Stephen Acabado: Thanks everyone for the interest in this webinar series. As some of you know, this is the first of 10 panels that we have arranged to talk about engaged research in the asia pacific region. This series is related to a Routledge engaged scholarship volume that Daya (Da-wei Kuan) and I are co-editing. The 10 panels scheduled in the next 10 weeks highlight how communities stakeholders and researchers work together to co-produce and co-create knowledge which we hope will eventually lead to administration of their heritage and other issues. We are grateful for the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for anthropological research through the webinars on the future of anthropology grant, the Henry Luce Foundation, the new England University First People's Rights Center, the National Chengchi University Center for Taiwan-Philippines Indigenous knowledge, Local knowledge and Sustainable studies or CTPILS, the UCLA Cotsen Institute of archaeology and the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, the UCLA department of anthropology, the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa Center for Southeast Asian studies, Ifugao state university, the Partido state university, and the Save the Ifugao terraces movement are co-hosting this series. I would also like to briefly introduce the individuals behind this series. They have been working since June to plan these panels. All of the panels in this series will be an open conversation on engagement and empowerment. Panelists will discuss issues that facilitate their engaged work. Community members who engage the scholars are also represented in this series. To those with questions please post your queries or questions on the q and a for zoom and those on facebook live and youtube streaming can post their questions on the comments section. We are monitoring those platforms. E-certificates will be available for those requesting and there will be a survey form that you will be able to complete to request for the certificate. Before we start we would like to introduce or request Dr. Danilyn Rutherford, the president of the Wenner-Gren foundation to give us a brief background on the new Wenner-Gren engaged research grant program.

Danilyn Rutherford: Thank you all so much and thank you to our fellow sponsors and hosts and to the organizers for inviting me to speak. I'm Danilyn Rutherford and I'm the president of the Wenner-Gren foundation for anthropological research and I have both personal and professional reasons to be extremely grateful for all I'm going to learn from tonight's event and from this entire series of webinars. So a year ago I embarked on a series of conversations with an advisory committee which we at Wenner-Gren convened to design a new engaged research grant which will provide twenty thousand dollars to support projects which are collaborative from the get-go. Projects involving partnerships between doctoral students and post-phd researchers and members of communities who have historically been the objects rather than the subjects of research and I'm going to share my screen for a second and just to show you a slide with a little bit of information about this new program. So engaged research grants the deadline which we just determined will be august 1, 2021 and you know here is the website which I'll also figure out where to share with everyone who's attending and here's just you know some of the descriptions of this program. You can look at this if you get to the website as well. It sort of gives you a sense of the sort of emphasis that came out of these discussions with this advisory committee. We're trying to support projects that promise to make a significant contribution to anthropological conversations again through collaborations in which engagement is a central feature of the project from the start and then there's some further background around what we're trying to do. So I'm really excited about this. Little did I know just how important this new initiative would turn out to be when we set these conversations in motion so I just want to say a little bit to contextualize this in relationship to the current moment which is something that at Wenner-Gren we've been thinking about really hard with COVID-19, the uprisings for racial justice and climate disasters everywhere this has been a momentous year not only for anthropologists but for everyone affected by our work and we're in many ways in a moment of reckoning. We've been thinking very hard about the challenges that face anyone conducting research in our field right now and in part these challenges are intellectual given how uncertain the world has become. Anthropologists need to conceptualize their research questions broadly enough to be meaningful under changing conditions. We have to be nimble enough to come up with new methods and approaches when new problems and opportunities arise and again I think this is something that engaged research gets at in a really interesting way. The challenges are also methodological. We have to recognize what we can't do given the pandemic and all the other threats facing the world's communities and what we can do. At the same time we also need to use this as an opportunity to reconsider what we should do methodologically being far broader in our approaches as archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, biological anthropologists when it comes at getting at the sorts of research questions that seem to be important an

d relevant in this moment. But really for me and I think the more I think about this the main challenges of the current moment in anthropology are ethical. This moment brings to light a problematic assumption that's long been present in many european and north american traditions of anthropology, that anthropologists should be free to go wherever, talk to whomever, excavate wherever with little cost of entry and it seems like this is a moment when we really need to think about that cost of entry and again I think for archaeology this is especially pressing the idea that you can plan an excavation without involving communities with a stake in this research People with a claim to these landscapes and these past. This moment when communities all over the world are under such challenges, such threats it just seems like this is a really important moment to think about this. We need to think about the cost of participants and we've been working hard around safety issues around archaeologists and other kinds of anthropologists doing their research but also the risks not just of the people who are involved but everyone who's in some sense affected by your work involved in getting you to the place where you're doing research but even more importantly and this is something I feel that's really been underlined by the work that we've been doing on this new program is the whole question of whether our research is meaningful for those most directly affected by it. You know this seems like this is an important moment for anthropologists to be thinking broadly researchers to think not only about what one can do in this moment but why it's worth being done and it seems that engaged research is a really important kind of way to begin to

reconceptualize you know kind of the meaning of what we do as a field so I think that's where this webinar series comes in and hopefully where our engaged research grant program will make a difference. The kinds of thoroughgoing collaborations we hope to support through this new program are going to have to become more typical I think for the field as a whole for this new approach to research to succeed. We need models. We need to learn from the kinds of partnerships that this webinar series will explore so this is going to be incredibly useful for me and I really wanted to thank you all for doing this and it's really an honor to have any role in supporting tonight's event. Thank you so much.

Stephen Acabado: Thank you Dr. Rutherford. Professor Da-wei Kuan is going to give us a brief description of the webinar series.

Da-wei Kuan: Yes hi everyone greetings from taiwan. Many of the panelists in this webinar series have known each other for years. Though we come from different communities and different academic backgrounds we all see that there is growing attention and reflection on the relation between researchers and researched communities for the reason of methodological study as well as the realization of social justice. Ethnographic method was originally developed by anthropology ethnology but it is nowadays widely applied in many disciplines. With a growing reflection we examine the power relation in the fields, break the dichotomy of researchers and research. We also redefine field work as an action of social practice. It is encouraging but also very challenging because you need to be critical and sensitive to the power dynamic. You need to balance the interest of multiple stakeholders and you need to after all contribute to the body of knowledge to move the society forward to a better situation. I think therefore we need to share our experience to build a network for mutual learning and support each other. That is also why we have this webinar series. I'm grateful to all the panelists, team workers sponsors and participants in front of your computer monitors who make the network come true. I believe this network itself is also an action empowering us and co-producing knowledge. Thank you very much.

Stephen Acabado: Thank you Daya. I am going to give the floor or the screen now to Guy who will introduce the panel.

