สิ่งพิมพ์ภาษาอังกฤษ

Despite a growing social inclusiveness of global policy texts, conservation practice has not yet fully embraced the meaningful participation of local and Indigenous communities residing in protected areas. In this context, the Thai government approved two Royal Decrees for ecosystem conservation in November 2024 that would severely threaten the livelihoods, living prospects, and continued residence of Indigenous communities in protected areas. Protests with 10,000 participants prompted a review of the Decrees in May 2025. In response, this research report investigated the psychological and social implications of the announcement of the Royal Decrees and argues that it undermined community social capital and intrinsic engagement with everyday environmental heritage. We drew on qualitative and survey data, collected from 09/2024 to 05/2025 in two Pgaz K’Nyau and two Hmong communities in the northern Thai highlands, and comprising community consultations with 73 participants, 101 semi-structured interviews, and two survey rounds with 384 observations in total. We used qualitative thematic and descriptive statistical analysis to explore how community members experienced, interpreted, and responded to the announcement of the decrees. We found that Indigenous villagers experienced anxiety and unease, and that the decrees undermined community efforts to conserve and engage with local ecosystems. The continued uncertainty surrounding communities’ future sparked a strong activist sentiment to resist the decrees. Disruptions of community social capital and everyday environmental heritage also had plausible and potentially significantly negative ecological downstream effects. We therefore call for an urgent correction of the conservation initiative to embrace inclusive and bottom-up natural resource governance.

Despite limited power and capital, ethnic entrepreneurs can develop effective marketing strategies. This article examines the marketing approach of two silver craft entrepreneurs from the Iu Mien ethnic group in Thailand’s Nan Province. By engaging in cultural activities, such as gifting silver craft products to members of the Thai monarchy, offering a free dual vocational education program at their factory, and positioning their factory as a heritage tourism site, the entrepreneurs of Doi Silver Factory have made their economic objectives less apparent. Moreover, these activities create symbolic value for their enterprise, framing it as an act of “preserving heritage for the nation.” Anyone involved is also positioned as part of this preservation effort. Moving beyond a strictly Marxist interpretation that views this marketing approach as an advanced form of wealth accumulation, we argue that this practice is also a subtle form of ethnopolitics, where the entrepreneurs assert their place as contributors to the safeguarding of cultural heritage in Thailand, in contrast to being stereotyped as threats to national security. Therefore this marketing approach is both economically and socially oriented. This research contributes to the study of marketing strategies in ethnic entrepreneurship. The study is based on fieldwork conducted from 2020 to 2024.

Today, the Hmong, one of the largest highland ethnic minorities in Thailand, might be looked on as an object of exotic tourism, evoking images of peaceful and smiling Hmong women wearing colorful dresses. In Cold War Thailand, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, however, they were considered the most dangerous enemy - the “Red Meo” (Hmong) - that supposedly posed a serious threat to national security. During this period, Cold War competition heated up in the region. The Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), which had chosen the strategy of Pa lom muang (Jungles surrounding the cities), continued their guerrilla warfare in the jungles and borderlands of northern and northeastern Thailand, while the Thai government was determined to smash all communist forces throughout the country. Both sides approached Hmong villages in the region and provided weapons, and, as a result, tens of thousands of Hmong in the conflict areas joined each side. Many Hmong were killed by either government or communist forces. Much worse, Hmong communities were divided into two camps that confronted each other. Fear and antagonism were imposed on Hmong people who joined either side. Relatives and family members killed one another, leaving painful memories that haunt the Hmong people even several decades after the end of the Cold War. How did the Hmong people interact with the Cold War world? Why did they join both sides of the conflict, and what happened to them?

