- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness demonstrates that these traders' indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of 'smallness'—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of 'smallness' foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Table of Contents
- List of Maps and Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Language and Transliteration
- Introduction
- 1 “We Are All Tai Lue”: International Trade Fairs as Local Ethnic Affairs
- 2 “Normal Fruits for Laos, Premium Fruits for China”: Transnational Flows of National Differences
- 3 “Thailand: High Quality; China: Low Price”: “Banal Cosmopolitanism” in Local Marketplaces
- 4 “I Didn’t Learn Any Occupation, so I Trade”: Narratives of Insignificance
- 5 “No Matter What, We’ll Find a Way”: Uncertain (Chinese?) Futures
- Conclusion: Large Insights from Smallness
- Bibliography
- Index