Tropes of Fear: the Impact of Globalization on Batek Religious Landscapes

Abstract: The Batek are a forest and forest-fringe dwelling population numbering around 1,500 located in Peninsular Malaysia. Most Batek groups were mobile forest-dwelling foragers and collectors until the recent past. The Batek imbue the forest with religious significance that they inscribe onto the landscape through movement, everyday activities, storytelling, trancing and shamanic journeying. However, as processes of globalization transform Malaysian landscapes, many Batek groups have been deterritorialized and relocated to the forest fringes where they are often pressured into converting to world religions, particularly Islam. Batek religious beliefs and practices have been re-shaped by their increasing encounters with global flows of ideologies, technologies, objects, capital and people, as landscapes are opened up to development.

This article analyzes the ways these encounters are incorporated into the fabric of the Batek’s religious world and how new objects and ideas have been figuratively and literally assimilated into their taboo systems and cosmology. Particular attention is paid to the impacts of globalization as expressed through tropes of fear.

A Sense of Place short link:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-h8

Full Text: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/4/2/240

Tacey, Ivan. 2013. “Tropes of Fear: the Impact of Globalization on Batek Religious Landscapes.” Religions 4, no. 2: 240-266.

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Introduction to Siberia

Overview: Few parts of the world are so consistently ignored, at least in the English-language media, which  almost always focuses on the western, or European, parts of Russia, particularly Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the troubled North Caucasus. Thus, in most people’s imagination, in the West and even in Russia itself, Siberia looks like an iceberg: big, cold, mostly hidden from view, and inherently dangerous. In this series of posts, GeoCurrents aims to shed new light on this vast and significant place. If Siberia were independent, it would have the largest area of any country in the world—by a significant margin.

A Sense of Place Shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-gE

Lewis, M.W.. March 21, 2012.  Introduction to Siberia, GeoCurrents

Full Text: http://geocurrents.info/place/russia-ukraine-and-caucasus/siberia/introduction-to-siberia

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