Multi-Species Studies: Mutuality, modernity, and co-becoming

 

Multi-Species Studies: How multiple species are always in interaction.










Multispecies Entanglement & Co‑Becoming

The notion of “co-becoming” captures how humans, animals, spirits, and landscapes continually shape one another, central to both Western multispecies studies and Buddhist worldviews. Scholars like Haraway and Erik de Maaker (in Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas) show how these entangled relationships are indicative of environments as active, dynamic assemblages. Buddhism’s ritual recitations and prayer flags reinforce this: a poetic dialogue between humans and nonhumans, affirming that spiritual-ecological reciprocity is not metaphorical but lived.

Indigenous Cosmovisions & Sacred Spatial Practices

Across Himalayan communities, indigenous understanding of “space” is deeply spiritual. Practices such as “la dham” or “ri dham” mark mountain zones as off-limits ritual prohibitions that arise from respect for deities and local spirits. These closures aren’t arbitrary: they regulate resource use, maintain ecological balance, and uphold spiritual pacts, literally shaping landscapes through rituals like the Bhutanese mountain-sealing ceremony (ladam), which binds human acts to divine accountability.

State Capitalism & the Erosion of Relationality

Modern state policies and capitalist logics disrupt these interspecies relationships, converting relational landscapes into commodities. Large-scale development projects like dams, monoculture plantations, and land privatization erode indigenous governance systems and invalidate spiritual protocols tied to place-based deities. Such interventions replace sacred reciprocity with ownership, commodification, and state-defined rights, overriding ancestral ecological knowledge embedded within ritual and place.


Climate Change & Himalaya in the Making

Erik de Maaker’s work within the “New Himalayas” framework intersects with climate science to reveal how precipitation changes profoundly impact multispecies worlds.

 A warming-induced shift from snowfall to rainfall significantly accelerates glacier mass loss in High Mountain Asia, disrupting ecosystem services and deepening breakdowns in water–deity relationships that sustain human and nonhuman life downstream.

Mutuality, Modernity’s Blind Spots & Ethical Reconnection

What emerges is a critique of modernity’s blind spots: its failure to recognize nonhuman agency and spiritual-ecological accountability dismantles mutualistic modes of interdependence. By contrast, indigenous and Buddhist cosmovisions insist on relational ethics—humans are guided not only by social contracts but by covenants with spirits, animals, and landscapes. Reframing environmental policy around this multispecies mutuality can recover ethical checks on capitalist exploitation and re-center sustainable futures.

Ever since studying Western multispecies theory alongside Buddhist practices and Himalayan indigenous cosmovisions, I have come to understand that our world is never solely human—it is woven through with nonhuman voices, deities, animals, and landscapes, all co-creating our social reality. This realization has made me critically aware of how modernity and capitalism, through state-led projects and commodified land, have severed these vital relationships, ignoring nonhuman agency and eroding spiritual-ecological contracts. 

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