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Religious Relationships with the Environment in a Tibetan Rural Community: Interactions and Contrasts with Popular Notions of Indigenous Environmentalism

Woodhouse, E; Mills, MA; McGowan, PJ; Milner-Gulland, EJ; (2015) Religious Relationships with the Environment in a Tibetan Rural Community: Interactions and Contrasts with Popular Notions of Indigenous Environmentalism. Human Ecology , 43 (2) pp. 295-307. 10.1007/s10745-015-9742-4. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Article
Title: Religious Relationships with the Environment in a Tibetan Rural Community: Interactions and Contrasts with Popular Notions of Indigenous Environmentalism
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s10745-015-9742-4
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10745-015-9742-4
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com.
Keywords: Buddhism, China, Conservation, Religion, Sacred sites, Tibetan Plateau
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1489293
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