Guy Charlton: Thank you Stephen. Hello from australia. I would like to echo the thanks to everyone that's been already given for this really wonderful webinar series and I look forward to participating in it over the course of the next 10 weeks. The participants in panel one have an extensive history in this area and the panel itself will frame the direction of the webinar series. The panel will be moderated by Professor Miriam Stark of the university of hawaii manoa and panel members will discuss the major themes in the webinar series with particular emphasis on the bottoms up approach to research. The panel will highlight the role of the community involvement in translational research and social environmental justice movements. It will emphasize the participation of stakeholder communities in research as the first step to readdressing the marginalization of indigenous communities. Stephen Acabado is an anthropological archaeologist who has worked in Ifugao Philippines for almost two decades he's been collaborating with the Kiangan community that has resulted in the establishment of the Ifugao community heritage galleries that now serve as an indigenous people's education center in the region. Stephen is an associate professor of anthropology at the university of california los angeles and he is a co-convener of this webinar series. Da-wei Kuan who goes by the name of Daya comes from the tayal indigenous group in taiwan. Daya received his phd degree in geography from the university of hawaii manoa and is currently an associate professor in the department of ethnology at national chengchi university in taiwan. Daya has devoted his academic research, his teaching and his community service to integrating these bodies of knowledge into claims for indigenous land rights. He has collaborated with different indigenous communities in traditional territory mapping land use planning and community development projects. Kahlil Apuzen-Ito is a soil scientist and project director with the foundation for agrarian reform cooperatives in Mindanao, a non-governmental organization that serves over 6,000 community-based and indigenous family farmers in Mindanao. Kahlil creates and implements programs on the ground that focus on holistic community development and sustainable agro-ecological farming initiatives. She works collaboratively with indigenous and family farmers, farm workers, technical staff, educators, health practitioners, women and community organizers. Marlon Martin is an Ifugao and heads the save the Ifugao terraces movement, a non-profit heritage conservation group in his home province of Ifugao Philippines. He actively seeks with various academic and conservation organizations both locally and internationally in pursuit of indigenous studies, integration and inclusion in formal school curriculum. Along with Stephen he has established the first community-led Ifugao indigenous peoples education center, the first in the region.Kelli Swazey is an anthropologist and consultant whose research focuses on the relationship between religion and culture in the representation of identities across southeast asia. Dr. Swazey has coordinated the documentary film �Our Land is the Sea'', a documentary about three generations of Bajau family in wakatobi national park, indonesia who are navigating the dramatic cultural and environmental changes that are occurring today. Our moderator is professor Miriam T. Stark, professor of anthropology. She has co-directed field-based archaeological projects across cambodia for nearly 25 years with cambodia's ministry of culture and fine arts and the APSARA authority. Dr. Stark's archaeological projects blend research with capacity building for Khmer archaeologists and include heritage management in their long-term research designs. She has also worked among the kalinga in the northern Philippines. I look forward to hearing from the panel members. So I'll turn it over to you Miriam and Stephen Acabado and to the magnificent panel behind them who you can't see but who have been responsible for planning since June.

Miriam Stark: I also want to thank all of the panelists and guy for introducing us. This is going to be a really interesting and wonderful opportunity for us to share ideas and try to sort of frame the entire series by defining terms and talking about what we mean. I did suggest it actually to Boboy, to Stephen Acabado, as a starting point for engaged scholarship because we're crossing different subfields and even different fields in our expertise. So my job here is to moderate and I'm going to start with a series of questions that have to do with engagement as a concept: what is engagement, how does engagement influence your research and development work, how do communities respond to engagement approaches and how can we use community engagement to impact the future of research across the social sciences. Let me start first with Daya and Boboy.

Stephen Acabado: okay I think that Daya didn't unmute so I'm probably going first. So when we planned this webinar series so this is part of a larger project that has a Routledge volume coming out hopefully in the next six months to 12 months but our goal really is to highlight engaged research and how our work and the work of our colleagues in the asia pacific region seeks to involve the communities that they work with. We wanted to provide a venue where we are able to talk about engaged work, not just something of an outreach but providing a space for the communities to be involved in what we do and being a stakeholder and investing as in my work in archaeology and in their heritage. So we wanted to focus on engagement as a form of capacity building and in return or as a consequence as a result we'll produce or we're co-producing knowledge and later co-administration as Daya's work in Taiwan exemplifies.

Da-wei Kuan: I'm going to follow uh Stephen's discussion that there is a term participatory research right but in my opinion engagement is more than participation. Participation is you go there, being part of an activity but engagement is more than that it's binding by promise so you have your commitment to the community. You have to think about what's your contribution to the community or what's what your research can do for this community so it's not just going there or being part of the activity but you have to have a long-term consideration and commitment to you know mutually benefit each other. That's my response to Stephen.

Miriam Stark: Thanks, can I ask Marlon to speak next?

Marlon Martin: Hi everyone. From the community side when you talk about engagement it's actively involving the locals or the members of the community in the research. Now we have an experience and I think it's not unique among Ifugaos to be always the object of research every time somebody from outside comes to do some research work in the area. As for the experience of the Ifugao we have been the objects of research since time immemorial so it's rare and it's only now that we're actually having researchers who are including the locals or the members of the community to actually explore the research area you know a more active participation of the locals. So it's because it's not only the researchers going to benefit from the research and of course the research has to be premised on what benefits would the communities derive from it and not just to satisfy the objective of the researcher himself or herself. So it's as Daya mentioned an engaged research is something that would benefit both the community and the researcher well if it's not a common benefit actually.

Miriam Stark: Thanks could I just ask Marlon for you to go into a little bit more detail? You have a situation with people right here on this webinar where we have the whole history of development of a relationship and the continuation. I think it might be helpful for some people who are listening to hear about what are good first steps -how do you start with the consultation process, what are some kinds of things you'd like researchers to know especially given that a lot of researchers think their job is done once they have permissions in hand from the national government and they go to the place

Marlon Martin: Well perhaps I would narrate how we started with our collaborative project with professor Acabado how he started his research in our province. Well at first we never replied to his email because it was just another researcher because we get a lot of researchers a lot of proposals from researchers from outside trying to ask questions about how we live, our culture, our past and it's getting tiring actually because after you help all these people you don't actually see something that would benefit your community in the long run. Now the Ifugaos are probably the the most studied ethnolinguistic group in the asia pacific region and a lot of anthropologists have been doing all their research here since the time of the spaniards and the americans so much so that the people in the academe are more knowledgeable of the Ifugao than the Ifugao themselves. So it's rare to have researchers like when you know as for me my first encounter with somebody from outside who wanted to do some research in Ifugao is when Dr. Acabado sent his research proposal where there's actually an active or there's a part there where the community is supposed to be an active participant. So it took us a while to consider this because of course we need to present this to our organization. I have to present it to the board of directors. These are elders of the communities actually and of course most of them are like, okay so another researcher. But I said I think this might be a bit different from the other researchers because we would be actively participating in whatever he's going to do although we don't have archaeologists in our organization. But they said well the elders advise that for as long as you follow whatever is required by the local government or the national government I think they were referring to the national commission on indigenous peoples because we have this tedious process of you know the free prior informed consent process. Of course the first actual meeting with Dr. Acabado was when we had people from the local government, from the national government and other researchers who are doing their research in the area and notable personalities in our community and when Dr. Acabado represented his research proposal because I think it was unanimous with reservations, especially from the elders who have been used to having these researchers in our province. But when the research started when we started with our work we realized as members of the community that we were actually doing something not just for the researcher but mainly for ourselves because we are also literally digging up our own history and it was our first time for most of us who are members of the community who participated. It was our first time to participate in actual archaeological digs though we've heard of a lot of people doing diggings well archaeology and other types of diggings in our mountains but it's our first time to actually participate in an archaeological dig and we brought in students to the side. We have members of the community visiting the archaeological site and it gets more and more exciting every time. We include more people in the research process so it's not just the dig. After every time we do the field work we present the initial findings to the communities. We show them the artifacts and you get a lot of these responses especially from the elder members of the communities who would be talking a lot about all these artifacts. It's like they're trying to remember everything because all these things no longer exist but if you bring them all together and the archaeologist would show them the artifacts and ask them questions as to what would this possibly be and they all have these answers to all these archaeological questions so it brings out a lot of community memory also and that's community participation actually. You know, interpretation of their own past. I can say more but I'll give chance to the others.

