Mosehe Wonua: reclaiming ecological citizenship through indigenous sacred wisdom in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia

This study examines Mosehe Wonua, a sacred purification ritual practised by the Tolaki people of Southeast Sulawesi, as an enactment of ecological citizenship grounded in indigenous sacred wisdom. Drawing on an ethnographic case study involving participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, the study explores how Mosehe Wonua organises moral responsibility toward land, community, and spiritual forces through collective ritual practice. The findings show that Mosehe Wonua is locally understood as a lived and place-based form of ecological citizenship in which spiritual communication, social reconciliation, and ecological care are inseparable. Ritual participation cultivates ecological virtues such as self-restraint, responsibility, forgiveness, and behavioural caution, while also operating as civic ecology that organises collective stewardship and a preventive orientation toward environmental harm. The study further shows that these meanings are negotiated through religious interpretation, cultural change, and heritage governance. Theoretically, this study extends ecological citizenship scholarship by foregrounding sacred ritual and indigenous cosmology as sites of citizenship enactment, and contributes to civic ecology literature by identifying ritual as an infrastructure of collective environmental practice.