Ecology is a watchword for an increasingly obligatory sense of environmental responsibility. In religious studies and the anthropology or religion, ecology is used to both argue for the environmental importance of ritual life and indicate an encompassing wholeness that religious practices are held to reveal. Returning to the term’s origins in late 19th century biology and its shared roots with economics, this talk explores the pitfalls of uncritically deploying ecology to understand “religious” life. The appeal of ecology for religious studies, I suggest, is in its offer to uncover deep relatedness. Yet, just as often, invocations of ecology conceal what is particular about how ritual traditions create the relations that actually define them. Thinking through what Adam Yuet Chau calls exchangism—the tendency to boil life down to a matter of transaction—and drawing from recent ethnographies of religion and my own research on wildlife conservation and ritual in Singapore and Suriname, this talk suggests that ecology does indeed have a vital role to play in understanding religion—but only after its considerable conceptual baggage is adequately confronted.
Stuart Earle Strange is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He researches the nexus of knowledge, interaction, and multispecies ethnography with a focus on the politics of revelation and the interpretation of other minds in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. He is the author of numerous articles in journals like Environmental Humanities and Cultural Anthropology, as well as the monograph Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (University of Toronto Press).