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Abstract
The current ecological crisis and its accompanying environmental consciousness has prodded many to reject Western dualism and instead embrace animism. Taking the Sundarbans forests of India as a starting point, the author shows how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the "rules of the jungle." The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, "cosmic polities"—that undeniably govern life in the Sundarbans and across the landscape of South Asia. Mehtta shows how such nonhuman forms of governance and animistic ontologies can act as a source not only of care and an ecological consciousness but also are capable of exclusion and discrimination. Consequently, the South Asian context provides an important cautionary tale about the blind embrace of animism as the sole savior of our ecological crisis by revealing a spectrum of violence within certain strands of animistic ontologies. Simultaneously the author shows how Western repertoires of thought reveal framing devices that transcend dualism and may be read as the precursors of contemporary environmental consciousness. This article ultimately proposes the importance of acknowledging a bricolage of ontologies and realities without entrenching them in a particular identity of caste, tribe, or "indigeneity" or in being of "the West" or of "the rest of the world."

AbstractThe livelihood of crab collecting, practised for generations in the Sundarbans forest of India, has undergone a radical moral makeover in recent years. Largely landless crab fishers are now the subject of frequent public denunciations by local authorities for their supposed greed and reckless endangerment of the entire ecosystem. While greed and its related category of need emerge from a local moral ecology of the region, internationally funded conservation campaigns and recent disruptions in the global crab supply chain reveal how accusations are activated and the means through which they play out amidst pre‐existing village hierarchies. This article accounts for the political, economic, and moral shifts that underpin these accusations. In counterpoint, I present the defences of the accused, and explore crab collectors' notions of a sufficient life and the rich moral distinctions they themselves make between greed (lobh), need (aubhav), desire (chahida), and habit (swabhav). I then step back to show the broader political contours that shape the discourse of 'greedy' crab collectors. I argue that both the conservation movement and allied state actors have distorted the material and moral resources intended to combat climate change and other environmental threats by scapegoating the politically disenfranchised: local fishers. Powerful stakeholders, as a result of their own political impotency, are deployed in a game of crab antics that fails to address the underlying environmental catastrophe while displacing the psychic burden of greed onto the poor.

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people's ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcraft, scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal conflict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people's ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcra , scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal con ict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.