This study reconstructs life in the southern Mindanao highlands from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century from historical accounts and contemporary ethnographic observations. It explores the evolving relationships among highland groups, referred to as “atas,” “ata-as,” or “ataas,” and other communities in the region. Such terms, later recognized officially as “Ata,” were used by non-highlanders to denote highland communities based on their geographical location, while they self-identified according to upland river configurations.

This study reveals that various named groups inhabited a three-tier highland/inland-to-lowland/coastal axis, engaging in both cooperative and adversarial interactions, such as trading and slave-raiding. By the time Spanish authorities established the Davao pueblo, the highlands were already a dynamic, inhabited space, independent of colonial influence. The Pantaron highlands emerged because of long-term, cumulative decisions by these communities, reflecting a complex history that predates colonial dynamics. The findings challenge colonial-centric narratives and emphasize highlander agency in shaping their social and geographical landscape.

Possessing inferior religious status to males, who could be ordained as monks, females played a comparatively minor role in Theravāda Buddhism. Females were generally allowed to be involved in creating items to be donated to the Sangha, except for writing religious manuscripts, which required literacy in the Dhamma script; that skill lay with monks and novices, since the script was taught at monasteries. To compensate for their inability to obtain monkhood status, women wove textiles for wrapping religious books or donated their hair for binding palm-leaf manuscripts. Cloth-weaving skills compensated for their lack of literacy in the Dhamma script, while the donation of hair compensated for their lack of masculinity or monkhood. Women could also invest in tools, sponsorship, and financial support for commissioning religious manuscripts. Thus, although they were not allowed to be directly involved in the production of religious manuscripts, they were able to engage in ancillary activities.

There has been abundant research on marriage migration from the perspective of the receiving side, but research from the perspective of sending countries is limited. This paper investigates transformations in the sending community of Tan Loc, Vietnam, an island greatly affected by international marriage migration over the last three decades. The results of an analysis of empirical data collected from field surveys in 2019, 2020, and 2022 reveal transformations in Tan Loc, such as economic improvement, changes in social values, new pathways of labor migration, and issues related to returned marriage migrants. The mechanism of marriage migration in Tan Loc today is different from the way it was from the 1980s to the 2000s. This may be the case in other sending communities as well. Thus, such transformations on both sending and receiving sides need to be addressed in scientific research.

Over the years peatlands in Indonesia have suffered considerable damage, becoming vulnerable to hazards such as fires. The destruction of peatland is due to both legal and illegal logging, along with land conversion for agriculture, mining, and industrial forestry—including the planting of oil palm, paddy rice, and Industrial Forest Plantations (Hutan Tanaman Industri)—all of which lead to forest fires, deforestation, and forest degradation. This article addresses two points: first, the contributions of private companies to forest fires; and second, how local people in Riau and Central Kalimantan Provinces actively participate in sustainable peat swamp forest management and restoration. Building on various participation approaches as a theoretical framework for the analysis of peatland management and restoration, this study uses both political ecology, which emphasizes the roles of stakeholders (government, private companies, nongovernmental organizations, academics, local people), and the actor-oriented approach to development. The findings of the study indicate that the private sector contributes significantly to the deterioration of peatlands in Indonesia. Conversely, government policy plays a crucial role in driving and supporting restoration efforts according to the 3R (rewetting, revegetation, and revitalization) model. Furthermore, a key finding across all research locations is the significant role played by village-level actors, such as the village head, who can draw on various types of capital in shaping the effectiveness of peat restoration programs. Actors at the village level are not necessarily homogeneous; there is a complex mix of actors with unique contexts and interaction dynamics in each research location.

This paper investigates the 350-year-old Tai Zawti Theravada tradition and its distinct lay practice of keeping Buddhist texts, rather than Buddha images, on a dhamma altar inside the home. Drawing on Zawti-authored texts as well as interviews with Tai Zawti monks and laity, it examines the rationale for the altar, its function and position in the home, the nature of the texts kept on the altar, and how this marker of distinction is blurred by new challenges. While the Zawti tradition offers important insights into the nature of pre-reform Burmese Buddhism and premodern Theravada more broadly, by focusing on the nature of the lik long texts kept on the Zawti dhamma altar, the paper demonstrates how the Tai Zawti are firmly situated within the wider Tai cultural context.

Vietnam is considered to have been one of the most successful countries in implementing preventive measures against the Covid-19 virus. There were many forces that contributed to this achievement, including the fear of infectious diseases that has a long history in the country. This fear led people to maximize preventive measures to ensure their safety, even though in some cases it came with an economic cost or curtailment of individual freedoms. This paper proposes that fear also played a large role in people’s willingness to accept the government’s pandemic prevention policies and thus contributed to the success of Vietnam’s battle against the pandemic. This paper looks at contemporary challenges as significant causes of this fear. The paper aims to explore the core causes of fear, the forces that reinforced the fear, and the most affected social groups. It is based on a review of publications, news on mass media, prevention policies applied during the Covid-19 pandemic, and especially individual interviews with people from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.