When I look at the video in YouTube of the people of Sipsongpanna, I can not help but thinking I am looking at a video of people from Laos or Thailand.

China just want to erase any identity they have and make them become Chinese. It is a good idea because maybe later on these people want to become their own state.

Sipsongpanna is gone, but the Lue senses of thier homelands of course are still there, in thier minds. but what kinds of these homelands?

the Lue, to me, in Xishuangbanna, have been redrawn, they are really disappearing, or becoming the Dai, not Lue.
Of course there are still lots of people called Lue in Burma, Laos, and Thailand, and overseas. But these people have also been transformed.

you have to say in plural because there are lots of fractions, and they are so fragmented

so who are the Lue? this is perhaps not really a good question, but what have they been doing, or how could these people around the globe, in different places, maintain and perform to be ‘Lue’ that should be paid attention to, to me.

I agree “ethnicity” is as objectable a tool as any other –but still believe it may be necessary to understand, at least partly, “what is going on” in Sipsong Panna, for ethnic categories are constructed and re-constructed not only as a “statecraft” on the part of the CCP, but also, as Wasan has acknowledged, by the locals themselves.

And this is true not only regarding the “new”, state categorization which has labelled the Tai Lue as “Dai”, but also the “old” one, which I related to the traditional categorization imposed by the Tai Lue through the muang system, and which would roughly classify peoples as “civilized” and “uncivilized”, according to their possesion or lack of sasana. This categorization –again an ideal tool that we reproduced as we understand it served as an ideology for the ruling Tai, even if it is never found completely realized in the field–, is also still partially valid to understand social relations in Sipsong Panna, as shown for instance in the contempt with which some Tai Lue still regard other ethnic groups in the area –a contempt not understandable, for example, merely in socioeconomic terms.

In this sense, we cannot say that “Sipsong Panna” or the “Tai Lue” are gone, or dissapeared; how could we say this when so many locals still use the latter when referring to their homeland? There´s a big deal of surviving elements from social structures –including conceptions about ethnicity– previous to 1953, and these will remain here for a long time –even if the CCP has gone to great lengths to dismantle these structures. Coming back to “ethnicity”, the ways people understand and make use of these different categorizations are undoubtedly very complex, and surely taking “ethnicity” as a point of view is not enough to obtain a more or less complete picture of what is going on in Sipsong Panna. But I don´t see why we cannot use it as a tool to understand socioeconomic relations when these are undoubtedly still determined to a certain extent by ethnic conceptions.

In this remore country of southwest China, but also situates in the borderlands of the upper Mekong, there is no Tai, but Dai (Chinese Tai) as registered by the State and existed by local perception, though not all of them.

To me a term or concept ‘ethnicity’ is not really useful if you are going to deploy it in understanding what is actually on in Xishuangbanna, not Sipsongpanna (because it is gone), today.

Ethnicity studies, particularly in many Thai univ, is just what I call ‘an anthropological masturbation’, though many would alternately call it a statecraft in this (post)modern days and thereofore for those labelled peoples it is a tactic or a weapon of the weak.

Weak because at least they don have a tank and a missile like the State.

What about it? (sorry for insisting on ethnicity!)