From the Mountains and the Interiors: A Quarter of a Century of Research among Fourth World Peoples in Southeast Asia (With Special Reference to Northern Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia)

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, in 1970, when the first volume of the Journal of South-East Asian Studies made its appearance, I was living in a rather remote mountain village in Phrao district, northern Thailand, about to complete a four-year field project with the Lahu Nyi. I was one of close to a dozen social and cultural anthropologists, at various stages in their professional careers from Ph.D. candidates (such as myself) to seasoned professionals (like the late Bill Geddes), at work among Thailand's so-called “northern hill tribes”. The small expatriate community in the charming Chiang Mai of those days readily joked about “the anthropologist behind every bush in the northern hills”. In fact there were good reasons for this heavy concentration of anthropological research at that time. The 1960s were perhaps the halcyon days for social and cultural anthropology in the Western academy; naturally this happy situation was reflected in the numbers of doctoral candidates proceeding to the field. Moreover, within the mainland Southeast Asia of that time, only Thailand provided academic researchers with relatively easy and more-or-less safe access to its mountain peoples.

The ‘Thailand Controversy’ Revisited

“…Assistance to the TRC was thus nothing if not international, and continued until well into the 1980s. Walker (1995) provides a useful overview of research in the region, and places the work of the TRC in a wider context. This provided interesting anthropological material in itself, in the context of the increasing literature on bureaucracies (Hinton 1992).…”