Based on data that I collected through the fieldwork conducted between 1999 and 2000, this article discusses the adat (custom, customary law) practices of the Pubian society in Lampung province, Indonesia, and the role of the notion of kebudayaan (culture) during the so-called New Order era and the following years of transition. I focus on the marriage rituals of the Pubian society in order to analyze the relationship between adat and kebudayaan in those periods, as well as their current meanings. As a result of the massive domestic migration program implemented in Indonesia from 1969 to the 1980s, Lampung is now a place where the transmigrants and their offspring overwhelmingly dominate the indigenous Lampung people numerically, constituting about 90% of the population of the province, according to the "Statistical Yearbook of Indonesia 2000." Various development plans have also changed the economical, political, and cultural situations in the province. The indigenous Lampung people are composed of many ethnic groups, but today share an imaginary primordial tie as "Lampung." They are divided into two groups based on the difference of their adat: the adat Pepadun group and the adat Saibatin group. The Pubian people, the object of this study, belong to the former. The Pubian people consist of three large clans: the Manyakhakat, Tambapupus, and Bukujadi. Each clan is composed of five or sic descent groups, each of which has a chief called a paksi. They are tied to their own adat, named kuntakha khajaniti. The Pubian society is patrilineal, with an asymmetrical relation between wife giver and wife taker, and there are also mutual customary obligations between them, though it is not a prescriptive kinship. In Indonesia today, a marriage ritual can be interpreted from two perspectives: customary and cultural. As a custom, a ritual should be conducted correctly in compliance with the adat of one's ethnic group, and it is a set of rules, norms, procedures and obligations that should be fulfilled like adat itself. The adat knowledge is a matter of the ethnic group itself. As a form of culture, it is interpreted from the viewpoint of kebudayaan. In that view, elements of each ethnic culture are interpreted and recomposed as elements of a regional (in practice, a provincial) culture, which is taken as an essential part of Indonesian national culture. The emergence of that type of regional culture is a result of the New Order government's cultural pol-icy. The knowledge is also reproduced in school education and mass media, which enables the notion of a cul-ture to be widely accepted by the Indonesian people. It was urban-based local intellectuals - often members of academic institutions or administrative agencies in the provinces - who interpreted the customary-conducted marriage ritual as an event of regional culture. Adat and kebudayaan are different systems of knowledge, even though they each handle the same matter. For any rituals of Pubian society, the agreement and cooperation of the village adat council (bubidang suku) are indispensable. And it is the "adat intellectuals," specifically, who correctly carry out the necessary ritual procedures. Presenting the ability to correctly perform rituals is a source of their prestige. A correct execution does not mean a mere systematic execution; rather, it is necessary for them to make the interpretations and readings of adat suitable for the current sociocultural situations, and to arrange a prior consultation for the mutual agreement (mufakat) among all the people concerned. The adat intellectuals' daily milieu is mainly created within their village, but their past social experiences outside the village are taken as an important factor for acting as an adat intellectual. The main foci of the marriage ritual of Pubian society are to give a customary title to newlyweds, to acknowledge their

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Diverse crops in the world, which have conventionally been regarded as common property and exchanged generously at the local level, are now the foci of both local cultural and global genetic resources. Various efforts are being made by different institutions from international communities and national and regional governments to conserve them, as well as by a number of NPOs and NGOs. One trend of such efforts is 'in-situ conservation,' which aims to conserve biotic resources in their original habitats or locations. Also, the method of access to crop resources and ways to distribute profits to local farmers are being discussed internationally. Importantly, diverse crops are most abundantly held by small ethnic groups who often dwell in more or less marginal areas, such as mountainous lands. In this paper, I examine such a case study from Southwest Ethiopia by discussing the dynamics of diverse crops. The people concerned are the Malo, with a population of some 30,000-40,000. They are one of the dozens of small ethnic groups clustered in the region, most of which originally formed independent kingdoms but were later incorporated into the Ethiopian state at the end of 19th century. The Malo are predominantly sedentary farmers who engage in growing a large number of different crop species (as may as 105), of which most staple food crops are distinguished into numerous local varieties. The tremendous diversity of crops are related to three distinctive features of their farming: (1) heterogeneous ecological environments over a wide range of elevations - from 600 to 3,400 meters above sea level, (2) differentially-managed farm environments under a concentric land-use system centered on individual homes, (3) cultural practices such as labor exchange and sharecropping, which facilitate the ability of farmers to get the seeds they may have lost accidentally and newly arrived crops without monetary transactions. Information mainly obtained from oral interviews shows that more than 50 crop species, nearly half of the total, have been added to local crop repertoire in the 20th century, while two or more species disappeared in the same period. Thus, Malo crop diversity is assumed to have increased at the species level. Such new crops are mostly vegetables, spices and condiments, fruit trees, trees for material uses, or ornamentals, all of which only occupy secondary or no importance as food crops there. It must be related to the increased chance of acquiring them at outside markets that they visit to sell their agricultural produce. It may also be due somewhat to an increasing tendency to arrange conspicuous crops to display their home gardens aesthetically. On the other hand, only three species of root and tuber crops as well as three species of cereals and pulses have been added to major food resources in the meantime. While most of the traditional staple food crops are classified into numerous varieties -- for example, the most important local staple crop enset (Ensete ventricosum) into 66, taro (Colocasia esculenta) into 38, Ethiopian fine millet tef (Eragostis tef) into 24, barley (Hordeum vulgare) into 22 -- no information has been gained that suggests that crop diversity at the variety level in such major food crops has increased during the 20th century. Rather, it is quite evident that quite a few local varieties in cereals such as barley, wheat (Triticum spp.) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) have already disappeared or are almost disappearing. After the incorporation into the state, cereal production in the land was reinforced to raise more cash for taxes. In the process, the nature of cereal cultivation changed from home consumption-oriented to market sale-oriented. While individual varieties are said to have been once elaborately sown separately in different plots, they are now largely sown mixed together. Farmers now aim to get a quantity of cereals instead of

