The details are:

Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation – CALL FOR PANELS / PAPERS

2nd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network

Chiang Mai University (RCSD), Thailand

5 – 7 November  2010

State-centered views of the world continue to predominate, but it is increasingly apparent that these restrict perspectives on dynamics within broader regional fields. In an attempt to leapfrog a definition of the world in terms of national economies, societies, cultures and histories, ‘borderland’ centered perspectives have emerged. But whereas borderland studies have quickly developed in Africa, Europe and North America, the field is still in its infancy in Asia. ‘Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation’ intends to encourage scholarship that looks across Asian borders.

The conference takes its cue from an important new book by James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale UP, 2009). In this book, Scott focuses on the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and its lower ranges that run from the Central Highlands in Vietnam, most of Laos, Northern Thailand, Southwest China, Northern Burma, Northeast India, Eastern Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet. The 200 million people living in this huge region (over 15 million km²) are geographically dispersed and culturally diverse, yet they share crucial cultural, economic and social characteristics: hill agriculture, physical mobility, relatively egalitarian social structures, as well as commonalities in material culture and outlook. National borders often appear utterly arbitrary to them as many groups spill across two or more national borders. In this way they distinguish themselves from the lowland populations who dominate the states in which they live. Scott refers to this region as ‘Zomia’, a term coined by Willem van Schendel (2002/2005).

What is the viability and relevance of a concept such as Zomia for the study of Asian borderlands? To what extend are people in such border zones sharing ideas, practices and attitudes? Why and how do they remain different? How are relationships, alliances and conflicts between hills and plains people defined? In what ways are cultural and social dynamics in and beyond such a region influenced by political boundaries? How do people engage in, and are engaged by, processes of modernization and globalization?

We invite conceptually innovative papers, based on new research, which address questions such as these, in order to develop new perspectives on the study of Asian borderlands. Panels will be considered that have a thematic focus, are of a comparative character, and involve scholars affiliated to distinct research institutions. Click here to submit proposals. Participants will be notified by February 1st, 2010.

Deadline to send in abstracts / panel proposals: 1 December 2009

Participants are expected to fund their own travel and stay. Very limited financial support may be made available to specific scholars residing in Asia. If you would like to be considered for a grant: please submit with your abstract for a panel and/or paper a short letter motivating your request. Please specify the kind of funding that you have applied for or will receive from other sources. The conference operates on a very limited budget, and will not normally be able to provide more than a partial coverage of costs of travel and stay.

Convenors:
Dr. Chayan Vaddhanaphuti
Prof. Willem van Schendel
Dr. Erik de Maaker

With this in mind, I was pleased to see that there has been a recent spurt of eye-opening coverage that puts the web censorship that occurs in countries like Thailand and Burma in a wider context.

The Wall Street Journal has produced an interactive map of the Asian region (all the way across to the Middle East) that  gives a clear indication of the countries that have made the most substantial efforts to censor online content.  The map is best examined in conjunction with an article by James Hookway that describes attempts to circumscribe access to certain kinds of Internet material in China, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.  A recent article by Geoffrey Cain picks up similar themes and discusses the future of “Asia’s fragile cyber-democracies”.  That piece has already been translated into Thai.

From where I sit, real-world politics are increasingly taking root in the fertile (but muddy) soil of the online world.  This is happening almost everywhere.  Repressive governments, of whatever stripe, will continue to fear the subversive potential of online content. In response, their filtering, censorship and intimidation will probably only become more sophisticated as they meet new and unforeseen online challenges.

For those of us who embrace the potential (and the pitfalls) of web-based analysis, debate and discussion these are issues that will need to be constantly reassessed.  The future battlegrounds for politics, but also for academia and journalism, are fast taking shape online.  These recent articles provide some helpful pointers about issues to keep in mind.

Here’s a new book in which I have a chapter. My chapter deals with contract farming in northern Thailand, based on the fieldwork I have been doing in Ban Tiam.  Details about the book are available here.

The book is a bit pricey so contact your library and recommend that they order it.

Stir-fried or grilled, Vietnamese can’t seem to get enough of Cambodian rat meat, and the global influenza outbreak as well as recent heavy rains have proven a boon for both consumers and exporters.

