In Mozambique Island, a tiny island on the Indian Ocean, gossip is pervasive among women in the neighborhood. In discussions of gossip in cultural anthropology, structural functionalists stress its function to maintain order in society through sanctioning one’s behavior, while transactionalists emphasize the intentions of the gossipers, which can cause disharmony. However, this dichotomy may not accurately capture the picture, since the consequences of gossip can always be temporary and unfinished. This paper aims to show how island women are able to be co-present with neighbors in this small, densely populated island with intense gossip. Even though island women are embedded in such intimate neighborhood relations, where neighbors have strong interests in others and seek connection with them to exchange food, and where gossip is a major interest to them as well as a concern to those about whom it circulates, people tend to ignore the outcomes of gossip and do not care too gravely about gossip against themselves. What enables these attitudes is, firstly, the unique social space of co-presence in the island; neighborhood relations are densely knit, but they are also fragmented into small groups with fluid and changeable boundaries, making the circles of gossip temporary and uncertain. Further, although the island women seek connections with neighbors, they have an attitude of not giving themselves too freely to others nor requiring full trust or strong emotional connection with them. They are what maintain the co-presence of women in densely populated neighborhoods, through dissolving the functions and intentions of gossip, making them uncertain.

This study aims to explain the cycle of conflict escalation and tension reduction between India and Pakistan during the post-Cold War period. India and Pakistan have reiterated military conflict and diplomatic dialogue since their independence. They have fought three wars against each other and now have the highest risk of nuclear war worldwide. In the post-Cold War period, India and Pakistan have often threatened nuclear war, with incidents including the India-Pakistan nuclear armament in May 1998, the Kargil conflict from May to July 1999, and a military standoff from December 2001 to May 2002. Conflict escalation between the two countries has been explained from two standpoints. First, studies focusing on the structural factors of international politics have explained that the end of the Cold War fostered conflicts between India and Pakistan. Second, studies focusing on the internal political factors affecting India and Pakistan showed that the instability of Pakistan’s democratic institutions and the rise of extreme religious ideologies in both countries facilitated the conflicts. However, such factors are insufficient to explain the cycle of conflict escalation and tension reduction between India and Pakistan during the post-Cold War period.

First, this paper discusses how the ideology of the Indian regime affects the India-Pakistan relationship. Second, the degree of stability of the ruling coalition in the Indian parliament influences the cycle of conflict and tension reduction between India and Pakistan. Thus, this paper reveals the dynamics of conflict escalation and tension reduction between India and Pakistan.

This article examines memories and narratives of the 1988 democracy movement in Myanmar. Though this political uprising led to the collapse of the Ne Win regime that had governed the country for 26 years, it was suppressed with much bloodshed by a military coup on September 18th. Under the military regime from 1988 to 2011, the people of the pro-democracy forces were forbidden to express their memories about the event openly in public, until political liberalization with the transition to civilian rule in 2011 made it possible. This article analyzes how they remembered the event and mobilized the memories as a political instrument by focusing on the narratives in the commemorations that appeared after the political change. As an analytical framework, I propose poetics of memory that approach on the rhetoric people depend on when they express their memories. I argue that rhetoric rooted in the regional context conditioned the way of formation and mobilization of political memory. This framework provides significant insights into the relationship between memory construction and vernacular worldviews.

One Village One Product (OVOP) is a rural development movement that began in 1979 in Ōita Prefecture, Japan. OVOP in Ōita is regarded as a successful case and had been introduced as a rural development strategy in developing countries around the world. However, the movement failed to enhance community independence in many villages because governments kept the initiative in implementation. In the village of Nglanggeran in Java, Indonesia, several villagers utilizing locally produced cacao were able to enhance their cacao producing skills and self-reliance. This research investigates whether the case of Nglanggeran is an OVOP movement. The data is based on a field study conducted from August to December in 2019, and the results were analyzed in terms of the classification of local resources. Nglanggeran utilized various local resources, and these were supported by additional resources provided by external institutions. This paper reveals that the Nglanggeran model can be seen as a case of OVOP, and it proposes recognizing the existing local resources and supplying information to establish long-lasting local independence.