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“Now where did I leave my jolly pith helmet?”
I commend this book for initiating a shift of paradigm in research concerning the Yao of southern China and the Southeast Asian highlands .The author speculates on the “racialisation of Thailand’s ethnic landscape” since the beginning of the 20th Century. He introduces that insight by reference to the “proto-ethnographers” of the The Siam Society’ (1920-64) whose headquarters in Bangkok once provided access to the “ most English of gentleman’s facilities” in the royal capital and to a cloak room large enough “to shelve every pith helmet worn to an entire AGM quorum” (pers. com 12/4/68 from Mr Donald Gibson, British Consul, Chiangmai). Jonsson further develops his case as a critique of the later field research conducted among the Kingdom’s mountain minorities by Western anthropologists affiliated with the government’s Tribal Research Centre (Institute) TRC(I) ( 1965-1989) . Investigation into the operations of the TRC’s still extant successor, The Tribal Museum (1997- ) extends that theme.
The book argues persuasively that the Thai Kingdom has harnessed expatriate expertise to promote public conceptualisation of uplanders as the “un-Thai” and to legitimate processes whereby such highland populations have become subject to draconian state controls including military eviction from the jungle terrain of Phrachangnoi where Yao used to hunt, harvest opium poppy and cultivate grain swiddens by techniques of shifting cultivation.
For example, the Royal Thai Airforce forced Yao out of the mountainous Phrachangnoi Subdistrict and into the lowlands by bombing their forests, farms and villages . These attacks began in 1968 and were followed immediately by deployments of the Royal Thai Army ( 3rd Region) which seeded the habitat of the evacuees with landmines that prevented the return of all but the most foolhardy throughout the subsequent forty years.
Several of Jonsson’s older informants were fugitives from the horrors of this violence . About 250 of them made it from the village of Pulangka to the fringes of Chiengkam, the closest Thai town. The camp of miserable bush shelters they originally established there has now developed into an outersuburb of 24 imposing longhouses each owned by a Yao kin unit (peo) whose memebers to-day total about 800. Such observations are basic to the book’s enquiry into the opposition by urban Yao to recent state legislation (1996) which purportedly enforces conservation of high altitude forests and protection of endangered fauna. The book illuminates the desperation with which a marginalised minority has resorted to arson to destroy the headquarters of a newly created wild life sanctuary which a government decree has recently established within that territory. But there are flaws in the scholarship of both the reading and the fieldwork from which the author has generated these provocative perspectives .
In this paper I do more anthropologically than simply review Jonsson’s book and that is because New Mandala has provided me with the rare opportunity to detail two of the major discourses in the experience on which I draw in responding to the volume. First, what I write is as much about the nitty-gritty of the anthropological fieldwork which I myself have conducted among Yao in Thailand during the last 40 years as it is an assessment of a monograph by an anthropologist reporting on his research while living more recently with these these people. I will appreciate any response from professional colleagues and other readers especially to two of the propositions through which I take issue with Jonsson:
- That the Yao are most approporiately conceptualisaed as subjects of their own theocratic state which transcends national boundaries rather than as one of the stateless tribal minorities with which national and academic authorities have typically classified these people; and
- That far from disintegrating through suburbanisation and removal from the rural context in which they had developed, their bilaterally extended families (peo) have thrived and become infrastructurally crucial both to the prosperity they have regained and to the retention of their ethnic group’s overall cohesion.
I also present myself to the reader as someone whose experience happens to enable him to assess the significance of Jonsson’s work in relation to the various and changing intellectual prioirities whose hegemony over more than 25 years has collectively determined what Yao Studies have tended to be. It is in regard to this multidisciplinary enterprise that I propose the concept of “bibliophilia” to explain how a dominant discourse of religious philology has marginalised anthropology in scholarship about the Yao for nearly three decades. Hence, I applaud the volume for clearing a pioneering path into a new paradigm of research about this minority in Thailand.
