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8 Recording Tradition and Measuring Progress in the Ethnic Minority Highlands of Thailand Hjorleifur Jonsson It was clear that government interventions in highland farming had made local livelihood rather precarious by the time of my first fieldwork with the Mien people of Thailand in 1992–1994.1 Shifting cultivation had been outlawed for decades, and the bulk of highland ethnic minority peoples had not been granted citizenship, the legal prerequisite for owning land. Occasionally whole settlements were evicted, and in some places people’s fields were overtaken by lowland farmers with better connections to government officials. Sometimes I asked Mien people why they did not attempt to move across the border to Laos, where I assumed government intervention in farmer livelihood was limited. The most common answer to this query was that there was “no progress” there. Progress implied roads, markets, schools, health care, and the like, the local measure of modernity and well-being. To hear from older people that “progress” (Thai, khwaam jaroen, often used interchangeably with kaan phatthana, “development”) made their livelihood difficulties bearable was puzzling. Older people who talked with me also made this contrast with life in the past, the 1960s of ethnographies I had read in preparation for my own fieldwork. This was another puzzle to me, possibly because at the time I still thought there were hill tribes, ethnic groups with distinct cultures, in which older people (at least) were nostalgic for the social and cultural frameworks of their pasts. But they were not nostalgic. I was well versed in the earlier ethnography of the area and its peoples. I expected traditional shifting cultivators with specific forms of kinship and ritual that reinforced ethnic identities. My expectations did not include the successful insertion of the Thai ideology of modernity into the fabric of everyday life among the Mien, through schools, media (newspapers, radio, and television), and meetings. This ideology wed nation (Thai) and modernity (progress) partly through presenting the image of “unreformed” hill tribe peoples as a source of Thailand’s problems. If I could not easily cling 108 / Hjorleifur Jonsson to notions of ethnic culture to account for local social life, should I anchor my findings to national politics and ideology instead? But to think about Mien life today as merely a set of opposing orientations of “past/tribal” and “Thai/modern/state” is restrictive. There are multiple intertwinings of culture and politics, of the local and the national. To chase after these, I will relate some of my steps toward an understanding of Mien life, with a description of vignettes of Mien enactments of culture and identity in various settings. democr acy and kinship “They don’t like to grow rice, so they look for work in towns and also abroad,” said Dr. Chob Kacha-Ananda. He was an expert on the Mien at Thailand’s Tribal Research Institute (TRI), an arm of the government’s administration. In October 1992, Chob had kindly invited me to join his team on their trip to document a Mien wedding in the village of Rom Yen, near the town of Chiangkham in Phayao province. This seemed a good opportunity to visit some villages to find a fieldsite for my research. Rom Yen village is a fivehour drive from the city of Chiangmai, the administrative center of northern Thailand, where I was then based and where the TRI is located. On our way to Rom Yen, we first went to the Mien village of Pangkha, where we spent the night. Chob told me that the Royal Forestry Department of the Thai government planned to evict six villages from the Pangkha region in the interest of forest protection, and that the villages had purportedly agreed to move. One of the six would most likely be allowed to stay, he added, since the king’s mother (the Princess Mother, Mae Fa Luang) had donated a large school to the people there. According to Chob, this was the village of Pangphrik, where people “don’t like to grow rice. . . .” The Pangphrik school was run by Thailand’s Border Patrol Police (BPP). It was a remainder and reminder of a war of Thai military and mercenary forces (with American support) against the Communist Party of Thailand and its sympathizers . During the 1960s and 1970s, ethnic minority highlanders were viewed as holding uncertain political allegiance at best, and as communists at worst; active fighting lasted until 1982. A decade later, the BPP was still involved in instilling a sense of...

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