- Extracted from Ek Madra, “Flu fears, rains buoy Cambodia rat exports to Vietnam”, Reuters India, 18 May 2009.

Long-time readers will know that I have an interest in the episodic rat “explosions” that occur in parts of Burma and northeast India.  In those areas the rats are an unwanted pest causing untold economic, ecological and social problems.  I suppose the logistics of harvesting the rats of, say, Mizoram and sending (Warning: image contains rat tails) them to Vietnam are beyond even the region’s most enterprising entrepreneurs. Any logistically-minded readers care to comment on the possible expansion of this trade? According to the Reuters report:

In Vietnam, rat meat is something of a delicacy….more than 35 tonnes of rat meat a day was imported from Cambodia. Cambodian officials said they did not keep records of this aspect of bilateral trade but reckoned the figure was realistic…Live rats sold for $1 per kilo and dead ones — used for feeding crocodiles in Vietnam — went for $0.37, officials said.

As an aside, readers hoping to catch up on the rat situation in northeast India will find this article about a recent “red alert” has some key details.  The “mautam” continues in parts of the region where the explosive part of the bamboo-rat cycle is not over yet.

Talking ranges from communicating mundane facts to building meaningful relations with other human beings. Communicating personally with others generally requires the establishment of a shared language but it seems to me that something more is needed, such as a shared ‘conversational context’. What I mean by this is a language-use which is underpinned by a structure of shared associations, references and situations that facilitates mutual understanding on a personal level. Even though two people speak the same language this is not enough to guarantee communication of this sort, since they might not share the same context that has shaped their individual language-use. They might use the same word and yet mean different things by it because of differences in cultural background, life experiences etc. This is not to say that people must come from identical backgrounds in order to speak meaningfully to each other; nor am I saying that personal communication is impossible. All I wish to point out is that talking involves more than just speaking the same language.

This was running through my mind when I was in Vietnam for two weeks last November; with no knowledge of the language and little time in which to learn it. I was lucky enough to have a friend working in Hoi An for several months who willingly took me to all his favourite noodle places, drove me on a motorcycle around the countryside and introduced me to his friends. As a result, I did not feel like the average tourist coming to Vietnam and having to discover everything for herself. This feeling of belonging, however, often made me forget that I was still a tourist to many of the Vietnamese people. Indeed, there were various episodes during my trip that forcibly reminded me of this indispensable fact.

One moment for reflection came to me during my trip to the famous fish market in Hoi An. Wandering around the market, assailed by wonderful smells and sounds, I decided I wanted to talk to some of the vendors. Stopping to buy some Vietnamese coffee, my gaze fell on a beautiful wooden box. The sharp-eyed vendor noticed immediately and launched an offensive involving discounts and a cut-price hand massage. I foolishly took this is as my chance to try and talk with her – How is the box made? Is that gorgeous smell inside cinnamon? She answered all my questions in good English and I was excited because I thought that I was ‘getting to know’ this woman. Of course I immediately realised that I was not ‘getting to know’ her because we were not actually having a conversation in the strictest sense. She was responding to me but she was not talking to me because her words were merely part of her sales pitch.

As soon as I realised this I felt guilty since I had no intention of buying the box; I just wanted to talk to her but instead I was unwittingly misleading her and wasting her valuable trading time. Of course it seems obvious that this would happen: the market space is for selling and not for idle chit-chat. Yet, a similar situation arose in a wholly unexpected place. I was being taken on a tour of an old house in the ancient part of Hoi An by the owner. The first thing she told me was that it had been in her family for generations; the second thing she told me was that the family trade was embroidery and that I could buy some tablecloths for my mother. The tour lasted five minutes but for twenty minutes her cousins tried their best to convince me to buy a buffalo-horn pipe for my non-smoking father whilst we drank green tea. Again I tried to engage the guide in conversation, but she would only go as far as to answer me in short, well-spoken sentences.

