the chapters in this volume come from scholars in several fields, they all employ ethnographic method. That should not be taken to mean that ethnography represents the entire future for studying religion and climate change, but it does deepen possibilities in the new exchanges between anthropology and religious studies. In particular, the ethnographies of ethics being written in both guilds might take leave from the work here to develop ways of investigating how climate change shadows or stresses everyday moral life.

305

Conclusion

Among the other research methods that will shape the future of work on religion and climate change, let me name two as particularly apt for development. Collaboration with the arts may allow skills and understandings of creative expression to open new possibilities for tracking changes in climate and religion. How do the cultural stresses of climate change show up in the sounds, tastes, smells of religious life? How might climate-inflected arts open avenues of cultural creativity, including intersections with religious creativity? Finally, I note that as the research in this book questions anthropocentrism and at points argues for including agents beyond the human, expanding the methodological possibilities that research with and beyond the human will advance the field’s range of inquiry. The emerging field of multispecies studies may be a helpful companion in this. Its scholars cultivate skills of attentiveness to other organisms and relations, often by immersing themselves in the worlds of other species, incorporating affect and commitment into inquiry, and unabashedly seeking to deepen capacities of response (Van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016). Religious worlds are always multispecies worlds, embedded in biocultural relations—although it often goes unnoticed just how they are so embedded. Inquiry into the way climate change matters for those worlds should try to incorporate all their relations into our ways of knowing. W illis Jenkins is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology and The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity. Not e s 1. For an overview of research in the field, see Jenkins, Berry, and Kreider (2018). That work informs the agenda of this one, the shortcomings of which are my own. 2. I follow Gagné’s convention of naming this landscape-based spirituality as “Bon,” although that is a contested term.

306

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

R efer ence s Allison, Elizabeth A. 2015. “The Spiritual Significance of Glaciers in an Age of Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change 6 (5): 493–508. https://doi.org /10.1002/wcc.354. Barnett, Lydia. 2015, “The Theology of Climate Change: Sin as Agency in the Enlightenment’s Anthropocene.” Environmental History 20 (2): 217–37. Behringer, Wolfgang. 2010. A Cultural History of Climate. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Berkes, Fikret. 2017. Sacred Ecology. New York: Routledge. Berkes, Fikret, and Dyanna Jolly. 2001. “Adapting to Climate Change: SocialEcological Resilience in a Canadian Western Arctic Community.” Conservation Ecology 5 (2): 1–15. Boudino, Garrett F., and Todd LeVasseur. 2016. “‘Grow the Scorched Ground Green’: Values and Ethics in the Transition Movement.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10 (3): 379–404. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Callison, Candis. 2014. How Climate Change Comes to Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2):197–222. Clingerman, Forrest. 2015. “Theologians as Interpreters—Not Prophets—in a Changing Climate.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83 (2): 336–55. Clingerman, Forrest, and Kevin J. O’Brien. 2016. Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering: Calming the Storm. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Crate, Susan A. 2011. “Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 175–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104925. ———. 2012. “Climate and Cosmology: Exploring Sakha Belief and the Local Effects of Unprecedented Change in North-Eastern Siberia, Russia.” In Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles, edited by Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann, 261–66. London: Continuum. Crist, Eileen. 2013. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” Environmental Humanities 3 (1): 129–47. Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2017. The Ends of the World. Translated by Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes. Malden, MA: Polity. Deane-Drummond, Celia, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, eds. 2017. Religion in the Anthropocene. Eugene, OR: Cascade.

Conclusion

307

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dove, Michael R. 2006. “Indigenous People and Environmental Politics.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (1): 191–208. Duara, Prasenjit. 2015. The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fredericks, Sarah E. 2014. “Online Confessions of Eco-Guilt.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8 (1): 64–84. Halperin, Ehud. 2017. “Winds of Change: Religion and Climate Change in the Western Himalayas.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85 (1): 64–111. Harrison, Peter. 2015. The Territories of Religion and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howe, Nicolas. 2016. Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. “We Always Get the Climate We Deserve: The Tenacious Grip of Moral Accountability.” Gnosis 3:49–55. Jenkins, Willis. 2013. The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. ———. 2017a. “Feasts of the Anthropocene: Beyond Climate Change as Special Object in the Study of Religion.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116 (1): 69–81. ———. 2017b. “Whose Religion? Which Ecology?” In Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, edited by Willis J. Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, 22–32. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Willis, Evan Berry, and Luke Beck Kreider. 2018. “Religion and Climate Change.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43 (1): 85–108. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Lincoln, Bruce. 1999. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nelson, Melissa K. 2017. “North America.” In Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, edited by Willis J. Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, 138–47. London: Routledge. Norgaard, Kari. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

