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Accepted Paper:
Evangelising nature in the Anthropocene: Environmental and social justice in the Amazon
Natalia Valdivieso Kastner
(University of Manchester)
This paper examines the action of Catholic ecotheopolitics in the production of new signifiers and the (re)articulation of relations between humans, nature, and the divine and the collaborations across religious, non-secular, and secular arenas.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the operation of theopolitics in the context of vulnerable Amazonian ecological landscapes. Infused by the narratives of ‘the care for our common home’ and the ecological spirituality chartered in the encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015) and the Synod of the Amazon (2019) the action of ecotheopolitical regimes has been key in the production of new signifiers and the (re)articulation of relations between human beings, nature, and the divine. I argue that the conception of nature as a non-secular assemblage of humans and non-humans in the form of Creation has served to reorganise relations between humans and the natural world via the emergence of Christian environmental subjectivities. Based on a 14-month ethnographic fieldwork, I observe how the deployment of such language and narratives in the establishment of alliances and modes of collaboration across religious, non-secular, and secular arenas by a group of Catholic missionaries working in the Ecuadorian Amazon has served to the advancement of claims of responsibility for the commons in the political realm and the emergence of the Catholic Church as a plausible political and ecological subject in the face of the Anthropocene.