Peaceful Societies

The Scotsman published a news story on December 3 about a young Tristan Islander who has enrolled in a dental nursing program at the University of Dundee. The daily Scottish newspaper wrote that faculty and staff members in the School of Dentistry at Dundee warmly welcomed Michelle Green from Tristan into their program. For over 20 years it has been involved with providing dental care for the people of Tristan da Cunha.

Cows in a Tristan pasture with a ship anchored off shore (Photo by Brian Gratwicke on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

In 1995, Dr. Chris Southwick, who had worked at the Dundee Dental Hospital, saw an advertisement seeking a dentist to travel to Tristan. He was interested in going, so he put together a team, including a nurse and a technician, and they made the long trip—1,500 miles by boat west of Cape Town. They were able to stay 12 days on the island. Tristan has no airstrip, so the only way to get there is via the sporadic ships that call at the small settlement.

During their stay, the team worked frantically on a wide range of dental problems with the Islanders, from fitting dentures to pulling teeth. But they loved it, according to Dr. Southwick. “We had to squeeze everyone in during the time we had available, but it was made much easier by the fact that the people were so lovely and welcomed us with open arms,” he told The Scotsman.

Since that beginning, according to a news release about Ms. Green from the university, the School of Dentistry and the Islanders have developed strong links. Doctors who have graduated from the dental program, as well as dental nurses and technicians, have repeatedly gone to the island to provide dental care. Penelope Grainger, the current Tristan dentist and a Dundee graduate, has traveled their annually for five years. Dr. Grainger will be the head of the first dental suite which will soon be acquired by the island.

Michelle Green traveled 6495 miles to study dental nursing at Dundee — Michelle Green traveled 6,495 miles to study dental nursing at Dundee (Photo courtesy of the University of Dundee)

Professor Pete Mossey at the dental school has provided advice to the islanders over the years and he helped facilitate the trip by Ms. Green to Dundee for her dental nurse training. “It is such a delight to have Michelle here in Dundee,” he said. “She has a fantastic attitude towards this opportunity and is making the most of it, both professionally and personally.”

The 22-year old told the newspaper that her 6,495 mile trip to Scotland represented only the second time she had left her home community. The first occurred as a six-year old when she was part of a family trip to South Africa. Her parents, grandparents, and many other relatives live on Tristan, to which she will return after she completes her dental nursing courses in April. She said, “I was really nervous and scared about making the trip to Dundee, it’s a lot bigger than what I’m used to.” Dundee is a small city on the east coast of Scotland with nearly 150,000 inhabitants while Tristan da Cunha currently has 267 residents.

Green expressed optimism about her program. “I’m here to learn everything I can about dental work, from children to dentures,” she said.

A reporter from the CTV television network visited some Hutterites outside of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, recently and observed how devoted they are to their culture, families, and language. Julie Clark, the reporter, toured the Sunny Dale Colony, located in the Canadian prairie 40 miles west northwest of the city, to gain some perspectives on Hutterite society.

Hutterite women at work together (Photo by Stefan Kuhn in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Johnny B. Wurz, the Colony Manager, emphasized to Ms. Clark that one of the values at his colony is their tradition of separating men and women. Both have many different tasks to do but they work separately. Men and women eat meals separately and attend church separately at Sunny Dale. “The women never step in to where the men are, and the men never enter into where the women are,” Mr. Wurz said.

He maintained that they are proud of their self-sufficiency, their diversity, and the fact that they stick to their beliefs. “That’s what drives us every day, is our religion and our work,” he told the reporter. He indicated that there are roughly 50 different possible job assignments at the colony, from working in the wood shop to helping in the canola crusher plant. Each operation has its own manager.

A classroom in a Hutterite school (Photo by Stefan Kuhn in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The Hutterite children attend both a German and an English school at the colony and they complete their schooling when they finish eighth grade. The reporter spoke with Benjamin Wurz, a grade 4 student, who told her that they have school every morning but in the afternoons they get to play as well as work on their art projects.

At about age 18, young Hutterites begin visiting other colonies and start dating. After they are married, the men will grow beards. Televisions are not allowed in their apartments but adults may have cell phones and computers so they can make sure their business operations remain competitive. They wear modest dress that hasn’t changed in style for many years.

