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Description: This volume begins with the Boasian faith in fieldwork and ends by demonstrating that the humility of living with ordinary people and hearing their stories can still bridge cultures and transcend academic fashions. Along the way, it takes us deeply into Southeast Asia and a scholarly tradition where the humanist and the scientist are allies, not enemies. When Jane Hanks invites the reader "to enter into the life of Muang Kham," she, like Lucien Hanks, also invites us into an ongoing tradition of scholarship on Southeast Asia. Jane and Lucien Hanks carry on a tradition of humane ethnography that here covers fifteen tumultuous years in the life of upland Southeast Asia. They have created a story that turns a large place (775 square miles) into its diverse peoples and their 320 villages, all caught up in the crosscurrents of international politics, nation-building, the opium trade, growing population, and shrinking resources. Its locale - the Golden Triangle - adds current interest, but this volume's enduring value is as an ethnographic record that spans mountains and valleys, captures indigenous pluralism, and continues a Boasian tradition of areal ethnography. In locale, scope, and coherence, we have nothing to match this remarkable study, and, given the changes in scholarship and Southeast Asia, we never will. -Richard A. O'Connor and Cornelia Ann Kammerer
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