308

U n der sta n di ng Cl i m at e Ch a nge t h rough R e l igious L i fe wor l ds

Northcott, Michael S. 2013. A Political Theology of Climate Change. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Purdy, Jedediah. 2016. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sideris, Lisa H. 2017. Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sonnabend, Holger. 2012. “Environment, Climate and Religion in Ancient European History.” In Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles, edited by Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann, 261–66. London: Continuum. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2017a. “From the Anthropocene Epoch to a New Axial Age: Using Theory-Fictions to Explore Geo-spiritual Futures.” In Religion in the Anthropocene, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, 35–52. Eugene, OR: Cascade. ———. 2017b. “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch.” Theory, Culture and Society 34 (2–3): 253–75. Taylor, Bron. 2009. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tinker, George E. 2008. American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Tsosie, Rebecca. 2013. “Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples: Comparative Models of Sovereignty.” Tulane Environmental Law Review 26 (2): 239–58. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23. Weaver, Jace. 2015. “Misfit Messengers: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Climate Change.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83 (2): 320–35. Whyte, Kyle Powys, Joseph P. Brewer II, and Jay T. Johnson. 2015. “Weaving Indigenous Science, Protocols and Sustainability Science.” Sustainability Science 11 (1): 25–32. Whyte, Kyle Powys, Chris Caldwell, and Marie Schaefer. 2018. “Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for ‘All Humanity.’” In Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power, edited by Julie Sze, 149–79. New York: New York University Press.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. adaptation: to climate change, 6, 9, 14, 23–24, 28–29, 34, 40, 44, 67, 70, 77, 80, 83, 90, 91, 92, 93–94, 103, 126, 129, 137, 139, 141, 143, 155, 160, 166, 169, 171, 184–85, 295, 297; religious, 17, 78, 225 Afghanistan, 14, 162, 167, 169, 170, 173n4 agency, 44, 45, 63, 156, 157, 158, 170, 225, 263, 265, 279, 285, 295, 301; community, 155; divine, 10, 16, 114, 117, 249; double, 10, 11; intentional, 49, 64; moral, 295, 297, 301. See also goddesses, agency of; gods, agency of; Qulqipunku glacier, agency of Aggarwal, Ravina, 201n13 agriculture, 15, 31, 65, 133, 135, 183, 185, 187, 191, 193, 200n3, 211, 213, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227n3, 241, 280n3; agriculturalists, 61; agropastoralism, 66, 160, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170; monocrop, 127; plantation, 127. See also farming Alaknanda River, 239, 241 Aitken, Bill, 239 Allen, Catherine, 50 Alley, Kelly, 250 Allison, Elizabeth, 56, 298 Andes, 14, 45, 49, 50, 55, 64, 272, 280n1; Andean New Year, 262, 263, 266, 268, 272, 273,

280n3; climate change in, 61; Peruvian, 7, 15, 46, 49, 65, 66, 69n5, 70n14, 80, 126, 257n18, 264, 271, 272; tropical, 45 animism, 142, 291 Anthropocene era, 17, 46, 142, 157, 158–59, 160, 172, 173n1, 213, 214, 285, 292, 293 anthropology, 3, 11, 37, 119n2, 130, 133, 143, 145n11, 158, 297, 304; anthropologists, 25, 61, 186, 271; colonial, 166 anxiety, 1, 4, 7, 8, 13, 154, 155, 159–60, 168, 170, 171, 185, 186, 193, 195, 199, 213, 225, 299. See also rituals: ritual anxieties Apu Qulqipunku, 50, 56, 63, 64, 65–67 Asian brown cloud, 240, 243 Australia, 24, 27, 85 awareness campaigns, for climate change, 17, 87, 90 Badrinath, 239 balance, 11, 107, 114, 134–35, 137, 140, 143, 214; imbalance, 101, 118, 188 Balikci-Denjongpa, Anna, 227n8 Bear, Laura, 186 Berkes, Fikret, 61, 63, 144n7 Berry, Evan, 185

309

310 Bhagirathi River, 239; Bhagirathi Valley, 112, 113, 257n14 Bhutan, 208, 209, 210, 211 Bible, the, 7, 24, 25, 26, 36, 38, 39, 78, 87, 88–89, 145n10, 167 Blaser, Mario, 49 Boillat, Sébastien, 61, 63 Bolin, Inge, 257n18 Bon, 187, 290, 298, 300, 305n2 Boseto, L., 36 Brotherhood of Señor de Quyllurit’i, 50, 55, 64, 68n1 Buddhism, 168, 184, 185, 189, 193, 196, 197, 200, 201nn5–7, 201n10, 202n16, 210, 214–15, 216, 217, 219–20, 226, 286, 290, 298, 300, 301, 303; Buddhist monks, 188, 195, 198; Buddhist traditions, 187 Burman, Anders, 45, 49, 64–65 Cáceres, Berta, 145n14 calendars: agrarian, 191; divinatory, 137, 144n3; ecological, 8, 154, 158, 160, 162–63, 164–67, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172; Gregorian, 160; of human body, 154, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168; lunar, 69n3; solar, 160, 168; written, 161. See also chillas capitalism, 46, 78, 158, 167, 186, 199, 213, 252, 278 carbon emissions, 10, 86, 87, 160, 170, 243, 249, 255 cardamom: cardamom farmers, 208, 209, 211, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 224–25; cardamom plantations, 218, 221; cultivation of, 220–22, 223, 227n2, 227n8; decline of, 8, 208, 210, 211, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227n1, 227n3; fungal blight, 208, 211, 221, 222, 224, 225, 227n3 Catholicism, 44, 49, 50, 55, 58, 66, 67, 69n3, 87, 132, 133, 144n6, 280n3, 299, 300; folk Catholicism, 135; priests, 67; traditions, 129 centeredness, 126, 135, 137, 140 Central Asia, 8, 153, 154, 155, 157, 162, 164, 287 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 104–105, 285 Chanchani, Nachiket, 237 Childs, Geoff, 202n15

i n de x chillas (periods in the calendar of the human body), 163, 164, 166, 167, 168–69, 173n4 Christenson, Allen, 137 Christianity, 6, 7, 10, 24, 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 77, 81, 83, 92, 140, 156, 217, 288, 290, 291–92, 302; Christian identity, 300; Christian theology, 78, 80, 292; Christian traditions, 39, 78; greening of, 78. See also Bible, the; Catholicism; evangelicalism; JudeoChristian tradition; Protestantism climate models, 30, 45 climatic variation, 154, 155, 156, 160, 212, 287 coca leaves, 267, 268, 269, 280n1 Collins, Wes, 135 colonialism, 69n9, 102, 118, 138, 159, 171, 215, 218–19, 222, 289, 292, 300; colonial history, 28, 209, 216, 225; colonial interventions, 210, 211, 224, 226; colonial legacies, 210, 212, 219; colonial logics, 210, 212, 216, 225, 226; colonial policies, 227n6; colonial regimes, 213; colonial tropes, 217; environmental, 13; postcolonialism, 36; postcolonial politics, 101, 104, 105, 213, 215, 219, 224, 226; settler, 289, 291. See also anthropology: colonial; India:, colonial; politics: postcolonial conservation, 131, 138, 156, 169, 213, 216, 220, 262; conservation policies, 212, 226; conservation zones, 212, 221, 224, 227n4 Cook Islands, 14, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 40 Cook Islands Christian Church, 24, 25, 36 cosmologies, 4, 130, 189, 198, 209, 210, 214, 219, 226, 289, 291, 292–94, 296, 299, 300, 304; Andean, 270, 271, 278; Hindu, 116; indigenous, 16, 265; Ladakhi, 187; Maya, 127, 129, 131, 135, 138, 140, 144n8; Tibetan Buddhist, 187, 189, 201n7 costumbre, 129, 131, 135 Council of Pilgrim Nations, 55, 58, 60, 61, 65–66, 69n12 Cruikshank, Julie, 45, 281n4 cyclones, 14, 25, 26, 30, 32–34, 38, 40; Cyclone Meli, 84; Cyclone Tomas, 90, 91