Miriam Stark: That's a great start. Thanks a lot. You know in North America our experience really comes only through repatriation in that way where different descendant communities have been working with museums and bringing in elders. Nice to hear your story I'd like to turn to Kahlil because she has also quite an interesting case study of the evolution of her organization and it rests on a very deep and long-term relationship with the local communities

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: Thanks Miriam and thanks to the panel for putting this together. If I may, I'd like to show some slides to give you more of a picture of what we've done and actually our organization was founded by labor leaders as well as farm leaders from the community that we serve so it's already a partnership to begin with. If I may, I'd like to share the slides now. So this is one of the cooperatives that we work with just to give you the history. So for us community engagement is a dynamic process of learning how to work collaboratively with our communities to address community needs and our long-term relationship with our community has helped us actually evolve as an organization. I want to first just give you an idea of where we are located. We started first organizing Davao del Norte here in Mindanao the southern island of the Philippines but then we spread out and I'll give you a bit of a history of how that was. So in 1984 way back I've actually known these communities since then. My father was a labor union organizer and also a lawyer who was organizing agricultural plantation workers in the banana plantations in Davao del Norte and in 1988 when the government issued the comprehensive agrarian reform program which allowed plantation agricultural lands to be redistributed to the plantation workers there was very little government funding as well as very little assistance that would help carry it out but seeing it as a potential to actually uplift the plantation workers from poverty the labor union leaders that my father organized and my father came together and founded our organization. So in the very beginning they were working more towards gaining land for the farm cooperatives and organizing the farm cooperatives and they also have to start creating contracts with the multinationals who were the buyers at that time. However they didn't realize that the contracts they were getting into were worked against the cooperatives and they were so onerous to the point where the cooperatives actually became destitute and so they as an organization had to figure out a way to aggregate those contracts and create a fair market contract and created a contract that benefited the cooperatives more and that was the banana production and purchase agreement that became a model for banana aggression reform beneficiaries actually in the Philippines. So that was actually groundbreaking at that time. I should say that during these times from 1984 actually way before 1984 up to these times our leaders were facing threats and their lives were also under threat and sadly some of them have lost their lives. However all the changes that we've done through the organization all that work as a team have benefited the cooperatives to the point where their economic livelihoods have improved and they were now able to send their children to school, they were able to afford hospitalization and they became an economic and even political force in their own communities and they also helped other communities in need. So but they didn't stop there we didn't stop growing there because actually in 2003 we were approached by the tagabawa bagobo community in sibulan close to davao city and they asked us to help them create organic farm cooperatives an

d that's when we started moving towards brainstorming and exploring sustainable agriculture and how that could be and then not just to create organic farms but actually make it successful such that the farmers can also market their produce in a secure way and so we create an organic marketing arm and we also had to expand and have more staff that were skilled not only in financial management and farm management but also in marketing and from 2014 onwards to now we are trying to look more into how do we develop sustainability not only ecologically economically but also socially so that's how we've really evolved as an organization working together with our communities to to keep on growing and address their needs. This is a picture of the CARP, the comprehensive agrarian form beneficiaries who were striking at that time and this is my father a long time ago organizing and these are the staff who were recruited to help the agrarian reform beneficiaries to improve to train them in financial as well as farm management and also bookkeeping and all these little details of how to run a cooperative. These are also our second liners, the children of the cooperative members and leaders who are now working with us and this is Gemma who is in accounting and princess who is in HR and neneng in organic marketing. This is the sibulan area and back then we they didn't have roads so the bananas had to be carried by the the horses and so now we've actually helped them with road access which helped them improve considerably the state of their bananas once it gets marketed and this is the picture of the packing plant of their organic farm. So just to give you some idea in our core team our research team we actually have indigenous

tribal community members who are farmers working with us and we also work with the farm cooperatives and production staff and farm workers to discuss our observation of the farms. We also work with the tribal elders to figure out what were the past histories of the farms as well as parsed agricultural practices and we extend networks to other organic farmers, biodynamic farmers, agricologists and crop consultants who could probably help us as well. So we try to extend and have a broad discussion and our community engaged research is really an interdisciplinary approach and this is just the basic I would say because there is an other and I think everyone who's worked with indigenous folks would know and us also farmers in a level there's an other that we're looking at that may not be there and it's in a different kind of discipline. So we on the very basic level we look at the health of the soil, the plants, the diversity, what we're putting in there, the hydrology and the landscape and then perhaps we're still figuring this out but we're also starting to study cosmology which is something that the indigenous community that we're working with have actually integrated in their agricultural practices and it's something that we're still looking into. On a larger level in the farm and cooperative level we look at land management. We work with different teams to look at this and we also talk about the infrastructure such as water access or road access that could be prohibiting the production. Then we also look at the market access and I say that because we want to go beyond just bananas. We want to diversify as much as possible

. We would like to have more indigenous crops in there to really diversify the place and have something where it feels relevant to the community but we also need to create that market. So there's this discussion of what those can be and we need to look at the economics all the time whenever we introduce something or they want to talk about and they want to introduce something into the farm. How much is that going to cost and will it be doable as a cooperative? We also look at relationships between family and the farm worker farmer relationships if there is a farm worker and the cooperative relationships that could be effective production the politics and of course the the culture, farmer perspective and indigenous knowledge systems that could be affecting the production and just a bit of an example this is me working with one of our board of directors who is also a cooperative leader mario mandalunes. He's one of our leaders who's really fought for quite some time and we are showing him here a gps map of his farm and he gave us a field tour and we had to help rehabilitate these farms that were badly hit by a disease in the banana area. This is our team who are from the tagabawa bagobo community, will, noli and emilyn and they're helping actually look for local cover crops that can be used as legumes and nitrogen sources for their own community because we're trying as much as possible not to put anything from from outside so that's just a brief picture hopefully of of our work in terms of community engagement in research as well as how it changed our organization.

