The Food Debt

This article develops the concept of moral circulation to explain how ritualized debt repayment mediates relations among humans, spirits, animals, and the environment. Based on multimethod ethnography among the Bố Y of Hà Giang, northern Vietnam (2021–2024)—including forty-six interviews, six funerary observations, and integrated NVivo and SPSS analyses—the study theorizes multispecies religion as an ethical system in which obligation and reciprocity circulate across visible and invisible realms. The Cúng Yêu Tinh ritual, where food debt and repayment are enacted through offerings, fuses material exchange with cosmic rebalancing, sustaining a moral order that holds together the living, the dead, and nonhuman beings without fixed hierarchy. Findings reveal a generational re-articulation of ethics: elders emphasize communal honor and intergenerational duty, while younger participants adopt a more flexible ethos of repayment without abandoning the ritual’s moral core. The Bố Y model parallels indigenous ritual economies in the Amazon, Andes, and Southeast Asia, extending comparative anthropology of religion beyond anthropocentric and dualist paradigms. Conceptually, the article advances moral circulation as a framework for understanding how indigenous cosmologies generate ethical reasoning through exchange, contributing a Southeast Asian perspective to global debates in moral and posthumanist anthropology.