The Moken's lifestyle, as well as that of their Moklen and Urak Lawoi cousins, has changed over time and they have shown remarkable cultural resilience .  Three groups of Austronesian maritime nomads are spread out along west coast of Thailand and Burma, forming the northern point of Austronesian migration. 

After a long political crisis, on the 7^th of April 2010, the official government was once again overthrown in Kyrgyzstan – the second change of power in twenty years.  The first, known as the Tulip Revolution, put an end to Askar Akayev’s authoritarian regime on the 23^rd of March 2005 and was replaced by Kurmanbek Bakiev’s government, which was no less authoritarian.  Is this small Central Asian country (with a population of 5.5 million and an area of 198,500 km²) heading towards a permanent state of instability?  Some local researchers have attempted to interpret this chronic instability using culturalist models. Because the Kyrgyz are traditionally nomads, they were supposedly unable to adopt “artificial” structures following independence in 1991, which allegedly led to the repeated rejection of the State. This explanation, however, does not clarify why each coup d’état is followed by attempts to democratise, which would suggest Kyrgyz approval of the notion of a fair State. Furthermore, we suspect that external players may have orchestrated this change in power. It would therefore have been in the interest of the United States and Russia to oust the despotic Bakiev and replace him with a more “docile” candidate. Thus, is this situation the result of domestic social upheaval or an event organised with the help of the superpowers?

According to the UN Security Council’s classification, Australia is part of the ‘Western Europe and other’ regional group. This somewhat surrealistic view underlines the contradiction between the country’s historical heritage, in which the links between the former British colony and Europe predominate, and its geographic context, which is that of the Asia-Pacific region.

Are you familiar with Turkmenistan and its leaders? If you attempt to ask your entourage this question, it will most likely be met with a grimace – uncertainty about its location, cultural heritage or even the extent of its wealth, despite being as large as our Iberian neighbour and the world’s third biggest gas reserve, being common.

In India, hardly a day goes by without the media reporting a protest or posting a debate on the country’s Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policy. What is the policy about? Why is it so controversial? What are the main issues of conflict and who are the protagonists? How does the future look for India’s SEZs?

A country almost unknown to most, Kazakhstan holds the presidency of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe this year.  This organisation is recognised under the regional agreement of the United Nations Charter and offers a platform for dialogue and decision-making in conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict recovery (human, politico-military, economic and environmental aspects of regional security) to European and ex-USSR countries since 1994, following the Helsinki Final Act.  It may be surprising that such a responsibility be given to a young Muslim nation that only became independent in 1991.  A brief overview of its history enables us to shed some light on its remarkable development. 

The inauguration of the Suramadu Bridge by the Indonesian President in June 2009 was a great event. The bridge links the town of Surabaya, Indonesia’s secondlargest city, capital of the province of East Java and an industrial and port city with a population of 2.5 million, to the island of Madura, which is densely populated and impoverished. The modern design of the 5.4 km long cable-stayed bridge, the road infrastructure created to provide the bridge access and the possibilities for urban development opened up in Madura are all advantages for the city of Surabaya as it competes to attract national and international investors as a secondary city.

The medical system that has flourished for over two thousand years in China is extraordinary from both a historical and an anthropological perspective. During its long process of development it has maintained a remarkable epistemological continuity. China is the only country in the history of civilization that has preserved its traditional medical system, which was reinstated in the 1950s as a state-sanctioned health care system and accorded an official status comparable to that of biomedicine.

Through contacts with neighbouring nomadic and sedentary populations, the Shamanist Mongols were exposed early to various religions such as Buddhism, Nestorian Christianism, Islam or Taoism, not to mention influences of Zoroastrism and Manicheism in former steppe kingdoms. Chinggis Khan and his successors were interested in the spiritual and political benefits which could be gained from supportive mainstream religions in their dominions and consequenltly exempted religious institutions from taxes and military conscription. Although Nestorianism was initially favoured at the imperial court thanks to influent Christian wives of several Chinggisids, Mongol rulers eventually converted either to Islam (the Golden Horde khans in Russia, the Ilkhanids of Persia and the Chagataids in Central Asia) or, for those ruling in China, to Tibetan Buddhism.

The Environment often makes the headlines these days in China, especially in the case of problems related to water shortages or pollution. Indeed, water is an important issue in the Middle Kingdom since it is badly needed for economic development but also because China’s hydrological situation is rather paradoxical. General data are favourable, but precipitation is unevenly spread across the nation. When linked to population, these resources can be considered as meagre and put China at the hydric stress limit (1700 m³/year/inhabitant) since it sometimes falls as low as 1800 m³/year/inhabit.

During the colonial period that lasted from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20h century, writers, even more than painters, followed by photographers and film-directors, were the vectors of representation of the "Islands", this ‘somewhere else’, the most renowned of them, Tahiti. Faraway, inaccessible, they fired the imagination of a Europe that was awakening to the mass culture, that which came mainly through text at the time, and in particular the "serials", before the film projection got the upper hand, the painting "exhibition" being reserved for the intellectual elite. Thus, the western imagination of the elsewhere got anchored on the experience and souvenirs of a few travellers, who translated it into images, shows and writings. We will try to reconstruct this aesthetic image of Tahiti by analysing works of artists who came to Tahiti.

In the second half of the XXth century, Indian sociology was dominated by the paradigm of Homo hierarchicus according to the title of Louis Dumont’s long-standing popular book published in 1966. The objective of this approach to the society of castes is to combine field survey with reading of ancient India’s classical texts. While pre-colonial India does not have the tradition of conducting studies on society (unlike China, for example), it is the guardian of brahmanical trends of thought, through its texts written in sanskrit or other Indian languages, dealing with human relations, in a more theoretical than practical way, constituent of the socio-religious world of castes (Lardinois 2007).

The political system, society and economy of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) were thoroughly shaken up by more than a quarter of a century-old conflict (1983-2009) between the Sinhalese majority government (75% of the population) and the Tamil separatist guerrilla led by the organisation of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The latter which controlled vast territories between 1990 and 2007 in the north and east of the island, and had built a force capable of inflicting heavy losses on the Colombo Army, has lost most of its territories and military potential since 2008, and finds itself driven to defeat on a cramped coastal strip, where it was retaining about fifty thousand civilians, by the end of April 2009, to use them as a human shield. After suspending hostilities for two days on the occasion of Sinhalese and Tamil new year (14th April), fights resumed and the Sri Lankan Army moved forward till the sea, triggering a mass exodus of civilians, which as of 29^th April, continued under disastrous sanitary conditions.

On 29th January 2009, we have entered into the year of the Earth Ox considered as being favourable for field work according to the traditional Chinese calendar. If custom can be believed,  nature ought to be mild this year!

 Discover the mysteries of the Japanese calendar!