Transsustain Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir; Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2026). Ecologies of Gods and States: Theogenic Soils and Forests in the Blang Mountains, China. In Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISSN 9789087285081. p. 201–221. doi: https:/muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.uio.no/pub/293/oa_edited_volume/chapter/4305167. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter traces how relations between Blang communities and their upland environment has changed with the recent arrival of the Chinese state. It begins by analyzing how the change from swidden/shifting to paddy cultivation has transformed soil fertility from being theogenic (caused by gods) to anthropogenic. It then analyzes how these changes have created competing conceptualizations of what constitutes a forest, and the resultant effects on biodiversity. The chapter then explores the underlying change in the logic of how to solve environmental problems, from a relational to a manufacturing logic. Finally, it analyzes how Blang communities’ perceived lack of ability to change these relations are related to state curtailment of the previous techniques used to create freedom of action.

• Münster, Daniel (2026). Yogic Ecology? Spirituality, Science, and Pseudoscience in Indian Agroecological Movements for Soil Health. In Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISSN 9789087285081. p. 51–72. doi: https:/www.jstor.org/stable/jj.38401862.7. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The chapter examines the role of religion and spirituality in sustainable agriculture in India. Through case studies of figures like Albert Howard, Masanobu Fukuoka, Subhash Palekar, and yoga gurus Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Sadhguru, it explores how religious and spiritual idioms contribute to agroecological movements’ critiquing modern agronomy’s reductionist approach and highlighting the ecological and political-economic costs of the Green Revolution. The paper discusses the ontological politics of living soils and the potential of spiritually inspired agroecology to foster sustainable human-nature relationships. It concludes that while spiritually informed natural farming can challenge extractive

• Nielsen, Kenneth Bo & Gokhale, Nihar (2026). Agroecology as Christian Environmentalism in a Hindu Majoritarian Context. In Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISSN 9789087285081. p. 155–175. doi: https:/lup.nl/publications/academic-research/religion-and-ecological-crisis/. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How and why do religion and spirituality motivate individuals and collectivities in contemporary Asia to engage in environmental action? This question is at the heart of Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Across nine chapters, the book examines a wide range of environmental initiatives, ranging from agroecology, waste recycling and dietary change, to a broader cultivation of ecological values and ethics. With case studies from India, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, the book brings out the complex ways in which religious and spiritual institutions and movements become repositories of alternative ways of knowing and acting on the world, complementing and sometimes also providing more radical alternatives to scientific forms of reasoning and materialist modes of living. Religion and Ecological Crisis also crucially demonstrates how the power of religious and spiritual forms of environmentalism to accelerate the transformation towards more sustainable ways of producing, consuming, and living is conditioned by wider structural relationships. While there may be no immediate ecological revolutions on the horizon in the contexts and communities analyzed in this book, the case studies powerfully portray a rich landscape of collective environmental agency that points towards an ongoing search for more ecologically sustainable and ethically sound futures.

• Hansen, Mette Halskov & Wellens, Koen (2026). Enlisting the Divine Farmer, Shennong: Spirituality, Science and Environmentalism in Taiwan. In Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISSN 9789087285081. p. 29–50. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Taiwan may well be the country in East Asia with the highest concentration of both religious groups and environmental organizations. Some religious organizations are expanding and redirecting their traditional focus on human centred salvation towards a universal transcendent goal of protecting and saving the planet. We take the worship of Shennong, the Divine Farmer, as an example. We show how one Divine Farmer temple has creatively sought to realign the spiritual powers of the Divine Farmer to address new challenges in people’s relationship to nature. We discuss how religious institutions seek to mobilise people for the environmental cause responding actively to society’s call for action and thereby simultaneously strengthening, or even re-establishing, their own social and emotional relevance.

• Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2026). Introduction. Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. In Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISSN 9789087285081. p. 11–28. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this introductory chapter, we situate the book and its case studies from Taiwan, China, India and Vietnam in the wider literature on spiritual ecology, global sustainability, transcendence, and grassroots environmental movements in the Asian context. We identify conjuncture, future-orientation, and dynamics between self and collective as three specific interlocking dimensions in the spiritually and religiously inspired movements and initiatives that the book is concerned with. A focus on these dimensions, we argue, can reveal specificities, commonalities and variations within a highly diverse field of spiritually and religiously inspired movements and initiatives that operate in very different cultural and political contexts.

