Trade relationships between Lao valley, mid-slope, and peak communities
The Lao government has divided Lao citizens into three broad ethnic categories: lowland, mid-slope, and peak Lao peoples. Lowland Lao communities tend to be ethnically Lao, while most mid-slope communities are Khmu, and peak communities are usually Hmong. This ethnic division can be misleading, however. Lao villages of different ethnicities have always interacted with one another. Because valley, mid-slope, and peak villages are located in different environmental conditions, conduct different kinds of agriculture, and collect different kinds of plants, trade up and down the mountainside makes economic sense. Villages may maintain closer ties to others up the mountainside, or down in the valley, than they do with more distant villages of the same ethnicity. Although the political categories differ, social and economic relations in Northern Thailand, Shan State in Burma, and Southern Yunnan may operate similarly. I will present a poster on these interactions--particularly trade interactions--up and down Lao mountain slopes.
Focusing on Laos, however, we find that many of these valley-slope-peak relationships have changed over the years, as Laos experienced French colonialism, civil war, the effects of the Vietnam War, and particularly in the last twenty years as Lao government has encouraged (or caused) socio-economic change. These include forcibly moving villages, insisting that villagers change the kinds of crops they grow, encouraging wealthy foreign investors to buy land and set up business, and improving national and international trade infrastructure. In light of the major socio-economic changes that have resulted from these experiences, I propose to model a simplified history of trade relations up and down the slopes by examining three time periods:
1. Interactions during the late colonial period
2. Interactions during the civil war/Vietnam War period
3. Interactions in the 1980s and early 1990s
4. Interactions today and in the recent past.
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