Verschuuren, Bas. Review of Indigenous Sacred Natural Sites and Spiritual Governance: The Legal Case for Juristic Personhood by John Studley, Conservation & Society 17, no. 2 (2019): 218-19. https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_19_28.
Studley, John. Indigenous Sacred Natural Sites and Spiritual Governance: The Legal Case for Juristic Personhood. 1st edition. London: Routledge, 2018.
In this intriguing book, John Studley expands on the literature that questions how Indigenous peoples have governed and protected their sacred sites for countless generations (Carmichael et al. 1994; Liljeblad and Verschuuren 2019). His focus is on sacred natural sites, such as mountains, rivers, trees or water bodies known by indigenous people to be inhabited by a deity or numina, more commonly known as nature spirits. Spirits play an important role in everyday life of Indigenous peoples who maintain intricate relationships with nature spirits through ritual, ceremony, offerings, prayer and meditation. These practices are mostly aimed at consulting or appeasing the spirits who may also punish people for disobedience or harmful behaviour. This way, spirits possess agency and hold power over indigenous peoples and the ways in which they manage and govern their territories, a phenomenon which Studley describes as spiritual governance. (Excerpt from the book review)
© Bas Verschuuren 2019. Conservation & Society is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.5).