• Rots, Nhung Lu (2025). Towards an Alternative Buddhist Modernity: Hòa Hảo Charity Healing and Herbal Medicine in the Mekong Delta. Contemporary Buddhism. ISSN 1463-9947. 25(1-2), p. 216–243. doi: 10.1080/14639947.2025.2482902. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article examines the role of Hòa Hảo Buddhism in providing alternative healthcare, through traditional medicine and charity clinics, in the Mekong Delta. Based on participant observation and interviews with Hòa Hảo Buddhists, herb doctors, herbal healers, and other health professionals, it outlines the various motivations and interests behind Hòa Hảo’s large-scale charitable efforts, linking these to broader discussions of Buddhist modernity and biopolitics in Vietnam. This article argues that Hòa Hảo leaders and healers have turned common herbs and volunteer labour into tactical resources that provide meaning, generate value, and reshape religious and political identities for followers. With the emergence of new medical science and the market economy in recent decades, the rural Vietnamese populations have experienced insufficient healthcare. Hòa Hảo practitioners have offered alternatives to public healthcare services and responded to a lack of trained doctors and other medical staff by reemploying medical knowledge that originates from the teachings of their religious founder and pioneers. This new focus on healing practices has reshaped social relations within Hòa Hảo communities. It also constitutes an alternative trajectory towards a Buddhist modernity, providing religious devotees with new ways to reconnect their Buddhist cosmology with everyday needs in a changing society.

• Munro, Neil; Chug, Nai Rui & Chen, Lu (2023). Green Shoots of Revival: Political Leadership and the Differentiation of Space in a “Zero Pollution Village” in Rural Zhejiang, China. Capitalism Nature Socialism. ISSN 1045-5752. p. 1–18. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2023.2178945. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article uses a case study of a “Zero Pollution Village” (ZPV) initiative in Zhejiang, China, to illustrate how the Chinese state attempts to achieve rural revitalisation by harnessing the principles of uneven and combined development (UCD) and relying on the leadership of returned migrants known as “country sages” (乡贤, xiangxian). The ostensible goals of the initiative are to improve solid waste management and develop ecotourism, creating a model suitable for replication elsewhere. Village residents and the “country sages” aim to maximise returns on human, natural, social, and material resources at the scale of the village and household. The case shows how UCD can become a driver of both positive and negative changes which are manipulated by the state in pursuit of hybrid capitalist-socialist development. The research is based on research visits and follow-up interviews from 2019 to 2022.

• Sony, R.K.; Münster, Daniel & Krishnan, Siddhartha (2022). What counts as evidence? Examining the controversy over pesticide exposure and etiology in an environmental justice movement in Kerala, India. Environmental Sociology. 9(2), p. 148–164. doi: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2124625. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Scientific evidence and knowledge are central to movements for environmental justice. Cases of pesticide toxicity have often led to the emergence of controversies around the nature of evidence and its causal connection to observed pathologies. Toxic effects depend on multiple, situated socioecological conditions such as time and place, duration, and mode of administration, making quantifiable etiology tenuous. Research on toxic exposure issues has shown limitations of regulatory sciences in establishing causality and argued for bringing various ways of knowing to understand, acknowledge and act against harms due to exposure. This article draws on sociological research carried out in northern Kerala, where continued use of the insecticide endosulfan between 1977 and 2000 has had significant health impacts on farmworkers and the general population. We present the case of endosulfan poisoning as an instance of controversy over evidence and uncertainty about causality emerging from agriculture scientists’ insistence on proof of etiology that has effectively jeopardized justice for endosulfan victims. We argue that, in cases of economy-oriented production agriculture, powerful actors like agriculture scientists, governments and the pesticide industry use science as a tool to maintain uncertainty as a resource to obscure the truth, making claims about reparative policies and actions impossible.

• Liang, Siran & Münster, Daniel (2022). Between Medicine and Gift How Anticorruption, E-Commerce, and Biotechnology Fostered the Emergence of "fresh Cordyceps" in Sino-Tibetan Trade. Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity. ISSN 1573-420X. 17(2), p. 251–278. doi: 10.1163/15734218-12341515. Full text in Research Archive
• Chen, Lu & Hansen, Mette Halskov (2022). Gender and power in China’s environmental turn: A case study of three women-led initiatives. Social Sciences. 11:97(3), p. 1–14. doi: 10.3390/socsci11030097. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Chinese authorities have formulated a vision for the global future that it terms ‘ecological civilization’ (shengtai wenming 生态文明). It was introduced into Communist Party ideology in 2007 and endorsed by Xi Jinping in 2013 as a major framework for the country’s environmental policies. During the 2000s, the government set in motion many stricter environmental regulations and targets in line with this vision, including opening up some new room for bottom-up, volunteer-driven initiatives mostly on waste collection, recycling, education, and sustainable agriculture. At the same time, it calls for more participation of women in environmental governance at grassroots levels. Surveys in different parts of the world, including China, have suggested that women tend to be more concerned with environmental issues than men, but we have few qualitative studies in China of this topic. This article details three case studies in which women have initiated environmental projects in their local communities. They have mobilized other women (and some men) to engage in collective action, and they have generated financial and symbolic resources for their projects. We analyse these cases and argue that by raising the status of environmental issues such as waste collection and recycling, previously often downplayed as “women’s affairs”, China’s environmental turn has helped expand the space available for female subjectivities and participation in public activities. However, this expanding role has not translated into better representation or participation of women at higher levels of political authority beyond the village level, and the emerging female environmental subjectivities remain firmly based in existing political hierarchies and male-dominated structures.

