Shamanism, Magic, and Indigenous Ontologies: Eco-Critical Perspectives on Environmental Changes in India

This article proposes a discussion on the profound crisis of indigenous communities (ādivāsīs) in India, dealing today with a vast campaign of exploitation of environmental resources and with the mining activities that the government intends to install in their ancestral territories. Environmental disasters such as pollution, deforestation, and climatic variations frame a human drama involving land alienation, displacement, exploitation of cheap labor among ethnic minorities. Starting from some general theories of the “ontological turn” in anthropology and ecocriticism in India, the paper proposes a case study on Odisha’s Kondhs. I will stress how up to now the Kondhs have employed adaptation and survival strategies and how they interpret the imminent cultural disaster due to their gradual estrangement from a changing territory.