Hutterite women wear modest dresses in the light of a South Dakota sunset (Photo by Rainer Mueller in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Mr. Wurz addressed the criticism by some Canadians that the Hutterites tend to buy up too much land for their ever-expanding colonies. The Sunny Dale colony itself now has over 100 residents. It was founded in 1987 as a branch of the Hillsvale Colony, which is located almost 80 miles farther northwest near Cut Knife, Saskatchewan.

Mr. Wurz said that, in response to the critics, the Hutterites at Sunny Dale do make good use of the land they buy. He calculated that, with 35 families at the colony and 25,000 acres, it amounts to less than 1,000 acres per family. He implied that less land than that would represent a modest amount of acreage for ranching families in the Saskatoon area. However, he emphasized for the Saskatchewan television audience that the Hutterites place a very high value on having good relations with nearby towns.

Sonam Wangchuk, a visionary Ladakhi engineer, won a prestigious international prize for his ice stupa design in mid-November and announced two weeks later that the money would help fund a new university. His intention is that Ladakhis, at the first university to be built in their section of India, should themselves develop innovative solutions to the problems they face as mountain people. Scores of news services in India covered the story of his prize—and his extraordinary vision for Ladakh.

The Times of India, and most of the others, mentioned Wangchuk’s prize, one of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, which was announced on November 15. The prize, 100,000 Swiss francs (U.S. $104,000), is awarded according to the Rolex website to “extraordinary individuals who possess the courage and conviction to take on major challenges.” The award seeks to recognize “a new or ongoing project anywhere in the world—one that deserves support for its capacity to improve lives …”

The Rolex Award specifically recognized Wangchuk for his ice stupa project, which he developed with the cooperation of people at SECMOL, a pioneering school that he had founded in the 1990s. He developed his ice stupa concept by theorizing that when water is frozen and stored in cones of ice it will resist melting five times longer than the artificial glaciers developed earlier by another Ladakhi engineer.

Ice stupa developed in January 2014 by Sonam Wangchuk and some of his students (Photo on the Vikalp Sangam website, Creative Commons license)

In early 2014, with the assistance of some of the SECMOL students, he experimented with the construction of an ice cone. Local villagers were enthusiastic about his project, referring to it as an ice stupa rather than just a cone, and a Rinpoche from a nearby monastery hung prayer flags and blessed it. As the ice slowly melted, the water would be used by neighboring farmers for their spring crops. Wangchuk’s plan was to erect more ice stupas in the Phyang Valley a few miles to the northeast of the SECMOL campus and not far from Leh.

It is clear from the news coverage recently that Wangchuk’s pioneering advances in founding an alternative school were never far from his mind when he received the Rolex Award. One news report, posted on the website Firstpost.com, provided some interesting details about SECMOL, which the inventor had founded in 1994. Evidently as late as the mid-1990s, schools in Ladakh were failing 85 to 90 percent of their students. They saw schooling as alien and irrelevant, so Wangchuk decided to do something about it.

Realigning solar panels at SECMOL, July 18, 2009 (Photo by Kiran Jonnalagadda on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

He founded an experimental school a few miles from Leh and overlooking the Indus River called Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). Wangchuk used local materials and solar designs to foster a spirit of innovation—and to keep the buildings cool in summer and warm in winter. The new school promoted gender equality, an easy sell for traditional Ladakhi people, and Wangchuk stressed that the institution should be run by the students themselves. Leadership responsibilities change every other month.

But then the success of SECMOL prompted Wangchuk to found Village Education Committees to spread farther the revolutionary idea that education should be designed to meet the needs of students. However, those ideas seemed threatening to some of the vested educational establishments in Ladakh and Wangchuk decided to keep himself safe by fleeing from the state for a while. But now that his innovations have brought him global recognition, he doesn’t seem to worry. And, as Firstpost.com commented, Wangchuk does not appear to be resentful. The reporter wrote, “Perhaps the greatest education his movement can give is the art of forgiveness, of positivity and resilience.”

The Phyang Valley (Photo by hceebee on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Of course the major news is that Wangchuk decided to use last month’s prize money to found what he is calling the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives in Ladakh (HIAL). At a session of the Future Talk Series in New Delhi he announced his plan for an “alternative university for mountain development,” modeled after his alternative school, with his prize money getting it started. It will be located in the Phyang Valley, where his experimental ice stupas are being developed.

He said that the local government, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh, has allocated 200 acres of land in the valley for the proposed campus. He plans to use his 25 years of SECMOL experience in developing practical education programs and scale up to the issues of opening the first institution of higher education in Ladakh. He also announced a global crowdfunding campaign to seek additional supporters for his practical university. Furthermore, he hopes that his nearby ice stupas may generate some tourist revenues that will provide additional funds for the experimental university.

