Stephen Acabado, director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, has received a $200,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a project that’s intended to strengthen Indigenous community networks in the Philippines and Taiwan.
The grant is a complement to a larger project funded by the Luce Foundation, the Program for Early Modern Southeast Asia, which the center is implementing with other academic partners.
The community networks grant will expand efforts begun by the Ifugao in the Phillippines and Tayal in Taiwan to document their heritage, with a focus on practices, knowledge and history related to modern-day climate change. The project will enhance existing collaboration between them and add a third Indigenous group to the mix: the Agta of Bicol (Philippines).
Acabado, who is an associate professor of anthropology in the UCLA College, has been working with the Ifugao for more than a decade, and with the Tayal for about half that time. He considers the decolonization of knowledge to be part of his work as a scholar and has worked with the Indigenous communities whom he studies to develop instructional materials on their history and heritage that can be integrated into national and local educational curricula.
