A few days ago I posted several images of Sipsongpanna, taken during my recent (brief) visit there. My selection of images was intended to raise questions about Sipsongpanna’s cultural characteristics. I deliberately chose Han Chinese and modernist images to serve as a contrast with common representations of Sipsongpanna as a site of trans-border “Tainess” (representations that are often promoted by a new generation of pan-Thai intellectuals in Thailand). One reader, quite fairly, responded:
Andrew, I believe I get your point, but this is not all there is to it, right?
Right! I have no intention of denying the contemporary salience of “Tai-ness” in Sipsongpanna but the economic, demographic and social transformations that are taking place there invite new ways of thinking about culture in frontier regions. Is “Han” culture any less a legitimate and authentic part of the culture of Sipsongpanna than “Tai” culture? Are ethnic categories like “Han” and “Tai” really a useful way of understanding long-standing cultural dynamism? No doubt, ethnic markers are deployed in all sorts of official, unofficial, private and public situations but it would be interesting to see what sort of view of the region emerged from a conceptual framework that did not take ethnic categorisation as its starting point. It wouldn’t be easy given the extent to which Sipsongpanna (and Yunnan more generally) is saturated with the discourse of ethnicity, but it’s worth a try!
8 responses so far ↓
1 roger p // Jun 10, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Andrew, I agree it´s not easy to leave ethnicty behind, especially when the government itself promotes awareness of (artificial?) ethnic categories and most people are still to maintain a distinct ethnic identity even without the help of that promotion… My idea is that there is an old ethnic system (the one developed by the Lue themselves ago long ago) and a new one that the CCP etc. has been trying to impose since the 1950s. These can be maybe described as two ideal systems, the number of possibilities to be found between them, infinite.
What about it? (sorry for insisting on ethnicity!)
2 Andrew Walker // Jun 11, 2007 at 8:49 am
Thanks Roger. I’m cautious about the distinction between “old” and “new” ethnic systems but would be interested to hear more about how you would describe the “old” system.
3 wasan // Jun 14, 2007 at 7:46 pm
what do you really mean, A.Andrew, Rethinking Sipsongpanna?
In this remore country of southwest China, but also situates in the borderlands of the upper Mekong, there is no Tai, but Dai (Chinese Tai) as registered by the State and existed by local perception, though not all of them.
To me a term or concept ‘ethnicity’ is not really useful if you are going to deploy it in understanding what is actually on in Xishuangbanna, not Sipsongpanna (because it is gone), today.
Ethnicity studies, particularly in many Thai univ, is just what I call ‘an anthropological masturbation’, though many would alternately call it a statecraft in this (post)modern days and thereofore for those labelled peoples it is a tactic or a weapon of the weak.
Weak because at least they don have a tank and a missile like the State.
4 roger p // Jun 17, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Andrew, sorry for such a late response to your question –I hope you get to read this new post, and that you and Wasan are willing to continue the discussion.
I agree “ethnicity” is as objectable a tool as any other –but still believe it may be necessary to understand, at least partly, “what is going on” in Sipsong Panna, for ethnic categories are constructed and re-constructed not only as a “statecraft” on the part of the CCP, but also, as Wasan has acknowledged, by the locals themselves.
And this is true not only regarding the “new”, state categorization which has labelled the Tai Lue as “Dai”, but also the “old” one, which I related to the traditional categorization imposed by the Tai Lue through the muang system, and which would roughly classify peoples as “civilized” and “uncivilized”, according to their possesion or lack of sasana. This categorization –again an ideal tool that we reproduced as we understand it served as an ideology for the ruling Tai, even if it is never found completely realized in the field–, is also still partially valid to understand social relations in Sipsong Panna, as shown for instance in the contempt with which some Tai Lue still regard other ethnic groups in the area –a contempt not understandable, for example, merely in socioeconomic terms.
In this sense, we cannot say that “Sipsong Panna” or the “Tai Lue” are gone, or dissapeared; how could we say this when so many locals still use the latter when referring to their homeland? There´s a big deal of surviving elements from social structures –including conceptions about ethnicity– previous to 1953, and these will remain here for a long time –even if the CCP has gone to great lengths to dismantle these structures. Coming back to “ethnicity”, the ways people understand and make use of these different categorizations are undoubtedly very complex, and surely taking “ethnicity” as a point of view is not enough to obtain a more or less complete picture of what is going on in Sipsong Panna. But I don´t see why we cannot use it as a tool to understand socioeconomic relations when these are undoubtedly still determined to a certain extent by ethnic conceptions.
5 wasan // Jun 18, 2007 at 3:08 am
ok let me play a word,
I said ethnicity is not useful but did not day that you cannot use it
for me, I would rather prefer to use some thing like ‘cultural or social identity’, and these are different, conceptually.
Sipsongpanna is gone, but the Lue senses of thier homelands of course are still there, in thier minds. but what kinds of these homelands?
the Lue, to me, in Xishuangbanna, have been redrawn, they are really disappearing, or becoming the Dai, not Lue.
Of course there are still lots of people called Lue in Burma, Laos, and Thailand, and overseas. But these people have also been transformed.
you have to say in plural because there are lots of fractions, and they are so fragmented
so who are the Lue? this is perhaps not really a good question, but what have they been doing, or how could these people around the globe, in different places, maintain and perform to be ‘Lue’ that should be paid attention to, to me.
6 Andrew Walker // Jun 18, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Roger, I think we are in general agreement. I have no doubt that many aspects of social, political and cultural life have an “ethnic dimension”. Nor do I doubt that in some contexts, ideas like “Tai”, “Lue”, or “Sipsongpanna” have salience and can signal certain sentiments of belonging. What I am arguing is that “ethnicity” needn’t provide an overarching organising framework for the way we understand the region. What might an alternative approach look like?
7 roger p // Jul 9, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Andrew, sorry for not continuing the discussion for such a long time. Yes, we all seem also to agree that ethnicity cannot serve as an overarching framework for “understanding” the region (which is in itself quite an ambitious goal); but I find it difficult to find such another overarching approach -probably this should be a conglomerate of different approaches: socio-economic, political, cultural, etc. If you force me to I may come up with something more specific, but, what is your idea?
8 DallasLao // Dec 20, 2007 at 2:23 am
I am off topic but I want to say something. These people share similar background as the people of Laos and Thailand.
When I look at the video in YouTube of the people of Sipsongpanna, I can not help but thinking I am looking at a video of people from Laos or Thailand.
China just want to erase any identity they have and make them become Chinese. It is a good idea because maybe later on these people want to become their own state.
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