The latest issue of the JSRNC, Vol. 11, No 2 is out now. The theme of this latest Special Issue is Ecocosmologies and ‘Western’ Epistemologies: Contestation, Conflict, and Collaboration.
In their introduction to this special issue Kristina Tiedje and Lucas Johnston write:
As readers of this journal know well, there is a significant and growing literature either blaming religious ideation for environmental degradation or extolling its environmentally salutary promise. Recent literature reviews that have appeared here in the JSRNC (Taylor 2016; Taylor, Van Wieren, and Zaleha 2016) and elsewhere (Johnston and Taylor 2016; Taylor and Johnston 2016) concluded that, on balance, the most important and positive trends related to religiously motivated environmental care are occurring not within the mainstreams of the so-called world religions, but rather on their margins or among the world’s remaining traditional or indigenous cultures and their practices. This special issue explores some of these instances in which traditional or indigenous cultural movements are effecting positive change, in most cases by either contesting or complicating resource management regimes grounded in ‘Western’ epistemologies. Of course, the claim that there are ‘Western’ epistemologies, on the one hand, and traditional or indigenous ones on the other, and that they are somehow qualitatively different, implies a sort of essentialism that is ultimately problematic if not demonstrably false. Furthermore, not all ‘ecocosmologies’ perceive ecological systems as beneficent or positive. Robin Wright (2014, 2015), for instance, has noted that for the jaguar shamans of the Northwest Amazon and the communities in which they dwell, ‘nature’ is powerful and terrifying, not a safe space for enjoyable interactions with the other-than-human world. Here, however, acknowledging those complexities, the contributors to this special issue point toward ways in which such nonmainstream epistemologies are contributing to environmental protection and helping to forge new alliances between conservationists and other impacted communities.
Below is a summary of the content from this issue, with links to the content on the Equinox website for those with online membership.
