Cross-border traders in northern Laos

• Verfasst von: Rowedder, Simon [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Cross-border traders in northern Laos
• Titelzusatz: mastering smallness
• Verf.angabe: Simon Rowedder
• Verlagsort: Amsterdam
• Verlag: Amsterdam University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• Umfang: 259 Seiten
• Illustrationen: Illustrationen
• Gesamttitel/Reihe: Asian borderlands ; 16
• ISBN: 978-94-6372-236-0
• ISBN: 94-6372-236-X
• DOI: doi:10.5117/9789463722360
• Schlagwörter: (g)Laos <Nord> / (g)Thailand / (g)China / (s)Grenzgebiet / (s)Handel / (s)Kaufmann
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Erscheint auch als : Online-Ausgabe: Rowedder, Simon: Cross-border traders in northern Laos. - Chapel Hill : Amsterdam University Press, 2022. - 1 online resource (264 pages)
• K10plus-PPN: 1811909183

Abstract

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. 0'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