This volume presents the most comprehensive collection of research on Hmong culture and life in Asia yet to be published. It compliments the abundant material on the Hmong diaspora by focusing instead on the Hmong in their Asian homeland. The contributors are scholars from a number of different backgrounds with a deep knowledge of Hmong society and culture, including several Hmong. The first group of essays addresses the fabric of Hmong culture by considering issues of history, language, and identity among the Hmong/Miao from Laos to China. The second part introduces the challenges faced by the Hmong in contemporary Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Nicholas Tapp is senior fellow in anthropology at the Australian National University. Jean Michaud is associate researcher in Asian studies at University de Montreal. Christian Culas is a member of the National Center for Scientific Research in Marseille. Gary Yia Lee is senior ethnic liaison officer for New South Wales.

Though there are slightly more than six million Hmong worldwide, relatively few Americans know much about them. The Hmong people, who steadfastly retained many of their cultural traditions though they settled extensively in China, were forced to become perpetual migrants and montagnards, due to relentless persecution by the Chinese, who considered all but Chinese culture uncivilized. Most Hmong today live in China, Laos, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma, and are all descendants (it is speculated) of Hmong who originally migrated from central Siberia. Hmong: History of a People is a detailed rediscovery of their saga, following Hmong history and tradition from their early settlements in China, up to and including much of their contribution to the war in Vietnam. It is a book of struggle, prowess, and magic, and it reiterates the importance of cultural memory for any race and specifically the importance of the memory for the Hmong.

A century ago, the idea of indigenous people as an active force in the contemporary world was unthinkable. It was assumed that native societies everywhere would be swept away by the forward march of the West and its own peculiar brand of progress and civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indigenous social movements wield new power, and groups as diverse as Australian Aborigines, Ecuadorian Quichuas, and New Zealand Maoris, have found their own distinctive and assertive ways of living in the present world. Indigenous Experience Today draws together essays by prominent scholars in anthropology and other fields examining the varied face of indigenous politics in Bolivia, Botswana, Canada, Chile, China, Indonesia, and the United States, amongst others. The book challenges accepted notions of indigeneity as it examines the transnational dynamics of contemporary native culture and politics around the world.

This is a work of ethnographic reflection on Hmong society, history and culture, dealing with questions of the self and the notion that a romantic self inspired the ethos of hedonism associated with the consumer economy. A Hmong identity is shown to have been historically constructed through the works of colonial missionaries, linguists, and anthropologists. Yet Hmong voices have also been powerful in this process. Based on recent fieldwork in Asia and overseas, the Hmong diaspora is examined. The modern Hmong self is presented as a prospective one, constructed in diaspora and through the use of the internet and other modes of modern communication in a movement towards a virtual future which, despite the dissonance of voices appealing to an ideal unity, is one still rich with potentiality.

Gender, ethnicity, and nation in China, as seen through an ethnography of the changing cultural production of the Miao, a minority population.

The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of endangered languages. The book will provide an account of work in these areas, focusing on the achievements of SEAsian linguistics, as well as the challenges and unresolved issues, and provide a survey of the relevant major publications and other available resources. We will address: Survey of the languages of the area, organized along genetic lines, with discussion of relevant political and cultural background issues Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues Genetic classification and historical linguistics Areal and contact linguistics Other areas of interest such as sociolinguistics, semantics, writing systems, etc. Resources (major monographs and monograph series, dictionaries, journals, electronic data bases, etc.) Grammar sketches of languages representative of the genetic and structural diversity of the region.

This is the first completely up-to-date Hmong history book ever written by a member of the Hmong people. It describes the earliest civilizations of the Hmong and Miao in China, and why some of the Hmong migrated into Southeast Asia in the early 19th century, particularly to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand; and how the Hmong of Laos were involved with the Lao civil war, especially the secret war from 1962 to 1975 that caused almost a hundred thousand Hmong to flee to Thailand and Western countries as political refugees after the Communists takeover. This book includes the forcible repatriation of the Lao-Hmong asylum seekers at Nam Khao refugee camp in Thailand back to Laos in late 2009 and the arrest and discharge of former General Vang Pao by the U.S. authorities. "[It] is full of fascinating materials [and] a wonderful book. Congratulations," commented by Dr Nicholas C. T. Tapp, Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University.

“Calling in the Soul” (Hu Plig) is the chant the Hmong use to guide the soul of a newborn baby into its body on the third day after birth. Based on extensive original research conducted in the late 1980s in a village in northern Thailand, this ethnographic study examines Hmong cosmological beliefs about the cycle of life as expressed in practices surrounding birth, marriage, and death and considers the gender relationships evident in these practices. The Hmong (or Miao, as they are called in China, and Meo, in Thailand) have lived on the fringes of powerful Southeast Asian states for centuries. Their social framework is distinctly patrilineal, granting little direct power to women. Yet within the limits of that structure, Hmong women wield considerable influence in the spiritually critical realms of birth and death. Calling in the Soul will be of interest to sociocultural anthropologists, medical anthropologists, Southeast Asianists, and gender specialists. Replaces ISBN 9780295800424

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Butterfly Mother is a collection of epic songs from the rich oral tradition of the Miao (Hmong) people of southwest China. These poetic narratives, traditionally performed by two groups of singers, relate the creation of a world in which everything is alive, and listeners find that besides mountains, rivers, trees, and creatures, inanimate objects are also 'born' and have spirits. In his engaging introduction, Mark Bender places these mythic narratives in their social and historical context, describing the workings and traditions of Miao society. Brimming with cultural lore, Butterfly Mother is a virtual encyclopedia of time-honored myths, legends, and folk customs of the Miao people.