gillogly 2008 opium power people contemp drug probls

Opium, power, people:Anthropological understandingsof an opium interdictionproject in Thailand

BY KATHLEEN A. GILLOGLY

Opium interdiction projects have dominated Thai state interactionswith northern upland ethnic minority peoples since the 1970s. Oneof these projects, the Sam Muen Highland Development Project(SMHDP), had great success in ending opium production. Thissuccess emerged out of the participation of the most peripheralpeoples in international drug markets, the producers. To understandwhy Lisu villagers cooperated with the Project, I examine how statepower was realized through its practice in the village through theProject. Lisu had tactics and strategies available to them. Theystrategically adapted through household and kinship practices.They tactically cooperated through the use of Project discourse andthe performance of cooperation. Participatory drug interdictionwas not just a “new tyranny”; it opened up new political processesat the microlevel. However, Lisu villagers’ tactics for regaininglocal power were constrained by the global processes of drugcontrol.

Contemporary Drug Problems 35/Winter 2008 679

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly09-09-2009 Rev.

© 2009 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.

Starting in the 1970s, development projects focusing on theinterdiction of opium production commenced throughout thenorthern Thai highlands. Opium was designated as the root ofpoverty, lawlessness, and environmental destruction; endingopium production was seen as the panacea to social, econom-ic, and political problems in the highlands. Ending opium cul-tivation was seen as rational so it followed that success wouldarise out of the technique of education and persuasion:

the Huai Thung Choa Project is taking some initial steps to breakthe opium production chain. A parallel step was taken by persuasionof two of the senior Lisu families of the immediately adjacent vil-lage to attempt horticultural activities as a substitute for opium pro-duction on a two-year trial basis. The objective here was toconvince influential Lisu that recourse to horticulture would pro-vide a higher standard of living than their traditional form of swid-den-subsistence agriculture supplemented by opium. Since [thereare] numerous middle men in the opium proportion of the profits.[sic] for the poppy grower, potato production, given a direct mar-keting system. [sic] can yield considerably higher profits. It is notsurprising that the first steps in this approach have succeeded(Voraurai, Ives, & Messerli [1980] my emphasis).

Fifteen years after this report, opium interdiction in Thailandwas finally declared a success. The Office of NarcoticsControl Board (ONCB) claimed that the area devoted toopium cultivation in Thailand had been reduced by 97%(Renard, 2001, p. 36). While the validity of this figure is dis-putable, there is no doubt that opium was no longer the baseof the agricultural economy it had been before the mid-1970s.In over 3 years of research,1 the only poppies I saw were infront of a former drug lord’s shack, planted for the edificationof tourists. I have seen more poppies in the front yards ofnorthern Illinois farm houses. It was a far cry from the days of“poppies from horizon to horizon.” Upland minority villagersvigorously declaimed the evils of poppy cultivation to visitors;they kicked elderly “opium addicts” out of their villages; theysent their sons to Army boot camps for “playing with thepipe.”2 They were model cooperators.

680 OPIUM, POWER, PEOPLE


In 1990, one of the villages in the Sam Muen HighlandDevelopment Project (SMHDP) declared itself drug-free. Apact had been made between the SMHDP and the Lisu ofRevealed River Village: the SMHDP would convince the ThirdArmy to remove its soldiers if the village guaranteed that itwould police itself. Revealed River got rid of its addicts bybringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant households to evicttheir addicts or leave the village. As a drug-free village, sol-diers were removed from the village. This “village-initiated”policy was one of the capstones of drug interdiction in north-western Thailand, pointed to with great pride by officials tovisitors and used as proof by SMHDP workers and villagersthat upland minority peoples were safe, loyal residents of themountains of northern Thailand. In fact, SMHDP officials inChiang Mai had recommended this village for fieldwork to mebecause of their pride in its initiative and the fact that it wasperceived as safe for a single, foreign female to live in.

Why did the people of Revealed River take this action? Theexplanation of SMHDP officials was that minority villagerssaw the evils of opium and recognized their obligations as res-idents of Thailand. I heard another explanation from the Lisuof Revealed River and Thai teachers posted in the village. Forseveral years previous to the beginning of my research, sol-diers had been posted in villages in the area to guard againstopium trafficking and use. These soldiers—young, oftendrunk, carrying guns—caused a lot of trouble. There is a wide-spread belief in Thailand that sexual promiscuity is culturallyacceptable among all of the upland minority peoples, and thatethnic minority women are sexually available; they could notbe persuaded otherwise. The women of Revealed River andthe Thai teachers all told me of how the evening literacy class-es for women had ground to a halt when the soldiers were inthe village because they came to the school and harassed thewomen; conflict arose in other villages as soldiers flirted withyoung wives. Declaring themselves drug-free was a tactic toremove the daily presence of soldiers from their village.

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This dramatic example of participation in a drug interdictionproject illustrates the inner workings of opium control innorthern Thailand. I have written elsewhere of the institu-tional structures and techniques of the implementation ofopium control and watershed preservation (Tan-Kim-Yong,Limchoowong, & Gillogly 1994; Gillogly, 2004; see alsoRenard, 2001). Developers took an instrumental view, focus-ing on goals, implementations, and institutions of narcoticscontrol projects as their objects of analysis. The people whostopped production were often invisible—categorized ascooperators or noncooperators, but with little consideration oftheir agency in choosing (more or less voluntarily) to stopgrowing opium poppy. In fact, the meanings of developmentwere produced and negotiated in practice, with different sig-nificance for the villagers and development officials (cf.Mosse & Lewis, 2006, p. 9). This article queries the specificeffects of opium interdiction on local people and their role innarcotics control. Participation cannot be taken at face valueas only the triumph of enlightened methods leading torational cooperation. In this article, I will analyze the socialprocesses and meanings of opium interdiction policy innorthern Thailand through examination of the strategies andtactics of Lisu villagers in a Thai/UN opium control project. Idiscuss Lisu strategic adaptation to the end of the opiumeconomy through transformation of their social structures, thediscourses that legitimated opium interdiction as nationaldevelopment, and the ways in which Lisu tactically cooper-ated in this participatory development program. A key pointis that Lisu did have tactics and strategies available to them.Despite clear elements of subjection and discipline in theways in which this participatory development was carried out,the end results were not predetermined because developmentalso opened up opportunities for action in these new contexts(Williams, 2004). Opium interdiction wrought profoundchanges to life in the mountains.



