Part 1

• Rethinking Southeast Asia as an Archipelagic Space Joefe Santarita University of the Philippines

  This paper seeks to reframe Southeast Asia not as a collection of discrete nation-states or as a region defined by geopolitical or continental boundaries, but as an archipelagic space: a region shaped by fluidity, movement, and connection across seas and islands. Drawing inspiration from island studies, maritime history, and transnational approaches, this paper foregrounds the historical and cultural entanglements that emerge when Southeast Asia is viewed through its oceanic geographies rather than terrestrial borders.
  An archipelagic lens allows us to unsettle dominant mainland-centric narratives and reconsider how power, identity, and knowledge have circulated across this fragmented yet deeply interconnected region. From early Austronesian migrations and maritime trade networks to colonial port cities, diaspora communities, and contemporary border disputes, Southeast Asia’s histories are inextricably linked to its waters and the mobility they enable.
  This paper advances a critical, interdisciplinary rethinking of Southeast Asia as an entangled archipelago, emphasizing the role of mobility, hybridity, and shared space in shaping the region’s past and present.

• Philosophy, Ideology, and Social Technology: The Making of a Transnational History of Southeast Asia Vicente Villan University of the Philippines, Diliman

  This lecture reinterprets Southeast Asia’s historical development as a dynamic nexus of cultural, intellectual, and technological exchange. Grounded in transcultural heritage perspectives and the historical method, and framed by transnationalism and network theory, it explores how the region evolved through fluid interactions across maritime, riverine, and inland landscapes—beyond rigid national borders.
  Using philosophy, ideology, and social technology as conceptual tools, the study demonstrates how belief systems such as Anituism, Buddhism, Islam, and Confucianism engaged with global thought, and how ideologies like nationalism, socialism, and technocracy were locally adapted. Social technologies from—both religious and secular ritual practices to media—embedded these transformations to everyday life.
  This conference panel highlights the integrative roles of seascapes, riverscapes, and forestscapes: maritime routes connected island communities, rivers fostered cohesion in the mainland zones, and the forested hinterlands linked the upstream settlements through ecological and ideological exchange. This reframing positions Southeast Asia as a creatively generative region with transcultural competence in shaping global modernity.

• Forestscapes and the Transcultural Coconut Heritage: The Ecology of Power in Southeast Asia’s Transnational Hinterlands Romeo Peña Polytechnic University of the Philippines

  This paper explores the coconut heritage as a form of ecological and cultural power that shaped Southeast Asia’s transnational hinterlands. Anchored in the concept of forestscapes as dynamic zones of exchange, the study situates the coconut not merely as an economic commodity but as a medium of interconnection among islands, upland communities and coastal economies. Through the lens of transnational history and transcultural heritage, it examines how the cultivation, trade and symbolic value of the coconut reveal enduring structures of power that link the environment, agriculture, labor, belief systems and folklore across the region. Drawing from archival sources, oral literatures and ethnographic accounts, the paper traces how colonial and postcolonial forces transformed the coconut landscape into a site of both exploitation and resilience through ecology of power highlighting indigenous knowledge and narratives from memory. By reimagining the forested hinterlands as vital agents in the making of Southeast Asia’s modernity, this study contributes to the understanding of how natural resources like coconut mediate the transnational historical entanglements of environment, philosophy and ideology in the region.

• The Sea as a Relationship: The Human-Environmental connection in the Maritime Navigation Practices of the Sama-Bajau Fishermen in Indonesia Makibi Nakano Konan Women's University

  This presentation discusses the lifeworld as a human-environment relationship through an anthropological approach to the mobility practices of maritime peoples in Southeast Asia. In the maritime world of Southeast Asia, there are maritime peoples who have inhabited the boundary between sea and land as an ecological niche. The Sama/Bajau people, who are scattered across Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, are one such group. The presenter has been conducting intermittent field research since 2016 on their fishing techniques in the Banggai Islands of eastern Indonesia. As a strategic maritime hub and a crossroads of sea trade, the Banggai Islands feature an archipelagic landscape with scattered small islands and rocks—a rare characteristic for a Sama settlement—and relatively small coral reefs. In handline fishing—the most common practice here—fishermen have embodied skills for interpreting information from various environments—not only the sea itself but also the sky, wind, land, and underwater—to identify and reach fishing grounds. This is also a process of mastering how to pay “attention” toward the environment, centered on vision but also involving listening to the sounds of the sea and feel of the seabed through the fishing line. This way of experiencing the sea—which might be described as the “sea as a relationship”—naturally varies not only from individual to individual but also depending on the type of fishing. Historically, the introduction of motorized boats has significantly transformed the maritime navigation. Furthermore, in recent years, increased demand in global markets has led to a rise in octopus fishing, resulting in more traditional hand-line fishermen switching to this new method and an influx of new entrants. This presentation offers a preliminary examination of how the relationship between humans and the environment has been reshaped through maritime navigation amid these socio-ecological changes in the Banggai Islands.

Part 2

• Moving Worlds in a Frozen Earth: Melangun Rituals and Orang Rimba’s Nomadic Ontology under The State’s Territorial Regime Reny Ayu Wulandari Wageningen University and Research

  When land is perceived as a single dominant ontology of state-fixed territory, what happens to nomadic indigenous people who inhabit land through movement? The indigenous Orang Rimba have their own ritual tradition of Melangun, which requires them to move to another forest after a member of their tribe dies. Although some indigenous scholars have discussed Melangun primarily as a spiritual and kinship practice, its significance as a world-making practice within a territory shaped by nomadic movement has frequently been neglected. Rather than treating Melangun solely as a symbolic cultural practice, this study analyzes it as a framework for understanding nomadic ontology. This study draws on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork and is integrated with multisited engagement (2017-2023) with several Orang Rimba groups in Batanghari Regency, Jambi province, combining in-depth interviews and participant observation. We use Melangun as an empirical entry point to nomadic ontological insight through mobility, thereby contesting the state’s technocratic view of bounded territory. The findings show that Melangun shapes the Orang Rimba’s spiritual movement toward a cosmological balance through rotational ecological practice, generating a nomadic range—or ruang jelajah. The ongoing practice of Melangun, under the pressure of modernity and development, demonstrates that nomadic people adapt dynamically as a form of ontological continuity. This study demonstrateshow the dominant state spatial regime misrecognizes territorial production within nomadic ontology, revealing the ontological hierarchies that privilege fixed spatial rationalities.

• Collective Identity Formation and Its Drivers among Riparian Countries in Lancang–Mekong River Water Governance Yuanyuan Shen Yunnan University
• Rolling in the River: The Role of Rivers in the Making of Transnational History of Mainland Southeast Asia Princess Fame Pascua New Era University

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Archipelagic
• Indigenous spatiality
• Indonesia
• Orang Rimba
• Sama Bajau
• Southeast Asia
• border
• coconut
• ecology of power
• embodied skills
• fishing
• forestscapes
• human-environment
• maritime
• melangun
• mobility
• navigation
• network theory
• nomadic ontology
• riverscapes
• seascapes
• social technology
• state territoriality
• trade
• transcultural heritage
• transnational hinterlands
• transnationalism