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Religious and Spiritual Responses to Climate Collapse: Ethnographic Perspectives across Eight Global Sites
keywords:
anthropocene
religion/spirituality
climate change
While ethnographic scholarship about climate collapse quickly grows, less attention has been paid to the psychical, moral and emotional dimensions of the crisis. This seminar will bring together anthropologists focused on religious and spiritual responses to climate crisis in particular, and how this inflects being human in the so-called “Anthropocene” more generally. While tied to denialism in some cases, religious mobilizations are also engaging in a variety of social movements supporting climate justice. We begin with brief presentations of our individual projects, which span regions from China, India and the Phillipines to Peru, Mexico, Guatemala and the United States, and include transnational linkages across these settings. The town hall will then explore such issues related to the study of culture and climate change as: 1) an overriding secular bias; 2) the atomized nature of the anthropological work in this area; 3) how religious and spiritual perspectives provide actors with ontological, cosmological, and socio-organizational resources for resiliency, adaptation and mitigation; and 4) how scaled and coalitional scholarly and activist exchange in this area can inform and fuel climate justice activism.