This article makes a case for attending to the specificities of child illegality in migrant contexts. This is not simply because children have been left out of previous accounts, but also because their status as minors makes both their citizenship and their illegality different to that of adults. The analysis is based on research with children born to migrants in the state of Sabah, East Malaysia.
This Introduction foreshadows the main themes of this special issue on spiritual landscapes of Southeast Asia. The concept of 'spiritual landscapes' highlights the links, found throughout Southeast Asia, between spirit beings or potent energies and particular sites in the landscape, including trees, mountains and rivers. The concept also broadens anthropological approaches to the religious significance of the landscape in two main ways. Firstly, it problematises the separation of 'natural' and 'cultural' environments, and secondly, it side-steps the implication that something called 'sacred geography' can be separated from the pragmatic activities of daily life. In this Introduction, having given an ethnographic overview of spirit-places and environmental forces in the region, I suggest that we need to take more seriously the claims of many Southeast Asian people that their landscapes have agency. In the context of religious conversion, the agency of the landscape often becomes a central concern, as reformers and missionaries seek to 'purify' the environment of such spiritual power. However, in addition to 'purification', ongoing conversion may also involve new forms of conversation with the landscape, including reenchantments, religious syntheses, or reassertions of the landscape's potency.
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