Introduction: Spiritual Landscapes of Southeast Asia

Abstract

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.

“The Mountain Ate His Heart”: Agricultural Labor and Animate Land in a Protestant Andean Community

“…In her work on Indonesia, Catherine Allerton has developed the concept of “vernacular landscape” to think about the relationships between people and the land they work (, ). A vernacular landscape is one that is worked on and lived in everyday, juxtaposed with a sacred landscape, the concept specifically emphasizes the existence of non‐divine, animate land.…”

Lulik: Taboo, Animism, or Transgressive Sacred? An Exploration of Identity, Morality, and Power in Timor‐Leste

“…In many Southeast Asian societies, the inhabited environment, including certain sites in the landscape ( e.g. , rivers, trees, rocks, or hilltops) are ‘intersected by a spiritual or invisible realm’ (Allerton :235; see also Errington :42). In his classic study of the Javanese notion of potency, Anderson (:22) describes Javanese power as ‘that intangible, mysterious, and divine energy that animates the universe’.…”

“…Comparative insights from scholars of Southeast Asia who examine spiritual energies that animate the landscape ( e.g. , Allerton :5, ; Aragon :18; Guillou ) seem to cast doubt on the appropriateness of interpreting lulik within a Durkheimian framework. Allerton (:5) warns that ‘to speak of “sacred landscapes” [in Southeast Asia] would imply a perception of the environment set apart from the profane activity of daily life’ ( cf.…”

Moral circumscriptions: involuntary mobility, diaspora and ideological configurations in the Angolan Tokoist church

“…the definition of spiritually and theologically configured territorializations, producing "centers" and "edges" (Taylor 2007). This has been recurrently explored in the case of pilgrimage sites and centers, which provoke "sacred geographies", networks of religious significance imposed into specific landscapes, which in turn become spaces of memory and celebration (Basso 1996;DeRogatis 2003;Taylor 2007;Allerton 2009;Mélice 2011). They become sites of "abundant history" (Orsi 2008), recruited for and recruiting historiographical regimes and constructions (Taussig 1987).…”