Case Studies in Biocultural Diversity from Southeast Asia

Dr. F. Merlin Franco is an ethnobiologist interested in the interrelationship between human culture, language, and biodiversity. He has been collaborating with various local communities in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam on research projects that look into traditional ecological calendars, cultural landscapes, and folk classifications. Merlin believes that calendars and calendar-keeping are important instruments in the fight against loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Dr. Magne Knudsen is a social anthropologist interested in how small-scale fishers and farmers in Southeast Asia make a living and respond to new pressures and opportunities. His Ph.D. work focused on the differential responses of fishing families in the Philippines to a declining resource base, coastal property and tourism developments, and government and NGO efforts to protect the environment.  More recently, he has expanded hisresearch to the southern Philippines, where he examines agrarian transition among settler farmers and indigenous groups in upland Mindanao, and to Brunei Darussalam, where he looks at human uses of the Temburong River. Dr. Noor Hasharina Hassan is a human geographer interested in understanding the people’s relationship with their economic, social, and cultural (and, to some extent, environment) landscape. Primarily, her research focus examines consumption patterns and sustainable development in Southeast Asia. Her research on consumption found the existence of calendrical timing to people’s consumption with much of it related to cultural practices.

Introduction.- Temporal Dimensions of Low-Cost, High-Skill Fisheries in the Central Visayas, Philippines.- The Unsung Heroes in Indigenous Landscape Management.- Case Study from Rancakalong of West Java, Indonesia.- The Intersection of Kedayan Folk Medicine and Traditional Ecological Calendar.- Traditional Medicinal Knowledge of Vendors and Their Contribution Towards Community Healthcare in Baguio City, Philippines.- Case Study with the Urang Kanekes of Banten, Indonesia.- Case Study with the Vaie People of Sarawak, Malaysia.