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.

Authored by Michaud, Jean; Ovesen, Jan

Introduction Montagnard Domain in the South-East Asian Massif, John McKinnon, Jean Michaud; Chapter 1 Migrants, Runaways and Opium Growers: Origins of the Hmong in Laos and Siam in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Christian Culas; Chapter 2 ::, Jean Michaud; Chapter 3 The Western Protestant Missionaries and the Miao in Yunnan and Guizhou, Southwest China, Alison Lewis; Chapter 4 The Karens: Loyalism and Self-Determination, Clive Christie; Chapter 5 ::, Oscar Salemink; Chapter 6 Emergence of a Leading Group: A Case Study of the Inter-Ethnic Relationships in the Southern Shan State, François Robinne; Chapter 7 ::, Peter Kunstadter; Chapter 8 The Impact of Trekking Tourism in a Changing Society: A Karen Village in Northern Thailand, Henry Bartsch; Chapter 9 Traditional Tribal What? Sports, Culture and the State in the Northern Hills of Thailand, Hjorleifur Jonsson;