According to the crowdfunding website milaap.org, Wangchuk is hoping to raise 70,000,000 Indian rupees, seven times the amount he has already committed to the projected university from his prize. He wrote on the website, “HIAL will engage youths from multiple Himalayan countries in Research & Development to tackle the issues faced by mountain people, especially in the domains of education, culture, and the environment. Like SECMOL, the university aims to break the rigid boxes of conventional thinking, be relevant to people’s lives, and encourage learning via practical application of knowledge.” It’s no wonder the people of India, and Ladakhis in particular, are excited about his ideas.

The trailer for “Moana,” a current Disney film, depicts two main characters: the title heroine who is a Polynesian princess and a male demi-god hero, Maui, who is covered in tattoos. A review in The Guardian expresses cautiously positive sentiments about the latest movie for the pre-teen set, but an article in The Telegraph focuses on a more interesting question: why the tattoos?

Tahitian style tattoos (Photo by Duncan Rawlinson on Flickr Creative Commons license)

The author of The Telegraph review, Oliver Pickup, wrote that the word “tattoo” comes from the Tahitian ta tau, which had many ritual and talismanic meanings in their traditional society. He makes it clear that tattooing originated in Polynesia, particularly in Tahiti, and it is still an important aspect of their culture.

Captain James Cook, the 18th century British explorer, introduced the word “tattoo” to Europe. He was intrigued by the way men and women in Polynesia ornamented themselves with spectacular designs. “The marks in general are spirals drawn with great nicety and even elegance,” Cook wrote. He added: “One side corresponds with the other. The marks on the body resemble foliage in old chased ornaments, convolutions of filigree work, but in these they have such a luxury of forms that of a hundred which at first appeared exactly the same, no two were formed alike on close examination.”

Polynesian turtle tattoo on a man’s shoulder, the diamond shapes suggesting the scutes of the turtle shell (Photo by Micael Faccio on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Traditionally, the process of having tattoos marked into the skin was a major ritual, a sign, for men at least, of their manhood. For men, tattoos served as talismans that warded off harmful spirits, as markers of sexual attractiveness, and as representations of fierceness. Women would also be tattooed, though not as extensively as men.

Tattoos had differing meanings in the various Polynesian societies, though some elements were common across the Pacific. Sharks’ teeth, which appear frequently in the tattoo designs in Polynesia, show power and ferocity, according to Mr. Pickup. On the other hand, another poplar motif is turtle shells, or the scutes on turtle shells, which symbolize fertility, wellness, longevity, and peace. The Marquesan Cross, a common element in many tattoos, represents harmony.

A tattoo artist from Tahiti performing a traditional war dance (Photo by Mathieu Jarry on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The origin of tattooing on Tahiti is described briefly by Levy (1973). He wrote that in their pre-Christian society, tattooing served as a rite of passage and one of a series of ceremonies that marked an individual’s changing social status. Disney was simply trying to show the high status of Maui by covering his heroic body with tattoos.

Levy went on to quote from the published diary of James Morrison, the sailor who was part of the mutiny on the Bounty but who stayed on Tahiti rather than proceed with Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers to Pitcairn Island. Morrison traveled about observing the customs of the Tahitians in the early 1790s. He described in detail the fact that withstanding the pain of the tattooing process without making a sound was an important way for the Tahitian man to show his bravery.

But Morrison added that the women he observed acted even more stoically toward pain. “The young females are more remarkable for bearing it than the males, though they cannot suffer more than one side to be done at a time, and the other may remain perhaps for twelve months after before it is finished…” (p.373 of Levy 1973). Princess Moana, at least in the Disney trailer, did not appear to have any tattoos and it is not clear from Levy or Morrison if that would have been accurate in mythic times. Perhaps she simply didn’t express a desire for them—she was already a princess, after all.

A prolonged dry spell in the Kalahari Desert has prompted proposals to drill boreholes for wildlife but advocates for the San people argue that they too need more water. The apparent conflict between the needs of wildlife and of the G/wi and G//ana people, the predominant San societies in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) of Botswana, was described on November 18 by an article in Mmegi, a major Botswana news source.

