The global in the local: Contested resource-use systems of the Karen and Hmong in Northern Thailand

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 347-360

  Tomforde, Maren ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNIC GROUP; INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE; RACE; RESOURCE USE; SHIFTING CULTIVATION; SOCIAL IMPACT;

ASIA; EURASIA; NORTHERN REGION [THAILAND]; SOUTHEAST ASIA; THAILAND;

EID: 33744488738     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: 14740680     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463403000298     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (55)

1. Philip Hirsch, 'The politics of environment: Opposition and legitimacy', in Political change in Thailand: Democracy and participation, ed. Kevin Hewison (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 1;
2. Lotte Isager, Forest and people in Thai environmentalist discourse (Aarhus: Research Centre on Forest and People in Thailand, 2000), p. 4;
3. Kay Milton, 'Environmentalism and anthropology', in Environmentalism: The view from anthropology, ed. Kay Milton (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-2.
4. Kay Milton, Environmentalism and cultural theory (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 32-3. Milton's study provides an overview of the diverse forms of environmentalism which cannot be explained in detail here.
5. Philip Hirsch, 'Environment and environmentalism in Thailand: Material and ideological bases', in Seeing forests for trees: Environment and environinentalism in Thailand, ed. Philip Hirsch (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1996), pp. 16-20
6. and Anan Ganjanapan, 'The politics of environment in Northern Thailand: Ethnicity and highland development programs', in the same volume, pp. 202-22.
7. An overview of the financial issues is in Jonathan Rigg, Counting the costs: Economic growth and environmental change in Thailand (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1995).
8. Thirteen years after it was first drafted in 1990, the bill has yet to be passed by Parliament. One reason for the long debate over the final draft lies in the fact that other urgent issues need to be resolved first, such as land rights and the legal status of communities living in protected areas. If these problems remain unsolved, they threaten to undermine the main principles of the community forest bill. See Verena Brenner et al., 'Thailand's Community Forest Bill: U-turn or roundabout in forest policy?' (Freiburg: Graduate College Working Paper, 1999);
9. and Chayan Vaddhanaphuti and Karen Aquino, 'Citizenship and forest policy in the North of Thailand', paper presented at the Seventh International Thai Studies Conference, Amsterdam, 5-8 July 1999. See also the article by Jin Sato in this issue.
10. The research was conducted between May 1999 and April 2000 and again from April 2001 through March 2002. For previous scholarship on the same area, see Roland Mischung, Religion und Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen in einem Karen-Dorf in Nordwest-Thniland (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1984)
11. and Mischung, 'Geschichte, Gesellschaft und Umwelt: Eine kulturökologische Fallstudie über zwei Bergvölker Südostasiens' (Habilitation, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main).
12. Peter Vandergeest, 'Property rights in protected areas: Obstacles to community involvement as a solution in Thailand', Environmental Conservation, 23, 3 (1996): 159.
13. For good insight into the scientific debate about the positive and negative ecological aspects of swidden agriculture see Andres Masipiquena et al., 'The use of fire in Northeastern Luzon (Philippines): Conflicting views of local people, scientists, and government officials', in Indigenous environmental knowledge and its transformations: Critical anthropological perspectives, ed. Roy Ellen et al. (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 177-212.
14. See also Surin Vivajsirin et al., 'Thailand', in Biodiversity planning in Asia, ed. Jeremy Carew-Reid (Bangkok: IUCN, 2000).
15. Pinkaew Leungaramsri, Redefining nature: Karen ecological knowledge and the challenge to the modern conservation paradigm (Chennai: Earthworm Books, 2000), pp. 64-5.
16. 'Introduction', The future of peoples and forests in Thailand after the logging ban, ed. Pinkaew Leungaramsri and Noel Rajesh (Bangkok: Project for Ecological Recovery, 1992).
17. Pinkaew, Redefining nature, p. 3.
18. Conflict between ethnic mountain groups and lowland majority Thai has already erupted openly. One well-known example is the 1998 conflict in Chiang Mai's Chom Thong district, when Thai lowland farmers and activists grouped together to burn a Buddhist pavilion in a Hmong village and to close the roads of the Doi Inthanon National Park - mainly inhabited by Karen and Hmong - for a number of days. As stated by lowlanders, the intent was to remove the ethnic mountain groups from the Chom Thong watershed since they are seen as the cause of forest destruction and water shortages during the dry season; Pinkaew Leungaramsri, 'Thailand: The Chom Thong conflict', in Indigenous peoples and protected areas in South and Southeast Asia: From principles to practice, ed. Marcus Colchester and Christian Erni (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 1999), pp. 108-10. Ethnic mountain groups, on the other hand, have also organised themselves to demonstrate publicly for secure land and settlement rights, Thai citizenship and participation in local resource management. For example, rallies by the 'Assembly of the Poor' and other NGOs such as the Northern Farmers Network gathering hundreds and thousands of members of the diverse ethnic mountain groups are organised each year in front of government buildings in Chiang Mai and Bangkok to push for governmental negotiations about the most urgent problems.
19. See Lotte Isager, 'History and people of North Thailand', in Forest in culture - culture in forest: Perspectives from Northern Thailand, ed. Ebbe Poulsen et al. (Tjele : Research Centre on Forest and People in Thailand, 2001);
