Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud. Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands

Abstract

Livelihoods: Hmong in Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015, 223p.By choosing to work on of one ethnic group, on both sides of international Sino-Vietnamese border, this study focuses on how these people make and negotiate decisions in their complicated geographic, socioeconomic, and political contexts. The study provides a vivid description of a myriad of activities in everyday lives of Hmong on fringes as they make their living in sectors of agriculture, livestock transactions, distilled alcohol, cardamom, and textile trade. These have been shaped by various integrations and negotiations between their own background of environment, culture, local knowledge, and identities, and agents and institutions of state.In first two chapters, Upland Alternative: An Introduction and Frontier Dynamics: Borders and Hmong, authors clarify borderlands as a third space and suggest a theoretical framework to approach and facilitate a more comprehensive insight into how Hmong people are making a living and trying to maintain their cultures and identity (p. 15). This third space is area on both sides of Sino-Vietnamese border, Yunnan in China and upland northern Vietnam, which has been attracting a range of development schemes and policies issued on both sides in name of speeding up economic development of this undeveloped region. Tracing other associated political reasons, authors view these state efforts as part of an internal colonization scheme (p. 27) that has an effect, direct or indirect, on Hmong decision making. On other hand, using a bottom-up approach, authors offer a locally adapted, nuanced analysis of livelihoods (p. 7) with Hmong people passively acting as a local agency to navigate, rework, contest and appropriate specific facets of identity, modernity, market integration, and nation-state building as they go about creating resilient life-worlds and everyday livelihood (p. 7).Chapter 3, Borderland Livelihoods: Everyday Decisions and Agrarian Change, focuses on most important activity of Hmong on both sides of Sino-Vietnamese border, agricultural sector. This sector has changed a lot under effect of state development schemes, especially through sedentarization programs that aim to reduce use of slash and burn methods-a traditional agricultural practice among Hmong-in favor of intensification agriculture, even though this agrarian change significantly affects Hmong lives and livelihoods. Hybrid seeds were introduced and quickly adopted in this area thanks to their heterosis as well as pressure on limited land and concerns over food security. This unavoidable situation placed Hmong people in a vulnerable financial situation: due to additional costs of buying new seeds every planting season, fertilizers, pesticides, and investing in more stable irrigation, they are more dependent on government's subsidies and development programs. However, local people still maintain their old practice of swidden agriculture in some places where governments cannot exercise control; they persist in planting traditional rice on available land and try to avoid over-reliance on state by buying seed from private traders rather than waiting for subsidized bureaus. These active responses on part of Hmong people are the best, most resilient tactic (p. 58) and forms of everyday covert resistance and small acts of reinterpretation that take place in context of a marginalized group (p. …