This paper addresses how Makonde Muslim villagers living on the Swahili coast of southern Tanzania conceptualize and discuss environmental change. Through narratives elicited during in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, I show that respondents associate various forms of environmental change—ecological, climatic, political, and socioeconomic—with God’s plan. Respondents had a sound grasp of the material workings of their lived realities and evoked religious causality to fill in the residual explanatory gaps and find meaning in events that were otherwise difficult to explain. Such narratives reveal both a culturally engrained belief system that colors people’s understandings of change and uncertainty and a discursive idiom for making sense of social suffering. On an applied note, I submit that social science approaches to studying environmental change must take into account political and economic contexts relative to local cosmologies, worldviews, and religious faiths, which may not disaggregate the environment into distinct representational categories.

中文翻译：

---

坦桑尼亚南部斯瓦希里海岸环境变化的伊斯兰话语

本文探讨了居住在坦桑尼亚南部斯瓦希里海岸的马孔德穆斯林村民如何概念化和讨论环境变化。通过在深度访谈和焦点小组讨论中引发的叙述，我表明受访者将各种形式的环境变化——生态、气候、政治和社会经济——与上帝的计划联系起来。受访者对他们生活现实的物质运作有很好的把握，并引发了宗教因果关系，以填补剩余的解释空白，并在其他难以解释的事件中找到意义。这样的叙述既揭示了一种文化根深蒂固的信仰体系，它影响了人们对变化和不确定性的理解，也揭示了一种理解社会苦难的话语成语。在应用笔记上，