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This paper examines how the southern Tetum society in Timor responded to the extraordinary violence during the conflict in East Timor. It focuses on the disparity between the global humanitarian aid groups' and local society's understanding of the violence. In the turmoil following the referendum for independence in 1999, during a massacre, a teenage girl was kidnapped by a pro-Indonesian militiaman in Suai, the capital of Covalima district, East Timor. The media reported it and human rights activists reacted to it, describing the girl as a sexual slave of the militiaman. Although her family welcomed the activists' intervention, her family members and the locals viewed the relationship between the girl and militiaman as a form of marriage. I consider this discrepancy as being caused by different understandings of "reconciliation," and would like to argue that based on the local perspective of this kidnapping, the case should be termed "marriage by capture." When the theory of evolutionism was popular in the 19th century, "marriage by capture" was one of the central issues in the discussion of marriage systems. In many ethnographic accounts, anthropologists tried to explain the reasons behind ceremonial marriage capture. For example, J. F. McLennan claimed that ceremonial marriage capture was a symbol of a previous stage of society, when tribes were exogamous but hostile to each other. However, his argument of marriage by capture as the origin of exogamy was completely rejected by other scholars such as Arnold van Gennep. Since the popularity of the evolutionary theory declined, the argument of marriage by capture itself was dismissed as passe. While current anthropological works do not focus much on marriage by capture, sexual violence during ethnic or nationalist conflict has begun to capture feminists' and human rights activists' attention. the feminists' condemnation of sexual violence during conflict was triggered after the mass rape in the so-called ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. However, anthropological works on the abduction of women during the conflicts between India and Pakistan during the partition of Punjab in 1947, as well as the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, indicate that humanitarian aid and human-rights movements deprived the victims of their self-determination rights. According to them, in many cased, although the abducted women claimed that they "got married" to the men and wanted to stay with them, women's state repatriation projects and NGO reports of human rights disregarded the victims' assertions and assumed that all marriages between different religious and ethnic groups were forced ones. In East Timor, during the 1999 turmoil, it was reported that quite a few women and children were abducted by militia and became victims of sexual harassment and rape. Above all, the case of the abducted teenage girl is well known among human rights activists in East Timor and abroad. The reports and articles in NGO publications expressed the status of the girl as "a sexual slave" of the militia, when, in fact, the girl herself denied the kidnapping and claimed that she wanted to live with the man. This case has similarities with the cases during the conflicts in Punjab and Rwanda. In the kidnapping case, media coverage and NGO reports have stressed the violence and criminality by using the terms "rape" and "sexual slave" although the girl herself wanted to live with the abductor. What is the cultural and social context of that case? Recently, in southern Tetum society, where the kidnapping took place, there has been a serious increase in elopement, i.e., run-away marriages. According to the elders, in the past, couples used to marry late. Nowadays, since many teenagers meet the opposite sex in school or at dance parties during various local