Opium in Lisu life: Social transformations past and present

The Lisu are one of six ethnic minority peoples in northernThailand. A Tibeto-Burman speaking group originally distrib-uted along the Sino-Tibetan border, the Lisu migrated fromChina via northern Burma starting about 110 years ago, com-ing into Thailand, as did the Hmong, Lahu, Akha and Mien,as migratory swiddeners who grew food crops and opium as acash crop. After the end of World War II, coinciding withU.S. concerns with Thai border security in the early 1950s(see Bowie, 1997), these upland minorities became identifiedprimarily as opium growers on the margins of the Thaination-state, categorized in Thai political discourse associally and spatially dangerous people. But this adaptationwas historically contingent. Lisu were not always opiumgrowers; rather, opium production became entrenched in theirsocial and agricultural adaptations in the period from themid-19th century to the early 20th century. Thus, a histori-cally specific social and economic form was concretized inthe drug policy of Thailand.

This social form of southern Lisu3 society arose out of a num-ber of related and congruent factors that made opium awidely desired and easily saleable crop. Salient factorsincluded: the rise of British mercantile colonialism in thewake of the Muslim Uprisings in Yunnan in the mid-19th cen-tury; the destruction of traditional trade relations amongTibet, Yunnan, Beijing, on into India, Burma, and south-wards; the push of the Chinese Empire into western Yunnan;and the growth of opium addiction in China and parts ofSoutheast Asia where Chinese laborers worked (see J. Ander-son, 1871; B. O’G. Anderson, 1993; Baber, 1882; Bello,2005; Davies, 1909; Hall, 1974; Scott, 1981; Scott & Hardi-man, 1983, vol. 1; Scott & Hardiman, 1983, vol. 2; Walker,1991; Booth, 1996; Meyer & Parssinen, 1998; Trocki, 1999;Hill, 2001; Gillogly, 2006).

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Opium as a cash crop heightened expression of particular fea-tures of Lisu social structures over others. Lisu society innorthern montane Southeast Asia, where opium was the dom-inant cash crop, was marked by migration, early marriage,cognatic kinship,4 allegiance groups5 that cross-cut kin lines,and a lack of stable village authority structures. This wasassociated with key cultural principles of household auton-omy and the seeking of “repute” (Lisu: myi3-do5).6 Opiumfacilitated changes in economic relations resulting in alteredsocial dynamics, leading Lisu households to choose to seeknew, relatively open lands for settlement on the margins ofthe nascent Thai state,7 and their problematization as opium-growing peoples. Opium was deeply imbricated into Lisu lifein northern Thailand, both in terms of the social structure thatevolved out of it and in terms of global/local relations.

Opium introduced a new and relatively stable source ofwealth, storable and portable either on its own or convertedinto silver, granting small scale upland peasants a great dealof autonomy regarding when and where to sell their crop.Significantly, opium was ecologically suitable to mountainsoils, so it opened up economic and ecological niches thathad previously been unusable by humans. It could be grownanywhere; it was very high value per unit of weight; mer-chants came to the village to buy it. It gave households acushion of safety for buying food, land, and labor whenestablishing themselves in new locations. In short, opiumincreased and diversified the household subsistence portfolio,making it more stable. This appears to have resulted in bothpopulation increase and migration southwards in the late 19thcentury (Davies, 1909; Hertz, 1912; Butterfield, 1920, pp. 77-81, quoted in Renard, 1996; Enriquez, 1921; Fraser, 1922;Renard, 1996, p. 35; Scott & Hardiman, 1983, vol. 1; Scott &Hardiman, 1983, vol. 2). Opium increased the carrying capac-ity of the environment for uplanders in northern montaneSoutheast Asia. This increase in carrying capacity occurred inlarge part because by producing a cash crop that was in highdemand elsewhere in affluent parts of the world, uplanders



received wealth that could be used to subsidize their own sub-sistence (e.g., Jonsson, 1996b; Gillogly, 2006). A populationof this size would have been nearly unable to live in the highmountains of northern Southeast Asia without recourse toopium as a cash crop.8

In addition, Thailand, like northern Burma under British ruleand western Yunnan before the extension of Chinese adminis-tration, would have been familiar to Lisu at that time as aplace-in-between, at the edges of state power, like the ShanStates (Maule, 2002; Tagliacozzo, 2004); such regions hadbeen administered indirectly, creating places accessible tomarkets but with little government control beyond peace-keeping, which allowed free trade. This is key to understand-ing Lisu strategies in dealing with increased Thai control, asLisu cultural values of autonomy had found full expression inthis political and economic setting.

The emergence of pervasive and effective interdiction ofopium production in northern Thailand brought about a fun-damental shift in agricultural strategies. Kinship was a keyelement in Lisu strategies. Lisu cultural ideology valorizedpatrilineal relationships and enacted patrilineal relations inancestor rituals, but the value placed on age hierarchy, senior-ity, and patrilineality was accompanied by a high valueplaced on autonomy and the value of repute. Expression ofeach particular set of values depended on the economic andsocial resources available to people. The wealth attained fromopium, along with open lands and access to cheap labor forthis labor intensive crop, had allowed new households auton-omy from parental households so that newly established Lisuhouseholds could settle patrilocally, uxorilocally, or neolo-cally with more distant kin, especially since the main con-straint in this system was labor (more labor meant morewealth since land was an open access resource). As a result,patrilineages were dispersed across the landscape.

Opium interdiction fundamentally transformed social rela-tions. The end of opium cultivation meant that households

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needed to invest in different enterprises, usually cash cropsthat required more land. These crops also required better landwith access to water; capital for planting materials, fertilizer,and pesticides for the new crops; and more permanent accessto land for long-term crops such as fruit trees and coffeeplants. Finally, households needed access to trucks andmotorcycles as well as access to passable roads in order totransport their produce to lowland Thai markets becausetraders no longer came to the village. People strategized onthe most minute local level, in marriage practices, householdstructure, and interhousehold relations. Some of the mostimmediate changes took place in marriage practices and theseled to shifts in kinship structures. People held back on financ-ing marriages (which required a payment of bridewealth) inhopes of having a better year in the future.9 This resulted inlater age at first marriage because young men could not accu-mulate bridewealth themselves by opening land and cultivat-ing an opium field; they found themselves dependent onparents to not only pay bridewealth but to provide land to himand his bride. Yet households faced many other demands onavailable capital (land, cattle, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides,trucks, education) and waited to expend bridewealth, espe-cially since women’s labor did not expand household wealthas it once had. In some villages, rates of suicide amongyoung women have increased because of their shame at notbeing married (Hutheesing, 1990, pp. 153-156, 168-171;Hutheesing, 1994).

