Congratulations to two student groups from our Summer 2025 Environmental Transitions in Southeast Asia Field School! Both groups, consisting of graduate students and early career researchers from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, University of Malaya, Hasanuddin University and Chiang Mai University recently published articles relating to their summer research and experiences in the Forest and Society Journal at Hasanuddin University!
Authors: Xiaoyun Neo (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), Aswin Baharuddin (University of Malaya & Hasanuddin University); and Nur Fadilah Sunardi (Forest & Society Research Group (FSRG), Hasanuddin University)
Abstract: In rural, upland northern Thailand, Indigenous Karen (Paganyaw) communities have long practiced diversified subsistence cultivation and forest-based livelihoods. Yet state conservation policies and tourism-led development are reshaping these agrarian systems and livelihoods. This paper explores how one Karen (Paganyaw) community in Chiang Mai province reconfigures its livelihood strategies amid the decline of swidden cultivation and the rise of elephant tourism as a new rural economy. Beyond subsistence cultivation, villagers are seeking to diversify their households and personal income by participating in this new economic sector. We argue that the transition out of small-scale agriculture into tourism is not a neutral market choice but responds to the same political-economic pressures that have historically displaced swidden systems. Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews, this ethnographic research examines diverse forms of Indigenous involvement in the elephant tourism supply chain crucially determined by non-capitalist social relations and kinship networks. By identifying the socio-economic conditions – land and capital ownership, and familial and social networks – that result in socially-differentiated and stratified allocation of benefits from elephant tourism, it disenchants the notion of a monolithic ‘community’ yet reveals one empirical case of how Indigenous peoples navigate shifting economies and sustain meaning in their livelihood.
Read the full article here!
Authors: Areerat Worawongwasu (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa); Yuting Zhou (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) and Phyo Su San (Chiang Mai University)
Abstract: Abstract
In the Pga K’nyau village of Ban Huay E Kang in the Chiang Mai province of northern Thailand, a newborn’s umbilical cord is placed inside a bamboo container and hung from a tree. This is a sacred act of establishing a lifelong connection between each villager and the forest. The practice is known in the Pga K’nyau language as de paw thoo. This tradition has faced significant disruption from state-led conservation policies and the institutionalization of childbirth in state hospitals, which Ban Huay E Kang villagers contest through their revitalization of de paw thoo. Based on collaborative ethnographic research, we examine how spiritual, ecological, and cultural relationships structure Pga K’nyau epistemologies. In this research project, we ask: how is knowledge of de paw thoo transmitted and mobilized by women in Ban Huay E Kang to access resources? This paper argues that Pga K’nyau women in Ban Huay E Kang strategically transmit and mobilize de paw thoo as evidence of their long-standing relationship with the forest, to contest state territorialization, resist extractive state policies, and assert cultural belonging. We argue that de paw thoo functions not solely as cultural memory but as a dynamic tool for ecological governance that contests state territorialization and resists extractive policies. Drawing on feminist political ecology, the project investigates the tensions and innovations within these practices of intergenerational ecological knowledge transmission. This paper contributes to emerging scholarship on how gender, cosmology, and environment intersect in the making and remaking of Indigenous knowledge in upland Southeast Asia. De paw thoo serves as a lifeline of knowledge and a strategic political claim that secures the community’s reciprocal relationship with their ancestral land.
Read the full article here!