The musical instruments in ’Are’are, the southern region of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands, seem to be or sound like a mixture of various cultural and social elements. Likewise, the ’Are’are people’s contemporary life contains a mix of multiple sociocultural factors with different roots. In this paper, I try to understand the relationship between musical instruments and the contemporary life as a kind of mediation. For this purpose, I focus on the unique way in which bamboo panpipes, significant musical instruments in a village of ’Are’are, exist in local life and explore how the panpipes are assembled in village life from the point of view of people in ’Are’are. After outlining of the nature of contemporary life in a village and the features of contemporary bamboo panpipes, I describe 2 cases: the bamboo panpipes performance during a Christian ritual in the village; and the way of adopting musical instruments with different roots into the village band’s bamboo panpipes.

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This study attempted to retrospectively investigate the conservation insights embedded in the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of shifting cultivation practices in the dry zone of Sri Lanka. Focus group discussions were conducted in 3 remote tank villages in Anuradhapura district with farmers who had experience in shifting cultivation. The main aspects of TEK included farmers’ awareness of the quality and distribution of land and forest resources, weather conditions, and ecology and the threshold level of pests; practices; customs and traditions; and rituals and dietary patterns. This approach mainly contributed to minimizing soil and water degradation, maintaining the forest resilience, avoiding persistence effects on the environment, conserving biodiversity, increasing environmental concern, and controlling resource competition and consumption behaviour.

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This study first examines the historic context of immigrant and native laborers working at the early 20th century Japanese sugarcane plantations in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) located in northern Micronesia. The focus then shifts to archaeological inquiry on the island of Tinian, where the material record of the labor class has been preserved and examined in sufficient detail to appreciate some of the contributions immigrant laborers made toward building a sense of their own community and “belonging” so far from home. While still remaining at the bottom of the social class structure of this new plantation economy, many immigrants were able to acquire through their own labor some of the economic measures of higher status and self-achievement long denied them at home.

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