The Amphibious Villagers of Indonesia(economist.com)
economist.com
The Amphibious Villagers of Indonesia
https://www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/06/12/the-amphibious-villagers-of-indonesia
14 comments
> When you invite guests in, you say "Please, come up!"
japanese also does this idiomatically: the verb 上がる "to rise" can be used for "to enter (a house)", which gives rise to expressions like お上がりください for "please come in"
japanese also does this idiomatically: the verb 上がる "to rise" can be used for "to enter (a house)", which gives rise to expressions like お上がりください for "please come in"
So life carries on just fine despite floods? Whoda thunkit
Well they should look at their own sea gypsies - bajau people, how they live and lived in the past. Its wonderful to experience them and also read upon their history - in the past they had literal floating villages, migrating with seasonal currents, in complete tune with their environment.
In 50s IIRC forming government forced them to have stationary location/address, so they stubbornly agreed but still have all houses rising from the ocean on pillars, just anchored to some rocky cliff.
I love visiting that country, so vast, so diverse, so exotic to common western reality.
In 50s IIRC forming government forced them to have stationary location/address, so they stubbornly agreed but still have all houses rising from the ocean on pillars, just anchored to some rocky cliff.
I love visiting that country, so vast, so diverse, so exotic to common western reality.
The problem is, Indonesia is so diverse. Bajau people and the Javanese (the ones discussed in the article) have nothing in similar in their way of life.
Asking Javanese to learn from Bajau people is like asking ordinary Americans to learn from the Inuit, just because they happen to be citizen of same nation state.
Asking Javanese to learn from Bajau people is like asking ordinary Americans to learn from the Inuit, just because they happen to be citizen of same nation state.
I looked it up and it's quite fascinating indeed but I cannot stop thinking about sanitary challenges...
Unfortunately, this is one of those scroll-jacking sites so all the images are piled up along with the text making this link almost useless.
The paywall is so huge I can't even view the title of the article lol, bye Economist
Tldr; in a country full of floods another part has started flooding.
you forgot the point: no one cares, because it's been like that forever.
Comment not worth the bits the many processors serving http requests have to fire off.
The flooding the article is talking about is relatively recent so the disaster aspect is real. It catches people by surprise. But when the flood has been there since time immemorial, people find ways to adapt and stop treating it as a disaster.
Where I live, houses are built on the water, even today. Poles are driven in the bottom, and you build on top. For streets, they pour shit ton of rubble to displace the water, then put tarmac on top. In the past, there were almost no roads at all, people moved around in boats. You want to buy food - you go with your boat to the "local market", which is just a bunch of other boats with sellers.
It affects the language as well. Since your house is high above water, you don't say "I'm going out", you say "I'm going down" - because you have to go down the stairs and into your boat. When you invite guests in, you say "Please, come up!", as if you are in a tree house :) This wording is used even today, when most houses are at ground level.
When you order food where you can choose the protein part yourself, the seller asks you "What [kind of] fish?", and you can say "eggs", or "chicken breast"! Historically, since most of the meat available was various kinds of fish, this was the established expression, and it has stuck to this day.