Nicholas Tapp

Gary Y. Lee

This book is the first to balance an account of the traditional life and history of the Hmong as a global people, with a full account of their modern, urban lives. * A chronology from the earliest history of the Hmong to the present day * Numerous photographs depicting Hmong culture and artifacts * Glossaries of English, Hmong, Latin, and Chinese terms

Culture and Customs of the Hmong

Andrew Walker

A Digest of Articles from the Thai-Yunnan Project Newsletter

The Tai World

This first ethnography of the Hmong in China is based on Nicholas Tapp's extensive fieldwork in a Hmong village in Sichuan. Basing his analysis on the concepts of context and agency, Tapp discusses the "paradoxical ambivalence at the heart of Hmong culture." A paradox arises in the historical and ethnographic construction of the identity of the Hmong by conscious contrast with, and in opposition to, a majority Han Chinese identity at the same time that large parts of Hmong culture are shared with the Chinese and may be the results of historical processes of adoption, absorption, mimesis, or emulation. Tapp examines the Hmong rituals of shamanism, ancestral respect, and death and provides details on livelihood, kinship, local organization, and intellectual culture. The book is enhanced with thorough accounts of ceremonies, rituals, and folktales, with translations of Hmong songs and stories. This publication has also been published in hardback (no longer available).

Context, Angency, and the Imaginary

The Hmong of China

Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology Nicholas Tapp

The White Hmong are an ethnic minority in northern Thailand, Laos, southern China and Burma.

The White Hmong of Northern Thailand

Sovereignty and Rebellion

Philip Hirsch

This volume traces the threads that tie together an understanding of Thailand as a dynamic and rapidly changing society, through an examination of the work of one major scholar of the country, Andrew Turton. Turton's anthropological studies of Thailand cover a wide spectrum from politics and economy to ritual and culture, and have been crucial in shaping evolving understandings of Thai society. In this collection, ten leading specialists on Thailand from a variety of disciplines critically consider aspects of Turton's work in relation to the changing nature of different aspects of Thai society. The book tracks the links between past and present scholarship, examines the contextuality of scholarship in its times, and sheds light on the current situation in Thailand.

Thailand and the Work of Andrew Turton

Tracks and Traces

This is a work of ethnographic reflection on Hmong society, history and culture, dealing with questions of the self and the notion that a romantic self inspired the ethos of hedonism associated with the consumer economy. A Hmong identity is shown to have been historically constructed through the works of colonial missionaries, linguists, and anthropologists. Yet Hmong voices have also been powerful in this process. Based on recent fieldwork in Asia and overseas, the Hmong diaspora is examined. The modern Hmong self is presented as a prospective one, constructed in diaspora and through the use of the internet and other modes of modern communication in a movement towards a virtual future which, despite the dissonance of voices appealing to an ideal unity, is one still rich with potentiality.

Nicholas Tapp

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