Assessing China’s response to the South China Sea arbitration ruling

Many international legal experts believe that the Philippines v. China arbitration award of 12 July 2016 represents a game changer for South China Sea dispute settlements because the award has brought a breathtaking legal clarity to the complex disputes. This article argues that the sweeping nature of the award had a very paradoxical effect on Chinese policy. The arbitration ruling has led to the hardening of China’s claims, but it has also raised a new readiness among Chinese policymakers to renew negotiations. The sweepingness of the award makes it hard for the Philippines to reach a negotiated compromise with China on the basis of the award, but it also presents a surprising political opportunity in regional politics for the major actors involved to lower tensions and recalibrate policies. Although China’s new readiness to negotiate is welcome, the overall impact of the three-and-a-half-year-long arbitration is likely to create a deadlock in negotiations in the near future. Paradoxically, this may raise the importance of political and power-centred approaches to regional dispute settlements, as the legal approach embodied by arbitration continues to meet Chinese defiance.     

Folklore without a folk: questions in the preservation of the Marinduque Moriones heritage

Since the 1870s, the Moriones festival has been part of the Lenten celebrations in Marinduque, located at the heart of the Philippines. Inventoried by the Philippine government, the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA) and the Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (ICHCAP) as one of the Philippines’ intangible cultural heritage, the Moriones festival has exhibited various problems regarding a decreasing historical value, political intervention and increasing detachment from the Marinduque community. This study raises questions on regional inventorying of ICH, especially in light of what needs to be tackled before, during and after the incorporation of traditions and practices as ICH.     

Neogene crinoids of southeast Asia: preservation,systematics and significance

Donovan, S.K. &; Helwerda, R.A., August 2016. Neogene crinoids of southeast Asia: preservation, systematics and significance. Alcheringa 41, xxx–xxx. ISSN 0311-5518.

The Cenozoic record of fossil crinoids is poor. In part, this is because the stalked taxa have moved into deep water (>100–150 m water depth) since the Cretaceous, but also results from the propensity for the crinoid endoskeleton to disarticulate soon after death. Despite this, we report two new, small crinoid faunas of moderate diversity from the Pliocene of East Kalimantan and the Philippines. Included taxa are columnals of the isocrinid Metacrinus? sp.; a bourgueticrinid cup and columnal, Democrinus? sp.; and cirral and brachial ossicles (isocrinids and comatulids). The preservation of these Pliocene crinoids is not conducive to classification to the level of species, although some taxa are easier to determine than others, but the precise reason for this dearth of complete specimens remains uncertain. Because of our knowledge of extant crinoids, this Cenozoic ‘gap’ has been poorly appreciated. Rather than denigrating the Pliocene crinoids documented herein for being fragmentary and difficult to accurately determine, we instead report them as a rare set of data points, filling, in part, the Cenozoic ‘gap’.

Stephen K. Donovan [steve.donovan@naturalis.nl] and Renate Helwerda [renate.helwerda@naturalis.nl], Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Postbus 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. Received 03.05.2016; revised 16.06.2016; accepted 21.6.2016.     

A forest of dreams: Ontological multiplicity and the fantasies of environmental government in the Philippines

How do invisible beings in the forested hinterlands complicate the work of bureaucrats in the capital? What do dreams and the beings who visit them have to do with state power? Despite a deepening commitment to posthumanism, political ecologists have rarely opened our accounts of more-than-human assemblages to what have conventionally been termed “supernatural” or “metaphysical” forms of agency. To counter this lingering ethnocentrism, I argue here for an ontologically broadened understanding of how environmental government is produced and contested in contexts of difference. My argument draws on ethnographic fieldwork on Palawan Island in the Philippines, where the expansion of conservation enclosures has coincided with the postauthoritarian recognition of Indigenous rights. Officials there have looked to a presumed Indigenous subsistence ethic as a natural fit for conservation enclosures. In practice, however, Palawan land- and resource-use decisions are based, in part, on social relations with an invisible realm of beings who make their will known through mediums or dreams. These relations involve contingencies that complicate and at times subvert the designs of bureaucratic conservation. As a result, attempts to graft these designs onto Palawan practices do as much to engender mutually transformative encounters between contrasting ontological practices as they do to create well-disciplined eco-subjects or establish state territoriality. To better understand the operation of environmental government – and to hold it accountable to promises of meaningful local participation – political ecology should, I argue, attend more carefully to the ontological multiplicity of forces that shape spatial practices and their regulation.     

The evacuation camp as paradoxical space for women

In recent years, so-called natural disasters have devastated areas around the world. Survivors must leave their homes and reside temporarily in evacuation camps run by state, religious and humanitarian actors. These official post-disaster spaces are intended to provide safety to survivors while they repair damaged homes, rebuild livelihoods, or await new lodging. Not all people, however, experience or perceive these spaces as safe. Through the interventions of institutional actors and the actions of evacuees, these spaces can become sites of repression, violence and family separation. This study of women survivors' experiences in evacuation camps reveals that gendered social relations and norms, often invisible or incomprehensible to the organizations running the camps, shape these sites into paradoxical spaces. The paper draws from interviews and participatory videos made by urban poor survivors of Typhoon Sendong in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines. Gillian Rose's concept of paradoxical space is used to study women's access to, use of and experiences within official post-disaster spaces. Distinct outcomes for survivors based on gender, ethnic and class differences highlight the failure of official post-disaster spaces to protect survivors from harm and the need for women survivors to adopt conflictual strategies that simultaneously exposed them to harms and resisted ideal survivor subject norms.     

The Short History of the Ifugao Rice Terraces: A Local Response to the Spanish Conquest

Establishing the construction sequence of agricultural terraces is extremely complicated due to the nature of their technological foundation and use. A number of methodological approaches have been developed to address this difficulty, such as bulk soil ¹⁴C dating, Optically-Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), sediment grain size, or a combination of these, but a fundamental problem of stratigraphic disturbance still exists. In this article, we utilize multiple datasets, including radiocarbon determinations, faunal isotopic signatures, human osteological remains, archaeobotanical data sets, energetics assessments, and spatial data to establish the origins of Philippine Cordillera rice terraces. Dominant historical narratives in the region suggest a 2000–3000 b.p. inception of the terrace systems, but previous Bayesian modeling and current archaeobotanical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data indicate that the shift to wet-rice cultivation is a recent phenomenon and a response to the intrusion of the Spanish Empire in the northern highland Philippines.