Studies on Southeast Asia Series, No. 64. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2014. xv, 154 pp. (Maps.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-87727-764-4.
Hjorleifur Jonsson is an anthropologist at Arizona State University with an interest in the Iu Mien going back to his doctoral studies at Cornell in the 1990s. For this book, Jonsson draws liberally from five of his previous articles published between 2009 and 2012 (listed on page viii) and as can be the case is such circumstances, some chapters end up not being as firmly integrated as they could be. In a nutshell, this short book, in an unconventional genre, appears from the title to be ethnography-heavy, but as one reads on, it feels gradually more like a reflexive essay on the discipline of anthropology, and the author’s strong views on it. It has four chapters plus a preface, introduction, and afterword. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 build on interview data gathered in Laos, Thailand and the USA and provide the book with its ethnographic material. The four other chapters are devoted to Jonsson’s pursuit, with the author himself taking the front stage as an anthropologist, an intellectual, and a social commentator.
Right off the bat, Jonsson seems to suggest that just about everybody but him agrees with James C. Scott’s thesis expressed in his 2009 book The Art of not being Governed (Yale University Press, 2009), which is a bit perplexing given that critiques have circulated for years. The first third of Jonsson’s book, which includes direct references to Scott and Zomia (these Asian highlands others call the Southeast Asian Massif) on practically every page, is devoted to rebutting the Scott’s thesis, with Scott thus posited as the force against which Jonsson’s originality is pitted. Jonsson declares on the first page that “[t]he label ‘Zomia’ overrides considerable diversity of peoples, cultures, histories, and social conditions,” but in saying so, he appears to ignore the fundamental explanation provided by Willem van Schendel’s 2002 original proposition on Zomia (consigned here to a footnote) stressing the importance of multiscalar consideration in order to free these highlands from the historical grip imposed by a “geography of ignorance” and to add layers of meaning to local as much as global phenomena (“Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Southeast Asia from the Fringes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, 6: 647–668). Overlooking van Schendel, Jonsson has thus free rein to set up Scott as his straw man: “The case for Zomia is in many ways a very educated white bourgeois US American theory regarding what happens across difference” (22).
Overall, Jonsson’s enterprise is ambitious and, faced with this challenge, he relieves himself of methodological complexities by stating that his approach is subjective in nature:
There are four main components to my book; the Mien people, who are one of the ethnic minority highland peoples of mainland Southeast Asia and southern China and also now refugee immigrants in the United States and elsewhere; anthropologists and related scholars in the United States and also from France, Japan, and other countries; Asian societies, particularly China, Laos, and Thailand; and myself. I make no attempt to be exhaustive or authoritative through endless citations or a literature review regarding the peoples of Southeast Asia or studies of them. […] I write instead to change our academic and other terms of engagement regarding self, other, and world. (xiii)
Jonsson thus locates his project well outside standard academic research and pushes it into the realm of essays. Logically, he elects to use the first person singular abundantly and this makes for engaging prose. More intriguing however, and probably less successful, is his copious writing in the first person plural (“us,” “our,” “we,” “ourselves”) suggesting an (unexplained) amalgamation between writer and reader, and ignoring the very diversity he argues for earlier. For instance in the preface, “A Sense of Where We Are,” he notes: “The problem is still with us. I try to change the ways in which Asian peoples and places have been our objects of knowledge”; likewise “only by seeing ourselves as somehow in the picture and implicated will we be motivated to change this”; and “where we, the readers, as the audience, come into our knowledge” (xi–xiv), and so on.
One senses that Jonsson is seeking to recruit likeminded readers to embark with him on his journey towards questioning the basis of the discipline, “our failure” (xiv), “our naïve empiricism and political posturing” (48), and “our blindness [and] pervasive denial” (25). But who precisely are these companions he co-opts? The closest I came to an answer was: “My hope is to reach a more general audience without lecturing at people” (xiv). This is an important and noble task. One, however, is bound to wonder if releasing a book with Cornell University might be the most effective way to get there.
I for one am not sure I fit within Jonsson’s “we,” or at least I am not entirely comfortable being drafted in this manner. And although I see value in the ethnography proposed here, I am not convinced it has been tested against the relevant literature as soundly as it might have been. But that is, one could argue, the nature of an essay. Ultimately, it is for the readers to decide if they are willing to join Jonsson in his quest. His prose is engaging, his thinking can unquestionably be sophisticated, and many side trips into parallel worlds, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, do tickle the mind. Jonsson seeks to impress and often succeeds. Whether “the Iu Mien” come out of the exercise duly represented and better known to “us,” I am less sure.
Jean Michaud
Université Laval, Québec City, Canada
pp. 476-478