Miriam Stark: I point out in just this one panel we can see that successful engagement can take lots of different kinds of models and they cross cut different social sciences and natural sciences some researchers are already part of the indigenous communities in which they do work and Daya is an example. Some researchers like Boboy are outsiders who approach communities in which they want to do research and establish long-term relationships and some researchers always merge practice with their research and they approach communities with the explicit goal of engagement but there are some commonalities and we see this also in some of the more successful archaeological collaborations outside of the ones we're hearing about and outside of the other collaborations we're hearing about here. One is that participation requires invitation. This is a little bit new I think for anthropologists and anthropological archaeologists like I said usually where I work according to the ministry of culture. I just need this piece of paper but it's a lot more complicated than that and it should be. Outsiders have to accommodate local priorities. Flexibility is really necessary in response to local needs and one point that both Marlon and Kahlil just made is that putting elders at the center of the decision making is really key not just working with the younger colleagues in the community who might be more familiar with outsiders and the cosmopolitan life but making sure that all the voices are heard and long-term commitment to community is another. It's always a challenge to bring non-local approaches and frameworks whether from the social or the natural sciences to collaborative projects and with that in mind there are power dynamics that come out and and everyone who engages in research and works in communities has to in some way or another deal with differential power dynamics in the communities where they work and so a question for us is when and how can we qualify that communities are really engaged? What does it mean to be engaged, especially when communities themselves have all kinds of internal hierarchies and factions and so on. So for panel members I'd like to ask how did you communicate to the community that you wanted to involve them in the research? We've already talked a little bit or heard a little bit from Marlon about how they initially saw Boboy's community engaged research proposal. I wondered if other people would like to talk about that and if we could start with Kahlil because she's just given us a good background.

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: I'm sorry miriam I had a hard time with the sound can you please repeat again

Miriam Stark: So I'm just asking you to talk about power dynamics and examples of how you deal with differential power dynamics communities. You had offered to give some examples

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: Sure well for us there is going to be differential power dynamics with every community that you come across and our response depends on the context and where we can come in to influence the situation if we should that is still respectful to the community process in the short and long term. So our process we usually look have a full and thorough assessment and try to hear from different community members and organization staff in order to understand the context better from varying perspectives, then we weigh the pros and cons as an organization according to guiding principles and then we make a decision on how to proceed and these guiding principles we've found over the years are first respecting the community's need for their own time to process their own situation. Second is respecting their voices and when I told someone about this they're like why we always respect. No actually there's going to be a time where the community might say we actually want to have this mining here and that's really hard but you need to give your respect that that's the decision and this is the reason why. The other guiding principle we have is to be at the most fundamental level to understand that our role is as a peace builder and a bridge to achieve a more unified sustainable goal and so we cannot really divide communities. We have to work towards uniting them to care for the common welfare of each other regardless of rank and it sounds ideal but this is actually we do try to work with this in different ways and it's really a difficult line to take sometimes but we do do that. So I don't know if you want to hear an example. I'm happy to share a couple of examples with you of how that plays out for us but I'm not sure if I'm taking other people's time.

Miriam Stark: Maybe one? How about one example?

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: So one of them is the power imbalance among men and women in one of the communities that we work with where in this one community the education of boys is prioritized over girls and so teenage pregnancy is very high in this community and most of the leaders are men. We didn't really start a project to address that and we just wanted to create a project that addressed food security but in creating this project an organic backyard project we recruited two women and three men from the community and we teamed up with them to conceptualize the project. We all designed the project together and the two women were very shy in the beginning. Initially they were uncomfortable or nervous about speaking in the group. They also have very little means of livelihood but they still needed to share their ideas and so they helped design even to the point of how to monitor and how to assess the project. Basically there's a lot of back and forth and the project was successful. It benefited about over 800 people but the best part is the growth that we saw in these women. They became influential leaders because of the kinds of training that they received throughout the course of the project from not just livelihood but also in communication skills, participatory action tools that help them create a vision for themselves, for their family and communities which they also taught their husbands and their children and by doing visioning together and actually analyzing their dynamics together as a family over time these families and husbands and children started supporting their mothers more in the housework and in their roles in the community. So it wasn't something that we were dividing the men and the women. They have the tools, they use it and it was more of a united decision that we want you to succeed as my mother or as my wife. It was so successful and the growth was so very obvious actually they started sharing their skills and also the tools to their neighbors, to community men women and youth and that created a domino effect of just a lot of sharing throughout the community and yielded more growth not just in the women but also the men and the youth. So that's an example of everyone working together and not pitting people against each other.

Miriam Stark: Yeah that's great as much as I love the Philippines we should probably expand to other parts of asia and southeast asia. Kelli did you want to jump in here?

Kelli Swazey : Hi selamat siang from Indonesia everybody. I would love to just add a little bit about this idea of power dynamics within communities and just to sort of echo what the other panelists have been saying. So the project that I'm speaking of specifically was a film project and also a sort of curriculum development project that we were working on with a community of semi-nomadic individuals and people in southeast sulawesi in wakatobi national park and they go by the name the Sama Bajau. So In the course of working on the film that we were producing as part of this project we realized that you know as much as you talk about the power dynamics of working with a marginalized community or a discriminated against community vis a vis a university or the state and all of the power dynamics that happen in a sort of vertical sense hierarchically in those kinds of relationships and systems we also needed to pay attention to the various opinions and hierarchies within the community and so one of the ways that we tried to approach that was as other panelists have been saying you know having and developing these long-term relationships and building trust with the communities. It wasn't just a helicopter project where we dropped in and dropped out. We had had over 10 years of contact and relationship with this particular community so we were aware of the different issues and the different opinions and sometimes contrasting views within the community itself and for our film project we tried to look multi-generationally because that was one of the points of tension was about traditions and practices and how different generations within the community viewed those traditions and practices and whether they should be maintained or not as well as seeking out marginalized communities within the community itself so working for instance with different people from different gender identity backgrounds such as transgender individuals who are a very important part of the ritual life of this community but often their voices are left out by the leaders who represent them because they are not considered to be appropriate spokespeople for the community. So I think when we make this point about power dynamics it's not just to look at the larger power dynamics of the academic or state systems that we are working in but also to be really aware of the ways in which we can present multiple perspectives even if they're contrasting perspectives instead of simplifying especially issues about heritage down into one narrative, one sort of homogeneous view of a community because of course these kinds of things are never homogeneous and they are never one definition. So I think that an important aspect of the work as we get into these ideas of representing heritage or working on heritage projects is to think about ways that we can build these multiple perspectives into our projects from the very beginning.