• Kvanneid, Aase Jeanette (2022). Climate change, gender and rural development: Making sense of coping strategies in the Shivalik Hills. Contributions to Indian sociology. ISSN 0069-9667. doi: 10.1177/00699667211059723. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The lower Shivalik Hills of North India is a region that is experiencing rapid socio-environmental challenges from interrelated changes in climate, market and society. While decades of governmental development efforts in the rural region have brought increased access to education, sanitation and improved infrastructure in the lower Shivalik Hills, the region is still characterised by poverty, illiteracy, a severely eschewed sex ratio and increased male out-migration to the larger cities. The article draws on empirical cases intended to provide an insight into gendered consequences of the contemporary rural coping strategies. These cases are drawn from anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2013. 1 Although the joint households of the villages in the rural Shivalik Hills might seem to be resilient towards climate and market changes as men migrate for work, an overt focus on migration as a practice overlooks gender equality and social mobility, especially for young women, who are left behind to shoulder an extra burden.

• Münster, Daniel (2021). The Nectar of Life: Fermentation, Soil Health, and Bionativism in Indian Natural Farming. Current Anthropology. ISSN 0011-3204. 62, p. 311–322. doi: 10.1086/715477. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2020). The Science Question in Alternative Agricultures: Zero Budget Natural Farming and the emergence of agronomical pluralism in India. In Michaels, Axel & Wulf, Christoph (Ed.), Science and Scientification in South Asia and Europe. Routledge. ISSN 9780429353215. Full text in Research Archive

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• Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2026). Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISBN 9789087285081. 233 p. doi: 10.24415/9789087285081. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How and why do religion and spirituality motivate individuals and collectivities in contemporary Asia to engage in environmental action? This question is at the heart of Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Across nine chapters, the book examines a wide range of environmental initiatives, ranging from agroecology, waste recycling and dietary change, to a broader cultivation of ecological values and ethics. With case studies from India, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, the book brings out the complex ways in which religious and spiritual institutions and movements become repositories of alternative ways of knowing and acting on the world, complementing and sometimes also providing more radical alternatives to scientific forms of reasoning and materialist modes of living. Religion and Ecological Crisis also crucially demonstrates how the power of religious and spiritual forms of environmentalism to accelerate the transformation towards more sustainable ways of producing, consuming, and living is conditioned by wider structural relationships. While there may be no immediate ecological revolutions on the horizon in the contexts and communities analyzed in this book, the case studies powerfully portray a rich landscape of collective environmental agency that points towards an ongoing search for more ecologically sustainable and ethically sound futures.

• Jakobsen, Jostein & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2024). Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi's India. Routledge. ISBN 9781032709345. 112 p. Full text in Research Archive

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• Rots, Nhung Lu (2026). Stranding beach ridges: Plastic materiality and sediment crisis in the Mekong Delta. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Vĩnh Châu (Sóc Trăng) is a river estuary where one of the Mekong’s streams meets the South China Sea (called East Sea in Vietnam). The town’s surrounding landscape is comprised of small sand ridges of 1-4 meters high and muddy swamp in between. In recent years, these beach ridges have been swamped with landfill plastics. In order to solve the problem, Vĩnh Châu authorities have mobilized international donors, national campaigners, and domestic volunteers to clean up dumping grounds and raise environmental awareness of plastic ocean. However, plastic’s materialities have become embedded in local moral economy and deeply entrenched in their social relations. Based on fieldwork data and semi-structured interviews with waste management officers, local scientists, and cleaning volunteers, this paper shows the complexity of plastic materiality, Anthropocene sediments, local practices, and global initiatives to tackle ocean pollution. It concludes that plastic sediment is an on-going crisis in the Delta regardless of international cleanup efforts in the Mekong Region.

• Rots, Nhung Lu (2026). Buddhist Modernity and Anti-colonialism in southern Vietnam: the case of Hòa Hảo Buddhism. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hòa Hảo Buddism (Phật Giáo Hòa Hảo) is a religious tradition based in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam that blends ancestor worship, nationalism, and Buddhism. In recent decades, Hòa Hảo followers have actively participated in volunteer work and been engaged across social arenas. Their social engagement constitutes an alternative trajectory towards a Buddhist modernity, providing religious devotees with new ways to reconnect their Buddhist cosmology with everyday needs in a changing society.

