Across the FediSEA

Across Southeast Asia, interest in German is on the rise as the German government taps increasing numbers of the region's skilled workers to tackle the country's severe labor shortages.

Thailand has been lauded for the progressive legislation it has passed into law which ensures that women and girls have the right to a range of sexual and reproductive health services, but many teenagers struggle to access the care they need. The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has been working with organizations in the South East Asian country to make sure those young people receive the support they are entitled to.

Southeast Asia is home to the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest in the world, making it a pivotal region for global efforts to address the biodiversity crisis and climate change. But intense development pressure and global consumption are transforming the region’s landscapes, fragmenting forests, degrading waterways and depleting the natural resources on which countless species and millions of people depend.

LOMBOK, Indonesia — Suhardi, 43, glides across a technicolor coral garden. Freediving down to the seafloor, he scoops up a handful of sand that he sprinkles over the reef. The reef becomes a blur of color as reef fish scurry from all four corners to see what delicacies can be found among the falling grains.

This guest blog, by Prof. Edwin Wieringa of Cologne University, How Old is the Language of Young Malay Manuscripts?

A note on the unusual Malay reflexive phrase bertunjukkan diri(nya), turns the spotlight on a phrase in of one of the oldest Malay texts, ‘Tales of the Wise Parrot’.

One of the world’s largest palm oil companies appears to have overseen a network of companies responsible for deforestation of tens of thousands of hectares, according to a new investigation published by The Gecko Project, a London-based investigative journalism organization. Indonesian conglomerate First Resources, like many agribusinesses, has announced voluntary commitments to guarantee no new […]

The two books of this review article are valuable contributions to the history of racial theorizing in the colonial setting, in this case the Malay peninsula (Manickam) and the Dutch East Indies (Sysling).

https://asianethnology.org/articles/2227

POLEWALI MANDAR, Indonesia — Over the past three decades, the residents of Mampie village have watched their homes and farmland vanish from the west coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island. A grove of orange trees collapsed into the sea some time ago. Buffalo no longer cool off in muddy sumps by the beach. “It’s gone,” Darwis, […]

Content warning: Act of Killing movie details

Went out to Seafood City for my biweekly-ish groceries. Meats with cuts I use and also vegetables I eat! And there's also food there to tapau home. There was also a Filipino bakery around the corner so I tapau-ed some stuff there too. My fav places to shop at: Vietnamese markets, Filipino markets #Food 📎 (2)

JAKARTA — Indonesian fisheries authorities have welcomed as “better than nothing” a new policy by neighboring Singapore that should in theory help stem the smuggling of lobster larvae out of Indonesian waters. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) has since Oct. 1 required traders in the city-state who are reexporting live animals to other countries to […]

old lady in the neighborhood is listening to her favorite javanese lagu lama > she is 90 yrs old, a little bit deaf, and she still works in the garden everyday #tootsea #magASEAN

PHNOM PENH — A court in Cambodia has denied the requests of three activists from environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia to travel to Sweden to accept an international award. In a letter published Oct. 2 by Phnom Penh Municipal Court and posted publicly to Mother Nature Cambodia’s Facebook page, decrees the travel of the three […]

From Wikipedia:

The name Pontianak refers to a story about ghosts that people in West Kalimantan refer to as Pontianak (a ferocious female ghost in Malay); it was a ghosts' haunt until Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie and his army fought and expelled the ghosts who attacked them by firing cannons. He then built a mosque and a palace, exactly on the location of the ghosts' haunt, and settled there. The mosque and palace became the first buildings in the city, and to this day locals fire bamboo cannons on Ramadan and other holidays in memory of this.