Miriam Stark: Thanks Kelly, that's really helpful. In some ways I think the issues that we face as researchers from the outside are very different from the issues we face as either researchers from the inside or people on the inside who are collaborating with outside researchers and Daya I don't know if I can ask you to do this next but I'd like to ask you to talk about some of the kinds of control issues that happen within communities that are really important for outside researchers to know about during the process and that we aren't privy to. Because in my experience anyway the communities I've worked with in southeast asia are incredibly gracious and they're very nice and they don't want me to feel bad and so they don't tell me things sometimes and it takes a long time to form trust until like a no and yet we can't really resolve issues. So would you be willing to speak on that a little in your experience

Da-wei Kuan: Yes thank you miriam. Firstly I would like to say that I'm going to echo Marlon because I think Marlon plays a very important role in the cooperative collaboration between academic researchers in the community because Marlon kind of redirects the research interest to the community interest like the building of the indigenous people's educational center in the community that's for the interest of of the community. So maybe in the very beginning the research team didn't think about it but Marlon helped the team to figure out what's the need of the community so in this way he can redirect the academic research resources to benefit the community. That's my echo to the importance of the key persons in this process. Secondly I would like to say something about the issue of control. I think it's important to have some component in the process of engagement. One thing is we need to have the translation of knowledge and academic researchers might have our own purpose and not just our own purpose but also our own language of speaking things. So how do we have proper translation of the academic thinking to a local or community way of understanding. I think that that is important and also I think the decision-making process is important. We need to have the community participate in the decision making. For example how fast or how slow the research should go or go on. Should we stop somewhere or stop at some point --can we go a little quicker? I think we need to respect the opinion and the situation and consideration from the community. Also I think control over the outcome is important. The control of the knowledge translation, the control of the decision-making process and the control of the outcome I mean the interpretation of the outcome. How can the community participate in the interpretation of the outcome and the application right like what you and Stephen did. The artifact you got from the explanation .what's the application of that. You have to respect the community's will. So my answer is the control over the knowledge translation, the control over the decision making process and also the control over the application interpretation of outcome. They are all important.

Miriam Stark: Yeah thanks, I didn't mean to do this but I can't resist just mentioning a little bit about my field work with the kalinga because I was treated so well and I was there for quite a long time for my dissertation work but it was right after the Marcos government had tried to force the chico river dam on the cordillera peoples and the area where I worked in kalinga province was going to be flooded so the communities I worked in one of them had direct very negative experiences with the philippine government and one of the issues for our project which involved people from university of the Philippines, national museum ateneo de manila and university of arizona was the control of knowledge. That's a really big issue I think that anthropologists probably need to think more about and so of the several communities I worked with in the Pasil river valley, one had been really traumatized by the Marcos regime and so there was a long process of negotiation and finally we decided I couldn't make maps. I couldn't do the work I wanted to do and that was really important because they said if you make these maps suppose the philippine government gets them and the last time the government got them they took our elders up in helicopters you know and threaten them so I think control is a big issue but I hope that Marlon is still connected here and that he can speak to his role which Daya was mentioning not just as a liaison but thinking about what it is that in your experience good engagement and and serious researchers should know about what happens on the inside that they can't participate in but that they need to be aware of. oh we seem to have lost contact. All right we can come back to that later. When we're talking about control and thinking about how to make communities investments sustainable on the one hand there are these different goals particularly for researchers. On the one hand we go in and some like Kelli are there explicitly to make a documentary which is a shared documentary but she still wants to finish that work. Kahlil goes in and she's going explicitly to help people with their new banana co-op and so on but there are a lot of people who are going in and we want to do our own research and there must be a way that we can engage that's both equitable and translatable and so the next section of our webinar focuses on this level of engagement and theorizing and how like Daya was saying do you translate academic work -work that's research into work for the general public and to what extent does that matter. oh sorry Marlon you're back let's talk a little bit more about control if we still have your connection

Marlon Martin: Well when we started with the project of course our organization cannot be the lone representative of the community so we had to do a lot of consultations with the different levels of our community. Now even if we are an indigenous community you're also part of the national government and we're part of the local government which means we need to talk with the mayors, we need to talk with the governor we need to talk with the national commission on indigenous peoples. But somehow this is where we realize that there are actually a lot of conflicts between not that we don't know but there are we felt and we experienced the I didn't unmute myself. So there's always this conflict between customary laws and state laws like for instance the national commission on indigenous peoples requires us to do this standard process of consent taking which is not actually customary but in fact it's for the most part not how uh you get the consent of people in our community. But still you need to comply with the requirements of the government if you don't want you know Dr. Acabado kicked out of the province. So we had to comply with all these legal requirements but at the same time and which is more important for us being members of the community that we comply with the requirements of our customary laws. For instance on who makes the final decision as to whether or not we can dig on private property. It's not the government so even if we do all this consent process taking following the procedure prescribed by the national commission of indigenous peoples but if the land owner because it's a private property if the land owner would say no then we cannot. We cannot enforce it. We cannot claim that no we're going to do the archaeological dig because we went through the FPIC process of the government. So there's always a need to balance also what to and what not to comply with in terms of complying with the requirements of the government and of customary law. So you know we tried our best to comply with both and to at least satisfy especially the requirements of the national government we also need to consult with aside from our elected officials we need to consult with the other members of the community like we have politicians or not traditional leaders or not recognized elders in the community who cannot be the ones to give the final consent because even if you have all the legal papers if most of the you know the traditional leaders or elders in the community would say no then probably we should not continue the project if there's no blessings from from the elders of the community. So because we are a community organizing organization, we do community organizing and I think it's basic in community organizing that you need to always identify your core group in the community. Now who's the core group as far as an archaeological research is concerned? Of course the landowner, members of the influential, elders of the descendant communities. This is the core group and once you've gone through the legal processes of government then the final consultation should have to be had with this core group. Now when in 2012 we were supposed to do the first FPIC process. I don't know if it's a

blessing or it's a misfortune but the FPIC process in 2012 was suspended just when we were about to start with the archaeological research which means legally the suspension of this FPIC process means there's no FPIC process to talk about. So it was actually fortunate for us but we had to go through the traditional consent process. We have to perform the ritual. We need to talk with the elders, we need to talk with the community leaders, and everyone said yes. Even the gods said yes because when we performed the ritual it was like the mumbacki or you know our traditional ritual specialist says oh uh all of the omen is good which means you can proceed with whatever you want to do in the old kiyyangan village. We also invited the government people during the performance of this traditional consent process. You have to try at least to please everyone and there would always be conflict even within the community as to whether or not you are actually doing it for everyone. Is everyone satisfied, is everyone giving their consent if you're going to go on with the project. It was not it a smooth sailing experience for us as the community counterpart we get a lot of criticisms also from other members of the community but we know that we're going to go through that and by conducting all this every now and then we would invite all our critics especially all these people who would always say ah what do you know you are young people. You get a lot of criticism from elders who think what would young people know about the old kiyyangan village? What would young people know about you know something that has been forgotten even by majority of the members of the community but when we gather them and which we always do that's one of the reasons why we established our

community heritage center so that we can have a venue where we can discuss all these things where everybody can sit and you know present their whatever position they have as far as the project is concerned, as far as culture is concerned and we do this a lot you know bringing in traditional leaders, bringing in traditional elders into the heritage center and then we discuss about archaeology. We discuss heritage conservation and it is through this process that the members of the community get more and more educated and they get to appreciate the objectives of the research so it's a continuing dialogue actually between the researchers and among the community members also. So even if like every after field school Dr. Acabado and his crew would go back to their own respective countries and then it would be the community who stays behind and it doesn't end there. As Daya said, it's a continuing thing. We sit down, we talk about things. We talk about these pottery sherds, we talk about these faunal remains and it gets the community more and more involved so a wider part of the community gets more and more involved if you continue with all these dialogues.