i n de x dams, 211, 246; construction of, 115, 138, 211 dance, 69n9; troupes, 44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 64, 70n13; ukuku, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 66–67, 69n11, 70n13 deforestation, 15, 112, 114, 124, 127 deities, 40, 56, 119n2, 119n4, 187, 193, 200, 201n10, 217, 237, 239, 252, 257n18, 278; Andean, 271; devi, 105, 241, 242, 252; dissatisfaction of, 189; divine beings, 185, 186, 187, 199, 251; earth, 10, 11; glacial, 8; hunting, 216; land, 11, 188; Lepcha, 217, 225; mountain, 5, 267, 279, 280n1; nature, 5; placation of, 188, 199, 220; regional, 108, 241; and relationship with humans, 189, 193, 197, 199, 200; territorial, 187–88, 214. See also devata; goddesses; gods de la Cadena, Marisol, 49, 103–104, 292 denial, 12, 17, 40, 94, 279; climate denialism, 294, 304 de Scally, Fes, 33 devata, 8, 103, 105, 106–7, 108, 110–12, 114, 116, 239, 241–42, 247, 248–49, 250, 252, 255; Kandar Devata, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 114, 116 development, 118, 131, 138, 141, 216, 220, 255; development practices, 116; development projects, 12, 113–14, 124, 127, 137, 146, 222, 225; economic, 5, 12, 165, 249; industrial, 159 divine, the, 3, 101, 104, 105; divine abodes, 237; divine power, 110, 239, 242, 249, 263; divine punishment, 11, 15, 80, 115, 140, 255; divine warnings, 15, 253, 255; encounters with, 118. See also agency, divine Dobhal, D. P., 243, 244 Dollfus, Pascale, 201n5 Drew, Georgina, 240, 251, 257n15, 257n17, drought, 80, 126, 139, 208, 220, 246 Duara, Prasenjit, 298 Durkheim, Émile, 77, 186 Dzongu, 208, 210–11, 216–19, 220, 221, 222, 223–24, 225, 226 Early, John, 137 earthquakes, 107, 126, 139, 146, 211

311 Eck, Diana, 250 ecology, 4, 35, 70n14, 87, 119, 131, 142, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 209, 210, 211, 216, 218, 224, 226, 236, 243, 286, 287, 288, 292, 294, 296, 297, 302, 303; ecological changes, 80, 83, 102, 170, 171, 212, 295, 296; ecological conditions, 79, 81, 84, 102, 170, 171, 208, 214; ecological constructs, 123, 155; ecological crisis, 35, 88, 103, 210, 213, 214, 222, 225, 285; ecological degradation, 80, 89, 93, 94, 101; ecological footprint, 14, 114; ecological grief, 13, 19n3; ecological knowledge, 165, 288, 291, 292; ecological loss, 213, 226; ecological precarity, 8, 210, 213, 222, 225; ecological problems, 91, 117, 212; ecological systems, 155, 214; ecological transformation, 211, 224; human ecology, 168, 304; integral, 133–34; political, 126, 129, 130, 298; and religion, 2, 3, 102, 103, 285, 286. See also calendars, ecological; Forum on Religion and Ecology; science: ecological science; violence: ecological; worldviews: ecological ecopsychology, 19n3 ecosystems, 27, 44, 118, 130, 133, 155, 156, 157, 165, 214, 254; Himalayan, 113, 212; interdependent, 142; marine, 31; mountain, 45; planetary, 17 elders, 70, 84, 140, 171, 192, 193, 194–95, 197, 211 El Niño, 80, 126 El Salvador, 126, 132 enactments, 24, 25, 38, 40, 287, 288, 301; of climate change, 27, 29, 34, 40, 287, 289 environment, 2, 4, 10, 11, 18, 23, 28, 33, 34, 35, 37–38, 40, 46, 63, 94, 102, 128, 156, 161, 170, 172, 187, 193, 212, 213, 220, 221, 224, 242, 275, 279, 285, 287, 291, 295, 298; attitudes toward, 78, 236, 268; environmental abuse, 10, 14, 249, 250, 264; environmental activism, 38, 39, 120, 124, 132, 137, 138, 141, 264; environmental activists, 8, 64, 130, 133, 144, 211, 224, 264; environmental agenda, 137–38; environmental behavior, 61, 102; environmental blame displacement, 61, 64; environmental challenges, 1, 2, 67, 79,

