Some comments on the climate change impacts on Kerala fisheries scenario. In: Winter School on Impact of Climate Change on Indian Marine Fisheries held at CMFRI, Cochin 18.1.2008 to 7.2.2008

The annual marine fish production potential of Kerala is estimated at 9 lakh tonnes. However, over the last 5 years, an average of 6 lakh tonnes is realized every year in addition to 75,000 to 80,000 tonnes obtained from inland fishery sources (Harikumar and Rajendran, 2007). The biodiversity is very rich in Kerala, and the fishery landings comprise about 240 species including 60 species supporting major fisheries (Pillai and Ganga, 2007). There are 2.54 lakh active fisherfolk in Kerala in addition to an equal number engaged in ancillary fishery activities such as vending, processing and marketing. Thus, including their families, almost 3% of the population is fully dependent on this resource. Kerala earn foreign exchange worth Rs.1523.55 crores exporting 1,08,577 tonnes of seafood during 2006-07 (Anon, 2007d). Since Kerala’s economy is largely dependent on fishery wealth, any undesirable impact on the resource would be damaging the progress of the State

Forest and Society: Initiating a Southeast Asia Journal for Theoretical, Empirical, and Regional Scholarship

Welcome to our first edition. We are excited to provide a new, and what we believe, timely avenue for presenting research findings and publications in Southeast Asia, for scholars interested in Southeast Asia. Although Southeast Asia as a region of study has provided tremendous contributions to theory and practice regarding forests and society across the social and natural sciences, avenues for cultivating a scholarship of the region remain limited. We seek to engage on a broad set of themes through the application of targeted research related to timely issues affecting the human-environment interface in a diverse region that we have much to learn from. We take a broad understanding of the forest - as a politico-administrative unit, a geographic area, and as an ecological unit. We do not limit the forest to its boundaries but rather seek to engage on the dynamics of change in social and ecological processes. Under such an umbrella, new approaches and methods become possible. ‘Forest' can be analyzed as land use, ecological process, divided across watersheds, as landscapes, mountains, and more. The lens of ‘society' allows for opportunities to understand change, whether it is the interaction between a resource to be preserved, exploited, forgotten, or erased. Forests, therefore, operate as the clues of what once was, has become, and what can be. Particularly in the age of climate change, riddled by increasingly complex challenges, a new dimension also emerges for the forest. Different perspectives at different scales – from the local to the global – provide equally important dimensions, and are those which we seek to provide avenues to learn from, and communicate through this journal. As the reader will find in this inaugural issue, we have compiled an initial set of studies across multiple methods and geographies that help to set the terms of future editions. We examine: historical political ecologies of land use around opium cultivation in the uplands of Thailand; emerging governance regimes of corporate social responsibility in Myanmar; the capacity of new state institutions to manage land conflict in forest estate lands in Indonesia; a close analysis of forest harvesting and management in a mangrove forest in Malaysia; and, an economic valuation of non-timber forest products in a national park in Indonesia. There is much to choose from and much more to delve into. We hope that this issue serves as an impetus to engage on these timely themes and further encourages new ideas for submissions

The Legend You Thought You Knew: Text and Screen Representations of Puteri Gunung Ledang

This article traces the evolution of narratives about the supernatural woman said to live on Gunung Ledang, from oral folklore to sixteenth-century courtly texts to contemporary films. In all her instantiations, the figure of Puteri Gunung Ledang can be interpreted in relation to the legitimation of the state, with the folklore preserving her most archaic incarnation as a chthonic deity essential to the maintenance of the ruling dynasty. By the time of the Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Hang Tuah, two of the most important classical texts of Malay literature, the myth of Puteri Gunung Ledang had been desacralized. Nevertheless, a vestigial sense of her importance to the sultanate of Melaka remains. The first Malaysian film that takes her as its subject, Puteri Gunung Ledang (S. Roomai Noor, 1961), is remarkably faithful to the style and substance of the traditional texts, even as it reworks the political message to suit its own time. The second film, Puteri Gunung Ledang (Saw Teong Hin, 2004), again exemplifies the ideology of its era, depoliticizing the source material even as it purveys Barisan Nasional ideology. Keywords: myth; invention of tradition; Malay literature; Malaysian cinem

Kumukumu 1, a hilltop site in the Aird Hills: Implications for occupational trends and dynamics in the Kikori River delta, south coast of Papua New Guinea

We report on archaeological excavations undertaken at Kumukumu 1 atop the dense rainforest-clad Aird Hills of the Kikori river delta islands, south coast of Papua New Guinea. Results indicate exploitation of the nearby environment, including the gathering of some 200 million shellfish from riverine habitats at the base of the hill some 600 years ago, and deposition of shell remains onto hilltop middens. We ask what the implications of such a site in a defensive location on the upper, steep hillslope of Kumukumu hill are for regional occupation and dynamics. We conclude that the hinterland-marine fringe islands of the river deltas that include the site of Kumukumu 1 were especially sensitive to heightened cross-cultural influences and inter-group raids and competition, leading to accelerated processes of centralisation and aggrandisement among some groups, and the subjugation, fragmentation and dispersal of less powerful neighbouring groups

Palauan Handicraft Guidebook and 30 Storyboard Stories - Kldachelbai ra Berau

"Palauans are extremely fond of "style" that certain something that sets them apart from the mass. Teachers from other countries have conducted workshops in this country. This has improved, the quality of the handicrafts but basic "style" of the traditional crafts has remained definitely Palauan."Palauans are extremely fond of "style" that certain something that sets them apart from the mass. Teachers from other countries have conducted workshops in this country. This has improved, the quality of the handicrafts but basic "style" of the traditional crafts has remained definitely Palauan

Making “Uirapuru”: a musical quest in the Brazilian Rain Forest

Sixty years ago the author, an Israeli film student at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to make a film based on a Brazilian Indian legend which had been set to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). Filming was carried out among Urubú-Ka’apor Indians in the state of Maranhão. In Belém, capital of Pará, he was joined by German anthropologist Peter Paul Hilbert (1914-1989) of the Goeldi Museum on an adventurous and creative expedition, culminating in a prize-winning art-documentary film and a life-long friendship between the two