Official and Vernacular Identifications in the Making of Southeast Asia

The Southeast Asia team of the Collaborative Research Network brings together social scientists from Chiang Mai University in Thailand; researchers affiliated with the Center for Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge (CBIK), a non-governmental organization in Kunming, China; and a few scholars from the U.S., Britain, and Peru. The team's focus is the mountainous region straddling the borders of China, Burma, and Thailand. The research context includes the factors that constitute this as an identifiable region, and the boundaries that divide it into hill and valley and different nation-states.

High biodiversity and once-dense forests characterize this as a biophysical region. Three main waves of migration from China southward have linked the region by spreading across it peoples related through kinship, trade, and a shared history of violence and flight. Many of these peoples are now identified as hill ethnic minorities in China, Burma, and Thailand. Other peoples, mainly Tai and Han Chinese, have typically dominated the region from their administrative centers in the valleys. Indeed, perhaps the defining division among these peoples, as well as more broadly across Southeast Asia, has been the enduring distinction between hill and valley. This political and ecological arrangement both defines the region as an area of interrelated upland and lowland peoples, and also divides it by agricultural practice into those who grow upland rice and those who produce wet rice.

The primary concerns of members of the Southeast Asia team are processes of state formation in the region in relation to the broad CRN themes of official and vernacular identifications.

Membership: inclusion and exclusion

The Chinese state has included all minority nationalities as citizens. The research focus is on tensions between vernacular cultural diversity and official pronouncements on cultural unity. In Burma, minority peoples in the Shan State are in principle citizens. Since many of these peoples have been engaged in armed resistance to inclusion in Burma since 1948, the nature of official vs. vernacular identifications is polarized and heated, as some team members are exploring. In Thailand, those highland ethnic groups officially identified as "hill tribes" have largely been excluded from Thai citizenship, although there is currently an official drive to enroll highland people into citizenship. These contrasting national experiences of citizenship provide a rich arena for the study of inclusion and exclusion.

Geographical Identifications

In both China and Thailand, the enduring distinction between hill and valley has featured prominently in official definitions of upland and lowland production systems, landscapes, and peoples. In both countries, official identifications and representations of the uplands often target upland peoples and land uses as sources of social and environmental problems. Researchers are exploring vernacular understandings of poverty, development, and land use history as a counter to official narratives.

Some researchers are focusing on cultural assets, showing how in emerging political and cultural climates, ethnic minority peoples can market themselves and their artifacts in ways that have multiple meanings and potential outcomes.

Placement and Displacement

Several Chinese researchers are examining vernacular responses to the official location of peoples in space through state-sponsored property rights in household and village land, and official designations of nature reserves and other protected areas. Others in the China group are looking at displacement, official resettlement projects that move people from uplands to lowlands in the name of poverty alleviation and/or nature conservation, together with the increased poverty and environmental degradation that often result.

Southeast Asia Team Coordinators are James C. Scott (Yale University), Janet Sturgeon (Brown University), Chayan Vaddhanaphuti (Chiang Mai University), and Xu Jianchu (CBIK).