• Rots, Nhung Lu (2026). Redirecting Anxiety: : The Affective Labour of Hòa Hảo Buddhist Volunteers in the Mekong Delta. doi: https:/buddhist-studies.ed.ac.uk/2026-ukabs-conference-buddhism-and-emotion. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hòa Hảo Buddism (Phật Giáo Hòa Hảo) is a religious tradition based in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam that blends ancestor worship, nationalism, and Buddhism. In recent decades, Hòa Hảo followers have actively participated in volunteer work and engaged across social arenas. Their social engagement constitutes a form of religious mobilisation grounded in affective relationships with the founder and other religious pioneers, as well as Buddhist cosmology and the environment. Joyful affects from social work and mutual care have improved their mental and physical well-being, eased grief-related pain and sadness, and enhanced their capacity to cope with varying levels of anxiety. Based on ethnographic interviews with Buddhist volunteers, this paper examines anxiety as an emotional response to human insecurity, health vulnerabilities, environmental hazards, and market uncertainties in the Mekong Delta. I argue that this negative emotion can be redirected and transformed into a new form of labour in which affect is central to economic production, emphasizing feelings and passions as drivers for productivity. Accordingly, the affective labour in Hòa Hảo Buddhist practice of volunteering not only brings together the mind and the body, but also potentially produce new subjectivity and sociality.

• Nielsen, Kenneth Bo & Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2026). Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China - New Books Network. doi: https:/newbooksnetwork.com/gods-and-the-state-environmental-change-in-the-blang-mountains-china. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountains in southwestern China, a region that was incorporated into the nascent people’s republic of China from 1953 onwards, with immense consequences for Blang communities and ecologies. Our guest Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström disentangles how the arrival of the state disrupted long-standing relations between Blang communities and the local mountain gods, making the land sick. And what Blang people can teach us about tackling the ongoing climate crisis.

• Rots, Nhung Lu (2026). Hòa Hảo Buddhism and and the Target of Net-Zero Plastic Waste in the Mekong Delta. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Rivers and waterways in the Mekong Delta have become choked with plastic. To address this crisis, Hòa Hảo Buddhism has joined forces with local and national authorities. Devotees mobilized to act against pollution and to reach net-zero plastic waste; lay teachers propagated a green Dharma based on their founder’s teachings; and Hòa Hảo leaders formed political networks with state actors. Thus, the plastic crisis has provided Hòa Hảo Buddhism a good opportunity for religious revival after being long marginalized in the Vietnamese religious landscape. The chapter argues that while Hòa Hảo actions have been instrumental in raising environmental awareness, they have been less successful in transforming devotees’ behaviours towards sustainable consumption, let alone a future of net-zero plastic waste.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). When the next Buddha comes: towards a comparative anthropology of the end of the world. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  For Blang people, living in the uplands of the China-Myanmar border, the end of the world is a joyous event. When the next Buddha arrives “everything will be as flat as this board,” there will be no rich or poor, no mountains or valleys, everyone will be equally tall and beautiful. Our era of inequality will come to an end and the world will be swept clean. In some ways, Blang communities are themselves prefigurations of their own end times. They were born from conquest, epidemics, and state violence. Surviving the end of their worlds, Blang communities escaped the lowlands and established communities, self-governed through direct consensus democracy, with communal land allotment, and mutual aid. Blang communities are not utopias, but forms of social organisation considered utopian in our societies are commonplace in theirs. Blang ends of worlds are radically different from out own. This highlights the need for a comparative approach: what does the end of the world mean? How do people live before, in, and after the end of the world?