A San man drinking water from an ostrich egg shell (Photo by DVL2 on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The San people used to find water from natural sources in the desert and save it for drinking by using ostrich egg shells as storage containers. Now, they rely on running water, if possible, from boreholes and from large storage tanks in their communities. But the recent article indicated that the Kalahari Conservation Society (KCS) is planning to help the government drill five new boreholes in order to save the lives of some wildlife in the CKGR from the effects of the current drought. The boreholes will provide water for staff as well as for the wildlife in the reserve. “This is a drought mitigation measure due to climate change,” said KCS acting chief executive officer, Baboloki Autlwetse.

The news has irritated Bashi Thite, Councilor from Ghanzi Township East, who has complained in the past about the lack of secure water for the San residents of the CKGR settlements. He argued that wild animals should not have a higher priority than people in his district. “Provision of water to wild animals while there is insufficient water for human consumption is disheartening,” he told the reporter.

The commitment by the government to supply 5,000 liters of water per month to the San people living in six settlements within the CKGR—Molapo, Mothomelo, Metsiamanong, Gugamma, Kikao and Gope—is simply not enough, Thiti said. He argued that the government should continue to maintain boreholes, such as one in Mothomelo, in order to prevent water shortages from harming people. A two-minute YouTube video filmed in 2011 soon after the Mothomelo borehole was opened shows the people enjoying the luxury of having clean, running water rather than drinking from egg shells.

Mr. Autlwetse responded that different agencies of the government help their different constituencies in their own fashions: the Department of Water Affairs and Water Utilities Corporation is in charge of water for human communities and the Department of Wildlife provides for animals.

Wildlife in the Kalahari Desert may need additional water (Photo by Amada44 on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

He added that since rainfall in recent years has been limited, surface pans have not received as much rainfall as they normally do, so water from underground sources from new boreholes will help the wildlife survive. He suggested that the wildlife are used to surviving in drought conditions, but that the provision of additional water in the protected area, the CKGR, is still needed.

The Semai and Jakun people living in several villages around Malaysia’s Chini Lake have had to cope in recent decades with the effects of ever increasing pollution in the water. The Orang Asli people living near the lake, located in the southern part of Malaysia’s Pahang State, have found that the increasing amount of pollution has diminished their ability to successfully fish, gather and hunt. The water pollution has also driven away tourists, on whom the locals had come to rely for income.

Tasik Chini (Photo by Rebenjoker on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Maria J. Dass wrote a news report nearly two weeks ago for a prominent Malaysian news service about the causes of pollution in the lake and the remedies that various agencies are taking to restore its health—and the economies of its surrounding villages. Ms. Dass, taken on a boat tour with other journalists around Tasik Chini, the Malaysian name for the lake, observed the green hills that meet the edge of the water and the occasional lotus plants that are still able to blossom there. She said that the Orang Asli, the Jakun and the Semai, have started referring to the lake water as “teh tarik,” which literally means “dark tea.”

The lake has been designated as a World Heritage Site by Unesco because of its unique ecology and natural beauty. But the fish in the lake and the lotus blossoms have been slowly dying due to mining in the surrounding hills, siltation caused by unwise logging, fertilizer runoff from agricultural practices, plus herbicides and pesticides that have affected the plant and animal life. Most tourists have stopped visiting the area as word of its problems has spread.

A news story in 2004 described the rapid growth of e-coli, salmonella, and other bacterial pollutants in the water of the once beautiful lake. But researchers from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) had traced the sources of the pollution and were warning the Orang Asli about drinking lake water.

Tourist information board at Tasik Chini (Photo by Biberbaer on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

To judge by this current report, however, it is clear that researchers and agency officials are now working to stem the sources of pollution and to start a remediation process. They realize they will have to do a lot more if they hope for a rebound of ecotourism. Ms. Dass’s report indicated that the UKM is leading the efforts with its Tasik Chini Research Centre, a crucial part of which is the Tasik Chini Freshwater Laboratory Complex. The laboratory is committed to monitoring the quality of all the sources of water entering the lake in real time. Seven different monitoring stations and some cleanup efforts have already resulted in the improvement of water quality from Class III to Class II. It is now clean enough to bathe or swim in. The improvement will allow the lake to retain its status as a Biosphere Reserve. The Pahang State government is supporting the effort, hoping to revitalize the faded tourist spot.

The Director of the lab, Dr. Mushrifah Idris, said that improvement of the water quality has fostered other recovery efforts. Success has begat success. A lotus reintroduction project has started successfully, she told the journalist, and the fish diversity is improving. The UKM is working to reduce erosion along river banks and to prevent sedimentation from entering the lake. An official at the university, Dr. Mazlin Mokhtar, said that plans to rehabilitate the lake should ultimately lead to increases in ecotourism, which should benefit local residents.

