About Staff

I have conducted field research in an inland Malay village in central Sumatra, Indonesia. Villagers have used the land for swidden cultivation, gathering forest products, and hunting according to custom. In addition to customary land use, the land, which is engraved with historical events and memories of groups or individuals, implies an irreplaceable sense of place for villagers. In this area, the rapid expansion of commercial logging, oil palm plantation, and industrial reforestation have made a crucial impact on land use among villagers since the latter 1980s, and caused land conflict between the state and localities, or within village communities. My interest is 1) the transformation of land use and customary institution in social change, and 2) the reconstruction of the sense of place within this context.

In addition to these studies, I started research in villages of the mountain area in the northern part of Shiga prefecture, Japan. In this area until the middle of the 1960s, many villagers practiced slash and burn for cultivating forest and for maintaining grasslands. Focusing on the slash and burn system, I am recording the local knowledge and traditional techniques of forest use and reconstruct the ecological history of this area with documents, interview with villagers, and participant-observation of cultivation. In the last three decades, the mountainous areas of Japan has been suffering from problems of depopulation and the devastation of forests is owing to a national policy of industrialization and the dull market of local forestry. My research examines the cultural and ecological features of this area and tries to search for ways to revitalize communities through making use of them.