Waka Aoyama I could not be more honored that my book has been selected to be awarded the 23rd Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. As a researcher who specializes in Asia-Pacific studies, I would like to pay my respects to Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira for his achievements to support academic studies and other activities on Pacific Basin Community Concept.　I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the board of directors, the selection committee and everybody else concerned with Masaayoshi Ohira Memorial Foundation. In my wildest dreams I never imagined that I would receive this honor. The main theme of this book grew out of the dilemma that I experienced in an attempt to make a relevant framework to capture the dynamics of poverty in Davao City, the Philippines. As I encountered the Sama (commonly referred as to the Badjaos), who belong to one of the most underprivileged ethnic groups in the local context, I thought that I would simply borrow tools from economics and anthropology to come up with an analytical framework that could aptly incorporate the two key concepts, poverty and ethnic group. Notwithstanding, it did not take me long to realize, as glossaries of each discipline clearly reveal, that economics is rather unconcerned with the concept of ethnic grouping as its variable, whereas anthropology does not show much interest in the concept of poverty in its own tradition. In addition, it is clear that there is a very large and apparently unbridgeable gap between the two disciplines in terms of values and human models. Such difficult situation made me resort to the ethnographical method, which, I believe, provide the best means not only to record the economic standards of living of the respondents, but also to describe the dynamic processes in which their ethnic identities incessantly change according to the contexts they are in. In this way, I also hoped to give the reader an intimate and panoramic picture of socioeconomic life of the Sama. I cannot deny that writing ethnography itself has been controversial among the anthropologists, considering its highly political nature. However, I know it is also true that nothing could remind me, better than doing fieldwork, of a fact, which we very often take for granted and consequently forget even: just like I have a name of my own, they, too, have their own names, their own everyday lives, their own needs and aspirations, and their own families and friends to love. Embracing such experiences in my heart, I would like to continue my efforts in the most careful and respectful manner possible to listen to the narratives of others, especially the people who live in often overlooked corners of the Asia Pacific region, and whose voices, therefore, are not always easily heard by us.