Enclothing identity: A Hmong girl's journey into the politics of identification in Thailand

Teachers College Record

Volumn 109, Issue 7, 2007, Pages 1637-1662

  Johnson, Tracy Pilar ^a  

^a Teachers College ^*

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EID: 35648950092     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. To protect those involved in my research, all proper names and places referred to in this article are pseudonyms.
2. ASEAN is an acronym for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The ASEAN meetings were discussed in many local newspapers, for example see "War On Drugs", Bangkok Post, Sept. 13, 2002.
3. All words and phrases are transliterated from standard Thai using the Mary Haas system (Haas, M. 1956. The Thai system of writing. Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies) with some minor modifications. Thai words are italicized. All Hmong words are transliterated according to the Saturn Hmong-English/English-Hmong dictionary compiled by Mark Thompson and are italicized and underlined. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
4. Many Thai continue to use the term "Meo" to refer to the Hmong, even though the Hmong consider it a derogatory term.
5. The highland peoples of northern Thailand are referred to as "tribal people," "hill tribes," or "upland people" among other names. For the most part I use "upland peoples," as it is the name that most hill tribe people seem to prefer when speaking about themselves as a larger group.
6. Winichakul, T. (1994). Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, p. 166.
7. Wilk, R. (1995). "Learning to be local in Belize: Global systems of common difference." In D. Miller (Ed.) Worlds apart: Modernity through the prism of the local. New York: Routledge.
8. de Certeau, M. (1988/1984). The practice of everyday life. S. Rendall, Trans. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Los Angeles Press;
9. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York, London: Routledge.
10. The fieldwork for this study was conducted between December 2001 and November 2002, and between June 2002 and August 2003, and involved participant observation both in the village of Ban Rongrian and at the offices of a local development organization. Within the village I focused primarily on a group of 18 students, who as fifth-graders graduated to the sixth-grade class during the course of my study, and their families. I chose to study the sixth grade as they were the students most concerned with the differences and similarities between Hmong and Thai identifications and because they would be leaving the village at the end of the year to attend school elsewhere. During the course of this study, I also conducted a series of semi-structured and structured interviews with these 18 students, their families, the current and former village headmen, the Hmong community teachers, the Hmong development workers, Thai teachers, and Thai officials from the Ministry of Education. For the most part, I relied on the Thai language, with Hmong mixed in on an ad hoc basis, as my primary fieldwork language.
11. Hodgson , D. L. (1999). Critical interventions: Dilemmas of accountability in contemporary ethnographic research." Identities, 6(2-3), 204.
12. Phongpaichit, P., & Baker, C. 2000. Thailand: Economy and politics, 2 Ed. Kuala Lumpur, New York: Oxford University Press.
13. Povinelli, E. A. 1998. "The state of shame: Australian multiculturalism and the crisis of indigenous citizenship." Critical Inquiry, 24 (Winter);
14. for additional thoughts on the extent to which "multicultural" practices embody contradiction and ambivalence see Fish, S. (1997). Boutique multiculturalism, or Why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech, Critical Inquiry, 23(Winter);
15. and Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. Multiculturalism: A critical reader. D. T. Goldberg (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
16. de Certeau, Practice, 19.
17. Austin, J. L. (1975/1965). How to do things with words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
18. Butler, Excitable Speech.
19. Butler, Excitable Speech, 3.
20. Butler, Excitable Speech, 25.
21. Butler, Excitable Speech, 28.
22. Thongchai, Siam Mapped.
23. Chirasombutti, V. & Diller, A. (1999). Who am T in Thai?" - The Thai first person: Self-reference or gendered self? Genders and sexualities in modern Thailand. P. A. Jackson & N. M. Cook (Eds.), pp. 114-33. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.
24. This is not to imply that Hmong women do not have any power in Hmong social life. As Pat Symonds has noted in her recent ethnography Calling in the Soul: Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong Village [Symonds, P. (2004). Calling in the soul. Seattle: University of Washington Press], there are also instances around which a Hmong woman can demonstrate power, for example, they are the purveyors of life through birth and death, and they can express freedom in marriage choice.
25. While this could be seen as raising the issue of whether ethnic identification is an issue of group solidarity, this alone would be too simplistic a reading of the situation. Rather, as I hope that I am displaying in this chapter, decisions about dress also were motivated by individual concerns regarding the ability to maintain control over ethnic identifications, as well as economic concerns.
26. Schein, L. (1999). Of cargo and satellites: Imagined cosmopolitanism. Postcolonial Studies, 2(3), 365.
27. Schein. L. (2003). Ethnicizing production and consumption: The Miao, the media and the market. State, market and ethnic groups contextualized: Papers from the Third International Conference on Sinology, Anthropology Section. Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 222,
28. See WiIk "Learning to be local" for a discussion of how a global standard becomes the silent and ever present judge in local beauty contests in Belize.
29. For example see Mills, M. B. (1997). Thai women in the global labor force: Consuming desires, contested selves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, for a discussion of how many rural Thai women are lured by the promise of a better life in Bangkok only to find themselves working in factories.
30. Povinelli "The State of Shame."