Most strikingly, patrilineages reemerged among Lisu as theprimary organizing feature of Lisu society. With greaterinvestments made in smaller amounts of land and the growingpower of the parental generation over their male childrenthere was a resurgence of patrilocal postmarital residence.Land was held for a family’s male children and daughterswere told that they could no longer expect that they could livewith their natal family after marriage. This also meant thatthe previous system, in which poorer households (oftenyounger households with many young children) allied them-



selves with a local “big man” rather than patrilineal relativesfor better living conditions, ended. Only male patrilineal rela-tives were allowed to use a lineage’s land.10

Much of the reemergence of patrilineality arose out of theconstant jockeying with the SMHDP for access to scarceland. Ending opium cultivation required expansion of cultiva-tion even as Thai forestry laws decreased land available forcultivation. This was a point of juncture of Thai state agencyneeds and Lisu household needs. SMHDP officials promotedregulation of land use as part of its goal of developing a sus-tainable and self-subsistent agricultural system by attemptingto allocate no more than 15 rai (2.4 hectares or 5.95 acres)per family, officially to the male head of household, in keep-ing with the formal ideology of the Thai state. However,patrilineality was not imposed from without; it had beeninherent in Lisu cultural ideology. Opium had allowed theexpression of counterpractices such as autonomy and reputeto flourish over patrilineage and obedience to lineage elders.Faced with restrictions in the means of making a living, Lisuvillagers used social resources at their disposal, in this casepatrilineal structures, that were congruent with the politicaland economic conditions of the modern postopium world.

These were the internal strategies of adaptation. However,opium interdiction also brought about specific tactical prac-tices vis-à-vis agents of the Project and therefore of the Thaistate the Project represented.11 Given the economic and socialburdens of interdiction on these poor farmers, we need toquery why Lisu villagers in the SMHDP chose to cooperateand adapt.

Policy and practice in an opium control project

Narcotics control programs, funded by the UN, the US, andvarious bilateral programs with the Thai government, hadserved as a main vehicle for Thai government control of the

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highlands since their inception in the early 1970s. As such,nearly all areas of the northern Thai highlands had beendivided up and put under the control of various bilateralThai/international projects for opium control and watershedrestoration. Policy toward the highlands shifted over theyears, reflecting how the mountainous borderlands and ethnicminority peoples there had been successively problematizedby international development agencies and the Thai govern-ment. The three main paradigms of development were secu-rity, narcotics control, and watershed conservation, the “threeevil sisters of development” in northern Thailand (Kesmanee& McKinnon, 1986). Each paradigm was based on a unitarydiscourse of development (cf. Ferguson, 1994; Lohmann,1998) that labeled and categorized people in terms of howdevelopment institutions construed them as a “problem,”from the point of view of utility to the state in its moderniza-tion programs (cf. Escobar, 1995, p. 110). These problemati-zations reflected international concerns, for instance, U.S.concerns about their own heroin epidemic consequent uponthe Indochinese War (McCoy, 1972), but were refractedthrough national interests (Jackson, 2003a; Jackson, 2003b),particularly Thai concerns about modernization and incorpo-ration of the borderlands into the body of the Thai nation-state (Winichakul, 1994; Weimer, 2005). Each problematizationcreated its own set of conflicts and contradictions (Kesmanee,1994; Gillogly, 2004) but all functioned as vehicles to extendstate power. In this article, I focus primarily on the problema-tization of opium cultivation with some reference to the laterdominant problematization, watershed conservation.

The Thai government proclaimed the Opium Act in 1958under international pressure, but the first recorded instance oforganized antiopium programs in Thailand was in 1963 in theFive Year Plan of the Department of Public Welfare, whichsuggested finding other occupations to replace opium cultiva-tion (Tapp, 1979; Cooper, 1984, pp. 203-204; Renard, 1996).In the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis was almost purelypunitive, with the Army and Border Patrol Police destroying



A brief history of the

Sam MuenHighland

DevelopmentProject

fields, arresting growers and traders, and evicting entireminority communities. In many parts of northern Thailand,this led to violence between Thai government officials andlocal mountain minority people (see Saihoo, 1963; Keen,1968; Hearn, 1974; Chirapanda, 1982; Tapp, 1986; Kammerer,1988; Eudey, 1989; Pungprasert, 1989; Renard, 2001). TheSecond National Economic Development Plan (1966-1971)recommended coffee and tea as replacement crops (Tapp,1979) as did the Thai/UN project for “Replacement of Opiumand Other Crops and the Development of Hill Tribes inNorthern Thailand” (cited in Sabhasri, 1978). At least 15replacement crops were tried over the years, all driven by anassumption of a technological solution to opium-growing—finding the one perfect replacement crop that only necessi-tated development of the markets. However, replacementcrops in northern Thailand often resulted in expansion of cul-tivation as upland farmers attempted to both compete in low-land markets and match the income previously generatedfrom opium; this brought about environmental degradation,as did roads built to markets and the reduction of fallow peri-ods with the shift to permanent agriculture (Renard, 1994;Fox, Krummel, Yarnasarn, Ekasingh, & Podger 1995; Wang-pakapattanawong, 2001; Coxhead, Kaosa-ard, & Phuang-saichai, 2002; Ziegler, et al., 2004).

In reaction to these problems, integrated Highland Develop-ment Projects (HDPs) became the model of upland develop-ment starting in 1972 in selected areas of Chiang Mai andChiang Rai Provinces, although it was not until the mid-1980s that a fairly large number of projects emerged from theHighland Development Masterplan12 (Keen, 1972; Tapp, 1979).The HDPs focused on social welfare rather than on punish-ment as the means of control, seeking not only more effectivemeans of ending opium cultivation, but also increasing theadministrative control over local populations (Bhruksasri,1989). The Sam Muen Highland Development Project wasone of the first HDPs. It began in the mid-1970s as a King’sProject crop replacement program and evolved into an inte-

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grated development project in part to coordinate the range ofagencies involved in local development. I t is a jointUNDCP/Royal Thai Forest Department project. Significantly,it developed its own unique philosophy and methodologywith the goal of creating a sustainable economy for uplandpeoples. The story told me about the genesis of the projectwas that the head of the SMHDP, a forester, faced frequentviolent conflict between Lisu villagers and forestry officials.His attempt to reduce social disruption arising out of the col-lapse of the opium economy by finding marketable crops toreplace opium resulted only in further deforestation and eco-nomic decline. The project head had an epiphany, that thecore goal should be sustainable subsistence for uplanders,and devised a Buddhist-based philosophy of self-sufficientand sustainable development (discussed below under Termsof Cooperation). The integrated approach to opium interdic-tion included: an opium replacement program; road buildingto improve access to legal markets; “mountain” schools withspecialized curricula for upland minority peoples; and a rangeof other social services, depending on the locale and the Thaigovernment department and bilateral partners involved. Thisphilosophy joined together the streams of international trendstoward integrated development (Escobar, 1995, pp. 106, 170);Thai government concepts of zonally integrated development(Keen, 1972; Tapp, 1979. pp. 6-7, 40-43) espoused in the ThirdNational Economic Development Plan (1972–1976) and theSecond Phase of the Thai/UN Program (1979–1983); alongwith middle class popular discourse on Buddhism and com-munity (Nartsupha, 1991; Nartsupha, 1984, 1999; Connors,2002); and the growing interest of urban Thai in forests and‘natural’ spaces (Stott, 1991; Jonsson, 1996a).

