Hjorleifur R Jonsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 146317 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hjorleifur R Jonsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hjorleifur R |
| FAMILY NAME | Jonsson |
| SIGNATURE | JONSSON H R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8624-0608 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 115 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Thailand’s Plural Identities
This article examines notions of national identity and diversity in Thailand during the twentieth century. It draws on ethnographies, historical fiction, jungle adventure, romance, and official documents to question common notions of Thai identity and of what constitutes socially relevant Thai-language writing. The focus is in part on so-called hill peoples, whom scholarship has generally regarded as irrelevant to an understanding of Thai society…
From Tribalism to Nationalism
Revisiting Ideas of Power in Southeast Asia
The five essays in this collection examine ideas of power in Southeast Asia and reflect on foundational studies by Lucien Hanks and Benedict Anderson on Thailand and Indonesia. The essays by Hanks and Anderson crossed anthropology and area studies. The cases explore the relevance of their work in Southeast Asia and comparatively, in relation to academic consensus and debate, social entanglements, political divergence, negotiation, pluralism, and …
Losing the Remote
This article challenges the common understanding of Thailand’s ethnic divide as marked by unfamiliarity and an absolute difference between Thai society and the hill tribes in the country’s north. Much scholarship has overlooked how the negotiation of diversity and complexity has been foundational to Thai and other Southeast Asian societies and cultures for millennia. An ideology of ethnically singular and exclusive Thai identity framed the histor…
States
States are generally associated with regulation and a monopoly on the use of force, and anthropologists commonly use kinship or territoriality to distinguish states from nonstate societies. Alternative perspectives emphasize common features of human sociality and play that enable no such distinctions. Many theories rest on specific causal links between cities and countryside and between modernity and tradition. There is no agreement on the thingn…
Stexit
In a time of Brexit and Trump, when exclusive national identities are taken for granted, South East Asia's longstanding patterns of inclusive identity and interethnic networks merit our closest attention. However, much of anthropology and related scholarship has viewed ideologies of exclusive identity as normal rather than contingent. This scholarly emphasis has made the negotiation of diversity seem improbable and even detrimental to certain peo…
The Mushroom at the End of the World
The title character in this book, the mushroom at the end of the world, is matsutake (‘pine-tree mushroom’), a Japanese delicacy. Many intertwined histories and ecologies feature in the study, whic
Highland Chiefs and Regional Networks in Mainland Southeast Asia
This article is centered on the life story of a Mien upland leader in Laos and later in the kingdom of Nan that subsequently was made a province of Thailand. The story was recorded in 1972 but primarily describes events during 1870–1930. The aim of this article is to call attention to long-standing networks of highland-lowland relations where social life was unstable but always and persistently inclusive and multi-ethnic. The centrality of intere…
Dreams of the Hmong kingdom
Dreams of the Hmong kingdom: the quest for legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960." Asian Studies Review, 41(2), pp. 325–326
Slow Anthropology
Phantom Scandal
Manikin‐Ship
Objects are telling of identity and difference, through possession, exchange, and display, but this dynamic must be historicised and socially situated. In this article, I focus on the signification of ethnicity in Vietnamese museums, particularly on an apparent distinction between historically ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ matter. The earliest displays responded to the previous hegemony of French colonial significations. Subsequent national exhibits consisten…
Paths to freedom
The recent discovery that Southeast Asia's highland peoples had not been traditional tribals but were instead clever freedom-seekers brings up various questions regarding the politics of ethnographic prospecting. The ostensible anarchism of standing outside the state dismisses the possibility of political negotiation. It offers instead liberalist moral geography that celebrates individualism and the cutting of social connections, as it disregards…
James C. Scott, The art of not being governed
In this feature we highlight a recently launched book. We invite specialists in the field to comment on the book, and we invite the author to respond to their comments. In this issue we focus on James C. Scott's, The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Those invited to comment on the book are Michael Dove, Hjorleifur Jonsson and Michael Aung-Thwin. James Scott, in keeping with his long-standing practice, has …
