8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

Panel: Spirit Ecologies and the Role of Customary Governance in Southeast Asia 
convener: Andrew McWilliam (Australian National University), Lisa Palmer (University of Melbourne)
panel abstract
Rapid economic development and urbanisation across Southeast Asia in recent decades has seen dramatic changes 
in livelihoods and natural resource landscapes for the burgeoning populations of the region. The spread of industrial 
agriculture, forestry, fisheries and the commodification of land and its resources has driven remarkable economic 
growth but also placed unprecedented pressure on natural ecosystems on which the livelihoods of local communities 
depend. New and more effective approaches to environmental governance are urgently needed.
In this panel we are interested in the comparative analyses of locally relevant socio-natures and the ways they might 
help frame relationships between people and place and between customary approaches to nature on one hand and 
national governance policies over land and coastal waters on the other. Historically across Southeast Asia social re-
lationships and those between the human realm and nature have long been negotiated around complex patterns of 
exchange and obligation including forms of sacrifice and ritual commensality with ancestral and spirit worlds. These 
diverse and dynamic forms of religiously inflected practice frequently attribute agency to nature and draw cultural and 
cosmological associations that connect people, places and resources in mutually sustaining ways.
With comparative perspectives in mind, we invite panel participants to consider the multiple ways that ritual exchange 
and spirit sanctioned ecologies of practice across Southeast Asia work to sustain local communities, enact forms of 
intergenerational well-being and inform patterns of environmental governance over land and water resources. How 
might comparative perspectives on the changing nature of these relationships challenge our understanding of their 
multiple expressions, persistence, viability and adaptive forms in rapidly transforming worlds?
— Sharing the Forest with Spirits: Customary Management of Honey Harvesting Activities in Belitung,  
Indonesia 
Nicolas Césard (Univeristé Paris 8, IRIS)
On Belitung Island, Indonesia, the local population of Malay origin (Melayu Belitung) and of Muslim religion lives 
mainly off the sea and from a small subsistence and commercial agriculture. The exploitation of maritime and terres-
trial resources and the decisions concerning their use are regulated by the local custom (adat) and by its representa-
tives known as dukun. Each village has its own customary representative (dukun kampung) and depending on its size, 
the local competencies and the physical geographic of the land, a village can rely on several specialized dukun (land 
dukun, sea or wind dukun, etc.). Also, if the animist and religious background is similar all over the island, custom 

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and customary regulations may vary from one village to another depending on local authority/ies and their influence.
As the world is full of non-human beings which must be dealt with, each dukun draws on his knowledge of the super-
natural world to acts as an intermediary between his co-villagers and the local spirits. Villagers consult their dukun 
before each major activity outside the village as well as in case of an unexplained disease. The dukun function is to 
maintain the harmony between the human and the spirits in the sharing of resources, but also to insure by his author-
ity and his knowledge their abundance every year and their good use at each new season. 
After introducing the local socio-nature and the role of custom in Belitung, the presentation aims to examine and 
understand the various ways Belitung inhabitants regulate and organize their economic activities while taking into 
account the physical and spiritual environment in which they live in. Taking the example of the harvesting of forest 
honey, a major but seasonal economic resource, the presentation shall show the importance of custom in the manage-
ment of bee colonies (honey hunting and beekeeping of the giant honeybee) and the rights and the duties associated 
with it. It will build on a comparison between two neighbouring villages, one of which with a strong custom, and show 
how the local conceptions are acknowledged by the government and by the companies converting the local forests 
into oil palm plantations.
— Life in Stone: Megaliths in the Highlands of Borneo and Beyond 
Monica Janowski (SOAS)
In Borneo, and quite possibly throughout SE Asia, stone is regarded as petrified power or life force. This is part of an 
animist cosmology which sees the power or life force of the universe as flowing through all reality and all substance. 
Stone is an expression of points in reality where that power or life force coheres and, as it were, sits in stasis for a time. 
Many stone objects are regarded as not only being reservoirs of power but as being conscious, living beings. Small 
stones are frequently kept as charms, believed to be potent living beings which can bestow their power on their own-
ers, allowing them to achieve more. 
Megaliths take various forms in SE Asia: round boulders, sometimes carved; tall elongated forms; flat stones; stone 
jars. Although it is clear that some of these forms (e.g. jars) were originally created or modified by humans, I would 
suggest that many are regarded by the people of the region as sui generis and as being – like small stones – living, 
conscious beings. Throughout the region, but particularly in highland areas, there is evidence of megaliths which 
have been moved around and often arranged in groups, either at cemeteries or as monuments erected in places which 
are regularly visited by people. This is done to commemorate ancestors, with individual stones often associated with 
specific ancestors. It is associated with a belief in what can be described as the ‘powerful pool’ of the ancestors, which 
is available to their descendants. I will explore the megalithic culture of the Kelabit Highlands in the light of these 
hypotheses.
— The River Grew Tired of Us: Fishermen, Spirits and the Changing Mekong 
Andrew Johnson (Yale-NUS College)
A former fisherman from alongside the Mekong told me about why he moved to Bangkok: “Back in Nong Khai, water 
dragons [phaya nak] used to come up out of the river. They would come into town, put on human clothes, and come 
to the temple to listen to the Buddhist chanting. This was until 1997. Then they stopped.” He paused. I pressed him: 
“Why did they stop?,” but he responded simply “They grew tired of us.”
This man’s story speaks to a common experience of change, loss, and disillusionment among many living alongside 
the Mekong, an experience which in recent years has grown rapidly more pronounced in the wake of upstream hydro-
power projects along the Mekong in China and Laos. Fluctuating, unpredictable water levels and dramatic disruption 
of fish life cycles have had severe impacts upon villages bordering the river. Fishermen and former fishermen with 
whom I spoke described a collapse of traditional knowledge surrounding where, when, and for what to fish, and those 
living alongside the river were no longer able to cultivate the alluvial soil alongside the banks, cutting off important 
sources of livelihood. But, as the story of water dragons suggests, the changing river also radically disrupted tradi-
tional forms of religious practice venerating spirits of the river [phaya nak] and the fish within it. 
Drawing from work on the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) and recent anthropological attention on 
“animist” ontologies (Kohn 2013, Ingold 2012), I draw upon ongoing field research in Nong Khai, Thailand, to explore 
how radical disruptions in the environment affect the relationship between humans and non-human agents: in this 
case, rivers, fish, and spirits. Specifically, I argue that the changing Mekong ushers in a new, less certain era, one with 

