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Changing Pathways is a full-length ethnography that argues that the Batek are not helpless victims of development but, rather, shrewd players who understand what are the political, environmental, and cultural implications of environmental degradation.
The Malay-language term for the indigenous minority peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, “Orang Asli”, covers at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct subgroups. This volume is a comprehensive survey of current understandings of Malaysia’s Orang Asli communities (including contributions from scholars within the Orang Asli community), looking at language, archaeology, history, religion and issues of education, health and social change, as well as questions of land rights and control of resources. Until about 1960 most Orang Asli lived in small camps and villages in the coastal and interior forests, or in isolated rural areas, and made their living by various combinations of hunting...
Discusses the programs, policies, and laws that affect ethnic minorities in eight countries: Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Once targeted for intervention, people such as the Orang Asli of Malaysia and the "hill tribes" of Thailand often become the subject of programs aimed at radically changing their lifestyles, which the government views as backward or primitive. Several chapters highlight the tragic consequences of forced resettlement, a common result of these programs.
Bringing together the results of over twenty-five years of research on the indigenous peoples of Malaysia, this fascinating book illustrates the experiences of modernity in indigenous communities through a detailed case study of the Rual Menraq of Malaysia.
Death rituals and Buddhist imagery of the afterlife have been central to the development and spread of Buddhism as a social and textual tradition. Bringing together ethnographic, historical and theoretically informed accounts, the book presents in-depth studies of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China.
The egalitarian society once enjoyed by the Lanoh hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia is quickly changing. Throughout a year of ethnographic fieldwork among the Lanoh, Csilla Dallos studied and interpreted social change in order to better understand the processes leading to inequality and the concurrent development of social complexity within a community. From Equality to Inequality provides rich empirical data on the factors within a community that significantly affect the development of inequality, including the effects of sedentism, integration, leadership competition, self-aggrandizement, marginalization, and feuding kinship groups. In this case study, Dallos argues that in order to understand emerging inequality, anthropologists and social scientists need to revisit current conceptions of politics in small-scale egalitarian societies. Offering a new model of developing social inequality that is congruent with the principles of complexity theory, From Equality to Inequality is a sterling example of how anthropological practice can further our general understanding of human behaviour.
This book examines the theme of globalisation, the environment and the challenges of technology, and elucidates problems raised by these issues, providing a forum for critical reflection in the two domains of theory and practice, on the one hand, and action and power, on the other. With the continuing globalisation of technology, the debate on certain environmental issues has become pervasive, shaping thought and action in all sectors of the economy and levels of society. From films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) or Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home (2009), to shifts in the political landscape, as seen in the increasing number of seats won by Green Parties in European, regional...
The authors consider the ways in which the high degree of ethnic diversity within the region is related to the nature of tropical Asian environments, on the one hand, and the nature of Southeast Asian political systems and the ways in which they manipulate natural resources, on the other. Rather than focus on defining the phenomenon of ethnicity, this book examines the different social evolutionary contexts in which the phenomenon is manifested. Companion volume to Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia (Michigan Papers no. 27).