The SMHDP was widely considered a success as measuredby the reduction of opium produced, increase of forest cover(Tan-Kim-Yong et al., 1994), and decrease in violence inSMHDP controlled areas; it was made the template for theAccelerated Watershed Development (Raengrat Kaan FunfuuPaa Ton Nam) program across all of the major watersheds of


Evaluating asuccessful

project


the northern region. The SMHDP’s success was perceived asbeing due to community participation, carefully nurtured bythe planning of development experts, the architects of pro-grams that created the rational conditions for cooperation,according to SMHDP designers. In this view, successfulsocial technology was responsible for successful opium con-trol, specifically the technique of Participatory Land UsePlanning (PLP), which was

an operational tool or process which creates conditions of frequentcommunication and analytical discussions, hence strengthening localorganization by generating common understandings and sharedrights and responsibilities among project partners who carry outactivities that lead to the solving of local forest management prob-lems and other related community problems. (Tan-Kim-Yong, 1992)

PLP was constructed as a form of conflict resolution appliedto issues of opium control and natural resource management.3D maps served as the conduit for communication and thejoint development of land use plans by villagers and SMHDPpersonnel, and a means of regularly revisiting issues of inter-diction and appropriate replacement crops. As such, PLP wasintended to help ethnic minority villagers to gain a voice inthe process of land-use planning. This technique was congru-ent with overall goals set for the SMHDP of not only endingopium cultivation and swiddening, but also integrating uplan-ders into the Thai nation, helping them to gain citizenshipand land rights, developing health, education and communi-cations, and improving literacy and ability to speak Thai. Thework of PLP in the SMHDP has since been cited frequentlyby local researchers, the United Nations Drugs Control Pro-gram (UNDCP), Office of Narcotics Control Board (Thai-land), and the Royal Forest Department as having fulfilled itsgoals, and PLP has now been labeled the “traditional” formof land-use planning in Thailand (Kaosa-ard, 2000; Straub ¶Ronnås, 2002). Here was a successful opium control projectwith a significant community participation component.13

Because local people were involved in planning, they had astake in enforcing land-use plans that they themselves had

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helped to develop. Cooperation was seen as arising out of aneffective form of social technology. It was a simple and ele-gant solution to complex, many-layered problems of resourcemanagement, ethnic and class divisions, and internationalpolicy. The unquestioned popularity of this technique wentbeyond quantifiable success rates. Much was unexaminedbecause the SMHDP was congruent with other concerns, suchas political trends toward decentralization. Received interpre-tations of the success of the Project are not inaccurate, butthey are incomplete.

Next, I will examine how the paradigms of development andmodernization undercut examination of essential componentsfor understanding the active cooperation of ethnic minorityvillagers with the SMHDP. The meanings of Lisu participationwere made invisible by its success (Mosse & Lewis, 2006,p. 15); we must, therefore, understand Lisu interests as theyconstructed them, as well as how the Project employed them.

The terms of cooperation

To understand cooperation, we need also to keep in mind thepower of the state, the ways in which it has penetrated thevillage and the villagers’ lives, enveloping them in a grid ofstate power that defined the tactics possible to them. Govern-ment intervention and administration under the Thai bureau-cratic structure had intensified and accelerated by 1982 and,by the mid-1990s, representatives of the Thai state were per-vasive in the life of Revealed River Village. The state hadpenetrated the vi l lage on many levels and vi l lagers’anonymity and autonomy were lost (Bhruksasri, 1989). Thepower of the Thai state was the power of Thai people to entervillages for official or personal purposes at any time, evenignoring cultural boundaries in Lisu rituals (such as at LisuNew Year or the First Fruits); to post teachers and military asresidents in the village, placing Lisu villagers under the con-stant gaze of the state; for forestry officials to walk into



homes at any time to berate a man in front of his wife, chil-dren, and friends for opening a new field. Below, I will out-line the cultural frameworks or discourses by which Thaipolicy defined the development of upland minority peoples.Lisu had to learn these modes of discourse in order to earnlegitimacy in the eyes of the Thai who had power over them.

Uplanders have been defined as a significant problem inThailand since the end of World War II, corresponding withthe government’s solidifying concept of its own nationhoodbased on borders (Winichakul, 1994). It also correspondedwith Thailand’s ongoing negotiations with the internationalcommunity as to its right to be identified as a member of thefraternity of modern nations. Modernization once meantexcluding upland ethnic minorities; now it means incorporat-ing them. Thai society at large has pronounced reactions tothe upland minorities, called “hill tribe” (chaaw khaw), asstrange and foreign people within Thai borders. Uplandminority peoples are, by definition, not citizens because theyare not Thai—they do not speak Thai, they do not practiceBuddhism. It can be difficult for them to acquire “blue cards”(the equivalent of United States green cards) because theirhouseholds typically have not been allowed to register withlocal district officials. Most of the land on which they livehas been taken over by the state, most recently by classifyingall mountain land as Class 1A Watershed Land on which noone is allowed to settle; this makes all uplanders illegal squat-ters by definition. This policy is reinforced by Thai culturalperceptions of uplanders. Their tribal egalitarian social rela-tions appear anarchic and disordered to Thai, who conceptu-alize social relations in terms of their own frames of binaryhierarchy and patronage; hill tribes are believed to neverbathe; to be sexually promiscuous and I even heard my Thailandlady in Chiang Mai tell a Lisu college student visiting methat she had once believed uplanders to have tails. In short,they were considered disordered and dangerous peoples. Arecent countervailing trend is to conflate all uplanders into a“cute” role—several recent Thai TV serials have had a “hill

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Perceptions of uplandminorities

in the Thai state


tribe” character who filled the role of clown and Thai modelsdress as naïve hill tribe girls for photo shoots (Chiwit Chiwaa1993, pp. 20-29). Upland minorities are now familiar as“exotics.” Wealthy urban Thai visit annually to make Bud-dhist merit (tham bun) by providing charity to poor uplandvillagers; Thai tourists seek out the Night Market and enter-tainment locales in order to enjoy the performance of “hilltribe-ness.”