Jakun teenagers playing pick-up sticks in a community center (Photo by Xenobiologista on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Dr. Maketab Mohamed, formerly president of the Malaysian Nature Society, cautioned that the steps that were being taken by the agencies were important but he felt that they might not be enough. The agencies were not preventing water carrying excess fertilizers and pesticides from entering the lake. The polluting water, high in nutrients, results in the growth of invasive plants that are choking it.

He said that it has required activism by the NGOs and efforts of the academics to pressure the government agencies into finally taking action. “The watershed of Tasik Chini MUST be protected from development and only the Orang Asli should be allowed to develop the area as they are the original occupants,” he said. In other words, people in positions of authority should respect the wishes of the Jakun majority and the Semai minority in the villages around the lake.

The Chini River (Photo by Biberbaer on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Dr. Maketab said that one of the problems in the lake is that a small dam was built to raise the water level modestly in the mid-1990s, despite objections from some officials. It was built across the Chini River, the outlet stream, after the Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time, Mahathir Mohamed, visited the lake and commented that he thought the water level was too low. He suggested that it should be raised. The dam prevents the natural flushing that used to occur twice a year when the large river, the Sungai Pahang, just 1.5 miles away, was high. The flooding tended to clean pollutants out of the lake and maintain its water quality.

That natural flushing also exchanged fish between the river and the lake ecosystems. The Jakun and the Semai were aware of all that, but they had no way to contradict the expressions of the Prime Minster. Dr. Maketab told the journalist, “Ask the Orang Asli when the officials are not around and they will tell you they want the [small dam] removed. They say that was the start of their problems.”

An Orang Asli child, probably Semai, in the Cameron Highlands of Pahang state (Photo by Phalinn Ooi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Social scientists Ashencaen Crabtree and Parker (2014), in their “Report on Ethnographic Work at Tasik Chini,” said the same thing that Dr. Maketab told the journalist. The first recommendation in their report was that “The voices of the Orang Asli, diverse as they are, should be central to any development initiative (p.4).” Their careful study of the communities surrounding the lake in early 2014 showed how the Orang Asli are disadvantaged and marginalized in the Malaysian discussions of how to save and improve the habitat around what is one of their nation’s premier natural attractions.

The authors mentioned that there were, as of 2014, 429 Orang Asli living in five villages around the lake, of whom 88 percent were Jakun and the remainder Semai.

Two weekends ago, Nubian activists launched a protest action in Aswan against what they see as the marginalizing and racist policies perpetrated by the Egyptian government. An article by Aurora Ellis in a Middle East news service analyzed in detail the growing concerns of the Nubians, particularly their young people, and their demands for a right of return to their land.

Aswan street scene (Photo by Silar on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The Nubians gathered in their resettlement villages north of Aswan and traveled in micro-buses into the city to begin their protest march. The protest organizers, led by Mohamed Azmy, a prominent Nubian lawyer and head of the Nubian Union in Aswan, planned to then go on to the Toshka Project in the desert. The protest was stopped by government security agents, however, who confiscated the identification cards of the marchers at a checkpoint.

The Nubians were specifically protesting plans by the government to sell what they consider to be their ancestral lands to other Egyptians. “This land was originally ours and this is our constitutional right and the state can’t sell us our land,” Mr. Azmy told Ms. Ellis. By the evening of the aborted march, President Sisi had responded to the agitation that day. He assured the Egyptian Nubians that the priority of the government in the effort to make the desert bloom would be more lands for the Nubian people.

The leaders of the protest were not impressed. Mr. Azmy said that the government had responded quickly because of press coverage of the march. He saw the events of the day as a standoff between the protesters and the state. “It was an attempt to keep us quiet,” he concluded.

Two Nubian women (Photo by Katie Hunt on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Ellis interviewed Seham Osman, a member of the Nubian Union, about the protest. Ms. Osman complained that, despite all the promises by the government about Nubian rights, they really don’t respond to legitimate concerns. She emphasized that it is essential for the people to preserve their historic lands. While she admitted that participation by women in the protest was sparse, she said that Nubian women are leaders in the Right of Return movement. The reason is that it is an issue that very much affects many Nubian families.