Mimetic Minorities
Representations of identity are always political acts, but their politics are unpredictable. Among ethnic minorities in northern Thailand, there is a striking difference between the absence of ethnic markers from a political confrontation and the profusion of ethnic markers at non-confrontational festivals. I situate the difference in engagements with a national contact zone where so-called Mountain Peoples are denied political agency. Minority a…
Knowing How to Know
Above and Beyond
James Scott's notion of Zomia proposes a new look at historical and social dynamics in a vast area of the Asian hinterlands, in terms of deliberate state-avoidance that came to an end through the nation state's superior techniques of control. Zomia is a concept metaphor that defines the social reality it purportedly only describes. My examination points to a pervasive problem with the historicization of highland regions in Europe as much as in As…
War’s Ontogeny
This article concerns the dynamics of people-making during war and exile.While the Second Indochina War (1954-75) in Laos was international, the fashioning of ethnic identities in relation to militias also reflected local dynamics and divisions, and rivalries over prominence.I focus on the identification of Iu Mien peoples in relation to Chao La, a militia leader whose prominence reflected his authoritarianism and command over resources, as well …
On My Appetite, Vinegar, Financial Support, and the State
Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia
Book Review| October 01 2007 Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights. Amity A. Doolittle. Hjorleifur Jonsson Hjorleifur Jonsson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (4): 563–565. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.4.563 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site …
Mien Alter-Natives in Thai Modernity
This article discusses the repeated framing of Mien ethnic minority highland people as unmodern in relation to projects of modernity and modernization in Thailand. As upland livelihood has become increasingly precarious and entangled with state regulation, Mien people are engaging with national modernity and modernization through public displays that variously highlight their tradition or modernity or creatively combine the two. In this national …
Mien through sports and culture
The recent importance of sports competitions and cultural displays among highland ethnic minorities in Thailand suggests a growing resonance of national forms of sociability and presentability. A national contact zone simultaneously provides a context for unprecedented ethnic mobilization and identification among the country's minorities. Taking the case of Thailand's Mien (Yao), I explore the restructuring of social life that emerges with this e…
Other Attractions in Vietnam
This paper analyses the place of highland ethnic minorities in Vietnamese visual culture. For decades, artists have appropriated markers of ethnic difference in propaganda posters about national unity and progress. Vietnamese notions of ethnic groups draw on a historical trajectory that involves colonial racial classifications as well as the anti-colonial notion of 'the people'. The inclusion of ethnic minorities in official portrayals of the peo…
Does the House Hold? History and the Shape of Mien (Yao) Society
This article reexamines accounts of Mien (Yao) ethnic minority populations in northern Thailand, in particular generalizations about social structure in terms of household formations. Two ethnographic accounts from the same province of Thailand during the 1960s suggest opposite tendencies in Mien household dynamics, but each makes a case for Mien society. This restudy proposes that the dynamics of the 1960s were largely specific to engagements wi…
Serious Fun
In this article, I explore local social and cultural dynamics in the context of the national integration of ethnic minorities. My case concerns a Mien population in Thailand and describes various engagements of local and national spaces that center on issues of fun. Sports competitions and culture shows resonate with other projects that reinforce the centrality of villages in contemporary social life. For the Mien, these dynamics index a shift fr…
Above and Beyond
James Scott's notion of Zomia proposes a new look at historical and social dynamics in a vast area of the Asian hinterlands, in terms of deliberate state-avoidance that came to an end through the nation state's superior techniques of control. Zomia is a concept metaphor that defines the social reality it purportedly only describes. My examination points to a pervasive problem with the historicization of highland regions in Europe as much as in As…
Paths to freedom
The recent discovery that Southeast Asia's highland peoples had not been traditional tribals but were instead clever freedom-seekers brings up various questions regarding the politics of ethnographic prospecting. The ostensible anarchism of standing outside the state dismisses the possibility of political negotiation. It offers instead liberalist moral geography that celebrates individualism and the cutting of social connections, as it disregards…
