Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos

Mastering Smallness
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-94-6372-236-0
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 16, 262 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Asian Borderlands

Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness demonstrates that these traders’ indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of ‘smallness’ foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rowedder, Simon

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Internationale Wirtschaft Internationaler Handel
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Bereichsspezifisches Management Außenhandel
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Internationale Wirtschaft Volkswirtschaften einzelner Länder und Regionen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Notes on Language and Transliteration

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 - “We are all Tai Lue”: International Trade Fairs as Local Ethnic Affairs

CHAPTER 2 - “Normal fruits for Laos, premium fruits for China”: Transnational Flows of National Differences

CHAPTER 3 - “Thailand: high quality; China: low price”: “Banal Cosmopolitanism” in Local Marketplaces

CHAPTER 4 - “I didn’t learn any occupation, so I trade”: Narratives of Insignificance

CHAPTER 5 - “No matter what, we’ll find a way”: Uncertain (Chinese?) Futures

CONCLUSION - Large Insights from Smallness

Complete Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Rowedder, Simon
Simon Rowedder was a Research Fellow at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS), and member of the NUS-Max Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobilities and New Infrastructures. In December 2021, he became Assistant Professor of Development Politics at the University of Passau in Germany.