This chapter provides an in-depth analysis and discussion of eco-tourism in Surama Village. It considers such tourism’s origins and development in the village, as well as the circumstances regarding its ongoing operations and daily processes. There is an emphasis on the ways that this tourism is described in the local discourse of villagers. The chapter examines villagers’ interactions with outsiders, such as tourists, tourism leaders, and consultants, within the context of eco-tourism and explores how eco-tourism fits into a broader discursive context of ‘development’ in the village. The chapter discusses issues concerning commodification, as well as alternative options for paid employment in the region. It begins to elucidate how villagers working in eco-tourism relate to tourists as outsiders. Throughout the chapter, there is a central focus on how eco-tourism provides a context through which outside resources (both material and immaterial) are acquired and transformations towards otherness and alterity are enabled.

This chapter examines how the acquisition of material and immaterial things from outside visitors to Surama Village is used in local projects of transformation and becoming. The chapter begins with the author’s encounter with a villager in Surama who claimed to have inadvertently started becoming ‘white’ during his work with a BBC film crew. This transformation mostly centred around changes in diet and clothing. The chapter discusses how such transformations among the Makushi occur at a broader level through changing practices and how they are often associated with ‘development’ in the present. It links Makushi interactions with tourists with bodily orientated perspectival changes and shows how transformation is seen in the desires for education, healthcare, and political representation in Surama Village. Transformation is also seen in the gradual adoption of economic individualism, wage labour, and a cash-mediated economy. The chapter focuses on the shamanic aspects (particularly perspectival shape-shifting) of such transformations.

The afterword discusses the author’s return to Surama Village in 2019–2020 and describes recent political and economic changes. The chapter further addresses the consequences following the death of the local shaman (Mogo) and the elevation of one of the early promoters of eco-tourism in Surama to national political prominence. This final chapter addresses the mixed record of ‘development’ in Surama Village and the still changing nature of the eco-tourism economy in the context of Covid-19 and political uncertainties. It also further connects the book’s themes with the Amazonian ethnological literature as part of a broader examination of Makushi practices of drawing in the outside through persons, objects, and organisations. The chapter reiterates the significance of a shamanic relational mode for contemporary Makushi interactions with certain visitors (particularly tourists) in the village and the importance of these relations to the Makushi in forming partnerships with outsiders aimed at addressing contemporary challenges.

This chapter discusses the role of Imelda Marcos in the diplomatic practice and foreign policy of the government of Ferdinand Marcos. At the outset, Imelda is cast not only as a First Lady but as a vital colleague and co-operator in running the affairs of the Philippine state from the 1960s through the 1980s, the other half of the so-called conjugal dictatorship. At one point in time, she was simultaneously governor of Metro Manila, Minister of Human Settlements, member of the Interim Parliament, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. This being said, her status as First Lady and Patroness of the Arts is not dismissed as mere tangent or appendage; it was as First Lady that Imelda became a compelling presence in the political theatre. The combination of her beauty and her charisma formed a particular aesthetic that inevitably evolved into a policy of culture and democracy so central in the formation of a post-independence nation-state in Southeast Asia.

This chapter explores the synergies, limitations, and challenges of addressing statelessness through human rights and development approaches, using the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka as a case study. In addressing the legacy of statelessness, both the human rights and development frameworks must be drawn on and used simultaneously. However, a frameworks approach alone falls short in addressing statelessness, given the political, economic and societal factors that perpetuate discrimination. Instead, as the case of the Hill Country Tamils demonstrates, both human rights and development approaches must be underpinned by a deeper commitment to pursuing equality and combatting discrimination at large. Despite claims of success, the legacy of statelessness in Sri Lanka still lingers. The Hill Country Tamils are still among the ‘furthest behind’ in Sri Lanka and continue to experience severe discrimination well after securing formal citizenship. The community’s prolonged statelessness has led to long-term deterioration in human rights conditions, such that a grant of formal citizenship alone is inadequate to address structural drivers of disadvantage that the community continues to endure.

Child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) is a complex and challenging subspecialty in psychiatry that developed immensely in the last century. In this chapter, we present a brief overview of development and specific aspects of the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of children and adolescents.

Is the term “authoritarian commons” an oxymoron? No, it is not. It highlights the tension and interaction between homeowners and the authoritarian state. Total party-state control risks eroding party-state legitimacy simply through incompetence, whereas delegating service delivery to independent-minded middle-class residents can endanger party-state control. Overall homeowners appear to represent the best chance of democratizing urban governance in Chinese megacities. Homeowners’ associations have been a rare form through which Chinese citizens can get associated and have real elections recognized by law and respected by the government.

This chapter is concerned with recentring labour in regional development accounts and framing the claim of the book that the labour markets of Oman and the region are global. Most development accounts articulate Oman’s labour market as an object of development, a self-contained unit to be regulated and deregulated toward developmental ends. Development policy and academic discourse, in short, treat the labour market as a bounded, local space with enclosed, segmented social relations. In contrast to this development planning imaginary, this chapter argues that the labour market needs to be interpreted in global context and with a view of how regulation and relations transpire within, between, and across segmentations. The labour market is a place in which you can clearly see the outcomes of global market pressures and the competing poles for labour’s management and (de)regulation. These come from within but also outside national and regional boundaries. In combination, by looking from the bottom up, the labour market offers a space where we encounter humans in the economy and can more clearly visualise the human impact of economic transformations and choices.

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

This chapter presents Republican-era efforts to turn the Yangtze River into an engine of developmental nation-building by erecting a Three Gorges Dam. Starting with Sun Yat-sen’s initial proposal in 1919 and closing with the Sino-American attempt in the 1940s, this chapter examines how Chinese and foreign actors pursued this developmental dream.Undeterred by the financial challenges of the project, the dam’s backers argued China could overcome a domestic dearth of capital by working with foreign collaborators. This joint venture would benefit both China and foreigners by not only easing trade with the Chinese interior and creating a marvel of modern engineering, but also because the dam would furnish a gargantuan electrical stimulus to the transformation of China into an industrial powerhouse with a growing demand for foreign products. Although the dam was not constructed in the Republican period, Chinese and foreign actors would continue to pursue the infrastructural fantasy of installing mammoth dams on China’s rivers to fuel national industrialization on both sides of the Taiwan Straits during the Cold War.

This book begins with a close examination of Cochin’s natural environment. Barring some notable exceptions, histories of port cities have either completely neglected or failed to adequately engage with the coastal environments within which such cities are located. This has been an unfortunate omission since port cities have of course been fundamentally shaped by environmental transformations. In Cochin, the harbour’s very birth is often attributed to a flood that is said to have swept through the coast in the fourteenth century. Memories of this flood have lingered along the volatile coastline as has the fate of its most prominent casualty, the ancient city of Muziris, which is said to have been destroyed by the very same waters that gave birth to Cochin. From the colonial period onwards, therefore, the eventful history of Cochin’s coastline had begun to attract considerable interest and scrutiny. Through a focus on the discussions surrounding the port’s coastline, this chapter will examine how perceptions of the port’s environment intersected with visions for its development over the course of the late nineteenth century.