H High
Biographic Data
| ID | 16738 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H High |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | High |
| SIGNATURE | HIGH H |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8772-9678 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 112 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Forms of Project: A Love Letter
Much of the work of anthropology entails lifting time-delimited projects—ethnographies, field research, collaborations—out of the goings on of daily life. In this essay, I allow the real (but usually edited out) interruptions of non-project time in, asking how the project form influences anthropological practice. I argue that, despite the apparent contradiction between project time and other temporalities, particularly domestic and care work, ide…
The Other Half of the Ass: A Manifesto for Anthropology in Neo‐Illiberal Times
I applaud Michael Scroggins and his recommendations. In common with many readers of this journal, I have spent years reading about neoliberalism; now Scroggins provides a practical road map to put this knowledge into practice. Monetizing student anxiety, making markets out of lecture halls, commodifying success, and working behind a corporate shell: These are all excellent and workable suggestions. Scroggins errs in only two respects. First, he a…
Abortion in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic
Ministerial Approvals in 2021 clearly articulated for the first time the wide range of circumstances under which abortion in Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) is legal. These approvals likely reflect norms around abortion existent since the establishment of the Lao PDR in 1975: unregulated abortion is and remains illegal, but abortion that meets certain criteria is and has always been legal in Lao PDR. The legal status of abortion was fuzzy …
David Graeber: Un anthropologue anarchiste
David Graeber : un anthropologue anarchiste
Ethnography as bridge
It was not the Government that did it: It was us! Water Supply in Kandon as an Example of Living Lao Socialism
The core argument of this paper is that English-language scholarly understandings of socialism in Laos have been hampered by implicit ethnocentrism and denial of coevalness. Lingering but pervasive legacies of the Cold War include an equation of 'true' socialism with models of socialism that were practised in Europe, and a triumphalist tone that equates socialism with the past, the fake and the crumbling, even when it is (as with Laos) so evident…
Laos in 2020
In 2020, Laos successfully contained the spread of COVID-19, with very few cases and no deaths. The key elements of the COVID-19 response reflect not only public health advice but also the core values of the political culture promoted by the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. These include unity, solidarity, struggle, respect for science, guidance by a strong center, and the extension of the state into everyday life in the form of designate…
Laos in 2019
Climate disruptions highlighted factors likely to shape the contours of climate change in Laos. Among these, regional relationships and resource-driven development continued to be important, as did inequality within Laos. Popular dissatisfaction with the capacity of the Lao state continued, exacerbated by environmental disasters and continuing limitations on free speech
A Palang Among the Kantu: Or, Difference is a Medicine
Palang is a word used in an ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province, Lao PDR meaning people of a broadly white appearance. It is similar, in sound and semantic range, to words found in many Asia Pacific languages of indicating the West, Westerners, and things originating in the West. The Kantu palang is furthermore linked to other categories of human difference, including ethnicity, possession, sorcery, witchcraft and the dead. Health and a good …
The 2018 Dam Collapse in Attapeu, Laos: Charitable donations and the party-state thriving on crisis
Potlatch
“Potlatch” is a term used by anthropologists to describe gift giving that is intended to enhance the status of the giver, and it often implies that the relationship between the giver and some or all of the recipients is agonistic or at least competitive. The term derives from Chinook jargon and describes occasions of feasting, dancing, and giving in the Pacific Northwest Coast of the Americas
Trade, Long‐Distance
In anthropological discussions, “trade” is usually understood in the sense of an exchange where goods and services that are not available locally are obtained. Long‐distance trade may be conducted according to the market principle of a supply and demand price mechanism, but studies have shown that much trade occurs on different principles such as gifting or state treaty. Trade within a single culture often involves mores and norms that are specif…
Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier - By Tania Li
Slow Anthropology: Negotiating Difference with the Iu Mien
Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos
Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance
Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance
Laos in 2012: In the Name of Democracy
Southeast Asian Affairs is the only one of its kind: a comprehensive annual review devoted to the international relations, politics, and economies of the region and its nation-states. The collected volumes of Southeast Asian Affairs have become a compendium documenting the dynamic evolution of regional and national developments in Southeast Asia from the end of the ‘second’ Vietnam War to the alarms and struggles of today. Over the years, the edi…
Electronic Records of the Air War Over Southeast Asia
