Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia

Grounded in Southeast Asia's cultural, political, and environmental diversity, the five articles in this issue of SOJOURN not only document massive environmental transformations and the tremendous social exclusion that they entail, but also elaborate on conceptual shortcomings of modern universalist concepts of ecology. Shared understandings and basic definitions of terms guide all of the articles. Theoretically inclined to political ecology and the anthropology of ontologies, they employ political ontology as a major reference to bring those two approaches together. Analytically, the articles investigate a continuum of plurality, along which incompatible concepts of beings and relationships coexist, and hegemoniality, a process by which one ecology may marginalize or dominate others.