Slow Anthropology
Serious Fun
In this article, I explore local social and cultural dynamics in the context of the national integration of ethnic minorities. My case concerns a Mien population in Thailand and describes various engagements of local and national spaces that center on issues of fun. Sports competitions and culture shows resonate with other projects that reinforce the centrality of villages in contemporary social life. For the Mien, these dynamics index a shift fr…
Forest Products and Peoples
This article relates problems with the assumptions of village studies, and suggests ways of turning these issues towards region and history. The case concerns ways in which communities of Karen have been caught up in internal tensions as well as regional dynamics of both world-view and political economy, and how in the current context marginal communities such as Karen villages are framed by decisions at national and international levels. Village…
James C. Scott, The art of not being governed
In this feature we highlight a recently launched book. We invite specialists in the field to comment on the book, and we invite the author to respond to their comments. In this issue we focus on James C. Scott's, The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Those invited to comment on the book are Michael Dove, Hjorleifur Jonsson and Michael Aung-Thwin. James Scott, in keeping with his long-standing practice, has …
Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands
The place of Yao and other ethnic minorities in official museums and histories in China, Thailand, and Vietnam shows the state's involvement in identity politics. The museumizing of minority identities tends to endorse particular markers of difference, and simultaneously conceal both the state's role in sanctioning particular identities and the state's suppression of the cultural and agricultural practices that previously reproduced social differ…
Losing the Remote
This article challenges the common understanding of Thailand’s ethnic divide as marked by unfamiliarity and an absolute difference between Thai society and the hill tribes in the country’s north. Much scholarship has overlooked how the negotiation of diversity and complexity has been foundational to Thai and other Southeast Asian societies and cultures for millennia. An ideology of ethnically singular and exclusive Thai identity framed the histor…
Mien through sports and culture
The recent importance of sports competitions and cultural displays among highland ethnic minorities in Thailand suggests a growing resonance of national forms of sociability and presentability. A national contact zone simultaneously provides a context for unprecedented ethnic mobilization and identification among the country's minorities. Taking the case of Thailand's Mien (Yao), I explore the restructuring of social life that emerges with this e…
Other Attractions in Vietnam
This paper analyses the place of highland ethnic minorities in Vietnamese visual culture. For decades, artists have appropriated markers of ethnic difference in propaganda posters about national unity and progress. Vietnamese notions of ethnic groups draw on a historical trajectory that involves colonial racial classifications as well as the anti-colonial notion of 'the people'. The inclusion of ethnic minorities in official portrayals of the peo…
Does the House Hold? History and the Shape of Mien (Yao) Society
This article reexamines accounts of Mien (Yao) ethnic minority populations in northern Thailand, in particular generalizations about social structure in terms of household formations. Two ethnographic accounts from the same province of Thailand during the 1960s suggest opposite tendencies in Mien household dynamics, but each makes a case for Mien society. This restudy proposes that the dynamics of the 1960s were largely specific to engagements wi…
Stexit
In a time of Brexit and Trump, when exclusive national identities are taken for granted, South East Asia's longstanding patterns of inclusive identity and interethnic networks merit our closest attention. However, much of anthropology and related scholarship has viewed ideologies of exclusive identity as normal rather than contingent. This scholarly emphasis has made the negotiation of diversity seem improbable and even detrimental to certain peo…
Phantom Scandal
The Village Concept in the Transformation of Rural Southeast Asia
Revisiting Ideas of Power in Southeast Asia
The five essays in this collection examine ideas of power in Southeast Asia and reflect on foundational studies by Lucien Hanks and Benedict Anderson on Thailand and Indonesia. The essays by Hanks and Anderson crossed anthropology and area studies. The cases explore the relevance of their work in Southeast Asia and comparatively, in relation to academic consensus and debate, social entanglements, political divergence, negotiation, pluralism, and …
Dreams of the Hmong kingdom
