TY - JOUR
T1 - Re-Emplacing Homeland
T2 - Mobility, Locality, a Returned Exile and a Thai Restaurant in Southwest China
AU - Panyagaew, Wasan
PY - 2007/6
Y1 - 2007/6
N2 - In this article, I explore the new forms of people’s mobility in the borderlands of the upper Mekong, where China meets Myanmar and Laos. In particular, I examine a way in which returned exiles, restoring their senses of place, focused on their life stories after returning to their motherland in southwest China. Ethnographically, I investigate a Thai restaurant run by a returned exile family and the daily activities in and through this social space, read as ‘a transnational place’. Situating these returned exiles, the Chinese Dai minority, as members of the Tai-speaking peoples of the upper Mekong, who have dispersed across the national borders of China, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, I show that transnational mobility and connectivity, old and new, can be utilised by them to mobilise themselves into the contexts of modernisation, dislocation and regionalisation, re-emplacing their homeland, making their locality visible and sensible.
AB - In this article, I explore the new forms of people’s mobility in the borderlands of the upper Mekong, where China meets Myanmar and Laos. In particular, I examine a way in which returned exiles, restoring their senses of place, focused on their life stories after returning to their motherland in southwest China. Ethnographically, I investigate a Thai restaurant run by a returned exile family and the daily activities in and through this social space, read as ‘a transnational place’. Situating these returned exiles, the Chinese Dai minority, as members of the Tai-speaking peoples of the upper Mekong, who have dispersed across the national borders of China, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, I show that transnational mobility and connectivity, old and new, can be utilised by them to mobilise themselves into the contexts of modernisation, dislocation and regionalisation, re-emplacing their homeland, making their locality visible and sensible.
KW - Locality
KW - Mobility
KW - Returned Exile
KW - Thai Restaurant
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84979906876&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/14442210701299515
DO - 10.1080/14442210701299515
M3 - Article
SN - 1444-2213
VL - 8
SP - 117
EP - 135
JO - Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
JF - Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
IS - 2
ER -