traditional ways
Thai Passion for Water
Rural Thai society depends so much on abundant rainfall and numerous rivers to grow rice and fish that water is often featured in their national holidays and family events. Last week, Pattaya Today, a newspaper from the tourist city of Pattaya, published an interesting PR piece generated by the Tourism Authority of Thailand that described […]
Preserving Traditional Culture in Namibia
The Nanofasa Conservation Trust in Namibia has gotten a significant amount of funding to help it set up a “Barefoot Academy” for the Ju/’hoansi. The organization’s 2014 Annual Report, dated March 3, 2015 and available on its website, stated as one of its goals for the coming year that it wanted to “set up [a] […]
The Batek and the Forest
A news report from the U.K. last week described the recent visit of the British photographer Joshua Gray to the Batek living near the Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia.
Tahitians Learning from the Maori
A delegation from Tahiti recently visited a Maori community in New Zealand in order to study their approaches to teaching their language to children, since the use of Tahitian is dying out.
An Overnight Visit to the Dzongu
According to Kachyo, police officers stationed at the entrance to the Dzongu Reserve in Sikkim have hardly any work to do—there is very little crime among the Lepcha people. One of the reasons might be their ancient ceremony, called the thoursu, which is performed to keep the peace among them by appeasing the “quarrel” gods: […]
The Baybayin of the Buid
It is always heartening when the news media update really important issues, such as the ways people cherish their love poetry, rather than produce more dreary stories about wars and murders, diseases and disasters. Two different reports appeared in the Philippine press last week about the ancient baybayin script, used by the Buid and a […]
Schooling for the Semai
A well-known Malaysian sports figure recently spent a day at a Semai village to find out the needs of the people and to highlight a report on the major development issues facing the nation. According to the Wikipedia, the sports star, Nicol David, is ranked as the world’s number one women’s squash player, and she […]
The Challenges of Lepcha Identity [journal article review]
A brief journal article published last year describes the ways the Lepchas have attempted to maintain their traditions despite outside domination and internal religious divisions, issues they are beginning to overcome. The article, by Rip Roshina Gowloog, was published in the journal Studies of Tribes and Tribals and is freely available on the Internet. Gowloog […]
Reports of Violence in Thai High Schools [journal article review]
A recent journal article reports that, due to sweeping social changes, high school students in Thailand witness nearly as much violence as young people in the United States. The study, by Penchan Sherer and Moshe Sherer, was published in the May 2014 issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. The authors […]
Traditional Ways on Huahine
Susan Spano described a scary incident that occurred on Huahine, one of the Society Islands located 100 miles northwest of Tahiti. A former travel writer for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, she was interviewed by the L.A. Times last week regarding a new book she has published about her career. She […]
