Tag: agrarian-life

• For the sake of forests and the Gods podcast

  Recently I had the opportunity to speak to Wolfram Dressler about his new book, For the Sake of Forests and the Gods (Cornell University Press, 2025) on the New Books Network.

  The book examines the impacts of religious and environmental non-governmental actors on the lives of highlanders on Palawan Island, the Philippines. The absence of the state in Palawan’s mountainous regions have meant that these non-governmental actors have been able to increasingly assume governmental authority. Dressler explores these actors’ emergence, goals, and practices in Palawan to reveal their influence on regulating agricultural cultivation, forests, customary objects, healthcare, and value systems.

  Using a relational approach and based on more than two decades of experience in Palawan, Dressler explains the causes and consequences of converging religious and environmental nongovernmental reforms in indigenous upland spaces. The book aims to provoke us to critically reflect on the political consequences non-governmental actors have on upland peoples negotiating challenges of late capitalism, and advocates for indigenous communities to be able to do so on their own terms.

  You can listen by clicking here!

  July 17, 2025

  agrarian-life, conservation, Palawan, Philippines, podcast

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• Nominating Siri

  This video of agricultural workers somewhere on Java engaging in a pre harvest ritual prayer led by Google’s Siri went viral a couple of years ago on social media with tens of thousands of likes and many comments.

  View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by 🇮🇩 #NewNormal 🧼🦠 (@ngakaksehat)

  Comments often ranged from amusement to condescension about the apparent low level of Islamic knowledge held by laborers participating. For the latter, that Siri was leading the prayer suggested participants had a superficial understanding.

  But as this recent fascinating paper by Aarti Sethi in American Ethnologist about cotton production, gender, and harvest rituals in Vidarbha, Central India suggests (among many other insights), harvest rituals are not necessarily linked to religious identity but are instead connected to labour relations. Where I did fieldwork in rural Indonesia that was certainly the case: people could internalize religious ideals that rejected such rituals but nevertheless participate in them.

  Rather than reflect a lack of religious knowledge, nominating Siri to lead the prayer may more reflect the participants in that video, mostly middle aged, did not feel they were in a better position to do so. For instance, ritual prayer propitiations pre or post harvest are often undertaken by elderly men who have ceased to have desires that could undermine their integrity when making requests to the rice goddess Dewi Sri for success on behalf of the family or community. Already elderly, they have experienced life’s trials and tribulations and are meant to no longer have wants that could supersede a desire for the family’s wellbeing. Or in other words, desires that Dewi Sri could address at the expense of ensuring a good harvest for all. Siri, without any conceivable desires as the voice of a machine, could thus be the voice most suited to effectively negotiate on behalf of those present for a good result. Alternatively, a much simpler explanation could be that nominating Siri to lead the prayer was just a novelty for a spectacle.

  Whatever the actual case may be, such changing dynamics of technology, spirituality, and generation in longstanding ritual practices are where new forms of agrarian differentiation can be seen. Such new forms of differentiation appear to be lost on those expressing condescension about a supposedly homogenous peasantry’s backwardness — itself a practice of long-term continuity.

  October 3, 2024

  agrarian-life, farming, festivals, god, google-siri, peasants, religion, spirituality, technology

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