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its own kind of indigenous knowledge, its own demands, and its own spirits; spirits whose worship centers on the 
negotiation of doubt and precarity, rather than on long-term or familial terms.
— Spirit Ecologies: Fataluku Illustrative Forms (East Timor) 
Andrew McWilliam (Australian National University)
Complementing our overview presentation of the panel theme, my paper offers some specific illustrations of spiri-
tual ecologies of practice from the Fataluku speaking communities of East Timor. Since the end of Indonesian oc-
cupation in 1999, local people have been engaged in diverse processes of social recovery and the re-establishment of 
livelihoods. These processes include renewed attention to social alliance and ritual invocation to ancestors and other 
resident, non-human spirit forms. Arguably Fataluku efforts to revitalise their social world can be seen as communal 
efforts to overcome the dislocations and suffering experienced during the repressive period of military occupation 
under Indonesian rule (1975-1999). Viewed as techniques for enhancing intergenerational well-being through sac-
rifice and exchange, these complex sets of obligations and orientations to the ancestral and other spirit domains are 
simultaneously expressions of cultural sovereignty and resource governance.
— Spirit Ecologies and the Role of Customary Governance
Lisa Palmer (The University of Melbourne), Andrew McWilliam (Australian National University)
In this panel we are interested in the comparative analyses of locally relevant socio-natures and the ways they might 
help frame relationships between people and place and between customary approaches to nature on one hand and 
national governance policies over land and coastal waters on the other. Historically across Southeast Asia social re-
lationships and those between the human realm and nature have long been negotiated around complex patterns of 
exchange and obligation including forms of sacrifice and ritual commensality with ancestral and spirit worlds. These 
diverse and dynamic forms of religiously inflected practice frequently attribute agency to nature and draw cultural 
and cosmological associations that connect people, places and resources in mutually sustaining ways. In this opening 
paper we will explore the relevance and utility of the concepts of spiritual ecology, inter-generational well-being and 
customary environmental governance to understandings of the complex inter-relations between local and national 
governance frameworks.
— Negotiating Traditional Knowledge about the Sea in the Immediate Vicinity of the Pantar Strait Marine 
Conservation Park, Eastern Indonesia 
Susanne Rodemeier (independent)
During the last years changes have occurred among coastal villages on the island Alor accompanying the establish-
ment of a marine conservation park by the local government some fifteen years ago. Over this period this formerly 
remote area of Alor has experienced significant modernization including 24 hour electricity, a new mosque, dive-
centres, and access to mobile telephony communication. All these developments give village people the agreeable 
sense of finally participating in the much reported processes of globalisation. Nevertheless various inexplicable and 
unsettling incidents such as the specific circumstances of a clan’s leader’s ‘sudden death’ are causing feelings of inse-
curity and uncertainty among village people. They are no longer so sure of the benefits of their ‘modern’ technology 
and the behavioural changes that have led to the ignoring of inherited rules and traditions. In this presentation I look 
more closely at these cultural tensions to understand some of the problems and resistance faced by the WWF when 
they seek to implement marine protection measures and prohibit a range of customary practices.
 