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Everyday ethics in the Blang Mountains. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Blang villages that dot the mountainous China-Myanmar border are moral communities. Mapmun (ethics) inflect all aspects of everyday life: from eating food, to village self-governance, and relations with powerful others. Buddhist ethics are at the heart of what it means to be Blang. Children are taught what constitutes mapmun from an early age, from not lying to not singing while eating. Being Blang means living in a Blang village, which means abiding by the village rules—based on mapmun. People are not expected to succeed in being moral, but they are expected to apologise and pay a fine for violating village rules. The only act that can get someone banished from the community is repeatedly failing to apologise for their misdeeds. Relations between villages are based on an ethics of autonomy. Each village decides its own rules, and no other village can tell them what to do. Powerful others, such as ghosts, gods, and the state have a big impact on life in the Blang Mountains. Blang communities relate to these powerful others that surround them, based on an ethics of mutual aid: “we are good to them, so they should be good to us.” Because local ecologies are ruled by mountain gods, mutual aid ethics make possible everything from soil fertility and good harvests, to land degradation and locust prevention. This paper investigates what translating Blang everyday ethics can teach us about life in contemporary China and of potential futures on a warming planet.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Connections and disconnections on the China-Myanmar border. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The COVID-19 pandemic was a disconnecting experience for most scholars; able only to keep in touch with friends and interlocutors digitally. For me, returning to the Blang village of Man La, along the mountainous China-Myanmar border, was not just a reconnection, but also a process of coming to terms with the many changes the area had undergone in just a few years. On the one hand, Xishuangbanna is more closely connected to China than ever. What used to be a 24-hour sleeper-bus journey from Jinghong to Kunming, now takes three to four hours by high-speed rail. Conversely, the newly constructed border fence bisects the mountains just south of Man La, disconnecting flows of labor, kin, migration, and religion. Villages that used to take less than an hour to travel to are now days away. This paper traces the changing connections and disconnections, and how a new spatiality affect the lives of people who are used to living far away from states; how it has changed the importance of citizenship, impinged on autonomy and self-governance, and emptied the monasteries.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Theogenic soils: humans, gods, and ecology in the Blang Mountains, China. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Zomia uplands of southwest China, along the China-Myanmar border live a small ethnic minority that call themselves Blang. Until the 1950s, Blang communities lived in self-governed villages at the edges of kingdoms, maintaining soil fertility and and a diverse ecology through shifting, swidden cultivation. In scholarship, such soils are often termed anthropogenic, however, in the Blang context, it makes more sense to think of the resultant soils and forests as theogenic. According to my Blang friends and interlocutors, the land surrounding their villages is owned by local mountain gods. Humans can borrow land for cultivation from the gods, but when soil fertility is depleted after a year or two, they return their borrowed acreages, and fertility is restored. This likewise creates a varied forest, which can sustain a variety of beings. Since the arrival of the nation-state into the mountains, this system of knowledge and practices has been disrupted by modernisation attempts and land reforms. Blang communities blame the banning of shifting, swidden cultivation for the illness that now afflicts the land, forcing them to employ fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn makes the land sicker. In my presentation, I would like to show how the arrival of a new force—the state—has affected knowledge-making and the ecology.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Fear not ruin: Post-catastrophe social organisation in the Zomian uplands of the China-Myanmar border. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Zomian uplands of the China-Myanmar border live several "minority ethnic groups" who trace their origins to maroons and migrants who escaped slavery, epidemics, war, and conquest to establish new societies on the margins of states. Among them are Mon-Khmer speaking communities who call themselves Blang. My presentation will analyse what Blang communities can teach us about post-catastrophe social organisation. All Blang communities with oral or written histories maintain that they originally lived in lowland kingdoms, which they for varying reasons abandoned to escape into the mountains. Rather than (re)establishing their own kingdoms in the mountains, these communities are founded on the basis of consensus democracy. Each village is autonomous and social organisation differs somewhat from village to village, but they share some basic premises. Firstly, any issue that affects the entire village must be decided by the village general assembly (pom yung) which must reach consensus (pom bing). Without consensus there is no option but to keep deliberating. Secondly, specialists and office holders are selected by either committee, sortition, or primogeniture, but must ultimately be appointed by consensus of the village general assembly. Majority elections were only introduced by the Communist Party. In fact the biggest issue facing Blang communities is not climate change, but the state which since 1953 impinges on the village's self-governance. The social organisation of Blang communities thus suggest that catastrophe is not necessarily a simply destructive process, but that the ends of the world can also represent the birth of new possibilities.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Escape Futures and the Future of Escape: Lessons from the Chinese uplands. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Zomian uplands of present-day southwest China, communities have long lived beyond the reach of states and capitalism. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century many of these previously self-governed communities began to be incorporated into nascent nation states. Working with a small community who call themselves Blang, in an area called the Blang Mountains in what is today China’s Xishuangbanna prefecture, I am constantly faced with the slow infringement of freedom as my friends and interlocutors are slowly being integrated into the Chinese nation state. Blang villages trace their origins to maroons that escaped lowland states to create alternative communities governed by forms of direct, consensus democracy, and who annually allotted land for swidden, shifting cultivation. Rooted in Graeber and Wengrow’s recent call for an anthropology of freedom, I hope to contribute to the panel, by thinking with Blang freedom creating practices about prefigurative politics and the possibilities and impossibilities of escape as a liberatory technique. I would also like to highlight the transformative effects on my own thinking from spending time with people that have long lived beyond state control.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Infrastructures of Ghosts and States. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In China’s southwest, along the mountainous China-Myanmar border, live a small ethnic minority who call themselves Blang. Blang communities are surrounded by powerful, immaterial others: ghosts, gods, and states impose on the village from the outside. Ghosts are unable or unwilling to feed themselves; when hungry they afflict humans with mischief, misfortune, or violence in order to be fed. But how can humans send things to ghosts if they cannot see or touch them? My conference paper will examine the ritual infrastructure that makes possible interactions with ghosts; how humans can send foil, bamboo, and clay figures, that for the ghost becomes great riches; and how it makes possible the dispatching of ghosts, using infrastructure to send them away. Until 1953, Blang communities say they “had no state.” Much like ghosts you cannot shake hands with the state. How did this powerful, immaterial other make its way into the mountains? Employing lessons from the ritual infrastructure Blang communities employ to interact with ghosts, I show how infrastructure in the traditional sense (the construction of roads, border fences, and electricity lines) has made possible the transformation of something conceptual for one party into something real for the other. Just as humans send conceptual and metaphorical riches that become real for ghosts, so what was first conceptual (citizenship, population, borders) has recently become real for Blang communities.

