This omnibus paper session features new works on religion, racialization, ethics, and ecology in Indonesia and the Philippines. The first paper reveals how competing religious ontologies shape environmental futures in Southeast Asia, foregrounding indigenous Parmalim cosmology that disrupts anthropocentric moral hierarchies embedded in modern land regimes. The second paper examines the relative disappearance of race language in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century under Abraham Kuyper’s Ethical Politics, identifying traces of racial power in the moral vocabularies of care, tutelage, and responsibility. The third paper traces histories of migration to and evangelization in the Philippines, investigating possible evidence for the transmission of Manichaeism and the cosmology of the Infinito Dios.
Recent conflicts between the indigenous Parmalim community and industrial forestry in North Sumatra are often framed as disputes over land rights or environmental protection. This paper argues that such conflicts reveal a deeper ontological divergence concerning the moral status of land. Parmalim cosmology understands land as spiritually constituted through tondi, a life-force that binds humans, forests, and territory within reciprocal moral relations. By contrast, missionary Protestant theology introduced in the nineteenth century reframed land through a stewardship paradigm that conceptualizes nature as divinely entrusted resource under human management. While stewardship theology is not inherently extractive, its managerial anthropology historically aligned with colonial and postcolonial land governance. Drawing on decolonial theory and political ecology, the paper argues that Parmalim cosmology generates structural resistance to commodification by disrupting anthropocentric moral hierarchies embedded in modern land regimes. The case reveals how competing religious ontologies shape environmental futures in Southeast Asia.
This paper examines the relative disappearance of race language in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century under Abraham Kuyper’s Ethical Politics. Although racial discourse was widespread in European colonialism, colonial governance in Indonesia increasingly relied on the moral idioms of ethics, education, and tutelage rather than overt racial classification. I argue that this shift did not mark the end of racial hierarchy but its displacement into theological, moral, and pedagogical forms. The contrast is especially striking because Kuyper employed explicit racialized language elsewhere, including in his 1898 Princeton lectures and in his support for the Boers in South Africa. The Indonesian case shows how colonial domination could be recast as ethical responsibility while preserving structures of exclusion and inequality. Read from the present and through the lens of haunting future/s, this history suggests that racial power may survive most effectively when it no longer appears explicitly as race, but lingers in the moral vocabularies of care, tutelage, and responsibility.
The myth of the Infinito Dios presents a “heretical” cosmology that reimagines the Genesis creation account by positing a deity who precedes the Biblical God. The presentation describes the content of the Infinito Dios myth, tracing its development through the scant available source materials, which have traditionally been held in secret and hidden from researchers. The paper also speculates on the origins of the narrative within the context of ten centuries of Asian and European migrations to the Philippines and the beliefs and ideas that accompanied them. There are reasonable arguments and circumstantial evidence suggesting that the myth of the Infinito Dios has roots in dualist and Gnostic cosmologies in the Mediterranean world and Silk Route, specifically Manichaeism.