— Suitability of Local Resource Management Based on Supernatural Enforcement Mechanism in the Local 
Socio-cultural Context: Toward Self-Directed Resource Management by the People who ‘Coexist’ with 
Supernatural Agencies
Masatoshi Sasaoka (Hokkaido University), Yves Laumonier (CIFOR)
Environmental anthropological studies on natural resource management have thematized and widely demonstrated 
local resource management practices based on supernatural enforcement mechanisms, i.e., whereby people believe 
that supernatural agencies such as ancestor spirits and natural spirits monitor human conduct and impose punish-

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ments on violators, promoting compliance with the rules. In Indonesia, even though the legal status of local people’s 
right to the forest and forest resources is still weak, the recent transition toward decentralization presents a growing 
opportunity for local people to collaborate with outsiders such as governmental agencies and environmental nongov-
ernmental organizations in natural resource management. In such situations, in-depth understanding of the value of 
local resource management practices is needed to promote self-directed and effective resource management.
Here, we focus on local forest resource management based on supernatural enforcement mechanism and its suitability 
in the local social cultural context in central Seram, east Indonesia. Local resource management appears to be embed-
ded in the wider social-cultural context of the local communities. However, few intensive case studies in Indonesia 
have addressed the relationship between the local resource management practices closely related to a people’s belief in 
supernatural agents and the social-cultural context.
We illustrate how the well-structured use of forest resources, including game animals, is established and maintained 
through the interactions. We, then investigate how local resource management practices relate to the social-cultural 
and natural resources context of an upland community in central Seram. We also discuss the possible future applica-
tions and the further research implications for promoting self-directed resource management by people who coexist 
with supernatural agencies.
— Buddhism and Coffee: Spirit Ecologies and the Transformation of Locality in Southern Laos
Guido Sprenger (University of Heidelberg)
In many spirit ecologies, at least three different sets of relationships concerning non-humans intersect: relationships 
with spirits that enable the production of local livelihoods; “world religions” as means to create translocal relation-
ships; and modern economic relationships which treat non-humans as passive, exploitable resources. The tensions 
this trinity of relationships produces are exemplified by an ethnographic study among Jru’ (Loven), an ethnicity in 
the south of Laos. Currently, Jru’ relationships change along two different routes. First, there is a transition from sub-
sistence swiddening to cash cropping, mostly of coffee. Secondly, there is a transition from “spirit religion” (the local 
term) to Buddhism, with villages that identify as practicing both. These two processes are partially independent, but 
also reinforce each other. The relationships with spirits of the land and the fields are significantly changing, although 
they are not entirely abandoned. However, the relations with non-humans cultivated in swiddening have virtually 
disappeared. While Buddhism reorients local cosmologies towards the state and implicitly to translocality in general, 
local relationships with spirits and ancestors are still needed to ensure a productive livelihood in which non-humans 
are not exclusively like resources.
Panel: The Resource Development, Food Security and Livelihood Nexus in Lao Pdr 
conveners: Philip Hirsch (University of Sydney), Yayoi Fujita Lagerqvist (University of Sydney), Silinthone Sack-
lokham (National University of Laos), Sithong Thongmanivong (National University of Laos)
panel abstract
This panel explores the role and challenges of multi-disciplinary research in examining, and seeking to influence 
policy on, a key development dilemma for a resource-rich and income-poor country such as Lao PDR. Simply stated, 
the dilemma is that rapid economic growth based heavily on large scale natural resource development has had limited 
success in improving key health, nutrition and certain livelihood indicators of the country’s rural poor. In many in-
stances, the strategy has undermined access to the land and natural resource endowments on which the poor depend 
most. We will report on research that employs multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine linkages between food 
security and the nutritional wellbeing of rural people faced with resource development and rural livelihood change.
Three of the papers presented in the panel discuss key findings from a multi-disciplinary research project funded 
by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The first paper in the panel highlights 
patterns of food security and their spatial relationship to rapid resource degradation in the Nam Ngum River Basin, 
a critical river basin in Laos that hosts multiple resource development projects including hydropower, mining and 
plantations. Using analysis of satellite imagery, the paper demonstrates the spread of resource degradation in the river 
basin and its association with factors including overlapping resource development (e.g. hydropower, mining and plan-
tation) and concentration of population.

