Ben Campbell (University of Durham)
Being Reminded From the Other Side: Himalayan Eco-Sentience in the Age of Climate Change
As forests were burning in Nepal in 2009, Tamang communities were actively pondering their ethical relation to the forests and their creatures, and to the detachment of village youth from agro-pastoral subsistence routines that make possible effective livelihoods in the mountains. Villagers were particularly concerned that the spiritual guardians of place were wreaking revenge on humans for their disrespect and casual detachment from ongoing cultivated relations. This paper looks at simultaneous sites of rupture in ethical relations, and asks how the emergent crises of the anthropocene are given form and rhetorical character by indigenous and scientific framings.