312 134; environmental change, 17, 24, 35, 39, 70n14, 80, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93–94, 114, 123, 126, 141, 153, 155, 159, 169, 171, 185, 212, 248, 253, 279, 289, 290, 293, 294, 296, 297, 299, 303, 304; environmental citizenship, 131, 138; environmental concerns, 133, 264, 275, 278; environmental consciousness, 133, 141; environmental crisis, 2, 3, 134, 210, 274; environmental degradation, 16, 29, 38, 80, 81, 83, 86, 102, 116, 127, 129, 134, 138, 139, 212, 253, 257n15, 266, 268, 279; environmental disasters, 31, 140; environmental disruptions, 118, 126, 170; environmental impacts, 11, 157, 262, 263, 275, 277, 278; environmental issues, 2, 3, 4, 25, 119, 133, 249, 285; environmentalists, 25, 26, 28, 31, 34, 38, 256n3, 275, 287; environmental movements, 8, 293; environmental networks, 224; environmental organizations, 31, 32, 133; environmental problems, 24, 32, 39, 266, 274, 275, 278; environmental rights, 133, 141; environmental stress, 126, 127, 139, 296, 299; environmental studies, 3, 17; human-environment relations, 15, 18n1, 38, 44–45, 49, 88, 126, 134, 135, 137, 140, 142, 188, 189, 209, 210, 225, 248, 249, 251, 253, 254, 266, 295; protection of, 262, 264; and religion, 78, 101, 102; and theology, 25, 26, 78. See also colonialism: environmental; sacredness: of environment; values: environmental erosion, 30, 31, 39, 243; coastal, 35, 77, 79, 81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93 Eshelman, Catherine Good, 130 ethics, 77, 186, 199, 304; Christian, 78; cultural, 130 ethnography, 3, 7, 16, 23, 25–26, 28, 29, 37, 38, 40, 44, 49, 126, 158, 210, 217, 219, 222, 257n15, 264, 265, 297, 302, 304; ethnographers, 219, 288, 303; ethnographic data, 102, 219; ethnographic fieldwork, 114; ethnographic research, 77, 166, 167, 173nn3–4, 235, 236, 289, 303 Europe: European governments, 141; European history, 157; European political

i n de x thought, 104; Europeans, 32, 129; northern, 6, 25 evangelicalism, 63, 129, 144n6, 146n15; evangelical churches, 38; Evangelicals, 81, 132, 139–40, 300, 304 faith, 81, 82, 91, 92, 278; blind faith, 90, 116 fanaticism, religious, 157, 167, 173n6 farming, 155, 161, 162, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192, 193, 197, 199, 200n3, 224; families, 193, 194, 199; practices, 141, 221; season, 187, 191, 192, 199; subsistence farming, 83, 187; techniques, 222. See also Ladakh: farming in fear, 1, 40, 86, 159, 171, 236, 240, 242, 253 fertility, 44, 50, 267 Fiji, 7, 25, 35, 36, 77, 81–82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87–88, 89, 92–93, 289 Fischer, Edward, 135 floods, 15, 82, 83–84, 88–89, 93, 107, 112–14, 115, 116, 118, 167, 235, 243–45, 246, 247, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 257n9, 294, 295, 296; glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), 246, 252, 255 Flores, Carlos, 55 food insecurity, 127, 160 Forsyth, Timothy, 213 Forum on Religion and Ecology, 3 fossil fuels, 4, 9, 12, 15, 46, 243, 252, 295 Francis I (pope), 133–34 Fredericks, Sarah, 299 Galison, P., 24, 287 Ganga River, 102, 105, 107, 111, 112, 115, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 249, 250, 251, 254, 257n17, 295, 296 Gangotri, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 246, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 296 Garhwhal, 102, 116, 239, 240, 242, 251, 252. See also Himalaya: Garwhal geology, 46, 158; geological eras, 38, 296; geologists, 246. See also time: geological Gergan, Joseph, 245 Gergan, Mabel, 118 Ghosh, Amitav, 11

i n de x glaciers, 11, 17, 44, 45–46, 50, 70n14, 153, 156, 186, 189, 194, 196–97, 200, 201n5, 214, 235, 241, 244, 251, 252, 273, 277, 281n4, 290, 296, 297; artificial, 185; care of, 15, 192–93, 240, 298; Chorabari Glacier, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 251; deterioration of, 25, 255; Gangotri Glacier, 243, 251; glacial melt, 7, 8, 13, 45, 189, 192, 193, 201n8, 240, 243, 246, 248, 252, 262, 263, 264, 266, 268, 269, 277, 278, 279, 281n4; glacial retreat, 11, 14, 45, 49, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 70n20, 184, 189, 243, 263, 270, 280, 286, 294, 299; glacier lakes, 113, 246, 266, 275, 276; Himalayan, 113, 240, 243, 246; and impact of climate change, 55, 113; loss of, 185, 256n8, 274, 294; Sarasvati, 241; tropical, 274. See also deities: glacial; floods: glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF); gods: glacial; Qulqipunku glacier; water: from glaciers global South, 6, 7, 17, 138, 301 globalization, 252, 298; developmental, 255 God, 12, 17, 26, 28, 29, 35, 38, 78, 81, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 132, 140, 167, 247, 248; and climate change, 92, 93, 94; God’s control, 91, 94; God’s creation, 27, 36; God’s love, 36; God’s power, 29, 90; God’s protection, 91; God’s punishment, 14, 26, 34, 82, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91; God’s will, 170; God’s word, 139; God’s work, 25, 140; trust in God, 140 goddesses, 8, 104, 105–6, 218, 241; agency of, 117, 253; Gaia, 158; Ganga, 105–6, 115, 240, 241, 242, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253; river, 235, 239, 240, 255; Yamuna, 252. See also deities: devi gods, 8, 104–5, 106, 107, 144n8, 239, 241, 247, 291, 295, 303; agency of, 117; ancestral, 83; Buddhist, 220; glacial, 56; gods’ anger, 10, 12, 16, 17, 116, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 255, 257n15, 257n18, 295, 296; gods’ power, 114, 115, 253; gods’ punishment, 17, 247, 248, 252, 254, 255; gods’ warnings, 15, 254; of the land, 9, 11, 12, 13, 187, 253; local, 188, 201n5; mountain, 105, 108, 197; regional, 106, 242; relationship with humans, 11, 13, 101, 103, 105, 114, 118, 135, 137, 193, 242, 249, 253–54,

