SUSTAINABLE LIVING PRACTICE AMONG URBAN WOMEN IN JAVA: ON THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN ENVIRONMENTALISM IN EVERYDAY LIFE
ABSTRACT
The study attempts to seek the role of religion in environmentalism in everyday life. Focusing the analysis on the life of urban women in Indonesia, this study intends to find out how environmental issues that has been addressed in the household level could reach out into the public, and how religion takes part in this process. The objective is carried out by building relationships with urban women who have implemented sustainable living practice prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and extracting information from their actively engaging experience.
The purpose of this study was (i) to determine the types of environmental issues that the informants deal with on daily basis, (ii) to seek whether their interaction with environmentalism on daily basis influences their observance to religion, and (iii) to assess the relationship between religion and environmentalism on a pedagogical and political level. This goal was accomplished by contrasting the findings from the fieldwork with the readings of Tim Ingold and Hannah Arendt, which Sherilyn MacGregor had previously cited in her paper on the everyday turn to environmentalism.
The study found that the informants, through carework, have addressed the waste problem resulting from household consumption long before the Covid 19 pandemic, which have then developed into some cognate actions after the pandemic, including crafting and food growing activities. While technology has facilitated their access to sustainable living discourses and practices, its own function ceases as a medium of information and connectivity. Putting technology aside, it is by articulating the past and future in active present that the informants’ have enabled them find solutions to household environmental problems and reflected on their place in the world and the relations they have with God and other non-humans. This experience, in turn, grants the informants with a more rooted idea of her role in the world and, thus leads them to find ways to effectuate her personal responsibility to attend to and to draw into correspondence with the world.
Keywords: religion, environmentalism in everyday life, sustainable living practices, responsibility, correspondence