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Theme: 8. Negotiating Margins: Representations, Resistances, Agencies
Simon Rowedder
University of Passau, Germany
Aranya Siriphon
Chiang Mai University, Thailand
Simon Rowedder
University of Passau, Germany
Wanjiao Yu
Chiang Mai University, Thailand
Yi Yang
Beijing Normal University, China
Xiaoyan Long
Yunnan University, China
The Sino-Southeast Asian frontier (Yunnan province with its three directly bordering neighbors Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and the close neighbor Thailand) has been an important region for anthropologists to examine how border experiences and the process of bordering have been changed since the economic opening in the early 1990s. Conceptualizing the region as part of the “Southeast Asian Massif” (Michaud 2000) or “Zomia” (van Schendel 2002, Scott 2009), subsequent scholarship also investigated how its local inhabitants (often ethnic minorities) responded to those border transformations through diverse forms of cross-border and transnational mobility and networks.
This panel revisits this frontier region by offering fresh ethnographic insights on ethnicity, femininity, and human-material relations amidst most recent economic, social, and ecological dynamics of change. The central focus lies on the emergence of multiple marginalities, as well as local strategies to cope with these.
First and foremost, life in the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands has been transformed due to the rapid incorporation into the global market as lucrative resource frontiers, now increasingly driven by Chinese investment. Looking at gold mining on the Myanmar-Thailand border and transnational trade of globally demanded commodities such as rubber cultivated in Xishuangbanna in Southwest China’s borderlands, two papers investigate how local actors are impacted by, and in turn tactically negotiate, evolving economic, social, ethnic and gender marginalities and vulnerabilities. In addition, local frontier livelihoods are not only impacted by recently emerging marginalities but are also embedded in longer histories of marginalization. A third paper examines to which extent the Tai Lue history of forced migration out from Sipsongpanna (now Xishuangbanna) to present-day northern Thailand shapes their present ethnic identity through active practices of remembering and creating places of memory.
Taken together, the papers contribute to a more nuanced understanding of both local empowerment and powerlessness of actively engaging, and struggling, with past and present frontier marginalities at the intersection of ethnicity and feminity.
Presenter: Wanjiao Yu – Chiang Mai University
Presenter: Yi Yang – Beijing Normal University
Presenter: Xiaoyan Long – Yunnan University