Animist Sensibility and Power Sensitivities: The Mentawai Ontology and Forest Extractivism on Siberut Island

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68378009%3A_____%2F25%3A00641169" target="_blank" >RIV/68378009:_____/25:00641169 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://sites.ff.cuni.cz/ubva/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2025/05/EACX_June_27_final.pdf" target="_blank" >https://sites.ff.cuni.cz/ubva/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2025/05/EACX_June_27_final.pdf</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Animist Sensibility and Power Sensitivities: The Mentawai Ontology and Forest Extractivism on Siberut Island

Original language description

In the indigenous Mentawai ontology (sabulungan), human and forest’s spirit (Sikaleleu) have a primordial pact in which they share one world but live in separate domains. They constantly maintain mutual-dependency relations through the acts of offering where no parties feel dominated. The egalitarian relation of human and Sikaleleu is the fundamental value underpinning any traditional form of forest exploitation in Siberut Island, Indonesia. Decades large-scale timber operations have transformed sabulungan, intensifying the idea that forest is a merely commodity and creating hierarchy between sikaleleu, the Mentawai, and logging companies. At the same time, the logging operations have invited global biodiversity conservation agendas and indigenous movement to propose different ways of seeing Siberut rain forest and revitalize both the symbolic and material importance of sabulungan. The reconfiguration of human-sikaleleu-forest nexus have provoked the Mentawai to develop a complex and sometime ambiguous response toward the loggings. The loggings are seen providing material benefit but also bringing an unknown, powerful and greedy spirit (sanitu sareu). The Mentawai are welcoming but simultaneously protesting, accusing, and resenting logging companies because they separate forest from Sikaleleu, ‘eat’ it for themselves and diminish the egalitarian principle. The ambiguity reveals both the paralelity and the contrast of multi-spirits involved in, and value generated from, traditional and the large scale forest extraction. It also illustrates the Mentawai’s struggle to gain an equal share from forest exploitation and shapes their attempt to hold their autonomy and egalitarian value amidst the wealth accumulation and the creation of dependency. I argue that sabulungan poses an egalitarian spirit and serves an ideal political value for the Mentawai againts the foreign spirit of accumulation and powers hierarchy entail in the large scale exploitation. I claim further that the Mentawai sabulungan is not a passive ontology but a mode of being historically and politically active in ongoing social transformations, dynamically shaping the relations of human and non-human entities.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

O - Miscellaneous

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50902 - Social sciences, interdisciplinary

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA24-13058S" target="_blank" >GA24-13058S: Beyond Insecurity: Changing Indigenous People’s Foodways in Time of Climate Change in Indonesia (BICOFID)</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů