Why the Śailendras were not a Javanese dynasty

Archaeologists and art historians generally agree that most of the 8th- to 9th-century Buddhist temples in central Java were constructed by the rulers who claimed to belong to the ?ailendra dynasty. But the unsolved question preying on the minds of scholars for many decades now is the origins of this dynasty. Drawing on a variety of arguments this study contends that the present popularity of the ?ailendra dynasty's Javanese origin is ill-founded, and urges a resumption of research into its foreign origins, whether in India, Sri Lanka or mainland Southeast Asia.     

Environmental Accounts for Land Cover: Their Contribution to 'State of the Environment' Reporting

This paper critically reviews the way land-cover stock and change data are used for 'state of the environment' reporting. The paper considers the relative merits of the indicator approach as opposed to one based on natural resource accounting. It is shown that indicators have a number of shortcomings as measures of the sustainability of land-cover change, and that land-cover accounts offer a more rigorous framework in which to develop and test policy. The argument draws upon the experience gained in the preparation of land-cover accounts for Great Britain using data from Countryside Survey 1990.     

ASA 2003: Communitas enters the academy

Fifth Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, University of Manchester, 14-18 July 2003     

Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labour,or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?

This article presents a critique to the human trafficking discourse in relation to child migration, based on data obtained from the anti‐trafficking community in the Greater Mekong Sub‐region combined with an analysis of secondary material. It also presents a set of qualitative accounts of migration at a young age from Lao PDR and Thailand. On this basis a more theorized, grounded and nuanced perspective on child labour migration is developed. This situates child labour migration historically, embeds it within overarching processes of rural transformation and accounts for young migrants’ agency in the social process of migration, the latter shedding light on the social production of exploitation in relation to young migrants.