The extensive review by Douglas Miles of my book is both an honor and a surprise. I hope his engagement triggers some exchange of ideas about the ethnic and ethnographic landscapes of the region. He insists that my book is not an ethnography, by which he means “any monograph which inter alia documents the customs and traditions that are diacritical of a particular ethnic group.” This is a key issue, and I do spend some ink discussing this matter in the book. The bulk of my fieldwork was with people among whom Miles had done his fieldwork in the 1960s. I only gradually realized this and never set out to do a restudy proper. But I had to deal with the earlier ethnography and the world it described. Among the most stimulating for me was the difference in how Miles and Peter Kandre described Yao social structure in relation to household dynamics. One stated that there was on-going pressure toward large households (of almost 60 people) and the other that Yao households always fragmented and never became as big as the household-heads wished. The two scholars did their work a few years apart in the 1960s, and in Yao/Mien villages in the same province, maybe a hundred miles distance. As far as I can tell, no one noticed this divergent generalization about social structure (a diacritical feature of an ethnic group, presumably). Both descriptions appear quite credible. The focus on diacritical features of ethnic groups plays up structure and plays down history and regional context. In part, my book tried to offer a historical angle on the region (particularly the issue of highland peoples), and then to zoom in, on the twentieth-century nation state (Thailand), on historical changes in upland economy/society between 1860 and the 1960s, on the increasing importance of sports contests and village organization in social life by the 1980s/90s, and finally on what can be learned patterns in political protest in the late 1990s. I am very pleased over Miles’ suggestion that the book provides a new way to look at some matters in the area. It is possible that the structure of my book, what disqualifies it in his view from the category of ethnography, draws on a different sense of the diacritical features of a people, place, and time in this multi-ethnic region. Some recent NM posts, such as the one on Wa identity, indicate the complexity of defining a people. Ethnography should not look the other way. War, like sports, farming, and many other activities, can shape social life and identity in multiple ways, and each can potentially play up certain (local) voices or agendas as typical of “a people” while rendering many people mute (insignificant, ignorant, etc.). How we write about these realities may inevitably shake up what is considered a realistic ethnographic angle.
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This is relevant to some of the issues raised in Doug’s review:
Taoism of Northern Laos on display
A new exhibition entitled “Splendour and Sacrifice: Taoism of Northern Laos” will open at the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Luang Prabang on September 29. Items included in the new exhibition include headwear, texts, ceremonial robes and masks.
The culmination of two years’ research and supported by the US Embassy to Laos, the exhibition explores the Taoist beliefs, rituals and artefacts of the Yao ethnic group.
Items on display include silk-embroidered priest’s robes, ceremonial masks and prayer books, a documentary video, and a recreation of an ordination ritual.
Visitors to the centre will get a fascinating glimpse into the religious life of the Yao Mien and Yao Mun people.
The centre in Luang Prabang is dedicated to the lifestyles and traditions of the ethnic minority groups of Laos , exhibiting traditional clothing, jewellery, handicrafts and religious artefacts.
It also includes a shop selling authentic hand-made handicrafts from village artisans and a café serving food, drinks and cakes.
Splendour and Sacrifice: Taoism of Northern Laos will run from September 30, 2009 to September 15 2010.
Admission to the exhibition is included in the price of entry to the centre, 20,000 kip (US$2.40) per person. Entry for Lao citizens is free. The centre is open from 9am to 6pm on Tuesday to Sunday and closed Mondays.
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This debate needs to be spread out to a wider audience. As a layman developing an interest in the situation facing the hilltribes in Thailand I was blown away by the following quote from the review:
“Jonsson’s critique is not just about Thailand. It is the spearhead of his investigations which harshly expose the appallingly stubborn refusal by Yao Studies ever to have taken any initiative or responsibility for the theorisation of racism or the possibility of genocide under Thailand’s ruling elite whose iconically but deceptive serenity, charming but fabricated sophistry and obfuscatingly dazzling smiles have stereotypically characterised the presentation of itself to the rest of the world since beginning of modern history and can probably presume it can do so forever more. As this book signals, a sea change of highly innovatory conceptualisations will be necessary if research of quality concerning the Yao of the Kingdom will ever manage to rectify itself.”
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My gosh — such a jargon…
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Brilliant. Convinced me to buy the book and read it. On the bus this morning listened to an MP3 rendition for language learners of the “uthorized hill tribe myth”in “Thai for Advanced Readers” (Becker, 2000) which actually induced nausea after reading this. There is a real need for political realism in advanced Thai language learning materials.
Very interested in the historical sources used to write this history of exploitation. Doubt if it was carried as investigative journalism in the newspapers of the time. Perhaps similar events in more the more recent history of tribal groups will see the light of day in history in a similar fashion. Great work.
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Here is some additional material provided by Leif Jonsson.
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jonfernquest says: Brilliant. Convinced me to buy the book and read it.
Same for me. I am a layman in these matters but the book, though not for the everyday reader, contained enough challenging nuggets to set me thinking on new paths.
One contention that intrigues me is the unwitting collusion by tourists through well meaning purchases of hill tribe artifacts etc in the presentation of hill tribes as the “other” Thai.
What avenues have been opened to publicise this image manipulation to potential tourists?
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