Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic examples from my recent fieldwork among the Bajo of North Sulawesi, in Indonesia, I intend to explore how processes of semantic intrusion protect cultural identity in 'the intersection' between cultures.

Paper long abstract:

The way communities conceptualize their environments (socio-ecologically) varies greatly in between places, and often within the same place. Concepts such as 'nature' , a third person entity, do not operate in the same fashion worldwide. The Bajo have successfully accommodated 'foreign' notions of sustainability and resilience to their life-ways and environmental rhetoric. But how do they perceive their environment (s) and how does this impact on the metamorphosis their language experiences? Often, the interweaving aspects of linguistic changes and the environmental permutations in which these are embedded are simplified when we argue that language is a mere projection of human perception and thought; a relation that is never uni-directional, shaping not only the world(s) we construct but also our perception of them.