Jean Michaud

This book introduces, from an anthropological standpoint, French Catholic missionary colonial ethnographic writing from the highlands of north Vietnam and Yunnan at the turn of the 20th century, and searches for the genealogies of the intellectual influences at play.

French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880-1930

'Incidental' Ethnographers

The Book of Sa-Heti

Jan Ovesen

Scattered across the South-East Asian massif, a few dozen ethnic groups (numbering around 50 million) maintain highly original cultural identities and political and economic traditions, against pressure from national majorities. They face the same challenges. The means by which social change has been imposed by the lowlanders are similar from country to country, and the results are comparable. The originality of this book lies in the combination of multi-disciplinary mixing of social anthropology, history and human geography; multi-culturality grouping together several cultural contexts; trans-nationality straddling five countries and bridging the traditional divide between South China and Mainland South-East Asia; and history reaching back 300 years.

Mountain Minorities in the South-East Asian Massif

Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples

Tim Forsyth

The mountainous borderlands of socialist China, Vietnam, and Laos are home to some seventy million minority people of diverse ethnicities. In Moving Mountains, anthropologists, geographers, and political economists with first-hand experience in the region explore these peoples' survival strategies, as they respond to unprecedented economic and political change. Although highland peoples are typically represented as marginalized and powerless, this volume argues that ethnic minorities draw on culture and ethnicity to indigenize modernity and maintain their livelihoods. This unprecedented glimpse into a poorly understood region shows that development initiatives must be built on strong knowledge of local cultures in order to have lasting effect.

Jean Michaud

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