Ecosystem conservation has moved to the centre of global development agendas in light of an unprecedented acceleration of environmental degradation, species extinction, and catastrophic weather events. Global and national conservation policies with seemingly laudable aspirations, however, have been widely instrumentalised and distorted - leading researchers to argue that the very tools to safeguard natural spaces feed consistently into a market-oriented agricultural production and modernisation agenda. Indigenous peoples who continue to inhabit protected spaces as their ancestral lands have systematically suffered in this process. We conducted a place-based narrative literature review to formulate a consistent agenda for the next generation of conservation research and policy to help overcome this persistent challenge, drawing on the extensive and interdisciplinary research literature of the northern Thai highlands published until 2021. The place-based narrative review traced gradual contextual change, inconsistent policy directions, and perverse incentives that have created a systemic challenge to ecosystem conservation. Key research gaps are the under-appreciated symbolic and affective dimensions of evolving tropical landscapes at the interface of Indigeneity, conservation, and development. Our proposed research agenda involves the synergistic combination of tools of human security, everyday environmental heritage, activity spaces, and behavioural design to understand these experiential dimensions of conservation from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, their active role as security contributors, pathways to impact, and new models of policy making. Suggested policy responses revolve around comprehensive domains of action (instead of isolated interventions) to overcome the systemic and contextual challenges affecting Indigenous livelihoods.

The movement of indigenous peoples in Asia especially in South, East, and Southeast Asia, has become a prominent and powerful phenomenon over the past few decades. On a global level, indigeneity—the fact of originating or living in a particular place-has been used by marginalized peoples as justification for claiming and accessing basic rights. The origin of indigeneity may be found in colonized countries where European settlers permanently settled and gradually dominated indigenous or native peoples, particularly on the North American, Latin American, and Australian continents. Unlike many settler colonies in the West, native peoples in many former colonized countries and non-colonized countries are no longer dominated by recent settlers but are still being internally colonized by the present national governments (see Abeysekara 2011; Enloe 1977; Evans 1992; Prasit and Mukdawan 2021; Tan 2020; and Thongchai 2000). This has resulted in various native and ethnic groups identifying themselves as indigenous peoples and joining the international movement of indigeneity. In recent years, indigenism has become not only a common ideological consciousness but also a transnational movement in Southeast Asia, operating at different levels of networking. Considering this, my basic questions concern why indigenism is popular among various ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, what it stems from, and how it is being used to connect with indigenous peoples’ movements in other parts of the world. It is my belief that self-identifying as indigenous peoples, among marginalized ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, enhances the opportunity for power negotiation with national government and relevant agencies, and for international cooperation with concerning human rights claims. To understand these issues, we need to trace the historical development of indigeneity in former settler colonies and the influence of its achievements on the indigenous movements in Southeast Asia. Particular attention needs to be paid to the limited scope for participation of ethnic minority and marginalized groups in both the national and ASEAN arenas. Within the framework of the Southeast Asian region, the concept of transnationalism will be employed in my analytical framework.

The Hmong are a subgroup of Miao scattered in southwestern China and the upper Mainland Southeast Asia countries of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Burma.’ After the Communists took over Laos in 1975, tens of thousands of Hmong refugees from Laos fled the country and finally settled down in Western countries including the United States of America, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Argentina and French Guiana. The Hmong were formerly known as ‘mountain people’ in southwestern China and upper Mainland Southeast Asia. Since the colonial period, Christianity from Western countries has been spread among the highland ethnic minorities of upper Mainland Southeast Asia, replacing traditional beliefs (Hefner 1993: 3-7). Christianity as brought by foreign missionaries was one of the various ‘civilizing’ projects to which the Hmong have been subject during their history (Harrell 1995: 4-8). In order to attract new Hmong converts, some pioneer missionaries, such as Otto Scheuzger (1961: 30) have interpreted Yaw Sau, the Hmong God, as equivalent to the God of the Christians. In recent decades, Socialist governments have been concerned about a Messianic movement among some Hmong Christian groups in this region, especially in terms of rumours about the coming of a Messiah. In late April to early May 2011 there was a popular Messianic movement among Hmong Christians in northwestern Vietnam, particularly in the Dien Bien region. Even though the majority of Hmong people lived in remote areas and were strictly controlled by state authorities, through various means of communication they received news about a predicted Judgement Day proclaimed by eighty-nine-year-old Harold Camping, a Californian multi-millionaire who runs one of the largest Christian radio networks in the world. According to Jaweed Kaleem (2011):