Dreams of the Hmong kingdom: the quest for legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960." Asian Studies Review, 41(2), pp. 325–326
States
States are generally associated with regulation and a monopoly on the use of force, and anthropologists commonly use kinship or territoriality to distinguish states from nonstate societies. Alternative perspectives emphasize common features of human sociality and play that enable no such distinctions. Many theories rest on specific causal links between cities and countryside and between modernity and tradition. There is no agreement on the thingn…
Manikin‐Ship
Objects are telling of identity and difference, through possession, exchange, and display, but this dynamic must be historicised and socially situated. In this article, I focus on the signification of ethnicity in Vietnamese museums, particularly on an apparent distinction between historically ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ matter. The earliest displays responded to the previous hegemony of French colonial significations. Subsequent national exhibits consisten…
Mien Alter-Natives in Thai Modernity
This article discusses the repeated framing of Mien ethnic minority highland people as unmodern in relation to projects of modernity and modernization in Thailand. As upland livelihood has become increasingly precarious and entangled with state regulation, Mien people are engaging with national modernity and modernization through public displays that variously highlight their tradition or modernity or creatively combine the two. In this national …
Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400–1800
This Is Not an Island
Images of Contemporary Iceland: Everyday Lives and Global Contexts. Gísli Pálsson and E. Paul Durrenberger Icelandic Essays: Explorations in the Anthropology of Modern Life. E. Paul Durrenberger. San Francisco The Textual Life of Savants: Ethnography, Iceland, and the Linguistic Turn. Gísli Pálsson
The Village Concept in the Transformation of Rural Southeast Asia
Forest Products and Peoples
This article relates problems with the assumptions of village studies, and suggests ways of turning these issues towards region and history. The case concerns ways in which communities of Karen have been caught up in internal tensions as well as regional dynamics of both world-view and political economy, and how in the current context marginal communities such as Karen villages are framed by decisions at national and international levels. Village…
Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands
The place of Yao and other ethnic minorities in official museums and histories in China, Thailand, and Vietnam shows the state's involvement in identity politics. The museumizing of minority identities tends to endorse particular markers of difference, and simultaneously conceal both the state's role in sanctioning particular identities and the state's suppression of the cultural and agricultural practices that previously reproduced social differ…
Does the House Hold? History and the Shape of Mien (Yao) Society
This article reexamines accounts of Mien (Yao) ethnic minority populations in northern Thailand, in particular generalizations about social structure in terms of household formations. Two ethnographic accounts from the same province of Thailand during the 1960s suggest opposite tendencies in Mien household dynamics, but each makes a case for Mien society. This restudy proposes that the dynamics of the 1960s were largely specific to engagements wi…
Serious Fun
In this article, I explore local social and cultural dynamics in the context of the national integration of ethnic minorities. My case concerns a Mien population in Thailand and describes various engagements of local and national spaces that center on issues of fun. Sports competitions and culture shows resonate with other projects that reinforce the centrality of villages in contemporary social life. For the Mien, these dynamics index a shift fr…
Other Attractions in Vietnam
This paper analyses the place of highland ethnic minorities in Vietnamese visual culture. For decades, artists have appropriated markers of ethnic difference in propaganda posters about national unity and progress. Vietnamese notions of ethnic groups draw on a historical trajectory that involves colonial racial classifications as well as the anti-colonial notion of 'the people'. The inclusion of ethnic minorities in official portrayals of the peo…
Mien through sports and culture
The recent importance of sports competitions and cultural displays among highland ethnic minorities in Thailand suggests a growing resonance of national forms of sociability and presentability. A national contact zone simultaneously provides a context for unprecedented ethnic mobilization and identification among the country's minorities. Taking the case of Thailand's Mien (Yao), I explore the restructuring of social life that emerges with this e…
Mien Alter-Natives in Thai Modernity
