The parent organization of CEE Himalaya is the Centre for Environment Education (CEE), which was established in August 1984. CEE is a national institution with its headquarters in Ahmedabad and has been given the responsibility by the central government of promoting environmental awareness nationwide. It undertakes demonstration projects in education, communication, and development that endorse attitudes, strategies, and technologies that are environmentally sustainable. Based in the city of Lucknow in the state of Uttar Pradesh, CEE Himalaya has been working in the states of the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) for over two decades. The mission of CEE Himalaya is to enhance understanding of sustainable development in formal, non-formal, and informal education through its work with schools, higher educational institutions, local and Indigenous communities, policy makers and administration, youth, and the general commu-nity. The primary objective of CEE Himalaya is to improve public awareness and understanding of environmental issues with a view to promote the conservation of nature and natural resources by integrating education with traditional streams of knowledge and cultural expressions. This approach demonstrates and grounds sustainable practices in rural and urban communities and facilitates the involvement of the business and public sectors to respond to the effects of climate change and variability.

The punnuk is a tugging ritual of the village folk from three communities in Hungduan, Ifugao in Northern Luzon, Philippines. It is performed at the confluence of Hapao River and a tributary as the final ritual after the rice harvest. Its consummation brings to a close an agricultural cycle and signals the beginning of a new one. \n\nThe punnuk is a ritual of pomp and revelry. Garbed in their predominantly red-col-ored attire of the Tuwali ethno-linguistic subgroup, the participants negotiate the terraced fields in a single file amidst lush greens under the blue skies. The tempo builds up as the participants reach the riverbank, each group positioned opposite the other. The excitement is sustained through the final tugging match, and the sinewy brawn of the participants is highlighted by the river’s rushing water.

The paper presents the status of Shamanism practice, in terms of state policy, research status and challenges for the Shaman heritage in Bhutan. The paper is based on field research and policy analysis conducted by the National Library and Archive of Bhutan under a ICHCAP project grant. An overview of shamanism in different regions of Bhutan is presented with a region-wise categorization of Shamanism in Bhutan. This is followed by a brief overview of four shamanism practices prevalent in Bhutan, three in the southern region and one in the western region. The preliminary data show that the Shamanistic practices in Bhutan, as in other parts of the world, has been deeply rooted in religion and supernatural power. The paper also presents future plans and initiatives of the National Library and Archives Division for the documentation and preservation of Shaman heritage. In absence of any written state policy regarding the preservation and promotion of Shaman heritage, the study concludes by proposing some recommendations to the government and local stakeholders for the preservation and promotion of the practice.

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concern themselves with biological conservation but fewer explore the need for conservation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Pacific Blue Foundation focuses both on biological and cultural conservation, primarily in Fiji, and recognizes fundamental linkages between the two. For example, traditional marine resource governance at the community level often created “tabu” (pronounced tamboo) on their reefs that restricted or prohibited fishing. Modern ecologists who propose marine protected areas (MPAs) recognize Fijian cultural tradition as knowledge the ancestors understood to be healthy for the ecosystem. Pacific Blue Foundation (PBF) has sought to learn the stories of ancestral tabu areas to assist creation of new MPAs. One of the most iconic elements of Fijian ICH is their more than 3,000 years of construction, and navigating double-hulled sailing canoes. Here we briefly explore the role these traditional sailing canoes had in the human migration into Oceania, and the effort PBF has made in the past 15 years to revitalize the construction of these canoes and to envision their role in providing sustainable livelihoods in the future.

Silambam, a martial art originating from Tamil Nadu, South India, that focuses on stick twirling is one of many Indian traditional arts that have survived through the periods of Ancient India, Medieval India, and Modern India, including the British colonial era. It remained alive in other countries as well, including Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Singapore. Silambam is an ancient Tamil martial art that carries many Tamil cultural values in its training and also during the transmission of the art from master to students.\nAncient Silambam’s cultural heritage and knowledge survived thousands of years through transmission to many generations, but the art is currently facing extinction. This drastic change is due to contemporary Silambam practitioners forgoing the values of the art and adopting elements of other martial art cultures, introducing new traditions such as belt grading systems, becoming more competition focused, and so on. The martial art with these newly adapted elements has been categorized as Sports Silambam. Many new Silambam organizations have been registered and even masters who have coached traditional Silambam are adopting these changes to train students toward success in competitions. Meanwhile, competition organizers offer handsome rewards to the winners in order to entice many young students to learn Sports Silambam. By focusing on the new approach geared toward competition, Sports Silambam masters fail to preserve the original combat techniques and cultural heritage values of authentic Silambam arts. While Sports Silambam is heavily and widely promoted, authentic Silambam masters and practitioners are struggling and facing hurdles to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) of this particular ancient Silambam. Adding to the obstacles is the issue of finding the right disciples to ensure the knowledge is transferred to the next generations in the current era of mushrooming globalization.

