Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, the Mentawai Islands rise from the Indian Ocean in a patchwork of forests and rivers where macaques, gibbons and hornbills thrive. Among the Indigenous Mentawai, an ancient cosmology called Arat Sabulungan continues to shape how people understand the natural world. It teaches that every tree, river and animal is inhabited by spirits whose balance must be respected. Though Islam and Christianity have spread through the islands, many young Mentawai still join their elders in ritual offerings before cutting trees or casting nets, reports Keith Anthony Fabro for Mongabay.
“Mentawai youth today reinterpret their ancestral heritage in diverse ways,” researcher Dwi Wahyuni from Imam Bonjol State Islamic University, told Fabro.
A recent study by Dwi and colleagues explored how Arat Sabulungan interacts with modern religion and conservation. Conducted in five villages on Siberut and Sipora islands, it found that youth raised in churches or mosques often still honor ancestral rituals. One example is buluat, a ceremony performed before felling trees, which includes an offering to the tree’s spirit and a promise to replant fruit trees. “Any trees we clear are replaced … If we do not replant, the land will not thrive,” an elder said. The researchers observed that such traditions act as informal safeguards against overexploitation.
Yet Arat Sabulungan faces mounting pressure. Logging, which resumed after a moratorium ended in 2001, has stripped much of Siberut’s forest. “Forest exploitation by large companies and local actors has caused massive deforestation,” the study warned. The loss of forest, it said, undermines not only ecosystems but also the rituals and knowledge that depend on them.
Some scholars question the study’s optimism. Darmanto Darmanto of the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Oriental Institute argued that Arat Sabulungan does not automatically prevent forest exploitation and that brief fieldwork cannot capture its complexity. He warned against romanticizing Indigenous spirituality “as the good kind of primitive spiritualist that an urban audience wants to hear about.”
Dwi acknowledged these critiques, noting that his research aimed to show how cosmology interacts with economic and political forces.
“Rather than depicting them as purely green traditions, I suggest they form a cultural framework for negotiating human-nature relations,” he said. For the Mentawai, the fate of those traditions may depend on the fate of the forest itself.
Read the full story by Keith Anthony Fabro here.
Banner image: A sikerei, or shaman, walks in the forest. Image by The etnic via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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