Miriam Stark: Thanks but one issue that comes up a lot is that you could continue dialogues but what do you do when people continue to not want the work done? I think for most researchers who have much field experience working in communities that are not their own and maybe also their own. Probably all of us have come up against a situation where there was enough internal disagreement that we had to stop on some direction of some project and I think one of the issues apparently that's being raised in the q and a's and that anthropologists need to talk about is how indigenous groups and study communities whether they're descending communities or not they can really be exploited and that's been a problem in anthropology that maybe the social sciences more generally that people have ended up over ruling local desires. So I don't know if anyone on the panel wants to talk about this but do you want to very briefly give an example of where you were engaged in collaborative research and it just didn't work and you had to stop because I think that that actually is a sign of a good researcher. I mean I have my own examples where I've got permission up and down the road even from the head man but there's people who don't want us to do the work. At that point that's when we say no. I wondered if other people could talk about that anyone

Da-wei Kuan: Okay I say something not really directly answering your question but I think it's relevant because when you guys were talking about to invoke more community participation with different voices from different ages and different genders it really came to my mind that how do we have people you know really involved. It's sometimes difficult. I mean for example I know in many many cases that women do have a lot of knowledge in this community but also in many cases that a woman will be over marginalized in the public space right so I think it is important to create some occasion. For example it's more comfortable if you go to the government office and go for a meeting it's very open. It's the man coming to the meeting and talking a lot right but if we go to for example some dinner table sit down and chat then this kind of more comfortable location will bring in a more diverse voice to come out right. So I think that it's important for me in terms of what if some people in the community already disagree. They don't want this project to go on. I think communication is important and giving more information is important. I mean everybody makes their decision based on the information they have right now so once you're trying to have the research that goes on then you need to provide more information for decision making. You're not going to replace people, you're not going to make decisions for them but you can provide more information for their reference. That's my response to your question.

Miriam Stark: Thanks I see some heads nodding. Kahlil, did you want to add something to that?

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: I agree with many of the points that Daya and our panelists have mentioned and I think we did have normally it's usually not us going to the community, it's usually the community asking us to come in because they need help and the research that was created because we wanted to help organic farming to be more sustainable and right now it's really there's a lot of problems with organic being sustainable not just in the Philippines but also globally so I agree it's very difficult to bring marginalized voices and and also providing information is good. One of the things that we try to do is also in addition to providing information helping with tools. And in those tools for them to find their voices in those tools. An example that I've tried to do for example when you have a meeting and there are some people who are more vocal because they're more comfortable talking or they're more literate and then I'm talking to farmers who probably cannot read or write what I'm writing on the board. So what I try to do is bring 3d things in or we go to the field. Bring them in a place where they are at their element and that's when things start coming out and the inhibitions start dropping and you put them in the place where they are comfortable. So if you need to go to a kitchen or if you need to go to the farm then do so or bring things in there. So that's one of the things that we've done. Also doing drawings and movements to help things move along and I really agree that how you translate knowledge one of the things that we're trying to work towards is how do we really create a farmer participatory research within a grassroots organization that has very limited resources. And so a lot of the methodologies that we had tried in the beginning don't work. We actually questioned them and the chemistry of all these things does it even matter? What does the farmer see, what do they sense in the field that matters to them for production? So bringing that out and how do they really see this and where do they start gauging when they don't have the numbers that normally so called consultants would have. So I definitely agree with having information and also the tools to really amplify the voices to come out.

Miriam Stark: Flexibility is really key in what you're talking about. Kelli, did you want to say something?

Kelli Swazey: Just to sort of add once we get to the portion talking a little bit more about at least how I just want to I guess say at first I want to sort of recognize a name that I am speaking from

a position of privilege as a western scholar as a white western scholar working in southeast asia and I think miriam you made this point about you know the accommodating nature of a lot of these communities for white western scholars. In my project as well when I came into the field I was working with Gadjah Mada university which is one of the most famous and well-known universities in indonesia. There's a lot of status attached to that so there's double pressure you know it's not just us coming in as foreigners but we're coming in with this very prestigious university sponsorship so I just wanted to talk about a few of the ways that I have tried maybe not perfectly to facilitate more control and more information for the communities that we've worked with in this particular project and I think the first obvious one that everyone has been saying is that we need to involve the communities in the planning from the beginning. That can be difficult at times in academia but I think you know there are ways we can build this into our curriculum and to build it into our classes and into our training as field workers and I think insistence on not just having scholarly products but products that are more accessible for the general public is very important. In terms of this project we were making a film and also providing curricular resources. One of the important things we did was to make the film CC licensed so not only can we use it but anyone can use it anywhere in the world and the community themselves have access to this film to use it in whichever way that they see fit and I think for them that was quite an important point given the fact that so many people have written about Sama Bajau communities and they often don't get to even see or use the products that come out of these research projects.

They had been quite frustrated with scholars who had come in and done recordings of important traditions and songs and oral histories that they wanted to use for their own projects about trying to interpret and also archive their own history because they are mostly an oral community that lives a nomadic lifestyle so they don't have a lot of written documents of their history and so this was one way that we could make sure that that film is online and accessible for them. This is a little bit of oral history that they can use and I think that this in general really has to be essential for future scholarship with any of these communities that we are working with that really needs to be built into the projects. One of the the unexpected benefits of this project and having these kind of like open access documents online was that other Bajau and Sama communities from around southeast asia were able to learn and connect with Sama Bajau communities in indonesia that they didn't know about so I was able to take the film to sabah to samporna to interact with another Bajau community and make connections between these communities and oftentimes they don't see the histories or what's going on with other similar communities around the region unless someone makes it accessible to them or makes them aware of it and I think people really felt that that was a valuable outcome of the project. One other important thing that I think we did was to budget in involvement for the community from the beginning of our project. Marginalized and indigenous communities don't always have the resources to travel to film festivals or to come to universities and so when we were traveling around with this film to have discussions I made sure that there was budget built in to bring our collaborators and people in the film with us so that they could be

there to interact with audiences and talk to them but without having that built into our project budget from the beginning it wouldn't have happened because they didn't have the resources to be able to do that. And I think my final point that I want to make is just to say that I don't think as anthropologists we really can rely on this sort of idea of neutrality as much as we have in the past in terms of the history of colonialism and racism and injustice in our own field. I think when we start these projects we really have to consider from the beginning how these concepts of things like heritage landscape and culture intersect with forms of discrimination, oppression, inequity and those have to be worked into part of the project as well as to reckon with our positions within them and so how do we take this from the beginning of a project, implement it, make sure it's written into our very first grant proposals and then how do we teach this as part of the foundations of fieldwork ethnography and anthropology and I think that's something that we haven't talked enough about in our field and in other related fields that I think can be a point for moving forward

