Keeping (in) Touch

This article examines how residents of the Kullu Valley in Himachal Pradesh interpret environmental disasters as expressions of the agency of local deities ( devtās ), arguing that the intimacy between gods and landscape is constituted as much through material and ritual practice as through narrative. Taking the devastating floods of 2025 as a point of departure, I show that many villagers understood the disaster not merely as a climatic event but also as divine intervention—either punishment for ecological misconduct or a warning against environmentally harmful development. While myths, everyday discourse and oracular pronouncements explicitly link deities to forests, rivers and mountains, the author contends that these associations are equally grounded in embodied ritual action. Drawing on theories of material religion, the author demonstrates how offerings, incense burning, ritual bathing, temple installations and seasonal observances enact the gods’ presence in the landscape. Through embodied, sensory engagement with natural elements, devotees experience the environment as permeated by divine presence. By redirecting scholarly attention from symbolic and discursive representations of nature—which have often dominated academic accounts—to the performative processes through which environmental perception is formed and sustained, the article demonstrates that religious practice is constitutive, rather than merely expressive, of lived understandings of environment in times of ecological crisis.

Embodied cognition · Misconduct · Natural disaster · Performative utterance · Reverence · The Symbolic · Wilderness · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

• The Sacred Gaze

  David Morgan•Sacred Gaze•2005

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• Western Himalayan N?gs as Guardians of Water Resources

  Gerrit Lange•Journal for the Study of Religion…•2018

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