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Volcanoes are surrounded by villages, towns, and polities that are constantly shifting location to benefit from the rich soils generated in the aftermath of eruptions, while, at the same time, avoiding the worst of their destructive potential. We explore the attraction of volcanoes in a Southeast Asian context through a comparative examination of the communities surrounding Mount Mayon in the Bicol peninsula of the Philippines and Gunung Awu on the island of Sangihe Besar in Indonesia. These volcanoes influence the location of settlements, forms of community identity, and the expression of cultural memories. We argue that risk awareness programmes that disregard the extent to which a volcano is embedded within the physical and mental fabric of a society and fail to connect to local historical cultural memory are likely to have little lasting effect on reducing people's vulnerability.

This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well as the potential to take control over their individual lives. British rule that took over areas controlled by the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—first in the guise of the East India Company (1796–1802), then under the Crown (1802–1948)—introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives to dismantle slavery as it was practiced on the island. This article draws from Dutch and early British period petitions, court records, commission reports, and slave registers to interrogate the discourse of freedom that permeated the British abolition of slavery from 1806 to 1844 and suggests that in Jaffna after abolition there remained bondage in freedom.

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