“Facticity”-our “thrownness” into an absurd (and anthropocentric) world neither of our choosing nor fully under our control-is now recognized as a rhizomatic, non-hierarchial, multi-species, spatially foliated condition in which we have not only “never been modern” ( Latour 1993), but we have also “never been human” ( Haraway 2008). ![]() The “ontological turn” in philosophy and social thought ( Deleuze and Guattari 1987 Latour 1993 Haraway 2016), anthropology ( Viveiros de Castro 1998 Descola 2013 Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), geography ( Massey 2005 Braun 2006 Sullivan 2010 Castree 2012 Lorimer 2012), and other fields, drawing heavily from ethnographic work on indigenous cosmology, has altered some basic existential tenets. I pause intentionally, momentarily, to focus on a modernist definition of power here, because of its anthropocentric definition of “a group,” to emphasize how recent scholarship on animist and vitalist ontologies ( Viveiros de Castro 1998 Bird-David 1999 Bennett 2010 Taylor 2010 Descola 2013 Kohn 2013) sheds light on far more socio-ecologically complex conceptions of Mitsein (“Being-with”) than those espoused even by some of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century ( Heidegger 2019 De Beauvoir 1971 Levinas 1987). 50) definition of power as the property of a group when it “acts in concert,” we see that the potency of spiritual ecologies lies in their capacity to convene a multiplicity of beings and forces in the production and reproduction of space, place, community, and ecology. 2014 Duara 2015 Verschuuren and Furuta 2016 Verschuuren and Brown 2019). Recent discourse on spiritual ecology empowers scholars, activists, conservationists, indigenous peoples, and others to act in concert toward the realization of transformative ecological, cosmological, economic, and political reconfigurations of life systems worldwide ( Taylor 2010 Verschuuren et al. As dynamic, emergent, and flexible systems of socio-ecological adaptation that both shape and are shaped by regional and transnational media, they play significant roles in policy initiatives associated with Ecological Civilization and hold potential for broadening the horizons of Anthropocene scholarship, socio-ecological activism, and meaningful settlement in a profoundly unsettled world. Comparative analysis of Han and Tibetan spiritual ecologies reveals that cosmological landscapes comprise the armature of relational ontologies grounding and informing everyday life, livelihood, and power relations. ![]() ![]() Despite a century of dramatic sociopolitical change across rural areas in the People’s Republic of China, many villages maintain significant geo-phenomenological connections between body, mind, and land, comprising a body politic maintained through ritual cycles and dwelling practices that uphold the sanctity and integrity of vital watersheds. This article reports on 15 years of field research on “animate landscapes,” associated with gods and spirits in Tibetan communities, and “vital landscapes” associated with fengshui in Han Villages. The “spirit” in spiritual ecology is an active political force deserving sustained scholarly analysis and public recognition.
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