• Rots, Nhung Lu (2025). Review of "Environment and Narrative in Vietnam", edited by Ursula K. Heise and Chi P. Pham. Journal of Vietnamese Studies. 20(3-4), p. 192–195. doi: 10.1525/vs.2025.20.3-4.192. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2025). Soils, Carbon, Microbes: Biochar and the limits of more-than-human health. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Soil health is a widely used yet poorly defined concept in emergent debates about more-than-human health and other conversations about moving health and medicine beyond anthropocentrism. This paper will approach the issue of soil health, and more-than-human health by extension, through empirical engagement with the rediscovery of biochar among communities of practice engaged with finding solutions to degraded soils and blasted landscapes of contemporary India. Biochar is a carbon rich and highly porous black substance that is produced by burning organic matter under oxygen deprived conditions (pyrolysis). Biochar is currently experimentally applied as soil amendment, where it is supposed to adsorb toxins, improve water holding capacity and creates favorable microbial milieus. Another set of practitioners invests hope in biochar as a technology for mitigating climate change by fixing carbon. Based on anthropological fieldwork among biochar producers in India, I trace the emergence and consolidation of this low cost more-than-human “soil medicine” in the last century and its implications for notions of more-than-human health. Taking inspiration form recent work in STS and anthropology on elements (Papadopoulos et al. 2021), chemical relations (Murphy 2017), the social study of microbes (Brives et al. 2021) as well as my own work in soil ontologies, I explore the limits of the notion of more-than-human health. Biochar-making enacts health both at the planetary level removing carbon gases deemed harmful to “earth” and at the level of soil, acting on a distributed entity without body. However, paradoxically by transforming decayable life into a lifeless elemental form.

• Rots, Nhung Lu (2025). Khmer’s sacred time and sacred space in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Full text in Research Archive
• Rots, Nhung Lu (2025). Hòa Hảo Buddhism and the Green Revolution in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Religion and revolution: one day research seminar at MF, 12 June 2025 Time: Thursday 12 June, 09:00-16:00 Place: MF, Aud 4. The seminar is organized by MF Religion & Politics Research Group. Participants prepared 20 min. presentation/paper and leave 20 min for Q&A.

• Fjeld, Heidi E & Münster, Daniel (2024). Climate Mobilities: Exploring wild animals, plants, and deities on the move. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2024). Agroecological Movements in India: Mobilizing Religion and Spirituality in the Context of Hindu Nationalist Hegemony. Full text in Research Archive
• Rots, Nhung Lu (2024). The rise and fall of a Buddhist environmental movement: Hòa Hảo Buddhism and the plastic waste crisis in the Mekong Delta. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2024). Økologisk sivilisasjon: Kinas bud på fremtidens antropocen. In Mjaaland, Marius Timmann; Eriksen, Thomas Hylland & Hessen, Dag Olav (Ed.), Antropocen - menneskets tidsalder. Res Publica. ISSN 9788282263016. p. 151–165. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2023). Yogic Ecology and Soil Health in South India: Notes on Sadhguru's Safe Soil Campaign. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2023). Epilogue. In Münster, Ursula; Eriksen, Thomas Hylland & Schroer, Sara Asu (Ed.), Responding to the Anthropocene: Perspectives from Twelve Academic Disciplines. Scandinavian Academic Press. ISSN 9788230403624. p. 331–337. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Anthropocene - the era of humans - refers to a time when humanity has left its indelible stamp on the planet, including its geology and biogeochemistry. Understanding the Anthropocene, where the risk of irreversible and catastrophic ecological damage looms on the horizon, is a daunting task and solutions seem to be difficult to come by. What we offer in this book consists of fifteen perspectives on the Anthropocene written by scholars with backgrounds in over a dozen academic disciplines - archaeology, biology, geology, cultural history, literature, art history, science and technology studies, anthropology, political ecology, geography and law. Together, they offer tools enabling us to grasp the Anthropocene as a multifaceted phenomenon that requires attention from across the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities. Unlike most academic texts, these chapters are written in a personal and engaging style indicating not only that the Anthropocene is a worthy subject of scholarly attention, but that its implications are existentially important to the authors, who are not just researchers, but also global citizens.

