| Abstract: |
Mountainous Houaphan, home to about a dozen of the official 49 ethnic groups in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, offers ample test cases for the Zomia narrative, as already indicated. The province has no clear ethnic majority, even though Lao and upland Tai (Tai Dam and Tai Deng) hold key positions in the political administration. Mon-Khmer-speaking Khmu and Phong form large communities in the southern districts, while Hmong settlements can be found everywhere due to decades of resettlement campaigns and ongoing spontaneous movements in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands. Upland livelihoods include swidden cultivation, also among ‘lowland’ Lao and Tai villages. All groups share a history of migration, and in fact no group claims autochthony in the region. With the Hmong being relative latecomers in the region (late 19th century), the relationship between the groups of the Tai-Lao and the Mon-Khmer language families is key to the understanding of socio-political dynamics in Houaphan. As in other regions of Laos (see Badenoch and Shinsuke 2013 for NW Laos) the linguistically and culturally different groups form part of more or less stable networks of (hierarchical) political and economic relations – the müang as ambiguous political principle of socio-political organisation. In Houaphan, small Lao and Tai polities (dismissed by Scott as mere “mimicry states”; 2009: 37) are connected to surrounding village societies that in old sources are often categorised as kha (slaves), indicating hierarchy and inequality. Yet oral history accounts mention not only upland-lowland antagonism but also instances of collaboration and exchange.
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