In this article, we examine the environmental thought and practice of indigenous peoples living in and around a wildlife sanctuary in North India. Analysis reveals that those religious specialists (such as shamans) who possess knowledge of herbal healing are more committed than other villagers to preventing or mitigating the overharvesting of natural resources. To explain these results, reference is made to a specific juncture of native traditions and modern conditions and in particular to an intersection of local economies with global discourses of “ecodevelopment.” Drawing on theories and methods from political ecology and cultural psychology, we present a framework for testing the extent that local actors—in this case, shamanic and herbalist healers—are differently positioned to resist or accommodate state and parastate structures of “environmentality” than are other villagers.

This article discusses the environmental ethics of Indigenous herbalists inhabiting the Phulwari ki Nal Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India. Our respondents protected forests from activities like illicit tree felling because (a) they realized that their own human wellbeing is tied to the fate of the natural world, and (b) wild animals such as leopards form non-human communities that intrinsically deserve to live and prosper. Framing herbal-ists' environmental behavior as egocentric or altruistic (distinctions made in social psychological theories of environmentally significant behavior) oversimplifies the attitudes and behaviors. These distinctions only have meaning when the object of behavior is conceptualized as largely separate and distinct from the self, which is not the case in this Indigenous Rajasthani context. Here, humans and animals are understood to be interdependent family members who share substance, interests, and obligations to each other.

In this paper, we argue that shamans as compared to non-shamans demonstrate a deeper connection to wildlife. Shamans display particularly powerful love and reverence for leopards. That shamans more deeply revere, even worship, nature suggests that indigenous Animism does impact the environmental thought and practice of our informants. However, our indigenous informants' pro-environmental thinking is most strongly linked to only particular classes of people (like shamans) and to particular animals (like leopards). Likewise, shamans do not demonstrate significant differences with non-shamans on all survey items related to wildlife. Finally, the differences between the conservation sentiments of shamans and nonshamans are less striking than other pro-environmental feelings. We thus argue for a complex, and in some instances opposed, relationship between indigenous Rajasthani religion and pro-environmental thought and practice.