Photo by Phan Thi Hoan and Le Van Ha
Sacred Forests of Asia: Spiritual Ecology and the Politics of Nature Conservation
Friday, April 22, 2022 – Sunday, April 24, 2022
Online Event
Bard College at Simon’s Rock invites OSUN members to join a conference that celebrates a forthcoming volume on sacred forests of Asia, the first cross-cultural, multidisciplinary study of sacred forests in South, East, and Southeast Asia.
Contributors foreground new scholarly dialogues on the nature of sacred space, place, landscape, and ecology in the context of sharply contested ideas of the Anthropocene. Given the vast geographic range of sacred groves in Asia, contributors examine the diversity of associated cosmologies, ecologies, traditional local resource management practices, and environmental governance systems developed during the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods. Adopting theoretical perspectives from political ecology, the book views ecology and polity as constitutive elements interacting within local, regional, and global networks.
Readers will find the very first systematic comparative analysis of sacred forests that include the karchall mabhuy of the Katu people of Central Vietnam, the leuweng kolot of the Baduy people of West Java, the fengshui forests of southern China, the groves to the goddess Sarna Mata worshiped by the Oraon people of Jharkhand India, the mauelsoop and bibosoop of Korea, and many more.
Incorporating in-depth, field-based case studies, each chapter shows how the forest’s sacrality must not be conceptually delinked from its roles in common property regimes, community resource security, spiritual matters of ultimate concern, and cultural identity.
Friday, April 22 focuses on South Asia; Saturday, April 23 on East Asia; and Sunday, April 24 on Southeast Asia.