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This paper aims to reveal the historical context in which local iron production declined throughout the 20th century and to discuss the dynamics of the relationships between the Dime blacksmiths and the local society in southwestern Ethiopia. Most previous anthropological studies of blacksmiths in Ethiopia have analyzed their low social status and cultural role in the hierarchical society in comparison with the majority, the peasants. In contrast, I describe in this article how blacksmiths survive in traditional Dime society, discussing the different survival strategies that individual blacksmiths have adopted to cope with rapid social change in the 20th century. In Chapter 2, I introduce the subject of my research, the gitsi blacksmiths, especially focusing on the inter-ethnic relationships between gitsi and the neighboring ethnic groups, and the social relationships between the blacksmiths and the farmers. gitsi is a term in the local language referring to an endogamous group of Dime craftspeople. About two-third of the gitsi population reside in the Dime region at present, while the rest have emigrated to the Chara region and elsewhere. Therefore, I carried out the fieldwork underlying this article among two ethnic groups, the Dime and Chara, on two separate occasions in 2003 and 2004. In Dime, gitsi men have exclusively been engaged in smithery for generations, which farmers consider a despicable subsistence. that causes them to be differentiated from the peasants, who are referred to as nitsi collectively in various aspects of daily life. That is manifested not just in the negative stereotyping of gitsi people, but also in the custom against intermarriage of gitsi people with peasants. In addition, they are restricted in their social interactions, including commensality (i.e., eating at the same table) and their access to land and livestock. They tend to live more dispersed in the inhabited areas, and to migrate more frequently to other areas than peasants, since their livelihood depends on villagers' needs. Until the 1970s, the gitsi blacksmiths produced the steel used to make a variety of ironware, including agricultural implements such as hoes and hatchets, and music instruments for rituals. Those products were highly valued for their usefulness by the blacksmiths in other regions, and not just by the local peasants. However, local iron-making vanished in the late 1970s and the scrap iron imported from abroad came to be used as a raw material. In Chapter 3, I describe the field research used to analyze political and economical factors bringing about the decline of iron-making. In the beginning, an experiment restoring the process of the traditional iron-making in Dime reveals that gitsi people had historically spent a substantial amount of time and energy on it. In addition, since inexpensive scrap metal such as automobile parts is available at markets in neighboring areas, it proves to be more economical and beneficial to the blacksmiths to purchase the steel than to make it, although the good reputation of the local steel delayed the transition to the imported one somewhat. That also confirms the statement of the blacksmiths that 'iron-making doesn't pay." Moreover, the land reform implemented in 1975 under the Derg socialist regime undermined the traditional socio-religious system of the Dime. Gitsi men who were given lands were not obliged to pay tribute to the local chief in the form of iron bars anymore, and became more independent than before. As the social demand for smithery among the Dime diminished after the 1970s, the amount of labor that gitsi men invested in agriculture increased. Quite a few gitsi blacksmiths still continue manufacturing and repairing ironware in their smithies while plowing their fields and letting their cattle graze, while the rest have become full-time farmers. Furthermore, some gitsi blacksmiths who resided in

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This article attempts to illuminate a profile of the present state of a local community in a developing country by examining the way that it is constructed through a complicated intersection with so-called development discourse, that is, its engagements with the developed world. Specifically, an exploration is made of the contours of discourse by the Yolmos, a Tibetan-Buddhist people from the Yolmo region located northeast of Kathmandu, on the recently declined institution of "capture marriage." At present, capture marriage is a topic that Yolmos hardly dare mention (in front of outsiders, like the author). When they should be urged to do so (for example, by an intrigued anthropologist, such as the author), they talk of it negatively without fail - saying that it is not a commendable practice, that people did it because they were backward and did not understand what should be done or not be done, and that it is not practiced anymore and already belongs to their past as far as they are concerned, etc. This article's argument centers around the question of what, exactly, brings the Yolmos to come talk of capture marriage in that way - that is, it tries to delineate its discursive contents (the basis upon which they evaluate the practice) as well as its performative aspects (what the Yolmos try to do, and end up doing, in describing the custom in that way). At first glance, the Yolmos' discourse on capture marriage seems reminiscent of the evolutionist one in the 19th-century West, which positioned capture marriage as something "barbarous," in the far past of human progress. All the more, with their conspicuous employment of the term vikas (N.), a term widely used in Nepal for the English word "development," their narrative sounds like nothing other than a straight derivative from the modern Western discourse of progress, the heir of which in the latter 20th century is development discourse. But a closer look at those narratives show that they are two quite different things in their nature. Though Yolmos nowadays have adopted a progressive perspective in social change, regarding capture marriage as something from their past, the basis of that evaluation is not one upon which the Western perspective relies, presumably: that is, the diminution of violence against women or rise in respect for human rights of women. For Yolmos, the decline of capture marriage can be seen as part of the due course of development, and is thus worthy of admiration, not because it means greater respect for individual women's autonomy or a reduction in the violence against them. Instead, they believe it helps avoid such risks as social conflicts between families over the abducted woman, or any disturbances in their cosmic order of things that could be caused by the reckless actions of an angered abductee. Avoiding social conflicts between people and/or disturbances in the cosmic order can be seen as something always considered commendable in Yolmo society, even before development discourse was introduced (even if the reality did not always measure up to the ideals). It turned out that those local values actually form the bases of their negative evaluation of capture, now as well as in the past. Their version of development discourse is a hybrid construct which employs the :modern" conceptual framework of the general direction in social change (that is, progress) as well as their local values to distinguish the progressive/developed from the backward. Concerning the performative aspects of their speech acts, the paper argues that their talks achieve two rather conflicting effects simultaneously - constructing their modern progressiveness, while establishing their marginality or otherness in the West-centered world of the present. Basically, their acts of speaking in (a localized or hybridized version of ) development discourse can be considered to

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