The United States conducted a massive bombing campaign over Southeast Asia during the Second Indochina War. The joint chiefs of staff attempted to compile comprehensive databases of all US and allied air sorties during the conflict. In this article, we show how we tested the reliability of two of the most commonly used databases and then determined what they tell us about the air war, especially in terms of the tons of ordnance expended. The data…
Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos
It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practic…
Introduction: The Study of the State in Laos
SCOPUS: ed.j
Re-reading the potlatch in a time of crisis: Debt and the distinctions that matter 1
Anthropology and anarchy: Romance, horror or science fiction
This article introduces the special issue by considering some of the relations between anthropology and anarchy, real and potential. Anarchy, I suggest, is a word already burdened with strong (and often divergent) emotional overtones: it is invested with both romance and horror. These overtones point to related ideas about human nature as either social and peaceable or antagonistic and competitive. But are these parables about human nature just s…
Melancholia and anthropology
Relationships forged during ethnographic fieldwork are often ambivalent, if only because of the tension between "being there" and departure. Following Freud's argument that ambivalence in relationships lies at the heart of melancholia, I argue that ethnographic ambivalence can result in disciplinary melancholia, as seen in calls for a more ethical anthropology and in the pleasure of these appeals. I reach this conclusion by continuing a narrative…
Laos: Crisis and Resource Contestation
Laos in 2009 must be understood in terms of the broader context of ongoing crises that affected not only Laos, but also the region and indeed the globe. These include, primarily, the global financial crisis, the environmental crisis, and the food crisis, as well as Typhoon Ketsana and international outcry over the treatment of Hmong asylum seekers. While many of these critical situations have been developing for some time now, their cascading coa…
Ethnographic exposures: Motivations for donations in the south of Laos (and beyond)
In January 2009, I arranged the renovation of a school in my field site in the south of Laos with funds raised from donors in Australia. This project was initiated at the request of village leaders, and, initially, I saw it as a chance to acknowledge the generous assistance that residents had granted me during my fieldwork. However, the execution of the project was tense, particularly when it brought to the surface long-running ambiguities arisin…
Melancholia and anthropology
Relationships forged during ethnographic fieldwork are often ambivalent, if only because of the tension between "being there" and departure. Following Freud's argument that ambivalence in relationships lies at the heart of melancholia, I argue that ethnographic ambivalence can result in disciplinary melancholia, as seen in calls for a more ethical anthropology and in the pleasure of these appeals. I reach this conclusion by continuing a narrative…
Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos
Slow Anthropology: Negotiating Difference with the Iu Mien
Ethnographic exposures: Motivations for donations in the south of Laos (and beyond)
In January 2009, I arranged the renovation of a school in my field site in the south of Laos with funds raised from donors in Australia. This project was initiated at the request of village leaders, and, initially, I saw it as a chance to acknowledge the generous assistance that residents had granted me during my fieldwork. However, the execution of the project was tense, particularly when it brought to the surface long-running ambiguities arisin…
Introduction: The Study of the State in Laos
SCOPUS: ed.j
It was not the Government that did it: It was us! Water Supply in Kandon as an Example of Living Lao Socialism
The core argument of this paper is that English-language scholarly understandings of socialism in Laos have been hampered by implicit ethnocentrism and denial of coevalness. Lingering but pervasive legacies of the Cold War include an equation of 'true' socialism with models of socialism that were practised in Europe, and a triumphalist tone that equates socialism with the past, the fake and the crumbling, even when it is (as with Laos) so evident…
Join Together, Work Together, for the Common Good — Solidarity: Village Formation Processes in the Rural South of Laos
Anthropology and anarchy: Romance, horror or science fiction
This article introduces the special issue by considering some of the relations between anthropology and anarchy, real and potential. Anarchy, I suggest, is a word already burdened with strong (and often divergent) emotional overtones: it is invested with both romance and horror. These overtones point to related ideas about human nature as either social and peaceable or antagonistic and competitive. But are these parables about human nature just s…
The road to nowhere
Anthropological understandings of development have often discussed development projects in terms of an extension of the state. Using the example of a participatory poverty reduction project in Laos, this article outlines how development schemes also have the potential to define areas of exception from state services. This project was understood by project officers as an example of a successful "participatory" project. Lao recipients, however, int…
Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos
It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practic…
Join Together, Work Together, for the Common Good--Solidarity: Village Formation Processes in the Rural South of Laos
