Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies: Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia (Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Book 6)

The 1990s have seen a growing interest in the role of local ecological knowledge in the context of sustainable development, and particularly in providing a set of responses to which populations may resort in times of political, economic and environmental instability. The period 1996-2003 in island southeast Asia represents a critical test case for understanding how this might work. The key issues explored in this book are the creation, erosion and transmission of ecological knowledge, and hybridization between traditional and scientifically-based knowledge, amongst populations facing environmental stress (e.g. 1997 El Niño), political conflict and economic hazards. The book will also evaluate positive examples of how traditional knowledge has enabled local populations to cope with these kinds of insecurity. This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo China's most important pilgrimage island to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers' and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the 'Mongolian race' and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown. As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed. Contents List of Figures List of Tables Preface List of Contributors 1. Introduction 2. Responses to Medium-term Stability in Climate: El Niño, Droughts and Coping Mechanisms of Foragers and Farmers in Borneo 3. Kasepuhan Rice Landrace Diversity, Risk Management and Agricultural Modernization 4. Responses to Environmental Stress in the Baduy Swidden System, South Banten, Java 5. Innovation, ‘Hybrid’ Knowledge and the Conservation of Relict Rainforest in Upland Banten 6. A Comparison of Traditional and Innovative Subsistence Strategies on Buano during Periods of Socio-environmental Stress, 1980–2003 7. A Tradition of Change in Minahasan Agricultural Strategies, North Sulawesi 8. Cycles of Politics and Cycles of Nature: Permanent Crisis in the Uplands of Palawan 9. The Tobe and Tara Bandu: a Post-independence Renaissance of Historic Forest Regulation Authorities and Practices in Oecusse, East Timor 10. Perceptions of Local Knowledge and Adaptation on Mount Merapi, Central Java Index The story of five rare Buddhist sculptures and their extraordinary histories are the subject of this book. The author became fascinated by them when working as the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum (1996-2003) and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery, which opened in 2005.