Relational ecological subjectivity varies across Nusantara manuscripts oral traditions and customary practices

Nature is often treated as a passive object in environmental management, yet Nusantara ecological archives preserve other ways of understanding human-nonhuman relations. This article examines how primary manuscripts, published documentation of oral traditions and customary practices, official documentary sources, and secondary scholarship articulate nature as an ecological subject. Using a qualitative comparative documentary design, the study analyzes ten purposively selected cases spanning disaster memory, rain-making mantra, healing manuscripts, seasonal knowledge, customary marine governance, customary forest governance, living root infrastructure, and agrarian ritual. The cases were selected for analytical variation across source type, ecological domain, relational function, and region rather than as statistically or culturally representative of Nusantara traditions. Close reading, interpretive content analysis, cross-case comparison, and multiple-evidence synthesis identify three recurring but unevenly evidenced functions: warning and risk interpretation, healing and material knowledge, and restraint, recovery, and reciprocal care. The strongest claims of relational ecological subjectivity arise where primary texts or well-documented practices position nonhuman entities as responsive presences that shape action and obligation; other cases are treated as suggestive or contextual rather than equivalent evidence. The article proposes relational ecological subjectivity as a bounded analytical concept that differs from symbolism, general nonhuman agency, traditional ecological knowledge, kincentric ecology, and relational ontology by focusing on socially mediated relations in which nonhuman signs or capacities become consequential for human responsibility. Its practical contribution is a pragmatic model of relational ecological governance that seeks to retain nonhuman agency while informing disaster risk reduction, customary co-management, ethical biocultural documentation, and place-based climate adaptation.