313 255, 297; relationship with nature, 239, 241, 248–49, 253; Shiva, 237, 239, 240–41, 242, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 254, 256n4; village, 242. See also deities; devata; goddesses Goodwin, Bill, 83 greenhouse gases, 10, 15, 126, 170, 243 Grim, John, 2 Guatemala, 8, 123, 124, 126, 127–28, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137–38, 139, 144n4, 146n15 Halapua, W., 36 Halperin, Ehud, 114, 117, 242, 249, 252, 253, 257n15, 258n19, 297 harmony, 130, 134, 135, 140, 201n6, 267, 268; with nature, 10, 11, 12, 19n2 Havea, S. A., 36 Hermesse, Julie, 139–40, 141 hierarchies, 49, 65, 200, 225; patriarchal, 36; racial-ethnic, 62, 65, 210, 219, 224; social, 56 High, Mette M., 214 Himalaya, 8, 117, 120, 184, 185, 195, 201n6, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 224, 237, 239, 242, 245, 250, 253, 256n8, 257n18, 258n19, 290; central, 15, 102, 105, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256n1, 257n9, 257n15; and climate change, 210, 217, 243, 246, 247, 248; eastern, 211, 212, 214, 224; Garwhal, 105, 106, 118; Indian, 14, 118, 183, 210, 214, 236, 243; in Nepal, 212; western, 252, 253, 257n15. See also glaciers: Himalayan; mountains: Himalaya Hinduism, 81, 102–3, 105, 116, 214, 216, 219, 220, 236, 237, 241, 244, 249, 256n3; Himalayan, 10, 254; Hindus, 15, 103, 235, 239, 250; Hindu traditions, 255. See also cosmologies: Hindu; traditions: Hindu hisobdon (keeper of time), 163, 164, 167 Honduras, 126, 145 hopelessness, 4, 7, 12, 86 Huancayo, 261–62, 263, 264, 266–67, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275–78, 279, 280nn2–3, 281n5

314 Huaytapallana, 261–63, 264, 266, 267–70, 271, 272–73, 274, 275–79, 280n3, 281n6 Hubert, Henri, 265 Hulme, Mike, 40, 123, 288, 294 hunting, 155, 161, 162, 216, 220 hurricanes, 126; Hurricane Katrina, 81; Hurricane Mitch, 126; Hurricane Stan, 139, 140 hydropower projects, 210–11, 212, 220, 224 identity, 128, 129, 156, 301; community, 18, 129, 137; cultural, 124, 129; ethnic, 129, 145n11, 266, 274; group, 130; identity constructs, 123, 299; religious, 300. See also Christianity: Christian identity; indigenous peoples: identity; Maya: identity immorality, 14, 80, 82, 83, 88, 89–90, 91, 247, 250, 251, 254, 295, 297; sexual, 16, 295 Incas, 70n16, 267, 271 India, 8, 9, 14, 106, 110, 183, 184, 185, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215–16, 218, 222, 223, 227n3, 237, 239, 240, 249, 290, 294; colonial, 102; Indian Environment Protection Act, 212; Indian Forest Conservation Act, 212, 216; Indian government, 113, 237; Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, 246; Indian military, 215, 216; Indian Power Ministry, 210; Indian Wildlife Protection Act, 212, 216; northern, 1, 8, 183, 235. See also Himalaya: Indian; Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology indigenous peoples, 12, 49, 50, 52, 55, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69n5, 70n17, 81, 126, 130, 132, 138, 146n16, 156, 159, 208, 213–14, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221, 223, 226, 227n5, 227n7, 266, 289, 290, 291, 292, 297, 300; communities, 80, 153, 154, 157, 166; cosmopolitics, 49; cosmovision, 291; cultures, 12, 156, 212; identity, 266, 277, 289, 297, 300; knowledge, 130, 162, 165, 173n6, 289, 291, 292; movements, 264; politics, 291; practices, 44–45, 46, 50, 55, 58, 67, 219, 292; religions, 4, 10, 36, 37, 129, 142, 214, 223, 226; and responses to climate change, 209, 210, 215, 219, 224, 225; rights, 128, 216; rituals, 219; societies, 159, 162, 165, 168, 257n18; traditions, 7, 70n20, 289, 300;

i n de x worlds, 66, 67, 291; worldviews, 142. See also cosmologies: indigenous; shamanism: indigenous industrialization, 81, 86, 127, 165, 171 Industrial Revolution, 157 Ingold, Tim, 142 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), 15, 17, 27, 79, 81–82 International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 3, 153 irrigation, 184, 274; canals, 185 Islam, 81, 166, 167. See also Muslims islands, 23, 24, 28, 30, 33–34, 38, 39, 40, 82, 294, 295, 301, 302. See also Cook Islands; Fiji; Ono Island; Pacific islands; Rarotonga Jacka, Jerry, 80 Jasanoff, Sheila, 265 Jenkins, Willis, 185 Johnston, Barbara Rose, 133 Joshi, Hridayesh, 245, 257n11 Judeo-Christian tradition, 78, 88 Kanchendzonga Biosphere Reserve, 221 Kedarnath, 236, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244–46, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254–55, 258n20; Kedarnath disaster, 235, 242, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 255; Kedarnath temple, 237, 238, 255 Kench, P. S., 33 King, Sarah J., 117 kinship, 11, 166, 200 Kohn, Eduardo, 11 Kreider, Luke Beck, 185 Ladakh, 8, 183–85, 186, 187, 188, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200n2, 201nn4–5, 201n13; farming in, 190, 191, 200n3; Ladakhis, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 199, 200 La Niña, 126 Latin America, 6, 130, 131, 138, 146n16 Latour, Bruno, 46, 158, 166, 292 laya, 267–68, 271, 272; laya mayor, 270–71, 278 Lima, 9, 60, 273