Miriam Stark: Yeah of course I think that we have to start thinking of a much broader definition of success in research and that kind of success means making sure that part of your research outputs are also relevant to the people with whom you're working. If I have a chance or maybe before you could put it up the film that you and Marlon made with your colleagues about Ifugao stories is one example and I also just gave an example of Kelli's collaboration with her bajau colleagues If there's not another really pressing question we have so many q and a questions we're trying to get to them if possible is that okay with everyone maddie's starting to feed them to me. Siddharta Perez is asking if there are approaches the panelists encounter connecting diasporic individuals with indigenous localities. I'm struck with issues of power dynamics brought out by Kahlil and kelly -gender, multi-generational, etc. Are there cases where there's a need to bridge diasporic organizations and indigenous communities anyone uh oh Kahlil I think wants to talk if you can unmute and then maybe Kelli we can't hear you

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: Hey miriam the voice was very low. It was a bit muffled could you please repeat the question

Miriam Stark: Sorry let me get back to that. The question is about are there approaches panelists encounter connecting diasporic individuals with indigenous localities. I'm struck with issues of power dynamics brought out by Kahlil and kelly (gender, multi-generational). Are there cases where there's a need to bridge diasporic organizations and indigenous communities. did you want to respond to that Kahlil or Kelli do you want to talk about something very quickly

Da-wei Kuan: In taiwan you know there are waves of settlers that moved to taiwan. We do have indigenous people, we do have indigenous communities but also you know the han chinese or nowadays the han taiwanese they were kind of diaspora. They left china and moved to taiwan. In one of my research and my students research we are trying to know the experience of settlers, Hakka settlers in Dayan indigenous community and we turn to learn that even though there is a so-called settler colonialism which is kind of exploiting resources from the indigenous land through the settlers but settlers itself might be the victim of colonialism. So I think to kind of unsettle the dichotomy relation between settlers and indigenous people is important to trying to find some common future, to have close cultural cooperation. I think that's an important thing for me from my experience that I learned in Taiwan. Thank you.

Kahlil Apuzen-Ito: Great I agree with that because actually in the communities that we work with there's a lot from the tribal community also to abroad so what was once indigenous now becomes a diaspora and they affect each other. And I think being able to unite on common goals is really [[inaudible]]. I think we are going to be affected by common issues but we're just in different places, climate change being one but also land the issue of land and how you heal the land and that's so critical and knowing that hopefully still some of the indigenous folks have still some of those practices that can perhaps help but some of them lost it. Some of the communities we work with have been militarized so badly that they had to leave their farms and they're just relearning and reconnecting with the land and they are indigenous in that area so I think I [[inaudible]] talk more about the issues instead of being on us versus them and really look at the matters in front of us and start having a conversation about it and see where we can have common grounds thank you

Miriam Stark: Other comments?

Kelli Swazey: I would just add too that when we're talking about heritage and the concept of landscapes I think just echoing what Kahlil and Daya have said that we need to remember that heritage can be used for exclusivist purposes and exclusionary purposes as well as inclusive ones so when we're talking about a critical study of heritage you know we really need to look at these dynamics also of who belongs and who doesn't and how that gets played out in terms especially of people who may be settlers or immigrants or aren't original or indigenous to that community by definition of the state or other institutions and that's something that I see quite a bit in my work in indonesia is that heritage can often be used in this very exclusivist sense and we have to figure out how to capture I think the dynamism of history in which different groups might settle in some place and become part of the history and the traditions and how do we talk about that as part of our work and as part of representation

Miriam Stark: Yeah very very good points that bridge to Daya. There are so many very important questions coming in but I'd like to concentrate on two questions that are coming from maria nela florendo and grace barretto tesoro. Hi grace and the questions are how do researchers know that they are dealing with the right representatives of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples don't just speak with one voice, there's plurality there. And then grace follows up with how do you address conflicts between the community and the objectives of your research? I would like to ask Boboy to talk a little bit too because he's been extremely silent

Stephen Acabado: I'll be on all the 10 panels so I'll have but yeah so thanks for that question actually so as Kelli mentioned engagement should be part of the research design. If you don't have that in your plans it will be very hard to approach the community. You wouldn't know who to approach first if you don't have one, if you didn't do a feasibility trip or if you didn't contact anyone, so communicate. And also just knowing the power dynamics, the culture itself, the community. You're coming from the outside if you don't know anyone so you need to look for someone who you can connect with and in this case in the Philippines most probably will go to in my case I would have to go to the barangay captain or the mayor or the governor but no one really responded to me and even the local community and so I went there as a tourist of course funded by graduate school research fund and I just made it a point to talk to people and it also happened that an Ifugao was in hawaii for grad school so I had an entry point and he was actually the one who introduced me to Marlon and the rest is history. I mean so you really don't know you will have to feel your way in and use your best judgment. As mentioned a while ago all communities are not monolithic. There are power dynamics within the community itself and so sometimes you get caught in the crossfire but you have to make a stance. Sometimes you're not an innocent civilian when you're in the field.

Miriam Stark: Can I just put Daya on the spot? Daya you've worked for years and years and years with communities in taiwan I mean how do you do this? how does this work for you because you also work with communities that are not your own community right so you have to negotiate as well.

Da-wei Kuan: I think regarding to the question how do you know are you dealing with the the right representative of the community it's a very important issue but it's different I mean it differs in different communities but I gradually you know have kind of understanding that you have to look into the the social organization or social structure in the culture at the same time look into the modern transition like the penetration of the modern political power or modern economic power. They all work together with the traditional cultural, traditional social organization and modern political structure. They are all working together so what I learned is firstly you have to look at both. Second there might be multiple representatives in the community. For example in the community I get into I had some chance to know when you are talking about traditional ceremony, talking about the interpretation of culture you have to go to the age group that is still working today in charge of the ceremony but in talking about the land right you have to go to the individual household because it's decided on the household base but if you are talking about how do we come up with a public space or public infrastructure you have to go to the modern political system like the community or village captain because the mixture of traditional culture, social organization and modern political structure they are working together. So be aware of the possibility of multiple representatives. That's the lesson I learned

Miriam Stark: You have to somehow always respect that plurality. yes yes yes so we have lots of good questions still and a couple of them here uh one from lena muhs and one from repa kustipia sort of have to do with the same topic which lena asks as she's wondering how you could discuss how to avoid imposing non-indigenous categories and frameworks of research and thinking onto indigenous communities. Then Repa sort of follows up by saying you know it varies from each place how do you manage this, how do you work within translatable approaches. So you know you're coming as a researcher and you have your paradigms from whatever field you're in and how you avoid using those external frameworks with indigenous communities in ways that are problematic. Kelli did you want to say something about that you're smiling

Kelli Swazey: I mean it's a really important question and a difficult one to answer in a short period of time. I think we can't avoid bringing in our own paradigms and to think that we can is probably pretty futile. I think what we can do is number one remember that indigenous communities are empowered in themselves they're you know organized they oftentimes really know what they want and so this idea that there's a dynamic that we're bringing in these overwhelming paradigms that they can't handle maybe is one that we could dispense with entirely. It's a collaboration and it's a meeting of two different groups and I think if we pay attention to power dynamics and we listen to what's going on and I think listening and taking feedback is a really important mechanism that also needs to be built into projects. This feeds back into the idea that we aren't going to please everyone all the time and there are going to be different opinions within the community and so giving as much of a space for those grievances those concerns to be aired and working within the community functions in the way in which they normally deal with conflict can be helpful in that way but I think many indigenous communities today and all of them that I've worked with they understand that this is part of the process of having better representation and also being part of the scholarly conversation that's going on about them and around them and so I think it's just recognizing that yeah academia has very different ways of talking about and approaching these communities but if we work as a team if we work as collaborators and this can be in the research project itself, in the research design and also in the products that we are then granting a more equal footing to everybody involved and that changes our paradigm as well as us changing their paradigm right

Da-wei Kuan: This kind of reminds me that to have a fully represented community is not as easy as a mathematical issue like statistics. You do sampling so you very quickly get all the samples you need. It's a dynamic process so we have to admit that the limitation is almost impossible for you in the very beginning to have someone that trusts you and at the same time can represent all the the community but be aware of the limitation and knowing that you are trying and trying to expand the network to be more inclusive. That's also the lesson I learned in my experience.

