Abstract
This special issue comprising 13 articles is mainly related to the dynamics of inter-ethnic relations in the making of mainland Southeast Asia in recent decades, focusing on the Tai-speaking peoples and their neighbors across national boundaries : the Shan in Myanmar and Northern Thailand; the Tai Lue in Northern Thailand and Xishuangbanna, southwestern China; the Lao in Northeast Thailand and Lao P. D. R.; the Karen in Myanmar and Thailand; the Mien in China and Thailand; the Lisu in Thailand and China; the Akha, who have moved to the towns in Thailand; and the Kachin, who struggle for survival on the borders of Myanmar, Thailand and China.
The dynamics of formation and transformation of each group in the face of nation-state building, which draws national boundaries over their life-worlds, and of the recent development of inter-regional relations in the area, is described in detail based on firsthand data obtained from long-term field surveys conducted mainly in the 1980s and the 1990s. Sharing the notion that ethnicity is not fixed and bounded but mobile and relative, and recognizing that the sociohistorical formation of the region. conditioned by political power and the modes of cultural expression, has drastically changed in the new environment, the authors discuss various themes observed in fields that are mostly peripheral to the nation-state : the recent development of interregional relations across national borders; the duality of Buddhist ritual on the national border; the invention of ethnic symbols; the fluidity of ethnic identity in the process of migration; multiplicity of ethnicity between the majority and minority groups; the presentation of self-culture in the context of tourism; gender and ethnicity in changing village community; and so forth. Others concentrate on the relationship between the natural environment and the peoples who have been peripherized in the nation-building and on the theoretical problem in analyzing the mode of ethnic construction.
The descriptions are concerned with the process of socio-cultural change including the deinstitutionalization of ethnic label and its usage observed in each group of the region and at the same time seek new paradigms to interpret the transnational network of relations which will reconfigure mainland Southeast Asia in the age of globalization.
