Resilience of ‘hunter-gatherers’ socio-culture under the large-scale plantation development in Tropical Asia
The aim of my research project is to explore the stable livelihood of local people under the large-scale plantation development in Tropical Asia. In this presentation, I introduce the previous studies about hunter-gatherers in Tropical Areas and point out the problems among their assimilation and natural environmental changes by the government development projects in the 20th century. It is said that 99% of the human population were hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago. However, it became only 0.001% in the 1960s. In the 20th century, they became a subject of development, and the hunting-gathering way of life has been considered as "primitive" or "should be developed" by the government. There are conflicts between national development policy and local people’s livelihood while natural environment has dramatically changed in the late 20th century. In the latter part of this presentation, I introduce my ongoing research project which deals with the people’s survivability against the recent large-scale plantation development in tropical Asia.