The parent organization of CEE Himalaya is the Centre for Environment Education (CEE), which was established in August 1984. CEE is a national institution with its headquarters in Ahmedabad and has been given the responsibility by the central government of promoting environmental awareness nationwide. It undertakes demonstration projects in education, communication, and development that endorse attitudes, strategies, and technologies that are environmentally sustainable.

My initial research among Lach community in Lac Duong town, Lam Dong province, Vietnam started with my participation in a project entitled “Establishment of associated mechanisms for conservation of landscape biodiversity and cultural space in Lang Biang Biosphere Reserve, Vietnam,” headed by Southern Institute of Ecology (Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology) in 2016. The project was successful to some extent in documenting characteristics of cultural spaces of ethnic peoples in the region and the reality of these spaces’ conservation in close relationship with that of biodiversity. Noticeably, being a world heritage, gongs cultural space was recognized as one of the crucial elements constituting the entire cultural spaces and cultural identity of local ethnic groups in the region and thus recorded as being imperative for conservative strategies and actions. These preliminary conceptualizations attracted me as an anthropologist to explore further insights into the socio-economic and cultural life of the Lach in the context of their daily life from 2017 to 2018. \n\nAs the people have been taking more active parts in their national and international integration, their social and economic spaces get expanded, adjusted and re-created. So are their cultural spaces in general and gongs cultural space in specific. This paper is to explore local gongs clubs of the Lach in Lac Duong town and gongs culture restoration activities at the parish church of Langbiang to reveal the fact that gongs cultural spaces of the Lach are far from static, fixed and in need of reservation. Rather, they are dynamic, inclusive and on the process of continuous meaning making as the result of the people utilizing their agency in creating initiatives and mechanism to practice their culture and transfer it to next generations. It is implied that by ways of local participation and community based training, cultural heritage can be prolonged and perpetuated itself alive.

Impulse Social Enterprises (ISE) is a sister organization of Impulse NGO Network (INGON) which is combating human trafficking in Northeast India for 25 years. Lack of education, poverty, and porous borders are the main reasons why Northeast India is a soft target for human trafficking. ISE focuses primarily on the ‘prevention’ and ‘protection’ aspects of the model that would stop human trafficking before it happens. It has partnered with other organizations in each of the eight states of the Northeast in an effort to help six Rs: Rehabilitate, Repatriate, Reintegrate, Recompensation, Report, and Rescue of trafficking victims. ISE also realized that it was just not enough to rescue and repatriate victims, it was also important to tackle the root cause of the problem, which is abject poverty and lack of sustainable livelihood in many indigenous areas.

Two frequently used proverbs in Korea are “like a rat caught in a jar” and “the sauce rather than the pot.” The first is used to describe someone caught in a difficult situation, like a rat that has fallen into a large onggi jar while the second means that the taste of the sauce contained within the pot is more important than what the pot looks like and is used to emphasize that content is more important than form.

Epics are the literary version of a nation’s history. They provide insight into a nation’s lifestyle, traditions, history, and present and future ways of thinking. The process of modernizing moral values depends on the study of literary heritage.

Learning oral epic traditions means learning people’s lifestyle, traditions, customs and history, their present and future, their way of thinking and their spirit. Specifically, it means understanding the originality of a nation, its qualities, wishes, way of living and outlook or, in other words, learning the oral traditions of a nation means to study the nation itself. The process of modernising our present morals depends on how we have studied literary heritage, including the originality and degree of mythology in oral epic traditions. For this, initially we need to learn, investigate and research ancient mythological imaginations of our people and their oral narrative traditions, which are the base for art and literature. Oral epic works present the literary history of any nation.

Singapore as a secular, multi-cultural, and multi-religious city state has had processions as part of its socio-religious fabric since the nineteenth century. Thaipusam, observed in Singapore since the late nineteenth century/and early twentieth century, is one of the most vibrant and longest surviving festivals in Singapore’s history.