Cosmopolitical Trans-temporalities: Relational Landscapes, Shamanism and Indigenous Futurism in Southeast Asia

In Southeast Asia, Indigenous worlds have long been shaped through entanglements with outsiders. But how do such relations intersect with shamanic, place-making, and mythopoetic practices? This paper explores how the cosmopolitical engagements of the Batek of Malaysia unsettle colonial mappings of land, history, and identity, while creating space to contest environmental degradation, economic marginalisation, and political exclusion. It traces how origin myths are tied to land claims, how animist imaginations echo pre-colonial and colonial encounters, and how cosmopolitical practices appropriate foreign imagery and transform traumatic histories. Rather than viewing Indigenous actors as locked in the past–or cosmopolitics as a clash between incompatible worlds–I show how the Batek navigate multiple ontological frameworks, interweaving pasts, presents, and futures to challenge linear, state-imposed temporalities. Southeast Asian cosmopolitics thus emerge within a transtemporal zone, where shamans mediate relationships with diverse human and nonhuman actors, forging new forms of alliance and agency.