Japanese Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
Online ISSN : 2424-1377
Print ISSN : 0563-8682
ISSN-L : 0563-8682
Volume 41, Issue 2
Displaying 1-6 of 6 articles from this issue
Articles
  • Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr.
    2003 Volume 41 Issue 2 Pages 137-161
    Published: September 30, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    With the labor market fed by international migrations, global capitalism has seen a resurgence of archaic forms of labor in certain industries since the 1970s. The old capitalist strategy of employing multiethnic workforces has resurfaced in seafaring and transnational construction, which rely mainly on migrant male workers. In Western economies, the hiring of servants was thought to be a thing of the past, but today female migrants are widely employed as paid domestic workers. In industrializing Asia, the hiring of foreign domestic workers has also surged. Despite appearances, these old labor forms indicate a new set of contradictions directly implicated in the structuring of transnational social class and status relations. States play instrumental roles as labor recruiters and as users of migrant labor with few citizenship rights. The tighter interconnectedness of the global economy and of class practices notwithstanding, labor migrations deepen national attachment and reinforce the view of class structures as fundamentally national formations. This phenomenon is examined from the perspective of the Philippines.
    Download PDF (541K)
  • Keebeng Ooi
    2003 Volume 41 Issue 2 Pages 162-179
    Published: September 30, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Eurocentrism continues to inform the political discourses of former colonies like Malaysia to a large extent. Solid ethnicities were constructed and concretized, first conceptually and later through institutional means, to ease the governance of distant lands by Europeans and to make policies comprehensible to the home audience. In the Malay Peninsula, the “Malays” were essentialized, and declared “native” to the region, in contrast to migrants coming from outside what the British proselytized as a given regional and cultural entity, the Malay world. Such tactics stemmed from the Social Darwinistic mode of thought popular in European thought at the time. In application, an unspoken three-tiered ethnography came into being: The world was made up of spontaneous natives, museal peoples of failed and frozen civilizations and modern Europeans burdened by their recent enlightened state. The pluralistic reality existent in the region was not given recognition, and together with the idea that nations seek expression in united polity, plural societies of segregated ethnicities with minimized interfaces were formed. This is the heritage of the modern state of Malaysia: Ethnic bargaining as a necessity, nation-state rationale as a source of social knowledge, modernization as mankind’s unavoidable fate and western concepts as natural tools of thought.
    Download PDF (377K)
  • Tran Duc Vien
    2003 Volume 41 Issue 2 Pages 180-205
    Published: September 30, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper examines the interrelationships between the cultures of ethnic minority groups in Vietnam’s Northern Mountain Region (NMR) and their farming systems. The NMR is highly variegated in terms of topography, climate, and biodiversity and has a very high level of cultural diversity. It is home to more than 30 different ethnic groups. Each of these groups has its own distinctive culture and is associated with a specific ecological setting. As each group has interacted with the particular environment in which it lives, it has developed its own somewhat distinctive farming system. The study of these farming systems can reveal the particular ways in which different groups and cultures have interacted with and adapted to the specific environmental conditions in which people carry out their production activities.
    Download PDF (550K)
  • Examining National Forest Reserves in Thailand
    Wataru Fujita
    2003 Volume 41 Issue 2 Pages 206-238
    Published: September 30, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Thailand has experienced rapid deforestation especially since the 1960s. While large areas of forestlands were designated as national forest reserves, many forests were actually converted into farmlands. This article focuses on the institutional and administrative aspects of the national forest reserve system, the core institution of forest conservation in Thailand, and examines the institutional structure, historical process mostly since the 1960s, and procedures of the national forest reserve system and related policies at both in national and local levels. The national forest reserve system institutionally lacked sufficient mechanisms for enforcement and, because local people’s land use was not investigated in advance, the contradiction arose that large numbers of people resided and cultivated land in national forest reserves. While occasionally policies to give cultivation rights to these people were carried out, designation of national forest reserves continued without any structural amendments, and the contradiction was perpetuated. In the procedures of forest protection units, the sole organ for on-the-spot policing, breaches were sometimes overlooked in order to balance the regulations and actual situation of the local people’s livelihood. Forest officers are basically faithful to their tasks, even though they know the system itself substantially fails to function. But they also behave in realistic and flexible ways in applying principles that are far from appropriate to the actual situations they encounter. Institutionalization and activation of such an unrealistic system can also be interpreted as creating a wide range of discretion, which has enabled realistic forest conservation to be carried out as far as possible in the prevailing social or political climate without much friction. In order to argue for a suitable forest conservation system, this point must be taken into consideration.
    Download PDF (806K)
  • A Survey of Its Distribution and the Natural and Social Factors Influencing Its Use
    Masahiro Ichikawa
    2003 Volume 41 Issue 2 Pages 239-261
    Published: September 30, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    It has been argued that one of the characteristics of swamp rice cultivation practiced in the tropical rain forest climate of the lowlands of insular Southeast Asia is the transplanting of seedlings grown in nurseries to paddy fields. Such transplanting is carried out as a countermeasure to the problem of vigorous weed growth in tropical climates, but the author has reported in previous papers [Ichikawa 2000a; 2000b] that swamp rice cultivation in Nakat village located in the Bakong River basin, Sarawak, East Malaysia, is carried out by broadcast seeding. In this village, seeded fields were sometimes shifted to fallow grasslands and forests to solve the weed problem.
     The objectives of this paper are to describe other examples of broadcast seeding in swamp rice cultivation, to examine the distribution of this practice, and correlate it with the natural and social characteristics of the areas where it is currently practiced or was formerly used.
     Interviews in villages located in some large river basins in Sarawak revealed that, although transplanting is the principal planting method used, broadcast seeding is also practiced in some villages. It was also discovered that even in villages in which transplanting is the only method practiced today, broadcast seeding was practiced successfully up to from 10 to 60 years ago. Previous studies have reported a few cases of shifting swamp rice cultivation utilizing broadcast seeding in the Malay Peninsula, West Kalimantan and Sarawak. Such rice cultivation is observed not only in Nakat, but also in the abovementioned areas, and was no doubt practiced more widely a few decades ago.
     Among the various conditions to be satisfied in the areas where shifting swamp-ricecultivation with broadcast seeding is practiced, the two main conditions are: existence of abundant fallows which can be converted easily to new paddy fields, and favorable water conditions, the areas concerned being naturally protected from sudden flooding, and not being prone to flooding in the seed broadcasting season. To meet these conditions, swamp rice fields where broadcast seeding is practiced need to be located in swamps on slightly elevated grounds, such as flood plains, low terraces and fans, such as in Nakat. Insular Southeast Asia with its tropical rain forest climate is characterized by vigorous growth of plants and low population density. It is under such conditions that broadcast seeding in swamp rice cultivation has been practiced over broad areas as an appropriate labor-saving method, weeds being countered by shifting planted/seeded fields to fallows where few weeds grow.
    Download PDF (636K)
Review Article
feedback
Top