20. and Rigg, Counting the costs.
21. Conservationist disputes are also discussed in Anan Ganjanapan, Local control of land and forest: Cultural dimensions of resource management in Northern Thailand (Chiang Mai: Regional Centre for Social Sciences and Sustainable Development, 2000);
22. Hirsch, Seeing forests;
23. and the essays in Pinkaew and Rajesh ed., Future of peoples.
24. Isager, Forest and people, p. 33.
25. Philip Stott. 'Muang and paa: Elite views of nature in Thailand', in Thai constructions of knowledge, ed. Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton (London: SOAS, 1991), pp. 144-50;
26. and Richard Davis, Muang metaphysics: A study of Northern Thai myth and ritual (Bangkok: Pandora, 1994).
27. See also Lindsay Falvey, 'Self sufficiency or Buddhism? Applied agricultural ethics in Thailand', Tai Culture, 5, 2 (2000): 15-8.
28. For a closer description of Thai perceptions of ethnic mountain groups before'and during the foundation of the modern Thai state, see Charles F. Keyes, 'The Karen in Thai history and the history of the Karen in Thailand', in Ethnic adaptation and identity: The Karen on the Thai frontier with Burma, ed. Charles F. Keyes (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), pp. 31-54;
29. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam mapped: The history of the geo-body of a nation (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1994);
30. and David Marlowe,'Upland lowland relationship: The case of the Sgaw Karen of central upland western Chiang Mai", in Tribesmen and peasants in Thailand, ed. Peter Hinton (Chiang Mai: Tribal Research Institute, 1969, pp. 53-68).
31. For discussions of terminology regarding these peoples, see John McKinnon and Jean Michaud, 'Montagnard domain in the South-East Asian massif, in Turbulent times and enduring peoples: Mountain minorities in the South-East Asian massif, ed. Jean Michaud (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), pp. 5-9;
32. Ron Renard, 'The differential integration of hill people into the Thai state', in Civility and savagery: Social identity in Tai states, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000), pp. 79-80;
33. and John McKinnon, 'Structural assimilation and the consensus: Clearing grounds on which to rearrange our thoughts', in Hill tribes today: Problems in change, ed. John McKinnon and Bernard Vienne (Bangkok: White Lotus-ORTSOM, 1989), p. 307.
34. Pinkaew, Redefining nature, p. 5.
35. Ingvar Sander, 'Umweltpolitik in Thailand: Chancen für eine ökologische Modernisierung', in Thailand: Aktuelle Wandlungsprozesse in Politik, Wirtschaft, Umwelt und Gesellschaft, ed. Ingvar Sander and Gerhard Reinecke (Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, 2000), pp. 143-53.
36. Pinkaew, Redefining nature, p. 54.
37. Michael Gravers, The Pwo Karen ethnic minority in the Thai nation: Destructive hill tribe or utopian consermtionists? (Copenhagen: Centre for East and Southeast Asia, 1994), p. 21.
38. Royal Project, 'Royal Project Foundation' (Bangkok/Chiang Mai: Royal Project, no date). By 1983, there were no less than 61 different agencies at work in the Northern Thai mountains; Anthony Walker, 'Northern Thailand as geo-ethnic mosaic', in The highland heritage: Collected essays on upland North Thailand, ed. Anthony Walker (Singapore: Suvarnabhumi Books, 1992), p. 16.
39. Dietrich Schmidt-Vogt, Swidden farming and fallow vegetation in Northern Thailand (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1999).
40. Mischung, Religion und Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen, pp. 105-8;
41. Peter Hinton, 'Declining production among sedentary swidden cultivators: The case of the Pwo Karen', in Farmers in the forest: Economic development and marginal agriculture in Northern Thailand, ed. Peter Kunstadter et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 1978), pp. 192-3;
42. and Peter Kunstadter and E. C. Chapman, 'Problems of shifting cultivation and economic development in Northern Thailand', in the same volume, pp. 3-23.
43. About 70 per cent of the Karen of the research area still practise the traditional Karen religion while 30 per cent are Christians. Of all ethnic mountain groups, Karen have doubtless had the longest exposure to Christianity, initially Baptist Protestantism and later Roman Catholicism as well. See Robert Steinmetz, 'The ecological science of the Karen in Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, western Thailand', in Colchester and Erni, eds., Indigenous peoples and protected areas, p. 84;
44. and Walker, 'Geo-ethnic mosaic', p. 54.
45. Pinkaew, Redefining nature,
46. Yoko Hayami, 'Challenges to community rights in the hill forests: State policy and local contradictions, a Karen case', Tai Culture, 5, 2 (2000): 104-31.
47. Mischung, Religion und Wirklichkeilsvorstellungen, p. 67.
48. Mischung, 'Geschichte, Gesellschaft und Umwelt";
49. Hayami, Challenges to community rights'.
50. Steinmetz, 'Ecological science of the Karen', p. 86.
51. Nicolas Tapp, The Hmong of Thailand: Opium people of the Golden Triangle (London: Anti-Slavery. Society, 1986), pp. 19-28;
52. Anthony Geddes, Migrants of the mountains: The cultural ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of Thailand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 138-98;
53. and F. G. B. Keen, The Meo of North-West Thailand: A South-East Asian hill tribe (Wellington: Government Printer, 1966), pp. 18-38.
54. China is the place of origin from which, as a result of expulsion, wars and economic hardships, Hmong migrated via Vietnam and Laos to Thailand about 100 years ago. A migration pattern has long been ingrained in Hmong culture due to this migration from China and the system of semi-sedentary swidden agriculture.
55. Christianity was first introduced by missionaries to the Hmong in Thailand in the 1920s; however, most Hmong communities, especially in the rural areas, have chosen to remain with their traditional religion, which plays an essential part in the survival of their culture and identity.