Papers (Part 1)

• Cross-Border Ethnic Networks and Human Trafficking: The Case of the Hmong Along the Sino-Vietnamese Border Jili Zhu Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences Tam Ngo Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity

  In October 2012, Sao, a beautiful 25 year old Hmong woman, was sold to China. The person who sold her was none other than her own husband and the father of her three year old son. In the following months, Sao was traded several times among Hmong human traffickers across southwest China until a Han farmer family in Hebei provinces bought her for their son.

  China’s growing demand for women, as brides and sex slave, resulted from the country’s one child-policy and its alarming gender imbalance constitutes the basic cause for the trafficking of tens of thousands Vietnamese women to China in the last decades. Although Vietnamese victims of human trafficking can be from all ethnic and social background, Hmong women comprise an unusually high percentage in this disturbing development. The direct cause for the suffering that Sao and thousands of Hmong women have to go through, however, lay in the transnational nature of their own ethnic group.

  This article documents the ordeal that Sao has gone through from the moment her husband brought her to China to the moment she was rescued by the Chinese and Vietnamese authorities. Through a close examination of this empirical case of cross-border human trafficking, the article aims to provide analysis of a number of issues. 1) The transnational nature of Hmong ethnic networks and trust that give rise to a range of possible illicit cross-border transaction including human trafficking. 2) The legal and cultural demarcation of national sovereignty were done without taking into the interest of national minority and their transnational linkages, thus lead to ineffective combatting of human trafficking.

• Pioneers of the Plantation Economy: Militarism, Dispossession, and the Limits of Growth in the WA State of Myanmar Hans Steinmuller London School of Economics and Political Science

  The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. And this ecology corresponded to a general cosmology in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and agricultural technologies have effectively ended swidden cultivation. In this presentation, I follow the pioneers of the plantation economy in the Wa State of Myanmar, who dispossess local populations of their land and employ them as plantation labour. The limits of growth and potency they encounter are a) in the natural environment and b) in the resistance of local populations. Yet, even though there are such limits, the potency to which these pioneers aspire is still limitless. In this presentation I present the elements of this new potency, that is based on a new economy of life.

• “Sert Has Gone”: Reconciling Cosmological Conundrums on a Ridgetop in Laos Paul-David Lutz University of Sydney

  This paper is built on a year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017-18 in the ethnic Khmu hamlet of Baan Kak (a pseudonym) in Laos’ northernmost province of Phongsali. The paper sketches local efforts to square pre-existing politico-cosmological commitments with the political, economic and ontological claims emanating from the developmentalist state and globalized capitalism. As Khmu, the people of Baan Kak have traditionally viewed their destinies as intimately intertwined with energetic forces/“spiritual” vectors (hmaal, hrooy) ultimately embedded in the landscape of their mountain ridge (rngong). At the same time, and as long-standing supporters of Laos’ socialist revolution, the Khmu of Baan Kak have increasingly intertwined their aspirations with the modernizing states’ promise of prosperity – even as efforts to fulfil this promise have faltered and/or transformed their “spiritual landscape” in ways that have challenged both pre-existing livelihoods and politico-cosmological arrangements.

  Drawing on my PhD ethnography, the paper examines the proactive ways local Khmu have sought tointerpret, manage and mitigate the moral ambiguities and tensions arising from this conundrum. In doing so, it contributes to further upsetting simplistic juxtapositions of state-society, tradition-modernity, and resistance-subordination.

  The paper concludes by suggesting that the (albeit precarious) persistence of key cosmological commitments have helped the Khmu of Baan Kak construct a narrative that reconciles the intense ambivalences inherent in their own role as harbingers, implementers, victims and beneficiaries of Laos’ ongoing modernization.

Papers (Part 2)

• Hmong Christian Pioneers in Vietnam’s Highlands: Competing, Cooperating with and Mimicking State Governance Seb Rumsby University of Warwick

  This paper focuses on the role of new Hmong religious leaders – predominantly young men – who have embraced Protestant Christianity and played an important role in spreading its influence across Vietnam’s northern and Central highlands over the past thirty years. In doing so, these pastors and evangelists have directly challenged the authority of previously established Hmong local elites (shamans and clan elders) whose legitimacy rested on either traditional religious authority or state patronage, causing significant social conflict along the way. In areas where the majority of Hmong have converted, some new Christian pioneers have gained a local elite status as brokers and spokespersons for their community, enjoying a potent combination of spiritual authority, strong external networks and financial success. By focusing on three such leaders, this paper explores the surprising ways in which Christian elites may compete with, cooperate with or mimic state forms of governance, and the effects of such tactics on wider state-civil society relations. These case studies highlight the agency of aspiring Christian pioneers, the degree of political manoeuvring space available to non-state actors in a supposedly authoritarian state, and the ongoing tensions and contestations within the Hmong community in Vietnam.

• Making Future in the Politics of Belonging: Religiosity, Tradition, and Lisu Self-Representations in Northern Myanmar Ying Diao Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

  The majority of the Burmese Lisu reside in the country’s northern Kachin States where this inconspicuous Christian people are also known as one of the six Kachin sub-groups. In contrast to the aspirations of the dominant Jinghpaw to use Christianity for social mobilization of nationalism in the politics of integration, Lisu people’s future-making strategies as reflected in their public self-representations involved both maintaining religious independence while claiming belonging to the nation as obedient citizens with recognizable ethno-cultural characteristics. The reintroduction of pre-Christian traditions back to the church, however, imposed moral ambiguities to the Christian communities concerning the destructive power of secular practices toward Christian values and experiences. Drawing on the investigation of Lisu Literacy Centennial (2017) and other recent mega cultural events, in this article I examine how Lisu Protestants re-conceptualized distinct categories of religion and culture (litpix) that work in the mutually reinforcing way in the construction of contemporary ethnoreligious identity against the background of post-2011 ethnic politics. In the sections below, I first show how former missionaries’ attitudes towards indigenous traditions led to the historical divide between Christian and traditionalist practices. I then turn to the recent Lisu (Kachin) cultural revival movement in which cultural preservation and standardization occupied a prominent place. Finally, I comparatively look into the Centennial and similar Lisu transnational cultural events to analyze how a modality of mutual dependence between Christian formality and cultural performance in the public space offers a framework for the Lisu to perceive their place against other Kachin groups, in the Burmese majority society, and with the Lisu across borders. I argue that the juxtaposition of Christian and traditional practices in the public performance has been essential to the Lisu elites’ struggles for ethnic and political legitimacy for a promising future.

• Religious Implications of Some Upland Societies in Northern Laos Vanina Bouté Centre Asie du Sud-Est

  As a communist state, Laos did not set up atheism in absolute principle: unlike China or Cambodia, the takeover by the Communists Pathet Lao in 1975 quickly gave up rejecting religion, and tried instead to integrate Buddhism into its Marxist reading of the country's development and as a factor of cultural unification faced with the country's ethnic diversity (Stuart-Fox and Bucknell, 1982; Evans, 1998). While officially promoting the diversity of the various ethnic groups of the country, the recognized place for the religions of these populations (subsumed under an ad hoc created category "satsana phi", “spirits cults”) has been singularly restricted. Often confused with "traditions" (hit khong), folklorized, what become today these religions "other" than Buddhism? This presentation will attempt to answer this question by presenting the different contemporary responses given by three Northern Lao upland societies to this imposed tradition / religion articulation.

Abstract

Keywords

• Borderlands
• Future
• Religion
• Zomia