Entangled with Mother Nature through Anthropogenic and Natural Disasters

Abstract

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a guiding imperative in anthropology to better understand people’s entanglements with nature. This article sets out to investigate the emergence of spiritual ecologies in the Chilean town of Constitución. Unlike most previous studies, we rethink the partial connections and entanglements of humans with nature through linking this to spirituality, environmental care and gender. By adopting a “kaleidoscopic perspective”, we aim to avoid a simplification or a singular representation of the (re-)entanglements with Mother Nature. Constitución provides an excellent setting for studying contemporary changes in human–nature entanglements as compounding crises of earthquakes, tsunami and forest fires, exacerbated by extensive timber production, that have struck the town during the past decade, have led to a resurgence by a large part of the population in interpreting and expressing their relationship with Mother Nature. Through intermittent ethnographic research between 2015 and 2019, we have concluded that the entanglements with Mother Nature in Constitución are the result of what we call Andean performative pragmatism, and the overrepresentation of women within the group of people who care for Mother Nature can be interpreted through an ecowomanist perspective that stands for the creation of social and environmental justice. As such, the findings offer a fresh and updated way to understand and interrogate the challenges confronting present-day human–nature relations in times of climate adaptation both in Chile and far beyond.