Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples

Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples PDF Author: Jean Michaud
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136827889
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples

Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples PDF Author: Jean Michaud
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136827889
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands

Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands PDF Author: Alexander Horstmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317422740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Asia, where authoritarian-developmental states have proliferated, statehood and social control are heavily contested in borderland spaces. As a result, in the post-Cold War world, borders have not only redefined Asian incomes and mobilities, they have also rekindled neighbouring relations and raised questions about citizenship and security. The contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands highlight some of these processes taking place at the fringe of the state. Offering an array of comparative perspectives of Asian borders and borderlands in the global context, this handbook is divided into thematic sections, including: Livelihoods, commodities and mobilities Physical land use and agrarian transformations Borders and boundaries of the state and the notion of statelessness Re-conceptualizing trade and the economy in the borderlands The existence and influence of humanitarians, religions, and NGOs The militarization of borderlands Causing us to rethink and fundamentally question some of the categories of state, nation, and the economy, this is an important resource for students and scholars of Asian Studies, Border Studies, Social and Cultural Studies, and Anthropology. Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Art of Not Being Governed

The Art of Not Being Governed PDF Author: James C. Scott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300156529
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Imperial Borderlands

Imperial Borderlands PDF Author: Marie de Rugy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004469850
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents a connected history of South-East Asian borderlands, drawing on late nineteenth-century British and French geographical policies and practice. It focuses on the ‘scramble’ in Asia, when, in 1885, the British Raj incorporated Upper Burma and the French created a Protectorate in Annam-Tonkin, the Northern part of present-day Vietnam. Fought over by the imperial states and neighbouring nations, the frontier zones were fashioned and represented not only by the two European powers, but also by the Chinese Empire, the Kingdom of Siam, and the local populations. The counterpoint between the discourses produced and the cartographical practices on the ground, in the longue durée, reveals the interacting processes of territory-building in all their unpredictability. This book is the updated version of the author’s Aux confins des empires. Cartes et constructions territoriales dans le nord de la péninsule indochinoise (1885–1914) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018). It is translated by Saskia Brown, an experienced academic translator from French in the humanities and social sciences.

Projectland

Projectland PDF Author: Holly High
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824886658
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Projectland, anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province’s first certified “Culture Village,” the nation’s very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state’s resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one’s life as nonconforming but also nonagentive.

Musical Minorities

Musical Minorities PDF Author: Lonán Ó Briain PhD
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190626984
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Musical Minorities is the first English-language monograph on the performing arts of an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Living primarily in the northern mountains, the Hmong have strategically maintained their cultural distance from foreign invaders and encroaching state agencies for almost two centuries. They use cultural heritage as a means of maintaining a resilient community identity, one which is malleable to their everyday needs and to negotiations among themselves and with others in the vicinity. Case studies of revolutionary songs, countercultural rock, traditional vocal and instrumental styles, tourist shows, animist and Christian rituals, and light pop from the diaspora illustrate the diversity of their creative outputs. This groundbreaking study reveals how performing arts shape understandings of ethnicity and nationality in contemporary Vietnam. Based on three years of fieldwork, Lonán Ó Briain traces the circulation of organized sounds that contribute to the adaptive capacities of this diverse social group. In an original investigation of the sonic materialization of social identity, the book outlines the full multiplicity of Hmong music-making through a fascinating account of music, minorities, and the state in a post-socialist context.

Missions and Conversions

Missions and Conversions PDF Author: T. Pearson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230622526
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of "missionaries" that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee. Thomas Pearson uses ethnographic and archival research to tell the story of cross-cultural contact in the highlands during the Vietnam War, Christian conversion, refugee exile, and the formation of the Dega refugee community in the United States. His insightful study considers not just evangelicals and Catholics, but humanitarian workers in the highlands, refugee resettlement volunteers in the United States, and the American Special Forces soldiers. This book makes the case that the Dega have appropriated the anthropological and religious discourses of this disparate group of missionaries to recreate themselves through a multivalent "conversion."

Nationalism and Imperialism in South and Southeast Asia

Nationalism and Imperialism in South and Southeast Asia PDF Author: Arnold P. Kaminsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351997424
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is a festschrift for Damodar Ramaji SarDesai (b. 1931), Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where all of the contributors received their Ph.D as did SarDesai himself. His work for over fifty years at UCLA has been an inspiration to generations of students, and he has made major contributions to the world of learning, and in his chosen areas of specialization of India, especially its foreign policy with regard to Southeast Asia, imperialism and the history of the modern European empires; and Southeast Asia. He has served as Chair of the History Department at UCLA as well as Bombay University and President of the Asiatic Society of Bombay. The volume includes a biographical introduction and a bibliographic essay on SarDesai’s major writings and contains new and cutting-edge essays on the design of imperial Vijayanagara; famine policy in colonial India and how European imperialist policies created, or exacerbated the impact of, famines; the relatively unknown chapter of ‘Chinese Gordon’s’ brief Indian career; reflections on the Tamil humanist A. Madhaviah, a man ahead of his time; nationalism and the career of industrialist G.D. Birla, Gandhi’s friend; the ‘Chindia Problematic’—India and China relations; the state of Philippine historiography and its nationalist impulses; the role of Vietnamese highlanders in the Vietnamese nationalist struggle and their recent plight; early Malayan nationalism; and the efforts of American administrators to protect Philippine highland natives from being forced to participate in international exhibitions as curiosities from the American colony.

Living with Transition in Laos

Living with Transition in Laos PDF Author: Jonathan Rigg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134253583
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Laos - the Lao People's Democratic Republic - is one of the least understood and studied countries of Asia. Its development trajectory is also one of the most interesting, as it moves from state, or perhaps more appropriately subsistence, to market. Based on extensive original research, this book assesses how economic transition and marketisation are being translated into progress (or not) at the local level, and at the resulting impact on poverty, inequality and livelihoods. It concludes that the process of transition in fact contributes to the growth of poverty for some people, and shows how people manage to cope in very unfavourable circumstances.

Myanmar

Myanmar PDF Author: N Ganesan
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
ISBN: 9812304347
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
Covers issues of historical influence and political considerations that have shaped the dominant thinking within the state and the military. Examines the three major ethnic groups in the country - Karen, Kachin, and Shan. Deals with how the various ethnic groups are trying to cope with decades of conflict and reconstruct their communities.