Jean Michaud - Böcker

Do ethnic minorities have the power to alter the course of their fortune when living within a socialist state? In Frontier Livelihoods, the authors focus their study on the Hmong - known in China as the Miao - in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, contending that individuals and households create livelihoods about which governments often know little.The product of wide-ranging research over many years, Frontier Livelihoods bridges the traditional divide between studies of China and peninsular Southeast Asia by examining the agency, dynamics, and resilience of livelihoods adopted by Hmong communities in Vietnam and in China’s Yunnan Province. It covers the reactions to state modernization projects among this ethnic group in two separate national jurisdictions and contributes to a growing body of literature on cross-border relationships between ethnic minorities in the borderlands of China and its neighbors and in Southeast Asia more broadly.

Scattered across the South-East Asian massif, a few dozen ethnic groups (numbering around 50 million) maintain highly original cultural identities and political and economic traditions, against pressure from national majorities. They face the same challenges. The means by which social change has been imposed by the lowlanders are similar from country to country, and the results are comparable. The originality of this book lies in the combination of multi-disciplinary mixing of social anthropology, history and human geography; multi-culturality grouping together several cultural contexts; trans-nationality straddling five countries and bridging the traditional divide between South China and Mainland South-East Asia; and history reaching back 300 years.

This collection argues that minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif are not powerless in the face of economic and political change in the region - they are drawing on ethnicity and culture to indigenize modernity and maintain their livelihoods.

The mountainous borderlands of socialist China, Vietnam, and Laos are home to some seventy million people, representing an astonishing array of ethnic diversity. How are these peoples fashioning livelihoods now that their homeland is open to economic investment and political change?Moving Mountains presents the work of anthropologists, geographers, and political economists who have first-hand experience in the Southeast Asian Massif. Although scholars have typically represented highland people from this region as marginalized and powerless, these case studies – on groups such as the Drung in Yunnan, the Khmu in Laos, and the Hmong in Vietnam – argue that ethnic minorities draw on culture and ethnicity to indigenize modernity and maintain their livelihoods. This unprecedented glimpse into a poorly understood region shows that development initiatives must be built on strong knowledge of local cultures in order to have lasting effect.

Dwelling in the highland areas of Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), and southwest China are hundreds of ethnic groups known as 'tribes' in popular literature. Some groups number barely more than one hundred, others millions. Together their population adds up to 80 million, more than any of the countries (bar China) they inhabit, yet in each they are designated and treated as "minorities." They have been forced to dwell in the highlands while their enemies have occupied the more fertile lowlands. This, coupled with the fact that they are so little known abroad and even at home, has caused their way of life and cultural distinctions to come in jeopardy.This book offers hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on about 200 groups, the six countries they live in, some of their leaders, and their political, economic, social, cultural and religious aspects. The chronology covers important events. The introduction discusses both the diversities and similarities of the groups' ethnicities, languages, religious practices, and customs. The bibliography supplements the dictionary entries.

In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic?Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.

In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the-making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic? Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.

The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have undergone wide-ranging transformations, as the territorial reconfiguration of modern nation-states since the mid-twentieth century and the presently increasing trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods and capital, reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling them into global trends of modernisation and regional discourses of national belonging. This book explores the changes to native senses of place, the conception of border - simultaneously as limitations and opportunities - and what the authors call affective boundaries, livelihood reconstruction, and trans-Himalayan modernities. It addresses changing social, political, and environmental conditions that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as it emphasises the importance of place.

Scattered across the South-East Asian massif, a few dozen ethnic groups (numbering around 50 million) maintain highly original cultural identities and political and economic traditions, against pressure from national majorities. They face the same challenges. The means by which social change has been imposed by the lowlanders are similar from country to country, and the results are comparable. The originality of this book lies in the combination of multi-disciplinary mixing of social anthropology, history and human geography; multi-culturality grouping together several cultural contexts; trans-nationality straddling five countries and bridging the traditional divide between South China and Mainland South-East Asia; and history reaching back 300 years.

Dwelling in the highland areas of Northeast India, Bangladesh, Southwest China, Taiwan, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Peninsular Malaysia are hundreds of “peoples”. Together their population adds up to 100 million, more than most of the countries they live in. Yet in each of these countries, they are regarded as minorities. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on about 300 groups, the ten countries they live in, their historical figures, and their salient political, economic, social, cultural and religious aspects. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more.

This book explores the changes to native senses of place, the conception of border - simultaneously as limitations and opportunities - and what the authors call affective boundaries, livelihood reconstruction, and trans-Himalayan modernities.