Yahia Salah, a researcher studying in Sweden at Malmo University, explained that the Nubians have talked about their issues for years without seeing them in racist terms—racism existed in the United States, not Egypt, they felt. But Nubians are now taking their concerns to a new level, of conceiving of their struggle as an indigenous, black nation oppressed by a majority population, in their case the Arab people of Egypt.

After living in Sweden for a while and meeting Sami activists, Mr. Salah, a specialist in indigenous struggles, has gained a broader perspective on the plight of the Nubians. He compared the struggles of the Nubians, the Sami in Sweden, and the Native Americans with their current protests over an oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas and he sees many similarities among the three situations. In all three cases, the minority groups “are going through the same struggle, yet it’s seen differently according to their political context,” he said.

The new town of Toshka in the New Valley Project, the Libyan Desert of Egypt (Photo by Rémih in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

On the Monday following the march, the Nubians publicly vowed to continue their protests until the government stops selling Nubian territory in the Toshka Project. If the government persists, Mr. Azmy vowed, they would be taking their protests directly out into the desert.

The Toshka Project, located about 150 miles west of Aswan, involves a giant desert reclamation scheme that includes a large canal system being built to carry water from Lake Nasser into the planned settlement area. Begun in 1997 during the government of President Mubarak, the project was started as a way of developing a new area for farming. It would serve as a place for the growing population of Egyptians to expand into. Problems of the high saline levels in the soil that threaten the viability of the project, however, have been ignored by agencies advocating the development.

Nubian boys near the Nile, in 2009 (Photo by Patrick M on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Ellis concluded that the Nubian young people are becoming more and more determined to protect and to regain what they consider to be their land. It is a long-standing, historical struggle focusing on their perceptions of their land rights as well as their identity as Africans. They are no longer willing, as their elders used to be, to sacrifice what they consider their lands for the benefit of their country. They want to regain their homeland.

The cultivation of jasmine rice, a crop that under-girds the economy of the Rural Thai people, is in a state of crisis and the consequences for Thailand may be significant. Alexander Macleod, writing for the political news analysis website Global Risk Insights last week, indicated that the market value of the rice has dropped by one-third since 2013 and it is now at its lowest point in nine years.

Rice farming in Thailand (Photo by creawebpro on Pixabay, Creative Commons license)

In his article, Macleod blamed uncertainty in the nation’s rice growing regions, as well as in the rest of the country, in part on the recent death of long-term monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej. However, he placed most of the blame on past policies by the government and a couple decades of inept leadership.

The military junta that overthrew the government of Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014 ended the government-supported subsidies of rice production, one of her flagship programs. The generals made the argument that the program was squandering vast sums of money. The economies of the regions in Thailand that prospered under the incentive program, such as the northeast region, the so-called Isan Region, have been hard hit since the coup.

The author argued that support for Thaksin Shinawatra, who ruled from 2001 until he was overthrown by a military coup in 2006, and for his sister, Yingluck, is still reasonably strong in rural Thailand, though Thaksin is now much more popular than she is.

Rural Thai rice farmers (Photo by Torikai Yukiro on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Of more interest for the study of rural Thailand is Macleod’s contention that the production of rice has become controlled by sizeable business conglomerates that have managed to take away profits from the farmers themselves. Powerful middlemen also squeeze profits from farm families. Furthermore, article 44 passed by the military government allows the Agricultural Land Reform Office to take lands away from farmers.

In addition, many farmers are mired in debt to local businesses, which has caused a radical drop in the percentage of farm families owning their own land—from 44 percent in 2004 down to 15 percent in 2011. Household debt in Isan could result in social instability, Macleod wrote. He argued that the political instability of Thailand in this century has resulted in the rural parts of the country becoming a political football, tossed back and forth with succeeding governments not honoring the commitments of their predecessors to rural land rights.

Macleod wrote that the military rulers are trying to prevent a resurgence of popularity for Yingluck in the upcoming general election, now promised for late next year. By promising an election, the junta aims to undercut possible support for her. They are considering a trial against her for corruption and dereliction of duty because of her rural rice scheme, but they are being careful to not set her up as a martyr, which a prison sentence would doubtless do.

Yingluck Shinawatra and President Obama (Photo by Pete Souza from the White House, in the public domain)

But a key point is that Yingluck is not as popular in Rural Thailand as she once was. Despite being at one time a popular, attractive leader on the world stage, in December 2013 her government did not renew its commitment to the rural farmers to subsidize their rice production. In January 2014, the government failed to make payments to them and she lost the support of her rural constituency. She was overthrown, after a complex series of maneuvers, by a military coup d’état in May that year.