The more I observed and interacted with people in Vietnam, the more I came to the conclusion that any space is space in which to do trade. In these ‘trading spaces’ it seemed to me that I was not being related to as a fellow person but as a role, which for them was that of a tourist; and that this determined our ‘conversational context’. As a traveler who had a taste of a more personal side of Vietnam – I spent time chatting in cafés with Vietnamese friends, I talked to a friendly man at Hanoi airport about US politics – I felt it was possible to have a shared, responsive conversational basis with someone from a different cultural and linguistic background. However I realised that not many western travellers would be lucky enough to experience this, I think, due to their presuppositions about Vietnam and vice-versa. Their only chances of talking with locals would probably be exclusively within this nebulous space of trade. Meaningful communication between locals and tourists does not even begin because of their assumptions about each other, which is actualised in these ‘trading spaces’.

I don’t think this phenomenon is exclusively Vietnamese but is arguably common to many rapidly developing countries experiencing economic growth and tourist booms. According to the Financial Times UK banks have been set to expand in Vietnam, tourism statistics on the blog Vietnam Travel show that 4.2% of the country’s GDP is accounted for by tourism which, ignoring the recession for the moment, has been rapidly increasing over the last ten years.

Due to the huge influx of tourists a certain image of the foreign, notably western, traveler appears to have been cultivated; an image of great affluence and naivety both in equal measure. Hoi An notably markets itself primarily to wealthy tourists as seen by the abundance of exclusive resorts and chic hotels that have opened along the coastline. Cloth and antique shops feel comfortable charging higher prices every year because they know that westerners won’t haggle and will often accept the first price offered. Then there is the two-price system in restaurants; going out for dinner with my Vietnamese friend would invariably be a few dollars cheaper than eating only with western friends, once more because western tourists are unaware of how much things generally cost. The only way of finding out is, of course, talking to a local about prices. But as I have suggested, this is not always easy.

It seems therefore that tourists are caught in a trap. They are unable to engage fully with local people because of Vietnam’s economically effective tourism policies which unfortunately constructs the problematic divide of ‘us’ and ‘them’. As a result, travelers to Vietnam are forced into certain patterns of behaviour: taking packaged trips, frequenting western-style bars and cafes, rarely eating street food, which in turn reinforces their categorisation as a ‘western tourist’ by the Vietnamese.

Indeed, I would say that the Vietnamese are caught in exactly the same trap as the tourists. It is not solely Vietnam’s responsibility to end the self-reinforcing cycle of this kind of de-personalised tourism. Vietnam is arguably responding to ‘outside’ perceptions of itself as an economically viable business sphere, a novel cultural experience and a piece of colonial history. Indeed, the ‘trading spaces’ I mentioned previously seem to be generated by this economic and political climate which allocates social roles to individuals: such as ‘locals’ and ‘tourists’. These individuals find themselves inevitably acting out their given roles namely because they are treated in terms of these roles by others, and this self-perpetuating cycle is vindicated by wider socio-economic practices.

This cursory picture is not intended to be wholly negative since the number of travelers coming to Vietnam is increasing every year, with the resulting boost of the nation’s economy and political prospects. Yet it seems to me that ordinary travelers are getting a rather shallow experience of Vietnam and I suggest this could be partly remedied if the ‘conversational context’ was decoupled from trade. This might go some way to enable people create spaces in which they can meaningfully talk to each other.

Jagruti Dave is a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University.

This database is the result of a 4-year collaboration between the Center of Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD), a research group of the Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, and the Institute of Research for Development (IRD, France). The website is conceived as a tool for researchers and students who are interested in the contemporary history of ethnicity in this region.

The newspapers database contains 12,750 newspaper articles in English and/or Thai language covering the period from 1965 to the present. New articles are regularly added. Most articles are available in pdf format. More recent articles are available in html format.

The 5,072 articles in English language from 1965 to 2008 are extracted mainly from the Bangkok Post, Chiang Mai Mail, The Nation, Vientiane Times and Irrawaddy. One set (1965 to 1990) comes from the archives of the former Tribal Research Institute (TRI), the others (1990 to present) come from CESD archives.

The 7,676 articles in Thai language (1965-2008 or 2508-2551) are extracted from various newspapers:

• Khon Muang, Siamrath, Thairath, Thin Nue, Daily News, Daily Mail for the articles of the TRI archive (1965-1990).
• Chiangmai News, Thai News, Matichon, Thairath for the articles of the CESD archive (1990-2008).