Political conflict in Laos during the Cold War or Vietnam War, from the late 1950s to 1975, involved two opposite political sides, the communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao government. As a major ethnic group inhabiting the battle area, leaders of ethnic Hmong in Laos were divided and joined both sides. During the Cold War, Thotou Yaxaichu was a prominent military leader with the Pathet Lao who passed away in 1961, while Vang Pao served the royal government and the United States Central Intelligence Agency. After the Pathet Lao took over the country in 1975, Faidang Lobliayao, who fought side by side with the Pathet Lao, became a key person in the new Lao government and died in 1986. Meanwhile, Vang Pao, who was a Hmong military leader under the royal government, fled to America and died in 2011. Recently, monuments of the three leaders were formally erected in Xieng Khouang in Laos and in California in the United States, respectively. The main objective of this article is to understand the social meaning of the establishment of monuments of the three former ethnic Hmong leaders in the two different countries. The author investigates the history of those leaders and relevant contexts. Concerning methodology, information was mainly taken from existing documents, media, and interviews. Based on the result of research, it is my finding that, internally, the building of monuments of former Hmong leaders in both countries has become a modern means of conveying social memory to younger Hmong generations on opposite sides of politics. Externally, the monuments express Hmong ethnic identity and create social space in the context of national ethnicity, in both countries.

The Tai Lue in Chiang Kham have been of interest to scholars since the publications of Michael Moerman, an American anthropologist from the University of California in Los Angeles, in the 1960s. The most notable pieces concern ethnic identity since Moerman focused on both internal and external relations of the Tai Lue. Later scholars and graduate students focused on tourism among the Tai Lue, due to the revival of their history and the construction of their ethnic identity. However, the aspect of statelessness among them still has not been examined even though countless numbers of Tai Lue still live without Thai citizenship. Therefore, this article deals with the issue of stateless Tai Lue in Chiang Kham, based on our fieldwork in 2013-2015. We find that the consequences of the creation of modern nation-states and Thailand’s strict national security policies have led to a lack of citizenship among countless numbers of Tai Lue in Chiang Kham, despite their exceptional service to Thailand’s national security during the Cold War.

This article investigates the processes of becoming Indigenous Peoples in Thailand by tracing the transnational relationships and influences of global Indigenous movements on the creation of the Network and the Council of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand (NIPT and CIPT). In addition, it examines the Indigenous Peoples’ movement toward both internal and external recognition. I argue that in Thailand the Indigenous Peoples movement stems from the global movement and exists in relation to international organisations. Within Thailand, the movement represents a deterritorialisation of the ethnoscape, with those now identified as Indigenous Peoples previously being identified as ‘tribal peoples’, ‘ethnic minorities’, or ‘Others’ who threatened national security. Indigenous Peoples are also self-identifying as native and marginalised peoples whose basic rights must be recognised and who advocate for equal treatment as citizens. Yet, the Indigenous Peoples’ movement in Thailand is developing through a process of ongoing negotiations with various internal and external sectors. As a Hmong anthropologist and long-time participant in the Indigenous movement in Thailand, in addition to secondary sources, I draw mainly on personal observations and interviews with key informants.

This chapter celebrates Indigenous education movements in Thailand. Despite state attempts to homogenize its citizenry historically and today, Indigenous communities in Thailand have always been active in strengthening their family, cultural, and linguistic practices. Through connections to other Indigenous movements regionally and globally, Indigenous educators in Thailand are organizing what we call “moves to resurgence” in communities, in schools, and particularly in the in-between spaces across schools and their local communities. In this chapter, we provide an overview of (1) the history and construction of indigeneity and ethnicity in Asia that complicates a “white-other” binary, (2) the long-term impacts of schooling for Indigenous youth as it relates to the formation of nation-states in Southeast Asia, and (3) how Indigenous communities in Thailand have skillfully navigated across worlds to create coherent identities for themselves. We provide three cases that intentionally build innovative “both-and” constructions of identity and resist binary state narratives that attempt to place Indigeneity in contradiction to statehood. To resist the continued erasure of Indigenous peoples in Asia, we highlight case examples of Indigenous resurgence and celebrate Indigeneity in Thailand.

On 22 May 2014, the Thai military conducted a coup d’état and discarded the previous constitution. In April 2015, a new draft constitution was prepared. Although eventually rejected by the military, it represented an exciting moment for activists, as it recognized the existence of ‘indigenous peoples’ (referred to as chon pheun muang in the draft). This prompted us to conduct interviews in 2015–2016 with people belonging to four different ethnic groups and living mainly in Chiang Mai province, northern Thailand: the Lua, Khon Muang, Hmong, and Lisu, in order to determine their understandings of who should be considered ‘indigenous peoples’, and what rights should they have. The findings indicate that there is considerable variation amongst people regarding the meaning of the term ‘indigenous peoples’; who should be considered indigenous; and what rights those defined as being indigenous should be entitled to.

