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Can LaosΓÇöwith its small, scattered, ethnically diverse population, enchanting but rugged landscapes, and rich natural resourcesΓÇöemerge from the shadows of its more powerful neighbors? It has been carved up by colonial powers in the nineteenth century and dragged into devastating revolution and war in the twentieth. The authors provide a full, frank, and engaging survey of Laos today, assessing its history, prospects, and hopes. The book is essential reading for scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in coming to grips with Laos today.

Flanked by a fast-growing China hungry for markets and energy and other resources, the Mekong region is a target of competing local, national, regional, and transnational as well as commercial interests. There are many "Mekong regions" and claims to its water, heritage sites, tourism potential, and other resources affect one or all the countries. This volume contains provocative and sometimes conflicting views about history, geopolitics, and current dilemmas by scholars across the region.

Except on tourist brochures, the indigenous peoples of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and southern China (Yunnan) are the least visible, and most excluded, of citizens. All these countries have used similar strategies to classify, include, or exclude minority peoples from the project of nationalism. Understanding the cultural and economic trajectories of key minorities such as the Dai, Hmong, Lahu, Akha, and Karen is critical to apprehending the construction, workings, and future of each of these nation-states, indeed of the Mekong region as a whole.Conversely, as vividly demonstrated here, the minority peoples--many spanning more than one country--have adapted and accommodated to, or actively resisted, majority culture and state policy alike. There continues to be undeniable impoverishment, cultural loss, and "social suffering" in some communities, particularly among ex-swidden based upland groups in Vietnam and laos; the rearranging or reconstituting of trading and social networks; the over-commodification of aspects of culture, often for domestic tourism; and struggles to maintain language, rituals, and belief systems.The studies here bring alive these communities in transformation, pointing out those in near dissolution, such as some Akha villages in Laos affected by overzealous opium-eradication programs, as well as those reclaiming and expanding their cultural space, such as the Dai in Sipsongpanna/Xishuangbanna engaged in a cross-border revival of Theravada Buddhism and Dai culture.This is essential reading for anyone who wishes to uncover the nuances and interplay of ethnicity, nationalism, and change in the Mekong region, and serves as a companion volume to Living in a Globalized World: Ethnic Minorities in the Greater Mekong Subregion.

Indigenous peoples in Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Yunnan (in China) live in a region of massive change, fuelled by the rise of China, the end of war or sanctions, ΓÇ£open doorΓÇ¥ policies, and regional integration. Policies aimed at minorities or developing upland areas, as well as transformations wrought by migration, highways, hydropower, the Internet and other media, and tourism are all impacting the cultures of the Akha, Lisu, Karen, Dai, Mien, Khmu, and numerous other groups in the Mekong region.This book is the result of an innovative cross-border comparative project jointly conducted by an international team of scholars. The authors focus on a variety of phenomena including religious conversion, the media, healing practices, rituals, hydropower projects, and tourist-oriented ethnic enclaves. A closing chapter is a theoretically informed study of the transformation of Hmong culture and identity, with insights that may well be applicable to the other groups.