No dia 21 de fevereiro, Joana Roque de Pinho  e Troy Sternberg (CEI-ISCTE-IUL) serão os oradores do Seminário de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Antropologia. O tema será Mystical Natures: Preliminary findings on interconnected religious and environmental transformations in Kenya and Mongolia.

A partir das 14h30, na Sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa e online

Abstract:

Arid and semi-arid areas, which cover about 41% of the world and sustain two billion people, are uniquely challenged under global environmental change. Shifts in land management, land tenure and land use, political instability, and climate change challenge dryland populations who are often mobile and rely on livestock. In parallel, some of these areas are undergoing rapid religious transformations, with conversion to global religions, spiritual revitalization, and radicalization, which occur alongside cultural change, economic diversification, and growing political marginalization. The Mystical Natures project explores relationships between religious transformations and environmental changes in dryland areas of Inner Asia and Africa. Focusing on Kenyan and Mongolian pastoral communities, it addresses how Pentecostalism intersects with climate change and processes of land use change and land privatization among Kenyan Maasai pastoralists; and how Buddhism and shamanism in post-socialist Mongolia shape responses to climatic extreme events and mining, and informal privatization of pastures. The project advances the scholarship on global environmental change by addressing the neglected dimensions of spirituality, religion and religious transformation.

Joana Roque de Pinho is an ecologist and environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on changing West and East African sub-humid and dryland social-ecological systems; and how members of rural natural-resource reliant communities experience environmental changes. She is most passionate about engaging rural community members as collaborative researchers/visual ethnographers through participatory visual research methodologies. For the MYNA project, she explores the intersection of religious transformations with livelihoods, land tenure/use changes and climatic instability. She contributes a multi-sited Kenyan case-study that explores the neglected role of Pentecostalism in Maasailand’s social-ecological dynamics, and participates in the Mongolia and Mozambique case studies.

Troy Sternberg Extensive travel led to Troy's interest in desert regions, environments and people. Thoughts on how arid lands functioned and why there was such great diversity and extent led to his DPhil on pastoral environments in the Gobi Desert (University of Oxford, 2009). Research focused on extreme climate hazards (drought, dzud), environments (water, steppe vegetation, desertification) and social dynamics (pastoralists, social-environmental interaction, mining and communities). Since 2005 Troy has continued to research in Mongolia; in 2010 northern China and in 2015 Central Asia became additional study sites. Current research focuses on the FCT project 'Mystical Nature: A comparative study of religious-environmental dynamics among Inner Asian, African and North American dryland communities' at the Centre for International Studies, ISCTE-IUL as Co-Investigator. He also works on Post-Pandemic Societies in Inner Asia with collaborators at six Japanese universities and Oxford University, UK.