Chair: Nancy Eberhardt, Knox College

Classic ethnographic representation of peoples in Southeast Asia throughout the colonial period and well into this century focused on portraying unified, authentic subjects and holistic, coherent cultures. Various ethno-linguistic groups were mapped according to the presence of selected and unique cultural complexes, or differentiated from other groups according to the absence of what were considered defining cultural features. Ethnographic representations of this sort often produced dualistic tropes such as ‘highland/animist/competitive feasting peoples’ versus ‘lowland/scriptural religion/merit making peoples’ that guided or framed appropriate fieldwork topics. In this session, we explore the conventions of constructing coherent ethnographic representations in the past even as we relocate present subjects within this genre. A key issue that all of these papers focus on is the consequences of such orthodoxies for elucidating contemporary social processes and for resituating various peoples both within and outside the traditional ethnographic archive of Southeast Asian area studies. Since the great ‘tribal studies’ of the 1920s–1940s comprise the heart of the classic ethnographic period in anthropology, three of these papers appropriately focus on upland peoples in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The fourth paper addresses these issues from the perspective of the changing ethnographic images of Chinese and peoples of Chinese descent in Thailand. All of the papers contribute to a larger, contemporary debate about the promise, weakness, and future value of comparative ethnography in Southeast Asian area studies and scholarship—ideas that will be elaborated on by our chair and discussant to encourage audience participation and commentary.

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson, Arizona State University

Settlement migration was common in the forested hinterlands of mainland Southeast Asia prior to the 1970s. To the modern Thai state, these movements have contributed to their sense of upland populations as disorderly and dangerous to national security. As such, the image of migration has informed the civilizing mission of the Thai state toward what James Scott has called "the people who move about." This implicit dichotomy of grassroots expressions of freedom versus the disciplinary force of the state serves not only to convey kinds of people and political dynamics, but also to separate anthropology from its object. To anthropologists, settlement migration has been integral to their construction of "peoples" in ethnic terms. I will explore anthropological tropes of ethnic moves historically, from the migration of races to adaptations to the environment and flight from state control and oppression, and then examine the relations of these portrayals to state control and the connections between anthropology and the state. Drawing on my fieldwork in Thailand, I then re-situate uplanders in relation to historical changes in state control and anthropological understandings, and also in relation to their own varied and historically specific discourses of ‘locality’ and migration.

Ann Maxwell Hill, Dickinson College

Whether construed as sojourning or diaspora, Chinese migration to Thailand has been cast as the story of the overseas Chinese, later the Sino-Thai and, most recently, Chinese transnationals. This paper reflects on the mainstream ethnographic representations of Chinese in Thailand, beginning in the 1950s, from the perspective of the Chinese experience in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s major northern city. In Chiang Mai, the fastest growing group of Chinese have come overland from Yunnan Province in China, and descendents of overseas Chinese in this northern city have been deeply localized in a society markedly different from the urban centers of South and Central Thailand. The dichotomous conventions of much of the analysis of Chinese in Thailand—assimilation vs. separation, Thai culture vs. Chinese culture, native place vs. Bangkok, for example—have been confounded by the complexity and flux of local, multiethnic society in the North of Thailand. Here, the disjuncture of place and identity, said to be a condition of modern transnationals, characterized much of the history of Chinese migration to this northern city. Class distinctions, salient to the Sino-Thai middle class in Central Thailand, are less marked in a social environment in which the wealthy may be neither Thai nor Chinese.

Ethnography from the North argues for an alternative to the Bangkok/overseas Chinese model for understanding the Chinese in Thailand; this alternative model transcends national and ethnic boundaries to include Chinese populations across the Sino-Southeast Asian uplands. Equally important, a perspective from the North looking south encourages both a sharper appreciation of the factors that shaped the anthropological orthodoxy of Chinese in Thailand and new insights into the perennial question of Chinese identity in SE Asia.

Lorraine V. Aragon, East Carolina University

The first and hence "classic" ethnographic representations of Central Sulawesi peoples were created by Dutch missionaries and colonial officials who foundered in a quagmire of confusing ethnic autonyms based on shifting settlement domains. Colonial administrators and missionaries resolved their classification dilemmas through recourse to a religious dualism that simply separated Muslims from non-Muslims. Non-Muslim groups in the highlands were defined as ethnically "Toraja," without religion, and therefore eligible for Christian missionization. Muslim groups in the lowlands, deemed ineligible for proselytization, were identified ethnically with their South Sulawesi trade partners, the Bugis, Makasar, and Mandar peoples. Linguistic data were collected secondarily by both colonial and postcolonial missionaries to create a more detailed ethnic classification scheme that was set under the initial Muslim/lowlander versus animist/Christian/highlander division. Drawing on my fieldwork among highland Uma speakers in Central Sulawesi, I briefly review the classificatory pitfalls that misconstrue what contemporary observers still admit is a confusing set of ethnic autonyms, chain dialects, and shifting local identities. Then I address the consequences of the classic outsiders’ ethnic representations of Central Sulawesi peoples for postcolonial regional political alliances and escalating religious tensions.

Susan D. Russell, Northern Illinois University