i n de x Macy, Joanna, 19n3 Madre Selva, 133 Mandakini River, 237, 239, 241, 242, 244, 257n14 Mansilla, Pedro Morales, 274 Mantaro River, 275 Marx, Karl, 77, 104 Marzal, Manuel M., 58 Mathur, Nayanika, 242 Mauss, Marcel, 265 Mawayani, 58, 69n8, 69n12 Maya, 128, 130, 135, 140, 144n3, 144n6, 299; communities, 129, 137; cosmogony, 140; cosmovision, 123, 124, 129, 137, 140, 141, 142, 287; culture, 124, 135, 300; identity, 123, 124, 129, 130, 133, 135, 141, 300; languages, 135; lifeways, 138; Maya Movement, 128, 135, 137; Maya people, 128, 132, 137, 139, 144n4, 300; relationship with land, 132; religion, 8, 140; ritual, 137; spirituality, 129, 135, 140, 141; ways of knowing, 135; worldviews, 131, 135, 137, 141. See also shamanism: Maya Mesoamerica, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134 Mesa de Diálogo Ambiemental Huan cayo y Junín (Environmental Table of Dialogue Huancayo and Junín), 275, 276 migration, 39, 50, 65, 127, 134, 299; climate migration, 35; outmigration, 184, 193, 211, 213 Milan, Andrea, 127, 134 mining, 138, 141, 264, 275; mining concessions, 131, 133; mining contamination, 274 Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, 127 missionaries, 36, 219 mitigation, of climate change, 9, 103, 118, 210 mobility, 216; rural-urban, 50, 65 modernity, 35, 129, 131, 141, 186, 266, 277, 290, 291, 299 Mol, Annemarie, 25, 40, 287 monoculture, 138; plantations, 211, 212, 213, 221 monsoons, 105, 115, 184, 219, 243; monsoon season, 113, 227n1 mountains, 11, 49, 50, 106, 114, 115, 124, 131, 132, 143, 153, 156, 162, 163, 164, 168, 183,

315 187, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 201n5, 202n15, 211, 213, 214, 221, 237, 239, 241, 248, 249, 250, 254, 256n5, 301; Afghanistan, 14, 170; Andean, 119n2, 257n18, 267; high, 44, 50, 244, 294, 301; Himalaya, 240; mountain communities, 139, 155, 161, 170, 172; mountain residents, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120n6, 159, 173n6, 221; mountain societies, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165; punishment from, 252. See also deities: mountain; ecosystems: mountain; gods: mountain; Himalaya; Pamir Mountains; sacredness: of mountains Movimiento el Apu (the Apu Movement), 273 Muri Lagoon, 29, 30, 31, 34, 38 Muslims, 102, 167, 168; Muslim traditions, 167. See also Islam Naess, Arne, 4 Narayanan, Vasudha, 236 Narikoso, 15, 77, 83–84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90–91, 92, 93, 94 National Action Plan on Climate Change, 113 natural resources, 124, 171, 214, 275, 277 natural world, the, 2, 14, 15, 17, 18n1, 102, 129, 137, 146, 166, 196, 249, 254; naturalness, 85 nature, 26, 28, 37, 38, 40, 64, 107, 108, 111, 114, 123, 143, 213, 226, 236, 248, 278–79, 285, 291–92, 293; human-nature relationship, 26, 65, 78, 80, 88, 89, 107, 130, 134, 137, 140, 146n16, 247–48, 249, 253, 265, 277, 303; nature-society divide, 45, 46, 49, 64, 67, 188; perceptions of 5, 85. See also deities: nature; gods: relationship with nature; harmony: with nature; sacredness: of nature Nebesky-Wojkowitz, René de, 201n5 neoliberalism, 131, 214, 270, 274, 294; neoliberal logic, 210, 213, 222, 224–25, 226 New Delhi, 9, 112 Noah, 26, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 167; Noah’s Ark, 77 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 34, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 115

316 nonhumans, 2, 45, 189, 213, 264, 266, 271, 273, 290, 297; human-nonhuman relationships, 7, 278 nonmodern world, 290, 291, 292, 304 Norgaard, Kari, 94 North America, 6, 127, 131, 211, 271, 292 Northcott, Michael, 6 Nunn, Patrick, 28, 29, 39, 81