This chapter investigates the ways His Majesty the King’s visits to highland ethnic communities have been commoditized by the Royal Project and other relevant sectors. It is argued that the monarchy plays essential roles in launching projects relating to the contemporary popular tourism in highland ethnic communities. Importantly His Majesty’s visits and initiatives which have become history and symbol have been commoditized for tourism purposes. The historical development of the monarchy and tourism in highland communities began from the time of Chao Dararassamee, the consort of King Rama V when she returned to Chiang Mai since the 1910s. From 1961 on, since the Phuphing Palace was built, His Majesty the King and family members have made visits to highland villages near the palace and elsewhere in the north. In addition to His Majesty’s initiative on the Royal Project for introducing cash crops to replace opium cultivation among highland farmers in 1969, he donated funds and launched a store for local villagers to sell handicrafts for tourists. After promoting agricultural products for a few decades, the Royal Project started the tourism business in specific Royal Project sites in the early 2000s, with the slogan of “Following His Majesty’s Footprints”. Despite the fact that tourism has become popular in these Royal Project sites, highland ethnic peoples still do not participate much. Furthermore, tourists do not pay much attention to what His Majesty the King initiated but place more emphasis on exposure to nature, for leisure and relaxation.

This chapter contributes a new approach to gender studies power relations in Hmong society by examining women’s active negotiation for spiritual belonging. For over a decade, the activist Network of Hmong Women in Thailand has pressed Hmong society to address divorced women’s issues, specifically their postdivorce spiritual status.’ I investigate the gender ideologies that structure Hmong marriage and divorce practices within the Thai space to illustrate the network’s efforts to facilitate cultural belonging for divorced women within existing Hmong patrilineal practices. The network’s accomplishments, I contend, were intimately tied to the solidarity among the young Hmong women involved and to their strategic alliances with key Hmong lineage leaders and outside scholars, who helped them raise awareness and garner support beyond their ethnic group.

The Hmong are a transnational ethnic people, because of their dispersal from China into Southeast Asia in the early 19th century and from Southeast Asia to Western countries from 1975 onward. However, even within the context of Southeast Asia and southern China, the Hmong are a transnational ethnic group, due to state boundaries and the enforcement of international laws. Scholars speak as though the Hmong population has crossed political and legal borders by their movement across state boundaries and international borders. However, I argue that it is the political, social, and legal borders that have cut across the Hmong people and subjected them to be citizens of different modern nation-states. Even in the present time, these borders still, and continuously, play important roles that cross and divide the Hmong people into distinctive subgroups and fragments. In this article, I will start by describing the generally understood situation of Hmong being across national borders, and then will explain my argument that borders are across the Hmong.

This book is not an academic study of the ethnic minorities living in the highlands of Northern Thailand’. Nor does it pretend to assess all the changes that occurred in their lifestyle in the course of the last decades. It offers simply a glimpse on the photographic archives available at the Centre for Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD) of Chiang Mai University. This collection is unique in Thailand by its size (more than 6o,000 images), its geographic and ethnographic focus (highland populations of the Northern regions) and its time span (the images cover the period between early 1950S and present). It owes its existence to the historical context of the development of anthropology in Northern Thailand as well as to the personal dedication of the researchers of the CESD and the financial and technical support they received from various institutions.

The development of modern education in Thailand aimed primarily at backing up the foundation of the nation-state in a spirit of Thai-ness and modernity. In that respect, local cultures and identities were cast aside by the government. However, with the rise of communism in the region after 1949 and the support of Communism in border areas, the Thai government found it necessary to re-conquer these regions, and proceeded to do so via public education, among other solutions. The curriculum taught in schools did not take into account the specificities of the children who were taught the same subject and in the same language (Central Thai) as their lowland counterparts. Attempts have been made to improve education and safeguard local indigenous culture, showing the importance of keeping the opportunity for people to find alternative ways of development in an ever more complex world.

