@article{2ceeef259cc74426b1d96c6d486f5e03,
title = "Good attachment in the Asian highlands: questioning notions of “loose women” and “autonomous communities”",
abstract = "As part of the national consolidation of Thailand in the early twentieth century, various hinterland populations were actively marginalized and dispossessed. Anthropology and other scholarship normalized this racialized dispossession through notions of highland people{\textquoteright}s essential difference from lowland society. Two fantasies in particular cemented notions of highland otherness: ethnographic notions of autonomous and egalitarian ethnic communities, and heterosexual male notions of sexually loose and available non-Thai women. A comparative and regional approach to sexuality and politics suggests a very different reality. Across Southeast Asia, certain customs suggest a shared focus on the benefits of being well attached across differences, for women and for communities. Such customs have been obscured by anthropological and other convictions about culture and ethnicity. This case insists on the importance of customs that have encouraged good attachment and the negotiation of diversity, as common across Southeast Asia and as also shaped by the human bio-cultural evolutionary heritage.",
keywords = "Anthropology, evolution, history, politics, sexuality",
author = "Hjorleifur Jonsson",
note = "Funding Information: Importantly, these graduate students were keen on autonomous and egalitarian tribal peoples, which I consider a separate fantasy that in many ways precluded interest in history. Many of the highland peoples had for decades been stateless because of hostile government policies. Across Thailand{\textquoteright}s north, most highland settlements were vulnerable to extortion, threats of eviction, destruction of fields, and sexual predation. This situation, in which the two fantasies converge, lasted into the 1980s. The Tribal Research Center was based in Chiangmai, northern Thailand. It received initial funding from the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), and was a low-level branch of the national administration, first under the Ministry of Interior and then under the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare. The Center became an Institute in the 1980s but was disbanded by official decree in 2002. See Buadaeng ; Geddes . Funding Information: Research in Thailand in 2015 was funded by an A.T. Steele Summer Research and Travel Grant from the Center for Asian Research at Arizona State University. I thank the CAS editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive engagement with the material. I am also indebted to Ratason Srisombat and Suchon Numkang Mallikamarl for their assistance and encouragement. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 BCAS, Inc. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "2020",
month = jul,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1080/14672715.2020.1772092",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "52",
pages = "403--428",
journal = "Critical Asian Studies",
issn = "1467-2715",
publisher = "Routledge",
number = "3",
}