• Wellens, Koen & Hansen, Mette Halskov (2023). Spiritually Inspired Environmental Movements in Asia: Local Practices, Universal Potential? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2022). Hva er et individ i Kina? del 1 av podcasten Kinapodden. https://www.needtoknow.studio/sesong1. [Internet]. Needtoknow, Kinapodden. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hva er et individ i Kina? Kinakjenner Mette Halskov Hansen har skrevet boken "Kina. Stat, samfunn og individ". Hva skiller et kinesisk individ, en person i Kina fra en i Norge? Hvor er "plassen til" den enkelte kinesiske borger? Olav Njaastad i samtale med professor Halskov Hansen fra UiO.

• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2022). The Nordica Asia Podcast about Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Potentials. [Internet]. New Books Network https://newbooksnetwork.com/transcendence-. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Can spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lies at the heart of the research project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise” that we focus on in this episode. Also known as TRANSSUSTAIN, the project builds on the observation that scholars, activists, and even politicians in many Asian countries have found inspiration in traditional knowledge and in the premodern texts and practices of, for instance, Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian traditions to envision more ecologically sustainable futures. Exploring the mobilization and recalibration of such traditional Asian religio-philosophical ideas in response to the global environmental crisis, the project seeks to assess the potential of Asian environmental movements for helping us build sustainable global futures. Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo. Amita Baviskar is professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Lu Chen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

• Münster, Daniel (2022). Multispecies Anthropology: Reflections on Agrarian Wayanad. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2022). Microbes as gods? Exploring more-than-human health through practices of soil recuperation in India. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2022). Big cows vs little cows: Engineering (spiritual) livestock futures in South India. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2022). Thinking like a Holobiont. Microbial soil recuperation among planetary health workers in South India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this paper I will bring with microbial recuperation of soils in conversation with the emerging framework of planetary health (Horton et al 2014). Based on my anthropological fieldwork among natural farming activists in South India, I reframe their activity as planetary health work and explore how innovations in soil care practice contribute to enactments of human-soil dependencies based on understandings of distributed personhood at the microbial level (holobiont) and the foregrounding of symbiosis (Sariola & Gilbert 2020) in farming and society at large. As microbiopolitics is about how “dissent over how to live with microorganisms reflects disagreement about how humans ought to live with one another” (Paxson 2014), I engage with agricultural soils to explore microbial understandings about the intersection of human health and the environment based on metaphors and relations afforded by soil. Of special importance are practices of experimenting with microbial means of improving soil health such as the use of inoculants, composts and fermented compost teas that act to counter the devastations of productivist agriculture in post-Independence India. I explore how microbiomes invite us to think health and wellbeing from a microbial point of view as digestive (Mol 2021), eating and being eaten, symbiotic, and metabolic rationalities affecting materially and semiotically distributed holobionts.. I will take this material to reflect on the potential and shortcomings of recent approaches to ecologize medicine in the discourses on One Health and Planetary Health (Whitmee et al. 2015) by interrogating them through the lens of soils as a planetary microbiome. I will interrogate tendency in planetary health frameworks of taking the planetary (and its multiple crises) as narrative device for scaling up responses to threats to human health. Soils as relational, anthropogenic and plasticity and anthropogenic quality of soil, invites James Lovelock’s hypothetical “planetary physician”

• Chen, Lu (2022). The Nordica Asia Podcast about Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Potentials. [Internet]. New Books Network. Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2021). More-than-human health. Soil and people in natural farming (India). Full text in Research Archive
• Münster, Daniel (2021). Fermentation, Soil Health, and Planetary Health. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2021). Keynote: "Ecological Civilization: Chinese Dream or Global Strategy?". Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2021). Ecological Civilization: Chinese Dream or Global Strategy? A Discussion with Mette Halskov Hansen. [Internet]. New Books Network. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Podcast about Ecological Civilization https://newbooksnetwork.com/ecological-civilization-chinese-dream-or-global-strategy

• Hansen, Mette Halskov; Wellens, Koen; Münster, Daniel & Baviskar, Amita (2021). Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise. Panel presentation and discussion. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Are spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia largely overlooked as an essential contribution to the global goal of environmental sustainability? Presentation of a new international project based in China, India, Taiwan and Vietnam

• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2021). Ecological Civilization. Full text in Research Archive
• Chen, Lu (2021). Paper for Panel: China, Rural and Urban. Place Matters: Sprawl of Stones, Water and Plants from Mountains in Perceiving Unimaginable Disaster and Relocation. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Mette Halskov (2021). Forskningssamarbeid med Kina. Full text in Research Archive
• Wellens, Koen (2020). Indigeneity and environmental resource management in Taiwan: what can we learn from Tsou boar hunting? Full text in Research Archive
• Rots, Nhung Lu; Hansen, Mette Halskov & Ngo, Tam (2026). Engaged Buddhism and environmentality among religious minorities in Vietnam. Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Denne artikkelbaserte avhandlingen diskuterer hvordan buddhistiske samfunn i Mekongdeltaet forholder seg til sosiale, kulturelle og miljø-endringer, med hovedvekt på to minoritetsgrupper i Vietnam: Hòa Hảo-buddhistene og Khmer Theravada-buddhistene. Den undersøker hvordan den regionale miljø-forvaltningen påvirker lokale buddhistiske organisasjonenes responser på helse- og miljøutfordringer, og hvordan dette påvirker lokale institusjoner og deres ressurser. Avhandlingen bygger på ni måneders etnografisk feltarbeid i flere lokaliteter, med en kombinasjon av deltakende observasjon og oppfølgingsintervjuer med religiøse ledere og tilhengere, herunder buddhistiske abbeder, lekfolk og tjenestemenn i lokalsamfunnene. Forskningen bidrar til akademiske debatter innen miljøhumaniora ved bruk av teorier fra politisk økologi, utviklingsstudier og buddhismestudier. Avhandlingen bruker begrepene environmentality og engasjert buddhisme for å analysere en fremvoksende subjektivitet i de buddhistiske minoritetene, ved å se på hvordan de responderer på lokale økologiske- og helseutfordringer. Den legger vekt på hvordan den nye subjektiviteten kan skifte deres miljøpolitikk fra motstand til samarbeid med statelige myndigheter. Avhandlingen sammenligner og analyserer fremvoksende praksiser, nye strategier og endrede maktforhold innenfor de to buddhistiske gruppene i kontekster preget av utfordringer innen forurensning, klimaendringer og initiativer for bærekraftig utvikling. De tre artiklene illustrerer samfunnenes responser på nye sykdommer, utilstrekkelig helsevesen, plastforurensing, saltinntrenging, og sårbarhet i møte med ekstremvær. De belyser ulike veier som de to buddhistiske samfunnene har valgt i møtet med disse utfordringene. Avhandlingen konkluderer med at den fremvoksende subjektiviteten har motivert Hòa Hảo-institusjoner til å samarbeide med myndighetene i statlig ledet miljøforvaltning og alternative helseløsninger. En slik respons er imidlertid ikke synlig innen Khmer-samfunnet, noe som kan forklares med mangel på lokal deltakelse, forsømmelse av kunnskap om lokal økologi, og asymmetrisk fordeling av makt i bærekraftig politikk.  

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Ghosts and the State: Immaterial Agencies in the Blang Mountains. University of Oslo (UiO). Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  On the Zomian frontier between China and Myanmar lives an ethnic minority called Blang. These communities retain a great degree of autonomy and self-governance, but they are impinged upon from all sides by powerful invisible others, such as ghosts, gods, and the state. This dissertation is about how Blang communities interact with these powerful others. It asks and attempts to answer a very fundamental question: how do people interact with things they cannot see or touch like ghosts and the state? The dissertation details several techniques and technologies employed to make these interactions possible. Because they cannot be grasped, materialisation affords immaterial agencies a material extension in the phenomenal world, affording humans the possibility of grasping the intangible. Infrastructural technologies are employed by both humans and nonhumans to overcome distance, both spatial and ontological. Power is moved or networked to act across space. Things are sent across the ontological divide between humans and these powerful others. The dissertation will also investigate the processes by which Blang communities attempt to order the world, and the competing ordering regimes of the state on every level from the body to the cosmos. In Blang communities—violence though prevalent—is to some extent inhuman, and as we shall see both ghosts, gods, and the state employ violence in order to make humans acknowledge their agency and desires. According to Blang theories of possession, when a ghost enters a person, it transforms embodied perception making them see the world as the ghost does. When the state first entered the Blang Mountains in 1953 only its cadres considered Blang communities Chinese, now people see themselves as the state sees them. Is Chineseness, is citizenship then not in a sense a form of possession? Finally, the dissertation investigates how the current state differs from its predecessors and what its arrival has meant for human relations.

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