Seminar | For the sake of forests and gods: Governing life and livelihood in the Philippine Uplands | Wolfram Dressler

For the Sake of Forests and Gods documents the violent consequences of nonstate actors impinging on the existence of Indigenous peoples in the remote highlands of Palawan Island, the Philippines. Nimble, focused, and well-funded, religious and environmental organizations increasingly assume governmental authority over the lives and livelihoods of the Pala’wan people within their ancestral territories.

Wolfram H. Dressler traces these actors’ history and contemporary practices, revealing how they bypass the state to govern the less governed. In the highlands, environmental NGOs valorize customary objects and practices to suppress swidden and support forest conservation, while evangelical missionaries regulate Pala’wan beliefs, health, and hygiene.

Bridging material studies and biopolitics, For the Sake of Forests and Gods explores how these nonstate actors use customary objects for comprehensive reforms of Pala’wan bodies and souls, centering on how the unique properties of the Tingkep basket mediates nonstate biopower. These reforms impact highlanders differently: some adopt biopolitical ideals willingly, others for political and economic gain. Yet others resist interventions, prioritizing family livelihoods. Ultimately, Dressler argues that Indigenous sovereignty matters more than ever as nonstate biopower intensifies in Southeast Asia’s uplands.

Speaker

Wolfram Dressler’s (University of Melbourne) research involves the scalar politics of conservation and development that encompass environmental governance, agrarian change, rural livelihoods, and ethnic relations in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. His current work broadly examines the political ecology of local social responses and livelihood adjustments emerging at the conjuncture of changing environmental governance, resource extraction (mining, plantations, etc), and agrarian political economies in the frontiers of the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Laos. Wolfram has researched similar topics in the Canadian Western Arctic, Eastern Caribbean and Southern Africa.

Moderator

Putting power and politics central in the contemporary struggles of natural resource governance, Diana Suhardiman (KITLV) looks at policies and institutions (re)shaping governance structures, processes, and outcomes across scales (local to transboundary). Placing her research at the intersection of land, water, environmental, climate governance, she studies power struggles and processes of grassroots alliances shaping within the broader context of state transformation processes in various countries in Southeast Asia, including Laos, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the new conference room of KITLV (Herta Mohr Building, Witte Singel 27A, 2311 BG Leiden) and online via Zoom, on Thursday 10 October from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET).

Registration

1. On location: if you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: [email protected].

2. Online: if you wish to join this webinar online, please register here.

Seminar series

This seminar is part of the seminar series ‘Unraveling unconventional knowledge systems’.

Image

Pala’wan households in the highlands. Photo by Wolfram Dressler.