i n de x

60–61, 63, 64, 65–66, 67, 68nn1–2, 69nn7– 9, 69n12 pilgrims, 7, 44, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60–61, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 68n1, 69n12, 70n13, 235, 236, 240, 241, 246, 248, 253, 255, 256n5, 258n20, 264, 296, 298; Andean, 279, 280; unaffiliated, 58, 66 Politica Nacional de Cambio Climático, 138 politics, 45, 49, 104, 158, 224, 292, 293, 294; Oceania, 7, 24, 27, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 288–89, climate politics, 294, 299–300; cosmopoli290, 294, 295 tics, 104, 292; national, 16, 265; postcolooffering ceremonies, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, nial, 101, 104, 105, 118. See also indigenous 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 275–76, 278, 279, peoples: politics; ontology: political 280, 280n1, 280n3 pollution, 28, 31, 34, 102, 114, 219, 240, 247, Ono Island, 77, 83, 90 248, 250, 251–52, 253, 254, 257n15, 262, 274, ontology, 5, 46, 104, 166, 225, 291, 304; Bud275, 277–78, 279, 287, 297–98, 303; of water, dhist, 189; indigenous, 226; ontological 4, 140, 275 conflicts, 49, 292; ontological inclusion, Port of Spain, 9 104, 114; ontological pluralism, 156; onPosey, Darrel, 130 tological turn, 11, 101, 114; political, 104, poverty, 127, 274; poverty rates, 273 105, 118 prayer, 25, 27, 28, 29, 40, 171, 187, 190, 269, Orlove, Ben, 80, 185 270, 287 Ottati, Douglas, 145n10 preservation, 131, 138; of water, 8, 141 priests, 50, 107, 116, 250, 253, 271. See also CaPachaj, 124, 132, 135, 142 tholicism: priests Pachauri, Rajendra, 17 Protestantism, 35, 139, 140, 144n6, 146n15; Pacific Conference of Churches, 36, 82; Protestant Reformation, 298 Moana Declaration, 82 Proyecto de Reforestación Chico Mendes, Pacific Islands, 35, 37, 82, 85 124, 126, 129, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 143 palanquins (dholi), 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, purity, 145n11, 219, 225, 277, 278–79, 303; puri241–42 fication, 46, 105, 237, 296 Pamir Mountains, 8, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168–70, 171, Quechua, 15, 49, 61, 62–63, 64, 68n2, 70n20, 173nn3–4; Pamiris, 164, 166, 172, 173n6 257n18, 267–68, 270, 272, 280n2 Pedersen, Morten Axel, 214 Qulqipunku glacier, 7, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, Pedersen, Poul, 18n1 56, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68n2; agency of, Peru, 9, 14, 60, 80, 261, 262, 264, 266, 270, 271, 50; climbing on, 58, 60; and glacial retreat, 273, 274–75, 280, 297; Ministerio de Ambi64, 66, 67, 68n1; and image rock, 50, 52, 58, ente del Perú, 274; northern, 273. See also 63; relation to humans, 56; removal of ice Andes: Peruvian chunks, 55, 56, 60, 65; rituals of, 58 pilgrimages, 44, 236, 237, 280; Char Dham, Quyllurit’i, 52, 63–64, 66, 69n9, 69n12; 8, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240–41, 242, 244, Quyllurit’i shrine, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 58, 60, 246–47, 248, 254–55, 256n5, 257n9, 258n20; 63–64, 67, 68, 68nn1–2, 69n8, 69n12; TayQuyllurit’i, 7, 46, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58,

i n de x tacha Quyllurit’i, 50, 52, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67. See also pilgrimages: Quyllurit’i Rarotonga, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31; Rarotongans, 32 reciprocity, 126, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 188, 189, 240 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, 212 relocation, 13, 39, 77, 82, 83, 84, 87, 91–92, 94, 94n2 rituals, 8, 9, 13, 17, 44, 52, 56, 58, 60, 64, 111, 135, 168, 184, 185, 189, 190, 216, 220, 225, 236, 271, 293, 296, 302; Andean, 65, 267; Buddhist, 217; and climate change, 114, 186, 294, 297– 98; farming, 187; food, 78; harvest, 213; purification, 105; religious, 13, 116; ritual anxieties, 217, 222, 224, 226; ritual offerings, 214, 217, 265, 267; ritual practices, 55, 65, 116, 131, 188, 199, 214, 219, 226, 297, 303; ritual specialists, 188, 200, 217, 264, 270, 271, 272, 278, 280n2; shamanic, 219, 220; skyin jug ritual, 186, 187, 193, 194–98, 199, 200, 201n10, 201n13, 202nn15–16. See also indigenous peoples: rituals; Maya: ritual rivers, 11, 107, 145n14, 156, 200n3, 235, 239, 248, 251–52, 254, 257n17; Himalayan, 210, 240, 243; river worship, 239; Shullcas, 274, 275. See also Alaknanda River; Bhagirathi River; Ganga River; goddesses: river; Mandakini River; Mantaro River; Yamuna River Ruano, Sergio, 127, 134 Rudiak-Gould, Peter, 80 sacredness 4, 18, 66, 123, 129, 132, 133, 138, 153–54, 156–57, 158, 160, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 263–64, 265, 278, 279, 280, 292, 293, 296, 297, 304; of ancestors, 144n8; and climate change, 265, 299; of environment, 158; of geography, 186, 187, 199; and humans, 157, 193; of the land, 11, 153, 155, 158, 159, 236, 239, 285, 292, 300; of mountains, 1, 257n18; of nature, 35, 266, 297; of rivers, 107, 145n14, 256n6; sacred spaces, 12, 153,

317 159, 167, 169–70, 171, 172, 173, 236–37, 249, 271, 273; of time, 167; of water, 155 sacrifice, 264, 265, 297; sacrifice ceremonies, 80, 219, 263 saints, patron, 69n11; veneration of, 129 Samuel, Geoffrey, 187 science, 4, 13, 33, 45, 67, 84, 107, 156, 158, 289, 292, 293; biological science, 157; climate science, 16, 23, 82, 86, 101, 114, 118, 251, 255, 288, 294, 295, 296, 303; ecological science, 165; geoscience, 29; marine sciences, 30; natural sciences, 23; and religion, 4–5, 17, 84, 92, 133, 158, 293; social science, 5, 23, 78, 103, 104, 158, 172, 184–85, 301 scripture, 26, 36, 88, 103, 240 sea levels, rising, 5, 7, 11, 15, 23, 33, 44, 81–82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91 seasons, 30, 37, 38, 127, 159, 161, 163, 164, 172, 183; seasonal variations, 5, 7, 12, 27, 32, 124, 139, 155, 168, 208. See also farming; farming: season; monsoons: monsoon season seawalls, 34, 83 sermons, 28, 81, 83, 87, 88, 170, 287 Shah, Prithviraj Narayan, 227n6 shamanism, 271, 273; Andean, 266; “halfshamans,” 214; indigenous, 217; Lepcha, 210, 216, 219–20, 226; Maya, 10; Nepali, 217, 225, 300; pre-Buddhist, 201n6. See also rituals: shamanic Shining Path, 273–74 Shotwell, Alexis, 225 shrines, 44, 46, 106, 240, 242, 295. See also Quyllurit’i: Quyllurit’i shrine Sikkim, 8, 208, 210, 211, 212, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227n2, 227n7, 227n10; Forest Conservation Act, 216; North Sikkim, 208, 211, 218, 221, 294 Silk Road, 155, 159, 171 sin, 10, 15, 89, 91, 114, 117, 140, 247, 252, 253, 254 social change, 77, 141, 295, 297 South Asia, 6, 213 South Pacific, 6, 7, 14, 81–82, 86, 88, 93 stewardship, 3, 28, 35, 78, 130, 140, 157, 170, 171, 278, 287