Organized dissent has now been squashed, though the author speculated that the junta will throw more money at the rural rice farmers over the coming year to try and ensure their support in the run-up to the election.

The staff at the Pangthang Junior High School in Sikkim released a video to YouTube last week that portrays not only the school itself but also the spirit of the Lepchas. Titled simply “Pangthang School,” the three and one half minute video is sung in English by a group of the students, with subtitles in English.

A view of the hills surrounding Gangtok (Photo by proxygeek on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The school is located in the hills immediately outside Gangtok, the capital of the Indian state of Sikkim, about 12 km from downtown. It is not clear if all the students are of Lepcha origin, but a key phrase in the lyrics, repeated several times in the course of the verses, is “we are the light of this world, born in our Mayal Lyang.” Mayal Lyang, also spelled Meyal Lyang, simply means “Land of the Lepchas.” A group of six kids is credited at the end of the video with doing the singing, but throughout, in most of the scenes, all the children are either lip-sinking the words or perhaps they are just singing aloud with gusto and not being recorded.

The lyrics are mostly of the “we-are-proud-of-our-school” variety. One example, the opening stanza, will serve to give the flavor: “We are the light of this world in Pangthang Jr. High; we learn to gather knowledge each day, to grow strong lead the way, and fight ignorance without delay…”

The opening scenes, accompanied by the singing kids of course, show the children, who mostly appear to be about 8 to 14, streaming into the school, a modest-sized, yellow, two-story building. Then, they are shown at their desks, a teacher at the front of the room. The song praises the teachers. Then, we see a group of 40 to 50 children running across the lawn in front of the school.

During a few verses about how they are making their nation, India, proud, we see them parading around in groups holding patriotic flags aloft. That scene is followed by a group of 10 fairly young girls, all kneeling on the grass in front of the school, singing, “We are the light of this world.” So far as one can tell, the youngsters, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, are singing as lustily as their older schoolmates. That is followed on the completion of the verse by a group of older girls singing on the same lawn, also kneeling in the grass. Whatever one may think about the rah-rah lyrics, the video is enjoyable.

View of Kanchenjunga from the Gangtok area of Sikkim (Photo by proxygeek on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Scenes of the kids doing their work in school are followed by adults presenting awards to some of them. We then see views of older boys playing soccer (football) and random scenes of kids playing and interacting outdoors. Either the school children smile a lot, or the people who edited the video did a good job of presenting the kids looking their best. Surely, Lepcha children don’t smile all the time, one wonders as the video closes with a brief look at Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world and symbol of the Lepcha people and of their land, looming on the northwestern horizon. The composer was listed as Suman Karki, with lyrics/direction by Badhya Lama.

The video is not going to add to serious discussions about the status of women in Lepcha society or the desire of Lepchas to have instruction in schools in their own language. But readers who like to get away from serious issues once in a while and watch videos of children will enjoy learning that, whatever the problems and issues faced by this peaceful society, they do have seriously cute kids who are able to sing well together.

Because of the high growth rate of Amish society—their population doubles every 20.5 years—they are always on the lookout for more land to expand onto. Since they prefer to remain a rural society, they are generally interested in moving as groups of families to new farming areas.

An Amish woman hanging out her laundry (Photo by Bob Jagendorf in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A recent research article by Cory Anderson and Loren Kenda focused on three major factors that have an impact on the Amish choices of places to establish new settlements: location, agricultural issues, and population concerns. So the basic questions for the authors were, what characteristics about a place are likely to attract new Amish settlements? What kinds of places are they settling into? Will they have a future in those new places?

The authors wanted to find out how much the population density, the distance to nearby towns, and the county growth rates of possible new locations affected decisions about places to which they might migrate. They also wanted to determine how well the Amish were able to find culturally appropriate farms to purchase. They examined the topography of proposed settlement areas plus the prices and sizes of farms. Furthermore, they were interested in the spacing between new settlements and older, well-established ones. They included existing and abandoned settlements in their examination.

An Amish buggy heading for Lancaster City on U.S. Route 30 (Photo by Ad Meskens in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The Amish, the authors point out, may have an impact on other rural dwellers. For one thing, they reject the land use planning and the transportation systems available in many rural areas. Their rejection of the automobile culture implies the need for a rural transportation system that will accommodate horse-drawn vehicles, walkers, bicycles, and scooters.