Nevertheless, significant discourses in state policy of uplandminority peoples as a danger to the security of the nation bytheir lack of loyalty (through lack of shared culture, languageand religion) and a danger to the Thai state and the well-being of the world through opium swiddening remainedfirmly in place: they were seen as purveyors of dangerousdrugs and destroyers of the forest. It was the duty of uplandpeoples to change, and young teachers or community organiz-ers worked in the mountains to bring about this service to theThai nation. Thai validated their control over upland minoritypeoples as their responsibility to guide uplanders comparableto how older siblings guide younger siblings, in keeping withthe Thai cultural model of binary hierarchy and political lead-ership (cf. Anbarasan, 2000, p. 48, for an interview with onesuch Thai community organizer).

Development discourses are an extremely powerful form ofcontrol because they define both the “problem” and methodsto achieve its solution. Discourses are totalizing and theirlogic cannot be reduced to an objective causality. That is, thediscourse sets up a relationship between the problem and thesolution that exists even if the specific objective elementschange (Escobar, 1995, pp. 42-43). These discourses, not theactual or objective existence of poor minority people, shapedthe development planning. The discourse of development cre-ates a space in which only certain things can be said or evenimagined; policy is structured and problems constructed sothat policy is seen as practice and information that mightquestion development models is not available for examination


Discourses ofdevelopment


(Appadurai, 1996, pp. 114-135). It is a process through whichthe social reality imagined by the developers is brought intobeing (Ferguson 1994).

From the point of view of Thai national development (kaanphatanaa phrachaat), the upland minorities were marked ashaving primitive economies in which they subsisted by cut-ting down “pristine” forests to plant a poisonous drug, opium.Drug interdiction contained multiplicity of meanings, orpolyvalence (Turner, 1967, p. 54). It was conceptualized asnation building and also as a move toward the idealized “suf-ficiency economy”(as it has been recently termed by the Kingof Thailand).14 National development was reframed fromWesternization to Thai-style development according to amodel of romanticized self-subsistence and abstemiousnessin which agriculture and village life exist without externalsocial and economic linkages, isolated, and self-regulated(Nartsupha, 1991; Nartsupha, 1984, 1999). At the core of thiswere Buddhist values of taking the “middle path” (the FourthNoble Truth of Buddhism [Bercholz & Kohn 1993], a path ofmoderation and restraint [cf. Sivaraksa, 1992, pp. 102-106])arising out of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and particu-larly renunciation and right livelihood (Bercholz & Kohn,1993). Opium production came to be seen as iconic of desire,greed, and lack of community. Thus, opium control was notonly about stopping opium cultivation, but about being goodcitizens without the status of citizenship, good stewards ofthe land without the legal right to live on the land, andrenouncing profit-making inherent in growing a cash cropwithout the means to make legal livelihood.

Project personnel frequently carried out a discourse of sacri-fice for the good of the nation in their interactions with Lisuvillagers. At a 1993 meeting of Project personnel and vil-lagers, I counted 45 different uses of the word sia-sala (sacri-fice) in 1 hour by Thai speakers explaining to villagers whythey had to suffer economic hardships in order to help theThai nation. SMHDP officials recognized the hardships their

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Lisu “charges” endured and, in other situations, Thai officialspointed to themselves as examples of self-sacrifice to beemulated because they had left the comforts of their urbanhomes in order to help poor mountain peoples.15 This equatedthe position of Thai officials and Lisu villagers and requiredthat Lisu demonstrate their own sacrifices to SMHDP offi-cials and other Thai villagers. Lisu did this through participa-tion in the Project.

Political and community activists emphasized participation, butparticipation according to middle-class Thai mores. In thisview, people like the Lisu are not rational, educated, or high-minded enough to have an opposing voice in even local politi-cal processes (including negotiations for land managementplans to end opium cultivation) except under the right guidancetoward Thai standards. In effect, a stable society was seen asdepending on a hierarchical centralized leadership. The role ofthe people is to be self-disciplined and well-ordered citizens,and to that end they are endlessly educated on their proper rolein the state (Connors, 2002). The role of the villagers ofRevealed River was to follow the model of the wise leaders ofthe SMHDP and, yet, because of the character of these defini-tions of modernity and citizenship, the Lisu could not really becitizens of Thailand. In the end, this discourse was orientedtoward the closer regulation of Revealed River by the discipli-nary mechanisms of the state (McKinnon, 2007).

This discourse of participation illuminates the nature of theprofound satisfaction of policymakers with PLP in decreasingopium cultivation. There was participation in the originalapplications of PLP, but as it was extended across northernThailand the elements of listening to and taking into accountthe interests of upland villagers were filtered out in favor ofsatellite photos and GIS (Geographic Importation Systems).Why, then, this emphasis on the participatory nature of theProject’s prize program? It legitimated Thai forms of democ-racy in which the people acceded to the leadership, an argu-ment of great political potency in the 1990s.



Lisu agency—discourse, performance, and adaptation

I opened this article with an account of the declaration ofRunning River as a drug-free village. The irony is that Lisutypically did not use opium; addiction was rarely a socialproblem even at the height of the opium economy. In fact,one of the ethnic identifiers of being Lisu was to not smokeopium; they defined smoking opium as Chinese behavior (cf.Zheng, 2005). If addicts were so rare, then who was kickedout of the villages? Most of the “addicts” were elderly menand women who used opium medicinally to alleviate the painof arthritis. Opium use allowed them to continue as produc-tive members of their households, doing light work, cooking,and helping with child care. Labeled as drug abusers, theywere sent to live with other children in other villages or entirehouseholds with their “addict” kin were moved to new vil-lages,16 and some elderly were moved to huts in the forestwhere their children visited them several times a week tobring them food. The village also banned trekkers as theywere known for smoking opium as part of their tours in theGolden Triangle (cf. Leepreecha, 1997); a number of house-holds gave up considerable income from the tourist trade as aresult. Through these actions Revealed River won the appro-bation of Thai officials, giving villagers grounds for negotiat-ing more secure land tenure and less onerous monitoring oftheir daily behavior. They had regained a certain degree ofautonomy over their lives.

However, Lisu autonomy was illusory. Most evident was aceaseless round of hosting visitors and going to SMHDPmeetings and holiday festivities. Village leaders17 frequentlycomplained to me that meetings interfered with agriculturalactivities and marketing. Holiday festivities sometimes con-flicted with local village and lineage festivals as well. Forinstance, Thai Mother’s Day sometimes conflicted with FirstFruits, a Lisu day of ritual presentations to the householdancestors, and the SMHDP usually added a day to the LisuNew Year rituals by holding a celebration and dam hua18

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ritual at the local SMHDP center. Nevertheless, Lisu tacti-cally complied with the meeting requirements of the Projectby sending at least one household member to each event.Attendance demonstrated Lisu commitment to the plan ofmodernization through ending opium cultivation. Lisu vil-lagers learned the forms of discourse typical of SMHDP andperfected their performance of participation at meetings bytalking of the superiority of their new agricultural economy,the need for sustainability, and giving up the profit of culti-vating opium.