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The second paper in the panel highlights patterns of agricultural livelihood, food security and nutritional status of 
communities across the river basin based on a large cross-sectional household survey. The paper demonstrates ways in 
which household wealth and key livelihood assets including land, livestock, financial capital, and social networks are 
related to food security and nutritional wellbeing of mothers and children. The survey results show a high incidence of 
food insecurity and malnutrition among the socially and economically vulnerable population groups in areas affected 
by resource pressure.
The third paper employs narratives to highlight the dynamic processes of livelihood adaptation in the river basin at 
household level, based on in-depth qualitative interviews. It addresses different ways in which households respond to 
risks and opportunities created by resource development. The paper also addresses the critical challenge of facilitating 
livelihood opportunities for rural households that are socially and economically diverse.
In combination, the papers seek to demonstrate the need for multi-disciplinarity in understanding the multidimen-
sional aspects of people’s livelihood and nutritional circumstances. A fourth paper explores the specific challenges and 
potentials of working across disciplines, particularly in an applied research context.
— Understanding Patterns and Causes of Dynamic Land Use in the Nam Ngum River Basin
Sithong Thongmanivong (Faculty of Forestry, National University of Laos), Yayoi Fujita Lagerqvist (School of Geosci-
ences, The University of Sydney)
This paper examines detailed patterns of land use transition in the Nam Ngum watershed during 1975 and 2014 by 
using a series of remote sensing data to detect areas of highly dynamic land use change. It further assesses areas the 
effect of resource development and population growth on land use patterns. Nam Ngum watershed is a site where 
for decades, watershed resource management planning process has been taking place to improve the management of 
water, forest and land. It is one of the economically critical watershed in Laos, which hosts a cascade of hydropower 
projects, including the country’s first hydropower project, Nam Ngum 1. However, in the recent decades, increased 
numbers of resource-based development activities including mining and plantations and rapid population growth 
are putting pressure on existing resource base. Our study highlights highly dynamic movement of population across 
the watershed between 1995 and 2005, and despite the movement of population away from remote areas, forest areas 
continue to decline due to widespread expansion of agricultural and development activities. 
— Agricultural Livelihoods in the Nam Ngum River Basin
Silinthone Sacklokham (National University of Laos), Lytoua Chialue (National University of Laos), Yayoi Fujita La-
gerqvist (The University of Sydney)
The study aims to assess the importance of critical livelihood asset including land, livestock and natural resource 
for rural households across the Nam Ngum watershed where over 3,500 households were surveyed for the ACIAR 
Lao Livelihood Project during January and May 2014 in 157 villages. The current paper characterizes main liveli-
hood activities of households and examines relationship between household wealth, and household access to land 
and livestock. The study further characterizes household nutrition status and its relationship with livelihood basis. 
Our preliminary results suggests that stunting among children under five and women are slightly higher among the 
communities that have recently resettled, and also higher for households that have no member working outside of 
the community. Level of child stunting are higher among the households whose main livelihood activity is based on 
remittances and non-timber forest products, as well as households without access to land and large livestock. Our 
study highlight the importance of understanding the varying conditions of livelihood basis and its potential long-term 
impact on human health. To improve the household wellbeing, our study also highlights importance of understanding 
principal constraints of households to access livelihoods assets. 
— Food Security, Nutritional Status and Wellbeing in the Nam Ngum River Basin
Somphou Sayasone (National Institute of Public Health, Laos), Sengchanh Kounnavong (National Institute of Public 
Health, Laos), Jessica Hall (Sydney School of Public Health)
Although Laos continues to experience strong fiscal growth and has set its sights on graduating from least developed 
country status by 2020, malnutrition and food security remain a major public health concern for the country. This 
is demonstrated by recent figures reported by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and the 

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Laos Social Indicator Survey that 22% of the population are undernourished and stunting rates of children under the 
age of five remain among the highest in the Southeast Asia region at 44%. With a growing population and continued 
investments into large-scale resource developments, Laos faces intensified competition over its already limited natu-
ral resources, which could exacerbate the existing nutrition and food security problems. To effectively address these 
issues in Laos, reliable and timely information on the status of food and nutrition security within the communities 
experiencing these resource pressures is vital. 
This paper aims to explore the food and nutrition status and their determinants in the Nam Ngum River Basin, an 
area with a long history of resource development and home to 10% of Laos’ population including some on the most 
vulnerable communities. A cross-sectional survey was conducted between January-May 2014 in four topographi-
cal zones in the Nam Ngum River Basin. Data was collected at the community, household and individual level and 
included information on socioeconomic characteristics, environmental characteristics, wellbeing, social capital, food 
security and nutrition. Analysis of the data was performed using STATA 13 software. The World Food Program Food 
Security Criteria was used for assessment of community and household food security status. Results showed out of 
3,212 households, 2.8% were classified as having poor food security. Among the communities experiencing food in-
security, the highest percentages were found in the highlands zone (5%) and among the poorest households (10%). 
From the 1,331 children under five years of age that were interviewed during the survey 4.4% were found to be wasted, 
14% underweight and 25.8% stunted. Similarly, the highest prevalence for underweight and stunting was found in 
the highlands zone.  This paper demonstrates the need to carefully distinguish the assessment of food and nutrition 
security, and its linkage with critical factors including socio-economic characteristic of population group, geographic 
location of communities, access to natural resources and feeding practices of mothers.