318 Sufism, 166, 168 supernatural, 45, 67, 80, 129, 156, 222, 290, 293 superstition, 49, 292 sustainability, 4, 102, 118, 131, 137, 141, 185, 254, 299 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 296 Tajikistan, 162, 167, 169, 173n4 Taylor, Bron, 3, 35, 293 technology, 4, 23, 93, 161, 185, 186, 190, 198, 210 temples, 106–7, 108, 110, 116, 167, 240, 241, 245, 250, 256n4. See also Kedarnath: Kedarnath temple theology, 2, 6, 12, 26, 27, 35, 38, 83, 133, 139, 142, 146n15, 250; and climate change, 25, 36, 39, 80, 81, 87, 89, 93, 103; eco-theology, 25, 36, 39; theological changes, 8, 17, 254. See also Christianity: Christian theology Thompson, Lonnie, 70n14 Tibet, 194, 196, 201n13, 202n15, 211, 215, 271; Tibetan Plateau, 8; Tibetans, 227n7 time, 116, 143, 154, 156, 157, 163, 170, 171, 209, 216, 292; agrarian, 186, 199; conceptions of, 27, 160, 161, 162, 186; cycles of, 117; dimensions of, 161; geological, 157, 173n1; historical, 104; measurement of, 160, 162; mediation of, 198–99; sense of, 8; social, 186. See also hisobdon (keeper of time) Tingmosgang, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196–97, 198, 199, 286 Tolia-Kelly, D. P., 213 tourism, 30, 31, 38, 81, 124, 155, 262, 271; ecotourism, 224; yatratourism, 256n5 trading zones, 24, 29, 40, 287 traditions, 8, 12, 13, 78, 102, 130, 132, 139, 145n11, 289, 290, 297, 301, 302; Abrahamic, 168; Bon, 187; Catholic, 129; Christian, 39, 78; cultural, 5, 218; Hindu, 255; indigenous, 7, 70n20, 300; Muslim, 167; oral, 144n8; philosophical, 189, 236; religious, 7, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 35, 37, 132, 133, 140, 144n6, 226, 236, 301; ritual, 2, 17; spiritual, 133; theological, 2, 36; Western, 140, 271. See also Buddhism: Buddhist traditions; Catholicism: traditions; Christianity: Christian

i n de x traditions; Hinduism: Hindu traditions; indigenous peoples: traditions; JudeoChristian tradition; Muslims: Muslim traditions Tsing, Anna L., 213, 215 Tucker, Mary Evelyn, 2 Turpo, Mariano, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70n20 Tuwere, I. S., 36 Union of Concerned Scientists, 14 United Nations, 19n2 United Nations Climate Change Conferences, 34 unity, 132, 300 Uttarakhand, 113, 118, 239, 244, 246, 251, 252, 257 Uttarkashi, 8, 105, 106–7, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 239, 242, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257n17 values, 18n1, 117, 140, 154, 171, 268, 285; community, 199; cultural, 165; environmental, 78; ethical, 169; local, 156; moral, 11, 187–88; religious, 18n1; social, 191; traditional, 252 Van Vieren, G., 35 Vásquez, Manuel A., 119 Vavilov, Nikolay, 173n3 violence, 14, 127, 170, 211, 213, 214, 274; ecological, 223, 224; political, 266, 273, 299 Volkov, Nikolay, 173n3 vulnerability, to climate change, 5, 6, 13, 45, 61, 79, 82, 92, 126–27, 129, 160, 171, 185, 197, 210, 212, 215, 222, 224, 243, 274, 300, 301, 302; invulnerability, 12 Walker, Andrew, 213 war, 14, 127, 159, 162, 170, 171, 237, 273 water, 26, 44, 56, 68n2, 82, 89, 105, 106, 107, 111, 124, 127, 131, 133, 142, 143, 155, 183, 190, 244– 45, 256n6, 257n18, 299; fresh water, 112, 196, 274, 275; from glaciers, 45, 184, 197, 198, 200, 267, 271, 277, 280n3; resources, 126, 130, 132–33; scarcity, 37, 116, 138, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 246, 266, 274, 277; seawater,

319

i n de x 34; sources, 123, 187; supply, 45, 139, 184, 185, 186, 193, 194, 195, 198, 264, 275, 286–87. See also drought; floods; hydropower projects; irrigation; pollution: of water; preservation: of water; rivers weather, 34, 87, 127, 183, 185, 192, 200, 209, 225, 249, 294, 296; control of, 117, 193, 197, 198, 202n16, 220, 253, 297; weather changes, 111, 112, 155, 160, 170, 184, 253, 255, 287; weather events, 5, 10, 12, 33, 64, 101, 112, 113, 124, 139, 154, 155, 159, 160, 220, 236, 242–43, 247, 250, 252, 254, 295; weather patterns, 26, 27, 86, 91, 124, 126, 129, 139, 160, 224 Webb, A., 33 Weber, Max, 77

White, Lynn, Jr., 2, 88 Whitmore, Luke, 241, 242, 254, 256n5 Whyte, Kyle, 212, 214, 227n5 worldviews, 29, 91, 93, 123, 129, 130, 132, 139, 141, 188, 193, 255, 297, 298; cultural, 80; ecological, 103; holistic, 249, 253, 254; religious, 2, 4, 77, 78, 80, 89; Western, 271. See also indigenous peoples: worldviews; Maya: worldviews Yamuna River, 102, 235, 237, 239, 240, 252 Yamunotri, 235, 239, 256n7 Zaheka, B., 35 Zoroastrianism, 168