Miriam Stark: thank you. thanks that's great

Stephen Acabado: Well I think the term is flexibility. So I came in and you know my work was all about self-organization and so I don't think Marlon even knows what self-organization is but I still write about them I still write about self-organization but the interaction with the community and also the idea of decolonizing our work provides a space for for including or providing a space for indigenous epistemologies and Marlon has a good story to tell about the age of the terraces the two thousand year old terraces and what 'old' is in Ifugao epistemology.

Miriam Stark: Marlon you're on. He wants you to tell a story you're muted sorry

Marlon Martin: I think Dr. Acabado is referring to well we had this conference in in UP and there was this academic who asked the question how do I feel as an Ifugao that the research of Dr. Acabado states that the terraces are much younger than two thousand years old and I said maybe I should ask you how you feel because the two thousand year old thing didn't come from us. we never said, Ifugaos never said it's 2000 years old it's mainly coming from you people from the academics who have been teaching us at the rice terraces are 2000 years old. The Ifugaos never said that. We have a different way of reckoning time when our ancestors when our grandmothers our grandfathers talk about how old the terraces are it's always about oh they're as old as they were constructed during the time of the ancestors it was your great great grandfather so and so. They never said two thousand although we have a figure of two thousand but they never actually said two thousand so it didn't come from us. So how do you feel so yeah anyway about this interpretation of archaeological findings? I think where you know how the community would get more meaning from these archaeological discoveries is it's up to the community to actually make use of them. You know it's not how do the communities interpret technical archaeological findings when all these things that are being said by Dr. Acabado are so technical talking all about these scientific things but for us like you know you don't you don't look at indigenous peoples as like they're all trapped in the past. Indigenous peoples in the Philippines are not you know you don't just you know every time you talk about indigenous peoples every time you mention about you mention indigenous peoples they're like people who don't go to school, people who don't participate in the modern world. Yes we do. We are active participants in the modern world and we also make use of scientific discoveries to make use of all these new findings that scientists come up with like how we make all these archaeological findings relevant to us as a people. You know we have traditional knowledge indigenous people should have traditional knowledge. We have traditional history, we have traditional memories of all the things that you're still trying to research and you know we make use of your scientific findings to justify. I don't know why we even have to do that to justify our traditional knowledge. So at first when we were working with Dr. Acabado we were like more on the science side and then when we were getting more and more results we were like okay so that's how you're going to that's how we're going to explain this practice of our people you know our traditional knowledge about the forest about the rice terraces because when you discuss about when you talk purely of traditional knowledge of the Ifugaos it gets relegated to something that's backward. You know because indigenous people are backward but when you back that up with more scientific things then it gets more acceptable to the general public like in textbooks. Now we don't you don't usually see traditional knowledge being mentioned in textbooks in the Philippines but if you back that up with you know archaeological terms then it gets more acceptable so that's how we do it. The indigenous knowledge of the Ifugaos gets more acceptable in textbooks, in reference books if it's if it's backed up by archaeology because archaeologists and archaeology is such a big word so that's how we do it like how do we make our traditional knowledge, our indigenous knowledge relevant to the modern world because our young people would also shy away from our indigenous knowledge because they are growing up in a very modern world. So all these things that usually are dismissed as superstition oh that's just the belief of your ancestors you back that up with science you back that up with the research that you're doing with your collaborators with people from outside like what you're doing they were actually using Dr. Acabado okay so I think there's mutuality in this because of course he built his career on archaeological research in Ifugao and at the same time the Ifugaos as our organization we're actually also using his research as as a way of advancing our advocacy on the acceptance of or the institutionalization of our traditional knowledge. Now in our indigenous people's education program in the Philippines you don't you will never see something that oh according to elder so and so according to our culture bearer so and so this is how we're supposed to take care of the forest this is suppose this is how we take care of our rice terraces. No you make use of it according to the findings of dr so and so and it gets more mainstream it gets more acceptable but we hope that there will come a time that our traditional knowledge, the knowledge of our elders would be perhaps not the same level as those with phds but it becomes more acceptable. It becomes it gets easily acceptable by the academic world

Miriam Stark: I've been asked to give this screen to dr rutherford for one minute because you had some very important things to say Marlon even if you asked where you were going and we feel like this is a really good point to make a transition and we'll give this screen to dr rutherford and then guy will come in and he'll ask each of you for your closing remarks so thank you very much for letting me moderate.

Danilyn Rutherford: Great I think there was just there was a question about the new engaged research grant program and the first thing to say is just I really recommend everyone go to the website because there's full information about eligibility and what the application process will be like and so on but someone asked a very interesting question whether the research grant can be extended to communications practitioners who would like to pursue theorizing from the grassroots or indigenous theorizing from the lens of communication and the program will be open to you know applicants again applying with partners who are not academics but applicants who have you know phds are enrolled in doctoral programs in anthropology or related field and I think if you can make the case that communications is a field related to anthropology which it seems like it would be you know in many of these situations I think we would definitely welcome applications from you know from you from someone who's doing that kind of work so we really want as many people as possible to take advantage of this opportunity so thanks

Guy Charlton: All right I'd like to thank all the panelists and it's a really interesting and wonderful discussion and I hope we can carry it on after in the future weeks as we go through every panel. I would like to remind everyone that there'll be another panel next week on september 23rd at 7

p.m in north american time and then september 24th taiwan and sydney time sydney 1pm and then taiwan at 11 o'clock and the other thing I'd like to remind people is attached to the information on the web page is a survey. If you have time we'd really appreciate it if you'd fill that out and I guess at that we can close things up or if anyone has some final statements or words they want to say. Otherwise we'll bid everyone adieu. Miriam?

Miriam Stark: I just want to thank everyone for taking time. I'm really delighted to see everyone on screen. It's wonderful when we can be in the same physical space but this is really productive and I'm excited about what kinds of insights and new relationships will develop as a result of this important series that Daya and boboy have organized so thank you to everyone.

Guy Charlton : Well thank you and then we'll leave it there and we look forward to next week. thank you thank you bye