Most of the articles focus on Thailand and Burma but some of them also concern Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, East India, Malaysia and Indonesia. Currently, all the articles in English from the TRI archives are available for download. The articles in English from the CESD archives are also progressively being scanned and put online. The whole set will be available by mid-February 2009, including the articles extracted from the Vientiane Times 2003-2008.

About 30% of the articles in Thai are also currently available on-line in pdf format. The whole set of articles in Thai will be online by the end of March 2009.

Search can be done by newspaper name, by title, by date and by keywords. Articles in English have been indexed only with English keywords and articles in Thai only with Thai keywords. For each article, CESD staff has selected four categories of keywords:

• country
• ethnic group
• main theme
• acronym 

A complete list of keywords in English and in Thai is available by clicking on the “help” icon on the search page. The list is constantly updated.

The website also contains an NGO directory, 4,000 pictures with detailed captions (part of the private collections from Hans Mansdorff, Jacques Lemoine and Paul T. Cohen which are currently being scanned and uploaded) and a e-museum where you can download video clips on ethnic cultures.

But then there is this.

Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man – she doesn’t know his nationality – who had purchased her virginity.

After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive… Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.

“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”

There should be a legal corridor to assure better operation of the blogs…We’ll manage them by randomly checking—we don’t need to control all the blogs…When we create a legal corridor, determining what is legal and what is a violation of Vietnamese law, the blog community will detect such things on its own and will let the government know of violations…

-  Nguyen Tu Quang, director of Vietnam’s state-run Bach Khoa Internet Security Center, quoted in “Vietnamese to Police blogs”, Radio Free Asia, 9 December 2008.

Minorities At Large: Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam Beyond the State Frame

Special Issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies
Volume 3, Number 3, October 2008

Edited by Philip Taylor

Representing a new approach to ethnic minorities in Vietnam, these essays challenge the prevailing “carceral” conception of Vietnam’s minorities as territorially circumscribed, disciplined subjects. This new research demonstrates, to the contrary, that ethnic minorities have been active in the transformations of their worlds. The essays situate contemporary minority transnational networks in the context of older translocal affiliations, identities and livelihood strategies. The enduring anthropological preoccupation with official classificatory projects is questioned; instead attention is given to popular identifications in circulation, and transition, among ethnic minorities and their proximate others.

I have a paper in the collection, co-written with Stan B-H Tan of the National University of Singapore. The paper is called “Beyond Hills and Plains: Rethinking Ehtnic Relations in Vietnam and Thailand.” It takes the form of a conversation between myself and Stan (drawing on the many conversations we had during Stan’s time at the ANU). Here is a brief extract from the closing section:

So, from this conversation we could probably conclude that it is important to recognize that neither cultures nor states are fixed entities-they are constantly being formed, modified, and negotiated. This is a particularly important insight in the uplands of Southeast Asia, where a strong geographical and ideological distinction between the hills and the plains can underpin a sense of implacable difference. Going “beyond hills and plains” involves recognizing that the uplands can be simultaneously a volatile site – where differences lead to conflicts – and a middle ground – where differences converge in new social formations. This needn’t distract us from the reality of power differentials. But it can remind us that power relations are played out through specific interactions and that human creativity and ingenuity means that there are many surprises in store when we approach these interactions without the conceptual shackles of overused binary frameworks.

During the American War, countless Vietnamese fought and died for their nation, and many of the martyrs’ remains have been lost in Laos for the past 40 years. Now, a new generation of soldiers is bringing them back home.

- Extracted from Tran Bien, Tran Hoai and Ho Linh, “Soldiers bring martyr remains back home”, Vietnam News, 27 July 2008. 

One sometimes hears of the ongoing American efforts to account for all of their dead and missing from the war in Southeast Asia.  This is, however, the first time I have heard of the efforts of the Vietnamese to recover their war dead in Laos.  For anyone with even a passing interest in this period of Southeast Asian history the long and detailed Vietnam News article is certainly worth a look.