Do ethnic minorities have the power to alter the course of their fortune when living within a socialist state? In Frontier Livelihoods, the authors focus their study on the Hmong - known in China as the Miao - in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, contending that individuals and households create livelihoods about which governments often know little.
The product of wide-ranging research over many years, Frontier Livelihoods bridges the traditional divide between studies of China and peninsular Southeast Asia by examining the agency, dynamics, and resilience of livelihoods adopted by Hmong communities in Vietnam and in China's Yunnan Province. It covers the reactions to state modernization projects among this ethnic group in two separate national jurisdictions and contributes to a growing body of literature on cross-border relationships between ethnic minorities in the borderlands of China and its neighbors and in Southeast Asia more broadly.

Sarah Turner is professor of geography at McGill University. She is the author of Indonesia's Small Entrepreneurs: Trading on the Margins (Routledge, 2003) and Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2015); and editor of Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia (University of British Columbia Press, 2013).

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Jean Michaud is professor of anthropology at Universite Laval. He is the author of Incidental Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880-1930 (Brill, 2007) and Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the South-East Asian Massif (Scarecrow Press, 2006), and the coeditor of several volumes, including Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands (UW Press, 2015).

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"Recommended."

Choice

"A powerful ethnography of economics that reaches deep into local and regional economies and histories, tracing the pathways of key products made and traded."

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Provides a vivid description of a myriad of activities in the everyday lives of Hmong on the fringes as they make their living in the sectors of agriculture, livestock transactions, locally distilled alcohol, cardamom, and the textile trade."

Southeast Asian Studies

"[This] important contribution . . . provides new insights into borderlands and everyday politics of ethnic minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif."

SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

"Written in an extremely clear and engaging style, this book has a lot to offer to all those interested in borderlands studies and in the lives of those who inhabit the Southeast Asian Massif."

New Books Asia