The Falcon in the Web: Relational Reconfigurations in Tribal Digital Landscapes of Manipur, India.

Abstract

This paper examines the Amur Falcon conservation initiatives of the Rainforest Club Tamenglong (RCT) among the Zeliangrong-Inpui (ZLRI) community in Manipur, India, to analyse how digitality reshapes indigenous social-ecological relations, knowledge production, and authority. Drawing on digital ethnography, the paper approaches digital engagements not as neutral tools but as landscapes—entangled spaces where cosmology, ecology, technology, and power intersect. It argues that digitality simultaneously enables new forms of relationality, advocacy, and cultural creativity, while also introducing risks associated with datafication, surveillance, and the privileging of modernist epistemologies embedded in digital infrastructures. While recognising that digital infrastructures operate simultaneously as sites of both emancipatory empowerment and extractive marginalisation within indigenous landscapes, the paper traces a set of tensions that emerge in practice: the reconfiguration of human–nonhuman relations, the reductive translation of lived ecological knowledge into data, the reshaping of indigenous subjectivities, and the potential risk of epistemicide alongside renewed assertions of cultural and theological agency. The category “indigenous” is employed not as a homogeneous identity marker but as a cosmological– philosophical orientation rooted in relationality with land and nonhuman life, offering a contrastive lens through which the ontological (western) assumptions of digital systems become visible. The paper further argues that RCT’s practices constitute profound expressions of ecclesial witness beyond formal church structures, contributing to eco-theological reflection on cosmologies, creation care, epistemic justice, and shared responsibility in postdigital worlds. By attending ethnographically to plural modes of knowing—scientific, embodied, performative, and theological— the paper offers critical reflections for ecclesial futures, seeking relational, context-sensitive, and cosmologically-nuanced approaches to faith, ecology, and digital participation.