On the other hand, immigrating Amish settlers may revitalize a depressed rural economy, make use of vacant or underutilized lands, and develop new farming operations. Furthermore, they may become the basis of a new tourist economy that benefits local businesses. In order to find a good spot to establish a new settlement, the Amish will send out scouting parties to explore. Once a consensus develops about a desirable area to which some families want to resettle, different households will purchase land in reasonably close proximity to one another in the new community.

An Amish factory worker (Photo by drainhook on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Decisions to migrate to a new area are frequently made by residents of older, well-established settlements that face shortages of land for the growing Amish population. If landless families want to go into farming and no affordable land is available, they must either resettle to a new area or take employment in non-farming occupations such as work crews, small shops, woodworking, or factories.

Sometimes, the diversity in customs from one church district to the next may produce stresses that relocating may help ameliorate. The authors write that migrating to new settlements may foster peace and help prevent local schisms from occurring. Some other peaceful societies such as the Paliyan have a history of moving away from threats of conflict (Gardner 1985), though recent news has indicated that at least some of them are now staying put and sticking up for their rights.

The contrasts between the modern society and the Amish in Lancaster County — The contrasts between modern society and the Amish in Lancaster County (Photo by Franco Folini on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

While the Amish continue to thrive in older settlements that have been caught up in development, such as Lancaster County, when they move they prefer to settle into highly rural areas. However, they also prefer to live within an easy horse and buggy ride of small commercial centers. They rely on the basic services towns provide such as banks, a post office, grocery stores, a library, hardware stores, and pharmacies. Small towns also provide markets for the goods and services they can provide.

The Amish still maintain for the most part a self-image as farmers. Their farming de-emphasizes cash crops in favor of crop diversity, though they still produce commodities for the market. They like to transfer their farms to their children as soon as possible so they can keep the land within the local community. Their use of horses for power in the fields defines their approach to farming.

An Amish farmer and his team of draft horses (Photo by Carol M. Highsmith in Wikimedia, in the public domain)

When the Amish are searching for a place to resettle, they look for settings that will support small farms. Their horse culture works best on them. Also, they seek places with a moderate topography, neither too mountainous nor too level. They also look for areas with inexpensive farmland. Their farming is an economic pursuit, of course.

From their analysis of detailed statistics and maps, the authors found out that the average distance from a settlement to the nearest town runs from 7 to 15 miles, a comfortable ride in a buggy; 20 miles is their normal limit from a population center. They normally don’t settle closer than 5 miles to a town—they want to live close enough to have access but not be right in it.

An Amish farm in Orange County, Indiana (Photo by Cindy Cornett Seigle on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The analysis of figures available on the actual characteristics of their lands showed that the ideal Amish farm runs from slightly under 200 acres to just above 300 acres in size. The Amish tend to avoid settling in counties that are already dominated by numerous large, industrial farming enterprises. Prices of land may have some bearing on whether new Amish settlements are established, but those costs do not appear to play a role in the long-term viability of the settlements.

The authors found that new settlements established far from existing ones tended to go extinct; on the other hand, new settlements located in closer proximity to established ones tended to survive. In recent decades, new settlements around 20 miles away from existing ones have survived the best. New settlements a lot farther away have not survived nearly as well.

An Amish broom stand in Lancaster County (Photo by Lancaster County Market on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The Amish are no longer focusing exclusively on farming, of necessity, so they are more easily able to develop new settlements than they were when they focused just on the farming economy. Yet they still maintain all the vestiges of a farm-based culture: facilities for horses such as barns and pastures, the home-based production economy such as gardens and food preservation, and the in-home fabrication of goods for sale.

The authors predict that the Amish will maintain an agrarian society and that their new settlements will continue infilling around existing ones, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic region, the Midwest, and the Upper South. While new settlements are springing up, the older, well-established ones are also doing quite well and growing.

And while the Amish continue to thrive in growth areas such as Lancaster County, when they move to new settlements they are not looking for markers of prosperity. In fact, just the opposite. Counties that are lacking in high wages and areas without amenities that appeal to others are just the types of places that attract the Amish. “Many rural counties that find no selling points to draw people may be, by that very fact, an attractive destination for Amish” they conclude (p.505).

Anderson, Cory and Kenda, Loren. 2015. “What Kinds of Places Attract and Sustain Amish Populations? Rural Sociology 80(4) (December): 483-511

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