Religious Relationships with the Environment in a Tibetan Rural Community: Interactions and Contrasts with Popular Notions of Indigenous Environmentalism
Representations of Green Tibetans connected to Buddhism and indigenous wisdom have been deployed by a variety of actors and persist in popular consciousness. Through interviews, participatory mapping and observation, we explored how these ideas relate to people's notions about the natural environment in a rural community on the Eastern Tibetan plateau, in Sichuan Province, China. We found people to be orienting themselves towards the environment by means of three interlinked religious notions: (1) local gods and spirits in the landscape, which have become the focus of conservation efforts in the form of 'sacred natural sites;' (2) sin and karma related to killing animals and plants; (3) Buddhist moral precepts especially non-violence. We highlight the gaps between externally generated representations and local understandings, but also the dynamic, contested and plural nature of local relationships with the environment, which have been influenced and reshaped by capitalist development and commodification of natural resources, state environmental policies, and Buddhist modernist ideas.
目次
Abstract 295 Introduction 295 Study Site 296 Methods 297 Local Gods in the Landscape 297 Ritual Observance 299 Environmental Norms 300 Protecting our Valley: the Territoriality of Local Deities and Land Governance 301 Karma and Environmental Actions 302 Non-violence and Good Fortune 302 Interactions Between Karmic and Local Deity Models of Fortune 302 Buddhist Precepts: an Environmental Ethic? 303 Differences Between Lay and Monastic Discourses 304 Conclusion 305 References 306
