Forests of Belonging

Reflections from Peasant and Adivasi Perspectives

Authors

  • Pramod Parajuli Prescott College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v4i2.232

Keywords:

Hinduism, ecology

Abstract

This special issue is a welcome addition in the history of ecological and cultural discourses in India. As complex as it is, it would be foolhardy to construct a unified theory of what might be the ecological cosmology of the Hindus who live in India. Given the diverse bio geographies of India and people co-evolving in those areas with their own ways of making a living and creating meanings, diversity is the only rule of the game. This special issue on the Forests of Belonging does a good job of depicting that. The primacy of the ethnographic element in all contributions is also encouraging. Yet, I posit that these discourses have not distanced themselves far enough from the Brahminism and textual Hinduism that has dominated Indian studies for so long. My short commentary interrogates those texts from the lived experience of Hindu peasants in my own village in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal and my work among the adivasi (original inhabitants) peasants in the Jharkhand region in India.

References

Parajuli, Pramod. 1998. ‘Beyond Capitalized Nature: Ecological, Ethnicity as an Arena of Conflict in the Regime of Globalization’, Ecumene 5.2: 186-217. doi:10.1191/096746098701555639.

———. 2001. ‘No Nature Apart: Adivasi Cosmovision and Ecological Discourses in Jharkand, India’, in Philip P. Arnold and Ann Grodzins Gold (eds.), Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree (London: Ashgate Publishers): 78-108.

———. 2004. ‘How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle?’, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments 14 (Winter/Spring), http://www.terrain.org/essays/14/parajuli.html (accessed 30 May 2010).

Parajuli, Pramod, and Frederique Apffel-Marglin. 2000. ‘Sacred Grove and Ecology: Ritual and Science’, in Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds.), Hinduism and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 291-316.

Tomalin, Emma. 2009. Bio-divinity and Biodiversity: The Limits of Religious Environmentalism (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers).

Sontheimer, Günther-Dietz. 1989. Pastoral Deities in Western India (trans. Anne Feldhaus; New York: Oxford University Press).

Published

2010-07-11

How to Cite

Parajuli, P. (2010). Forests of Belonging: Reflections from Peasant and Adivasi Perspectives. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 4(2), 232-238. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v4i2.232

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