I also had the opportunity to observe Lisu villagers “back-stage” (Goffman, 1959; Kothari, 2001) as they discussedwhat the latest policy meant and tactically dealt with thechanging conditions of daily life in the mountains under theSMHDP. For example, my team visited my research sitewhile carrying out an evaluation of PLP for the UNDCP Pro-jects Coordination Office (Northern Thailand). While inter-viewing the three leaders of the village, they told us abouthow bad it is to grow opium, that they were not seeking com-mercial gain and “conspicuous consumption” anymore, butnow sought sustainable subsistence as advocated by the Pro-ject. Near the end of the interview, as my colleague turnedaway to make notes, they said to me in an aside, “How are wedoing, Ajarn [Professor]? Is it good?” This was a consciouslywrought performance.

There was also an intravillage discourse of cooperation inwhich leaders and farmers in good standing with the Projectexhorted the village. “We must change our ways. We mustfollow the Project’s advice. If we don’t, we’ll lose our land,they won’t respect us, they’ll think of us as bad people, asuncivilized. We have to progress,” they exclaimed when oth-ers complained of the onerous regulations against opium,police harassment, the limits on land use, and in generalbemoaned the poverty that had beset them since the end ofopium cultivation.



This is not to say that there was no everyday resistance. Dailyresistance occurred through refusing to repair roads on thegrounds that officials drove in more often than villagers, sur-reptitiously opening new fields, cultivating mushrooms in theforest, or (more pertinently) cultivating opium fields inBurma or small fields in isolated places around northernThailand (the “balloon effect” of drug interdiction). WhileProject personnel often suspected Lisu of acts of resistancesuch as setting forest fires, large-scale opium planting withinSMHDP borders, or involvement in the drug trade (officialsassumed that any late night activity was evidence of drugtrafficking), by and large villagers made every effort to pub-licly and vocally adhere to the standards of the Project. Nev-ertheless, outright rebellion was rare and I never saw a Lisuvillager directly and publicly confront an SMHDP official.The Lisu villagers’ energies were more often put into privatenegotiations with individual Project officials to gain access toland, seeds, fertilizer, rights to graze cattle,19 and help in navi-gating the government bureaucracy. That is, they treated Pro-ject personnel as sponsors, much in keeping with the Thaipolitical style of patronage.

There was an implied contract in their good performance.People expected that if they cooperated with the Project theywould be granted land security. There was plenty of evidenceof the precarious position they were in—no legal land rights,living well beyond the carrying capacity of the land, seeingpeople in other villages evicted and in general how grindinglypoor other villages had become in the last decade. Yet theybelieved that the SMHDP kept things from being worse. TheLisu of Revealed River had land; their girls were in the vil-lage, not in the lowlands in the sex industry; their boys werein the village, not heroin-addicted drug mules for some drugwarlord in Burma. From this perspective, the Project wastheir best hope for stability, and so they cooperated.

SMHDP personnel sometimes made this trade-off veryexplicit. At a meeting shortly after the Black May Massacre

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in 1992,20 one SMHDP extension agent exhorted: “If youdon’t do this, the soldiers will come up here, and they’llshoot first! Only we can protect you, and that depends on youfollowing this plan [to cease opium cultivation]!” Most Lisuhad had enough personal experience of the violence of sol-diers and the venality of the police that they feared the conse-quences if they each individually lost the support of patronsin the Project. Everyone knew someone in jail in Chiang Maior Bangkok for purported opium cultivation or trafficking.The villagers appeared to believe, furthermore, that the Pro-ject would protect them from being evicted from their land ashad occurred widely in the uplands in the past and morerecently in the lowlands of northeastern Thailand (in 1992).21

I raised this case and others with villagers, but they insistedthat they had done everything the Project wanted—they weredrug-free!—and therefore had land security. In order to sur-vive sans opium, farmers had made considerable investmentsin their land by planting coffee, fruit trees, and other treecrops that did not give return for several years. It seemedillogical that they would make these investments in condi-tions of land tenure insecurity. Yet they did so, and perhapsthere was no other rational course of action.

One way that actors with different interests worked togetheris through polyvalence; when more than one meaning isattached to the signifier, different interpretations can be sub-sumed and conflated such that the opposing understandingsof different actors do not usually collide. Lisu tactically tookadvantage of different meanings. An example of this was acase of Thai redefinition of Lisu practices. Most Lisu villageshave an Old Grandfather’s Shrine established by the foundingLisu lineage of the village.22 Thai SMHDP personnel hadnoted the location of Revealed River’s shrine at the peak of amountain and that, as sacred space, no cultivation took placearound it. They reinterpreted the practice as a form of water-shed protection. There was no evidence that Lisu thought ofthe shrine this way, but they did not dispute SMHDP claimsof indigenous wisdom when Thai Project personnel espoused



it at meetings; they simply continued to carry out their semi-annual rites of offering. Counterdiscourses existed in thesemultiple meanings, particularly in gaps in understanding. TheLisu accepted the benefits their “indigenous ecological wis-dom” brought them, but did not otherwise alter their ownsense of meaning of or use of the shrine.

Meetings communicated not only adherence to the SMHDPopium cessation plan, but also something among the partici-pants other than what the organizers intended (cf. Steinberg& Clark, 1999). Lisu adopted SMHDP development dis-courses to reinterpret and own them. Antidrug officialsintended cooperation and that is what they saw, but for theLisu villagers cooperation was about affirmation of localownership of the process. One villager, who was regularlyinvited to regional meetings to discuss opium replacementand sustainable subsistence agriculture, began to make a habitof managing the ritual showing of his garden. SMHDP offi-cials resented this usurpation of their roles as “guides” to theProject. A community organizer exclaimed “I taught it all tohim in the first place!” and complained about this villager’s“arrogance.” This overstepped the community organizer’sunderstanding of the interpersonal relationship of patronageand went against the paradigm that Project workers workedwithin, that they shared the travails of the upland minorityvillagers in order to lead the way. They were older brothers,not masters, and any implication that they controlled their“younger brothers” was deeply resented, but the villagersowed respect to their “older brothers” nonetheless. But bydemonstrating superior knowledge (and, privately, this farmerinsisted that most of the innovation in replacement crops hadbeen his own, not the Project’s), the farmer sought to makelegitimate claims to land and the right to autonomy.