This article discusses the repeated framing of Mien ethnic minority highland people as unmodern in relation to projects of modernity and modernization in Thailand. As upland livelihood has become increasingly precarious and entangled with state regulation, Mien people are engaging with national modernity and modernization through public displays that variously highlight their tradition or modernity or creatively combine the two. In this national …
Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia
Book Review| October 01 2007 Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights. Amity A. Doolittle. Hjorleifur Jonsson Hjorleifur Jonsson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (4): 563–565. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.4.563 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site …
On My Appetite, Vinegar, Financial Support, and the State
War’s Ontogeny
This article concerns the dynamics of people-making during war and exile.While the Second Indochina War (1954-75) in Laos was international, the fashioning of ethnic identities in relation to militias also reflected local dynamics and divisions, and rivalries over prominence.I focus on the identification of Iu Mien peoples in relation to Chao La, a militia leader whose prominence reflected his authoritarianism and command over resources, as well …
Mimetic Minorities
Representations of identity are always political acts, but their politics are unpredictable. Among ethnic minorities in northern Thailand, there is a striking difference between the absence of ethnic markers from a political confrontation and the profusion of ethnic markers at non-confrontational festivals. I situate the difference in engagements with a national contact zone where so-called Mountain Peoples are denied political agency. Minority a…
Knowing How to Know
Above and Beyond
James Scott's notion of Zomia proposes a new look at historical and social dynamics in a vast area of the Asian hinterlands, in terms of deliberate state-avoidance that came to an end through the nation state's superior techniques of control. Zomia is a concept metaphor that defines the social reality it purportedly only describes. My examination points to a pervasive problem with the historicization of highland regions in Europe as much as in As…
James C. Scott, The art of not being governed
In this feature we highlight a recently launched book. We invite specialists in the field to comment on the book, and we invite the author to respond to their comments. In this issue we focus on James C. Scott's, The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Those invited to comment on the book are Michael Dove, Hjorleifur Jonsson and Michael Aung-Thwin. James Scott, in keeping with his long-standing practice, has …
Manikin‐Ship
Objects are telling of identity and difference, through possession, exchange, and display, but this dynamic must be historicised and socially situated. In this article, I focus on the signification of ethnicity in Vietnamese museums, particularly on an apparent distinction between historically ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ matter. The earliest displays responded to the previous hegemony of French colonial significations. Subsequent national exhibits consisten…
Paths to freedom
The recent discovery that Southeast Asia's highland peoples had not been traditional tribals but were instead clever freedom-seekers brings up various questions regarding the politics of ethnographic prospecting. The ostensible anarchism of standing outside the state dismisses the possibility of political negotiation. It offers instead liberalist moral geography that celebrates individualism and the cutting of social connections, as it disregards…
Phantom Scandal
Slow Anthropology
Highland Chiefs and Regional Networks in Mainland Southeast Asia
This article is centered on the life story of a Mien upland leader in Laos and later in the kingdom of Nan that subsequently was made a province of Thailand. The story was recorded in 1972 but primarily describes events during 1870–1930. The aim of this article is to call attention to long-standing networks of highland-lowland relations where social life was unstable but always and persistently inclusive and multi-ethnic. The centrality of intere…
Dreams of the Hmong kingdom
Dreams of the Hmong kingdom: the quest for legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960." Asian Studies Review, 41(2), pp. 325–326
Stexit
In a time of Brexit and Trump, when exclusive national identities are taken for granted, South East Asia's longstanding patterns of inclusive identity and interethnic networks merit our closest attention. However, much of anthropology and related scholarship has viewed ideologies of exclusive identity as normal rather than contingent. This scholarly emphasis has made the negotiation of diversity seem improbable and even detrimental to certain peo…
The Mushroom at the End of the World
The title character in this book, the mushroom at the end of the world, is matsutake (‘pine-tree mushroom’), a Japanese delicacy. Many intertwined histories and ecologies feature in the study, whic
Sociology (21 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · History (12 works) · Ethnic group (9 works)