Mien Relations: Mountain People
and State Control in Thailand
Hjorleifur Jonsson

ISBN 978-974-93619-7-9
2006. 226pp, 145x210mm, B625
For sale in Southeast Asia

Thailand’s hill tribes have been the object of anthropological research, cultural tourism, and government intervention for a century, in large part because these groups are held to have preserved distinctive ethnic traditions despite their contacts with “modern” culture. Hjorleifur Jonsson rejects the conventional notion that the worlds of traditional peoples are being transformed or undone by the forces of modernity. Among the Mien people of northern Thailand, he finds a complex highlander identity that has been shaped by a thousand years of interaction in a multi-ethnic contact zone.

Hjorleifur Jonsson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University.