Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness

Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Southeast Asia and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, serious attention is seldom paid to local voices.

My book Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, I accompany northern Lao small-scale traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation, and aspiration. I demonstrate that these traders’ vital but often invisible role in the everyday workings of landlocked Laos’s land-linked visions relies on their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic and cultural inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of ‘smallness’ foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.