This article explores the concept of the solidary village in contemporary Laos. It argues that the "village" today is not a fixed, primordial entity, but a continually emergent formation resulting from numerous processes, including but not limited to modern state processes. The notion of "village" circulates in the ambiguous "common sense" pertaining to rural Laos, in the attitudes, expectations, representations, and regulated requirements of the…
Ritualising Residency: Territory Cults and a Sense of Place in Southern Lao PDR
Territory cults in southern Lao PDR exemplify the importance of ritual for the production of locality in an era of mobility. Here, the idea of village expressed in ritual incorporates scattered members who have ties of history and affection to village households—a view of residency that is extra-verted, inclusive and traverses space
A Palang Among the Kantu: Or, Difference is a Medicine
Palang is a word used in an ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province, Lao PDR meaning people of a broadly white appearance. It is similar, in sound and semantic range, to words found in many Asia Pacific languages of indicating the West, Westerners, and things originating in the West. The Kantu palang is furthermore linked to other categories of human difference, including ethnicity, possession, sorcery, witchcraft and the dead. Health and a good …
Electronic Records of the Air War Over Southeast Asia
The United States conducted a massive bombing campaign over Southeast Asia during the Second Indochina War. The joint chiefs of staff attempted to compile comprehensive databases of all US and allied air sorties during the conflict. In this article, we show how we tested the reliability of two of the most commonly used databases and then determined what they tell us about the air war, especially in terms of the tons of ordnance expended. The data…
Laos in 2019
Climate disruptions highlighted factors likely to shape the contours of climate change in Laos. Among these, regional relationships and resource-driven development continued to be important, as did inequality within Laos. Popular dissatisfaction with the capacity of the Lao state continued, exacerbated by environmental disasters and continuing limitations on free speech
The 2018 Dam Collapse in Attapeu, Laos: Charitable donations and the party-state thriving on crisis
Violent Landscape: Global Explosions and Lao Life-Worlds
Laos, a small country tucked into the heart of Southeast Asia, seems an unlikely target for the world’s most intensive bombing campaign. But from the 1950s to the 1970s, the U.S. intervened in Laos to combat the local communist forces and to attempt to stop the flow of North Vietnamese supplies through Lao territory, an intervention prompted by a particularly “global” outlook. The U.S. military intervention was characterised by tactics that pitte…
Join Together, Work Together, for the Common Good — Solidarity: Village Formation Processes in the Rural South of Laos
Join Together, Work Together, for the Common Good--Solidarity: Village Formation Processes in the Rural South of Laos
This article explores the concept of the solidary village in contemporary Laos. It argues that the "village" today is not a fixed, primordial entity, but a continually emergent formation resulting from numerous processes, including but not limited to modern state processes. The notion of "village" circulates in the ambiguous "common sense" pertaining to rural Laos, in the attitudes, expectations, representations, and regulated requirements of the…
Ritualising Residency: Territory Cults and a Sense of Place in Southern Lao PDR
Territory cults in southern Lao PDR exemplify the importance of ritual for the production of locality in an era of mobility. Here, the idea of village expressed in ritual incorporates scattered members who have ties of history and affection to village households—a view of residency that is extra-verted, inclusive and traverses space
Violent Landscape: Global Explosions and Lao Life-Worlds
Laos, a small country tucked into the heart of Southeast Asia, seems an unlikely target for the world’s most intensive bombing campaign. But from the 1950s to the 1970s, the U.S. intervened in Laos to combat the local communist forces and to attempt to stop the flow of North Vietnamese supplies through Lao territory, an intervention prompted by a particularly “global” outlook. The U.S. military intervention was characterised by tactics that pitte…
The road to nowhere
Anthropological understandings of development have often discussed development projects in terms of an extension of the state. Using the example of a participatory poverty reduction project in Laos, this article outlines how development schemes also have the potential to define areas of exception from state services. This project was understood by project officers as an example of a successful "participatory" project. Lao recipients, however, int…
Laos: Crisis and Resource Contestation
Laos in 2009 must be understood in terms of the broader context of ongoing crises that affected not only Laos, but also the region and indeed the globe. These include, primarily, the global financial crisis, the environmental crisis, and the food crisis, as well as Typhoon Ketsana and international outcry over the treatment of Hmong asylum seekers. While many of these critical situations have been developing for some time now, their cascading coa…
Ethnographic exposures: Motivations for donations in the south of Laos (and beyond)
In January 2009, I arranged the renovation of a school in my field site in the south of Laos with funds raised from donors in Australia. This project was initiated at the request of village leaders, and, initially, I saw it as a chance to acknowledge the generous assistance that residents had granted me during my fieldwork. However, the execution of the project was tense, particularly when it brought to the surface long-running ambiguities arisin…
