Muslim Women and Everyday Environmentalism in Post-Covid Indonesia: Shifting the Canon?

Everyday environmentalism in Indonesia is inseparable from the presence of some Muslim women whose appearance in social media help set the idea and the practice for sustainable living. Having attracted many housewives to follow their footsteps, existing studies, departing from ecofeminism, have underlined their impactful presence. While an etic evaluation might be pertinent to analyse how much this increasing public role able to improve their stake, an emic reading is no less important to understand their own interpretation. The study argues that a contextual reading of Muslim women’s engagement with everyday environmentalism in Indonesia cannot be undertaken by dissuading their view of religiousness, while permeating it with a prescribed gendered analysis provided by ecofeminism. But instead of rejecting the latter, the paper delves into the dynamic interplay of emic and etic rendition to the place of women, environmentalism in everyday life, and religion in Indonesia. Employing ethnography, the study found multiple layers of meaning of religiousness, showing their complicated relation with religious institution and an uneasy alliance with any given feminist ideas.