Gerard Persoon

Rivke Jaffe

P. Nas

Ritual language, wild and domestic animals, and objects of material culture like houses, palaces, and works of art, are often loaded with symbolic meaning. ‘Reading the landscape’, or giving meaning to the natural environment, is a cultural act as well, and one must discover what mountains, coastlines, and islands mean to different groups of people. In this book, written on the occasion of Professor Reimar Schefold’s retirement from the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University, colleagues and former students from the Netherlands and abroad demonstrate the variety and wealth of the field of symbolic anthropology. The regional focus of the book is Indonesia. The studies presented range from small island communities in western, northern, and eastern Indonesia to urban settlements in Java and Sumatra. All the contributions are in one way or another related to Reimar Schefold’s work over the past thirty-five years, work that includes extensive studies on material culture, rituals, and the use of symbols in the expression of ethnicity among the various cultural groups of Indonesia.

Essays in Symbolic Anthropology in Honour of Reimar Schefold

Framing Indonesian Realities

Percy E. Sajise

Diny M. E. van Est

- One of the few studies focusing on co-management of natural resources (as opposed to general environmental issues). - This approach to environmental management is rapidly becoming popular in Asia. Co-management, that is the sharing of responsibilities between governmental institutions and groups of resource users, is rapidly becoming popular in Asia. In many countries environmental management is reformulated from exclusive state control to various kinds of joint management in which local communities, indigenous peoples and non-governmental organizations share authority and benefits with governmental institutions. In this book case studies of experiments with co-management in a number of countries are combined with more reflective contributions pointing to underlying assumptions and problems in the actual implementation of co-management.

A Comparative Perspective

Co-management of Natural Resources in Asia

Arne Kalland

This volume paints a general picture of the environmental situation in Asia, backing it up with several case studies. Two major points are made in this general picture. The first is that environmental campaigns in Asia tend to have a local focus; they react to very concrete problems in the immediate neighbourhood and as such usually people are engaged in a cause for practical rather than idealistic reasons. Such can be seen in case studies from the volume dealing with campaigns against logging and tree plantations, tourist facilities and factories and in support or defence of nature reserves. This pattern is in marked contrast to the profile of the most successful Western movements (in terms of fund-raising at least) for whom the focus is on perceived problems in distant parts of the world. The second point is evidence in several of the case studies in the volume, namely that environmental campaigns cannot be understood in terms of environmental issues alone. Rather, they should be regarded as a form of cultural critique and frequently are a form of political resistance in situations where open political action is too risky.

Gerard Persoon

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