Indigenous Knowledge in Crisis: How Climate Displacement Is Reshaping Folk Exorcism

Introduction — A Hidden Cultural Emergency

Across island, riverine, mountain and coastal regions, climate-driven hazards and planned relocations are forcing communities to leave the environments that sustain living cultural systems. Intangible cultural heritage — the rituals, specialist skills and orally transmitted knowledge that underpin many folk exorcism and deliverance practices — is deeply place-linked; when people are displaced, the social and ecological conditions that make those practices intelligible and transmissible are disrupted.

This article surveys how displacement affects folk exorcism traditions, presents recent evidence of knowledge loss in relocated communities, and summarizes anthropological best practices and policy recommendations for safeguarding ritual knowledge in contexts of climate migration.

How Displacement Changes Ritual Practice: Mechanisms and Examples

Rituals such as folk exorcisms and traditional healing are built on three interdependent elements: a) ecological knowledge (plants, smoke, water sources, sacred places), b) social roles (lineages of healers, initiatory apprenticeships, elders), and c) situational authority (local cosmologies, customary law, community consent). Displacement severs or transforms each element: relocated people lose access to key plants and sacred sites; healer–apprentice chains are broken as elders die or youth migrate; and host-community norms may prohibit or criminalize practices that were previously lawful and consensual.

Recent reporting and fieldwork document these dynamics. For example, in Odisha, India, relocation after severe cyclone damage diminished access to medicinal plants and disrupted traditional healers’ authority, forcing communities to rely on unfamiliar biomedical services while losing embodied herbal knowledge. Such losses have cascading effects for ritualized forms of care — including exorcism-style interventions that depend on specific materia, songs and place-based narratives.

• Loss of materia medica: Sacred herbs, resins and waters used as purificatory agents may not be available after relocation, or protected by unfamiliar laws in a new jurisdiction.
• Interrupted transmission: Apprenticeship and embodied learning require stable social settings; displacement accelerates generational rupture.
• New risk environments: Urban and camp settings expose practitioners and ritual participants to legal, health and child-safeguarding scrutiny that can criminalize previously accepted practices.

What Anthropologists and Heritage Specialists Recommend

Anthropologists, heritage bodies and policy actors now converge on a set of practical, rights-based strategies to reduce cultural losses and support resilience in relocated communities. Key, evidence-backed recommendations include:

1. Community-led documentation and digitization (with free, revocable consent): Build locally controlled archives of songs, prayers, ritual sequences, materia knowledge, and genealogies so that displaced communities can maintain and teach practices even when ecology or settlement changes. Documentation must be co-designed and governed by communities to avoid extractive outcomes.
2. Safeguarding through adaptation: Support in-situ adaptation where possible (e.g., protecting micro-habitats, seed banks, or transplanting culturally important plants) and facilitate culturally appropriate ritual spaces within relocation sites. The UNESCO Guidance Note on climate action for living heritage recommends integrating living heritage into climate adaptation planning.
3. Participatory co‑design of relocation and aid: Ensure that relocation decisions and aid programming are co-designed with rights-holders so that ritual needs (timing, sacred places, healer roles) are respected. Donor and government processes that ignore local agency accelerate loss.
4. Capacity building and intergenerational transmission: Fund apprenticeships, intergenerational workshops and community cultural centres in arrival locations so younger generations can learn under elder supervision in safe, consensual settings.
5. Legal recognition and protective policy: Advocate for legal frameworks and climate finance streams that explicitly include intangible cultural heritage as non-economic loss and damage, so communities can access resources for safeguarding rituals and healers. Recent UN processes and UNESCO reporting are beginning to operationalize this framing.

These measures share a common emphasis: protect community agency, prioritize consent, and integrate cultural safeguarding into broader climate adaptation and human-rights frameworks rather than treating rituals as peripheral or merely ethnographic curiosities.

Practical Checklist for Researchers, NGOs and Policymakers

Below is a concise, prioritized checklist that teams working at the intersection of climate displacement and folk ritual should apply. Each item is designed to be practical and rights‑respecting.

Priority	Action	Why it matters
1	Adopt a participatory consent protocol (written + oral) before any documentation.	Prevents extractive research and preserves community governance of knowledge.
2	Support community-controlled seed/plantae banks and micro-habitat protection.	Maintains access to ritual materials and supports ecological continuity.
3	Create funded apprenticeship stipends and intergenerational programmes.	Restores interrupted transmission chains and compensates elders for teaching.
4	Include intangible heritage in climate finance applications (non-economic loss).	Secures resources for long-term safeguarding and site- or culture-specific measures.
5	Develop safeguarding protocols aligned with child protection and public health law.	Reduces legal risk while ensuring care and consent during high-risk rituals.

Implementing these steps requires flexible funding, trusted long-term partnerships and recognition that cultural continuity is itself a dimension of climate resilience. For further technical guidance, practitioners should consult the UNESCO Guidance Note on climate action for living heritage and regional initiatives on intangible cultural heritage and climate change.

Final note: Folk exorcism and deliverance practices are diverse and context-specific. Interventions that respect local authority and prioritize community-led solutions offer the best path to preserving these practices when communities are on the move.