Resource spirits: An interactionist approach to animism and extractivism in Southeast Asia

Indigenous populations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere have become a major source of inspiration for more sustainable relations with the environment.

Their animist orientations – attributing agency, personhood or spiritual powers to the non-human world – is what prevents them from treating the environment as a resource to be exploited.

Extractive industries, by contrast, are seen to objectify the environment as an entity separate from human beings, which is what allows them to extract resources at an industrial scale.

Through long-term ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste, this project investigates how natural resource extraction affects people’s diverse relations with the environment.

However, rather than pitching indigenous communities against extractive industries, this project’s conceptual step-change consists in the development of a social interactionist framework that examines how animism and extractivism are constituted through their interactions.

The hypothesis is that we find extractive logics within animist practices and that animist assumptions might also be uncovered within extractive industries.

The focus on interaction allows us to determine whether animist orientations truly ‘protect’ against extractivism and how multinational corporations counteract criticism by incorporating the very logics on which this criticism is based.

Ethnographic studies of resource extraction tend to be dominated by single cases, focussing on indigenous opposition and the incommensurability between indigenous and modernist ways of relating to the environment. The methodological innovation of this project lies in its comparative multi-scalar approach.

Through historically informed, long-term ethnographic case studies in four Southeast Asian countries, it constructs a comparative matrix for South-to-South comparisons and examines how human-environment relations are constituted through their interactions at different scales.