Resistance more typically took the form of a counterdis-course that appeared, on the surface, to adhere to the stan-dards of the SMHDP. There was little open resistance by the1990s, but there was a constant discourse of “freedom” (often

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using the English word free or the Thai word issara) in vari-ous contexts, and constant worry about what the future held.The Lisu of Revealed River along with villagers of the SamMuen cluster in general perceived the SMHDP as patron andopportunity, yet experienced their relations with staff asrestrictive and onerous, and they were constantly self-vigilantto fulfill the ideals of the Project. We can see this as the Lisuvillagers’ counterdiscourse, by which they took control of theconditions of their own lives within the parameters of theworld as it had become.

Conclusions

The SMHDP’s success in reducing opium productionemerged out of the active participation of the most peripheralpeoples in global drug markets, the producers, who cooper-ated for complex reasons based on their own culturally-con-structed strategies for household survival in the light of theirexperience of the penetration of the Thai state into their dailylives through this opium control project. To understand whythe Lisu of Revealed River cooperated with the SMHDP, weneed to look at power and its realization through practice inthe village. How and what this power expressed were func-tions of a series of dynamic linkages between the Thai stateand global interests, and of the structure of Lisu society andits interactions with a particular instance of Thai policy, theSMHDP. Officers of the SMHDP were adamant about whythe Lisu cooperated—They had participation! They had a bet-ter life than in the old days! And, by the standards of manyother upland minority villages, the Lisu of Revealed RiverVillage did have a better life. But they had little choice. Theircooperation is understandable in the context of their everydayexperience of the power of the state. Lisu experienced theglobal drug wars through the prisms of the interests of theThai nation-state to modernize and their own concerns withautonomy.



It should not be judged from this that Lisu were simply cogs inthe wheels of the machinery of power. They took action andcooperated for reasons that arose out of their own interests sep-arate from those of the Project. Autonomy was a generativeprinciple of Lisu society in northern Thailand. Lisu soughtautonomy within the framework of possibilities constructed bythe SMHDP. By practicing Project policy, the Lisu of RevealedRiver sought to regain a degree of autonomy within their ownvillage. They assessed, they manipulated, they took advantageof opportunities to turn SMHDP policy and practice to theirown ends. This is why we cannot say that these Lisu cooper-ated, therefore the technique of participatory development waseffective and examine participation no further. Rather, I haveshown how we need to analyze the agency of local actors suchas the Lisu and see the variety of ways in which they made useof available resources within the terms of their own culturalunderstandings. In this context, the SMHDP was a resource formaintaining access to land, subsidies for opium replacementcrops, and shelter against other, more threatening arms of theThai state. The social relationships between Lisu villagers andSMHDP workers were a key element of the practice of the Pro-ject. Lisu strategically adapted to the end of the opium econ-omy within the spheres of household and kinship relationsthrough marriage and patrilineage, where they had power. Theytactically cooperated through the use of Project discourse andthe performance of cooperation.

This is not to say that a program in which participation is akey component is no better than the militaristic punishmentand eviction formerly typical in northern Thailand. Participa-tion is not just “the new tyranny” (Cooke & Kothari, 2001).Part icipatory opium control opened up new poli t icalprocesses on the microlevel (Drydyk, 2005; McKinnon,2007). By their participation, Lisu as former opium producersvalidated Thai political culture both within Thailand and onthe global stage on which the drug wars were carried out.SMHDP officials needed good outcomes (Kampe, 1997), andthis gave Lisu villagers a certain amount of power vis-à-vis

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them (Tessier, et al., 2001); this put SMHDP officials in theposition of brokers for the Lisu (Mosse & Lewis, 2006) andillustrates the dynamic linkages between policy and practice(Lawrence, 2006). Participation is more than a tool for sub-jection. It expanded possibilities for political action in an on-going process of engagement (Williams, 2004) in which Lisuwere able to tactically structure some of the effects of opiumcontrol in their piece of northern Thailand. The terms of par-ticipation were heterogeneous, the intentionality of Lisu par-ticipants in drug control multifaceted, and the understandingsof the Project by the actors involved polyvalent. This isworthwhile to remember as international agencies apply par-ticipatory integrated development to narcotics productioncontrol in new settings around the world.

1. This article is based on a little over 2 years of field research from Jan-uary 1992 to March 1994 as partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. in anthropol-ogy. My main fieldwork took place in the village I call Revealed River,one of a cluster of seven Lisu villages at the core of the Sam MuenHighland Development Project. Using participant observation of vil-lagers and Project personnel, archival research, and interviews of Thaiand foreign development officials and data from anthropologicalresearch done in the late 1960s–1970s (Durrenberger, 1971; Dessaint,1972) and the 1980s (Hutheesing, 1990), I studied transformations ofsocial structure of the Lisu upland ethnic minority as a result of thecessation of opium swidden cultivation. Research funding was pro-vided by a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship for Doctoral DissertationResearch Abroad (Grant No. P022A-10068) and a Rackham Grant forDissertation Research (University of Michigan). At the end of my termof field research, I was contracted by Dr. Gary Suwannarat of theUNDCP Projects Coordination Office (Northern Thailand) in ChiangMai, Thailand, to evaluate the role of participatory land use planningin natural resource management and narcotics interdiction. Thisresearch was carried out from February to April 1994.

2. This is the practice of young unmarried men experimenting withopium smoking. Not all boys tried it. It was a short period in theirlife, ended by marriage when a young man began to establish hisown household. With the end of opium cultivation, boys sometimesexperimented with heroin, which more often led to addiction. Withlater age at first marriage and more difficulties in establishing anautonomous household, the rate of addiction among young men wasincreasing.


Notes


3. Lisu are divided into Black Lisu, generally in the far northwest ofYunnan and southern Sichuan, but as far south as northern Burma;the White Lisu, further east and south; and the Flowery Lisu orsouthern Lisu, a more Sinified group found throughout southwesternYunnan, northern Burma, and into Thailand. Most of the Lisu inThailand are Flowery or southern Lisu. Each of these subgroupswere distinguished by different patterns of political and economicrelations with the Tibetan and Chinese states. For further details ondistributions and the construction of these ethnicities in the contextof local political economies, see Gillogly 2006, chap. 2.

4. Cognatic kinship is when descent is calculated through either or boththe mother’s or father’s side. North American kinship is cognatic.Patrilineal kinship traces kinship only through the father’s andfather’s father’s side, and so on. North American society has vestigesof patrilineality as evident in designation of surnames. In kinshiptheory, the significance of and relationships between formal kinshipstructures and people’s actual social relationships with kin have beenextensively debated and was at the core of this research. Uxorilocalpostmarital residence, mentioned later, is when the new couple set-tles with the bride’s father and his family.

