Thi Thu Huong Le, Quoc Viet Tran, Van Tuan Bui, Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, Ngo Thi Minh, Minh Phuc Pham
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the post-ritual ecological restoration of the Tô Lịch River in Hanoi as a case of moral and mnemonic reconstruction in the absence of traditional communities and intact ritual structures. Drawing on posthumanist anthropology, affect theory, and vernacular ethics, the study challenges conventional heritage and ecological models that prioritize technical remediation or community-based revitalization. Based on 12 months of multisited embodied ethnography and 35 semi-structured interviews, the research identifies emergent affective practices—such as solitary incense offerings, light-based ritual simulations, and informal shrine maintenance—performed by local residents, former polluters, and digital artists. These acts, though decentralized and unofficial, constitute what the paper theorizes as a “post-ritual ethics of restitution”: a dispersed moral response to ecological and spiritual loss. Rather than framing restoration as a return to a lost sacred ecology, the paper conceptualizes the polluted river as an “affective archive,” where remnants of degraded materiality (waste, ruins, abandoned altars) trigger embodied guilt, affective resonance, and mnemonic experimentation. Through detailed coding of multisensory responses and spatial interaction patterns, the study shows how non-institutional agents—elderly caretakers, urban migrants, and digital performers—generate new forms of moral subjectivity and ecological kinship outside traditional religious systems. Importantly, technologies such as AR, holographic projection, and QR-mediated rituals do not merely simulate lost traditions but facilitate new modes of ethical attention. The Tô Lịch case complicates dominant models of ecological and heritage recovery by foregrounding post-communal moral agency, infrastructural memory, and the affective reconfiguration of ritual space. It proposes a conceptual shift: from community-based conservation to affect-driven co-regeneration, and from ritual reenactment to posthuman mnemonic participation. This reorientation offers critical insight into the ethical possibilities of ecological restoration amid the global erosion of shared symbolic systems.