The development of domestic (or national) tourism in Thailand in the second half of the 20th century relied on a new kind of relationship between the state and local cultures. Rural spaces have been reinvented and transformed into appealing visual and conceptual archetypes which sustain discourses on both local and national identity and history. Thai tourism allows a kind of pacification of the relations between the centre and the periphery, but it also perpetuates an internal colonialism, both towards Tai and non-Tai populations. This article investigates the social significance of domestic tourism in Chiang Mai and the links between non-Western representation of travel, nationalism and localized identity. It focuses on three attractions scattered along the road going up to the mountain of Suthep (Doi Suthep), one of the most famous tourist destinations in northern Thailand: a Buddhist temple, a royal palace and an ethnic village. These three attractions provide crucial insights into the history of domestic tourism in Thailand: its similarities to and differences from previous forms of travel, its relations to the idealization of the rural and its role in the pacification of the relations between the Thai state and its geographic and social margins.

Much of the discussion about ethnic tourism in Northern Thailand has concentrated on the impact of tourism on ethnic communities, the interaction between tourists and villagers, and its conunoditization. This paper approaches ethnic tourism differently, examining instead the political relationship between tourists, middlemen (businessmen and the state), and ethnic tourees (the people the tourists come to see). Viewed through this lens, it can be shown that the interaction between the three ethnic tourism stakeholders is only superficial. Tourists who eagerly desire to explore unspoiled cultures and consume authentic experiencesland souvenirs tend to experience only the fake and dramatic ones, since there is only limited time for the encounter. The main purpose of the middlemen. and ethnic tourees for dealing with tourists is business only. Meanwhile the state, which is comprised of different agencies, plays contradicting roles in ethnic tourism and related ethnic minority issues. Based on four decades of experience of ethnic tourism in the highlands of northern Thailand, the more tourism develops, the more the ethnic culture loses its authenticity. Instead, the encounter becomes a staged event only performed for the tourist. Highland ethnic villagers, as tourees, have gradually learned and adapted to take advantage of tourism. Their encounters with other stakeholders in the industry are still as inferiors. Nonetheless, the recent introduction of alternative forms of ethnic tourism, including ecotourism and community-based tourism, has created more equality between the three parties. This paper draws from personal observations and interviews as well as secondary’ sources.

Similar to people of other ethnic groups, the Hmong have their own myths, legends, and history. These stories were traditionally passed on to successive generations in the form of story telling in daily life and on special occasions. For instance, parents recounted these stories to their children over and over again before bedtime, men shared other stories at night at funerals, and ritual specialists performed them as songs or hymns during ceremonies. Nowadays, the Hmong are scattered all over the world and are a transnational ethnic group. Hmong children growing up in these countries gradually come to absorb their adopted country’s nationalism, particularly the nation-state’s myths, legends and histories, through the state’s “technologies of power.”’ In addition, globalization has brought new, sophisticated cultures and ideologies to the Hmong. Hmong ethnic identity, hence, has been gradually reshaped and eroded by nationalism and globalization.

Critical constraints around natural resources in northern Thailand have resulted in government officials and local villagers setting up strategies to manage watershed areas. The government, with the Thai Royal Forestry Department (RFD), bases its policies on the assumption that villagers cannot live in forest areas, whereas villagers argue that they can live harmoniously in forests by using their local wisdom. Villagers, supported by members of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and intellectuals, have revived and redefined their local culture in relation to issues of watershed management. The Hmong, most of whom live in watershed areas, have chosen the ntoo xeeb, or the tong seng, an annual tree offering ritual, to represent how their local wisdom can play a role in regional efforts in natural resources management. It is my argument that choosing and redefining the ntoo xeeb for natural resources conservation by the Hmong in northern Thailand is a reflection of the uniting of local villagers and grassroots movements in relation to natural resources management. It is also, critically, about the representation of Hmong ethnic identity in mainstream Thai society. The Hmong have been alleged to be destroyers of forests, due the system of shifting cultivation that they have practised for decades. By contrast, this article shows how a network of Hmong villages is applying the ntoo xeeb ceremony to natural resources management. The first such ceremony I observed took place in Mae Sa Mai, a Hmong village in Chiang Mai province, during the Hmong New Year on 2 January 1998.