5. In the opium economy, Lisu grouped themselves together via alle-giance groups more often than as patrilineal groups. The core of alle-giance groups was a group of sisters, affines, or friends; or alliancewith a powerful man. The members of an allegiance group workedtogether as allies in pursuit of mutual interests. Most commonly thisentailed exchange of agricultural labor, sharing of a rice mortar,making liquor together, and depending on each other for emergencyneeds. They also cooperated in rituals that allowed status display andrequired extra-household labor (Dessaint, 1972).

6. Myi3-do5 is a significant generative principle in Lisu society thatorganizes people’s goals, strategies, and their relations with eachother and their ancestors. Generative principles are the basic, unex-amined, assumptions that guide behavior and constitute the wayspeople implicitly evaluate their own and others’ behavior on the basisof fundamental standards (Bourdieu, 1977). Myi3-do5 reflects thelogic of Lisu social relations. Myi3-do5 is generally translated as“repute”: Lisu translate it into Thai as mii kiat, meaning to have honor,face, fame, and especially repute as in to have or be imbued withrepute. Etically, it is comparable to what anthropologists call prestige.

7. Due to warfare and disease, many parts of northern Burma and north-ern Thailand were greatly underpopulated (Hanks & Hanks, 2001;Maule, 2002; Tagliacozzo, 2004).

8. Poor areas such as Kokang in Burma have long been made wealthyby opium (Scott & Hardiman 1983, vol. 2, p. 466). Both historicaland recent bans on opium caused widespread famine as no other

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crops grew as well in this high, steeply mountainous region. (SeeJagan, 2005; Kramer, 2005; Pathan, 2005; U Sein Kyi, 2006 for thesocioeconomic consequences of a recent opium ban in northernBurma as an example.)

9. Anxious parents with young children constantly asked me when theywould be allowed to grow opium again, assuming that I had someuseful inside information about the Project’s plans and at New Year’sdances the elders bemoaned boys’ and girls’ lack of opportunity tomarry.

10. In Revealed River, many of the families that left due to having anopium user in their household went to join kin in places where theythought land was still available. Many of these families were notpatrilineal kin of the two dominant patrilineages in the village and solacked political power to negotiate for more land. In addition, thesehouseholds tended to have a high ratio of young children to produc-tive adults. That meant that these households were more dependenton elderly resident grandparents who used opium for child care whilethe parents worked their fields. In addition, these households wereless likely to have sufficient land in the future for their children dueto the restrictions on land ownership by the SMHDP in the SamMuen cluster. In other parts of northern Thailand, there are no proj-ects, or the projects that exist are poorly managed and land is boughtand sold in these places, albeit not legally. Migrant families thereforecould buy land or work for people who had a lot of land. A growingclass of landless Lisu with no secure access to land arose in ChiangRai when these poor families sold what little land they had towealthier residents (Hutheesing, 1990). In addition, there is anemerging trend toward rural urban migration. I met a group of Lisuin Chiang Mai living off the Thai and foreign tourist trade near theend of my fieldwork.

11. Here, I use tactics in the sense of Certeau to refer to those practicesvis-à-vis the dominant power, where people have no secure inde-pendence, using ruses and opportunities to gain possibilities fortheir own ends. “In short, a tactic is an art of the weak” (Certeau,1984, p. 37). These are arts of resistance that do not directly resist (J.C. Scott, 1985) but rather use the systems of power in their ownways when possible. As opportunistic and private actions, they donot “count”—they are outside the system and so do not appear to besystematized (Certeau, 1984, pp. xvii, 38), they are practice (local)rather than policy (universal), and thus made invisible. Certeau’sdistinction between tactics and strategies is useful in that it high-lights differences in power available to different actors. However,the distinction is too binary; it does not allow for recognition of theways in which action takes place in different niches of power, asfor instance, Lisu had power within their household and kinshiprelations.



12. Dr. Gary Suwannarat, personal communication September 24, 2002.

13. Extended throughout the north in the Accelerated Watershed Devel-opment program, the original goals of PLP were distorted, serving anation integration function far more than a communication negotia-tion process that gave villagers a voice. The extension privileged GISand satellite photos (“Don’t lie to us, we can see what you’re reallydoing,” as one project officer said to a villager) and cut out the long-term research element that had built relationships between commu-nity developers and villagers (Puginier, 2001; Gillogly, 2002) andpotentially made PLP a tool of the science of discipline (Foucault,1978), a panopticon on a regional scale (Foucault, 1975).

14. For more recent discussions of this idealized view of the Thai villageeconomy, see Sufficiency democracy in action on the New MandalaBlog. http://rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/newmandala/2007/08/03/sufficiency-democracy-in-actin/#comment-137003.

15. Mountain teachers, political liberals, similarly conceptualized Thai-land as a place of unity, community, and nationhood for which theego had to be abandoned.

16. Five out of 48 households left the village in 1990–1991.

17. There were three key village leaders. Two were the senior males oftheir patrilineages and one of those was the headman of the village;they represented the main part of Lisu in the village. The third leaderrepresented the Yunnanese Chinese/Lisu in the village, and he ledthat faction by virtue of his education and the force of his personal-ity. However, Lisu society was egalitarian, so Lisu leaders had nopower over people to whom they were not related and any respectedolder male in the village had a certain amount of authority in the vil-lage. It should be noted that Yunnanese Chinese had lived in Lisu vil-lages for decades and intermarried with Lisu. This leader’s motherwas Lisu, his father the son of a Chinese man and a Lisu wife; hiswife was of similar parentage. Being Yunnanese Chinese was moreof an ethnic identity than a reflection of objective bloodlines. Heidentified as Chinese, but lived according to Lisu social rules in aLisu village, for instance, he participated in the Lisu village rituals.

18. Dam hua is a ritual in which young people pour water over the handsof their elders and receive blessings in return, marking the mutualobligations inherent in binary hierarchies. It is often performed bymembers of an entourage for their patron. One year, the drug lordKhun Sa in Burma held a dam hua to which most villages in the SamMuen cluster sent a representative, even though it conflicted with theSMHDP New Year dam hua.

19. Cattle were an unspoken “replacement crop” in this part of northernThailand.

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20. Black May refers to the 1992 massacre of prodemocracy demonstra-tors in Bangkok.

21. In this case, northeastern (Isaan) peasants were forcibly resettledwhen a company with military backing took over their communityforest for a eucalyptus plantation.

22. This is a type of founder’s cult, found across Southeast Asia that ritu-ally marks rights to the land (Tannenbaum & Kammerer, 2003).

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