Melancholia and anthropology
Relationships forged during ethnographic fieldwork are often ambivalent, if only because of the tension between "being there" and departure. Following Freud's argument that ambivalence in relationships lies at the heart of melancholia, I argue that ethnographic ambivalence can result in disciplinary melancholia, as seen in calls for a more ethical anthropology and in the pleasure of these appeals. I reach this conclusion by continuing a narrative…
Re-reading the potlatch in a time of crisis: Debt and the distinctions that matter 1
Anthropology and anarchy: Romance, horror or science fiction
This article introduces the special issue by considering some of the relations between anthropology and anarchy, real and potential. Anarchy, I suggest, is a word already burdened with strong (and often divergent) emotional overtones: it is invested with both romance and horror. These overtones point to related ideas about human nature as either social and peaceable or antagonistic and competitive. But are these parables about human nature just s…
Laos in 2012: In the Name of Democracy
Southeast Asian Affairs is the only one of its kind: a comprehensive annual review devoted to the international relations, politics, and economies of the region and its nation-states. The collected volumes of Southeast Asian Affairs have become a compendium documenting the dynamic evolution of regional and national developments in Southeast Asia from the end of the ‘second’ Vietnam War to the alarms and struggles of today. Over the years, the edi…
Electronic Records of the Air War Over Southeast Asia
The United States conducted a massive bombing campaign over Southeast Asia during the Second Indochina War. The joint chiefs of staff attempted to compile comprehensive databases of all US and allied air sorties during the conflict. In this article, we show how we tested the reliability of two of the most commonly used databases and then determined what they tell us about the air war, especially in terms of the tons of ordnance expended. The data…
Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos
It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practic…
Introduction: The Study of the State in Laos
SCOPUS: ed.j
Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos
Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance
Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance
Slow Anthropology: Negotiating Difference with the Iu Mien
Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier - By Tania Li
Potlatch
“Potlatch” is a term used by anthropologists to describe gift giving that is intended to enhance the status of the giver, and it often implies that the relationship between the giver and some or all of the recipients is agonistic or at least competitive. The term derives from Chinook jargon and describes occasions of feasting, dancing, and giving in the Pacific Northwest Coast of the Americas
Trade, Long‐Distance
In anthropological discussions, “trade” is usually understood in the sense of an exchange where goods and services that are not available locally are obtained. Long‐distance trade may be conducted according to the market principle of a supply and demand price mechanism, but studies have shown that much trade occurs on different principles such as gifting or state treaty. Trade within a single culture often involves mores and norms that are specif…
The 2018 Dam Collapse in Attapeu, Laos: Charitable donations and the party-state thriving on crisis
Laos in 2019
Climate disruptions highlighted factors likely to shape the contours of climate change in Laos. Among these, regional relationships and resource-driven development continued to be important, as did inequality within Laos. Popular dissatisfaction with the capacity of the Lao state continued, exacerbated by environmental disasters and continuing limitations on free speech
A Palang Among the Kantu: Or, Difference is a Medicine
Palang is a word used in an ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province, Lao PDR meaning people of a broadly white appearance. It is similar, in sound and semantic range, to words found in many Asia Pacific languages of indicating the West, Westerners, and things originating in the West. The Kantu palang is furthermore linked to other categories of human difference, including ethnicity, possession, sorcery, witchcraft and the dead. Health and a good …
Laos in 2020
In 2020, Laos successfully contained the spread of COVID-19, with very few cases and no deaths. The key elements of the COVID-19 response reflect not only public health advice but also the core values of the political culture promoted by the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. These include unity, solidarity, struggle, respect for science, guidance by a strong center, and the extension of the state into everyday life in the form of designate…
It was not the Government that did it: It was us! Water Supply in Kandon as an Example of Living Lao Socialism
The core argument of this paper is that English-language scholarly understandings of socialism in Laos have been hampered by implicit ethnocentrism and denial of coevalness. Lingering but pervasive legacies of the Cold War include an equation of 'true' socialism with models of socialism that were practised in Europe, and a triumphalist tone that equates socialism with the past, the fake and the crumbling, even when it is (as with Laos) so evident…
Political science (18 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · History (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Cambodian History and Society (8 works)