Dreaming of Forest Spirits and Obama: Rethinking Indigenous Land Rights Claims Beyond ‘Local’ Traditions

In this paper, I draw upon case-studies collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia (2006-2019) to examine how Batek contemporary experiences of ecological destruction and socio-political violence are understood and reconfigured through esoteric practices (animistic, shamanic and myth-making practices). This leads me to discuss the potential of such activities as paths for gaining legal recognition of rights which encompass complexly entangled tangible cultural heritages (land rights) and intangible cultural heritages (shamanic and animistic practices). In Malaysian courts of law, recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights are increasingly established through a community’s ability to demonstrate their ongoing maintenance of traditional connections with the land claimed in accordance with customs distinctive to their particular community. Thus, such claims are dependent on notions of ‘authentic’ indigenous esoteric traditions which rely upon reified, static and highly localised representations of indigenous peoples’ socio-cultural traditions. Through highlighting the dynamic and fundamentally interconnected nature of Batek esoteric practices that not only bind people to their traditional territories and potent local landscape features associated with powerful spirits, but also connect them to a plethora of far-away people and places, the paper aims help rethink some of the complexities of esoterically informed restitution of the cultural, legal and ecological of indigenous peoples. The paper draws upon legal anthropology, Anthropocene studies, religious studies and the anthropology of the Otherwise, to rethink approaches to animism and shamanism and suggests avenues through which anthropologists can instigate collaborative approaches which facilitate indigenous peoples’ claims to rights.