“Where China Meets Mainland Southeast Asia”, prominently coined in 2000 by Grant Evans, Christopher Hutton and Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce, has been a major place where several anthropologists examined how border experiences and the process of bordering have been changed since the early 1990s onward. Scholarship on the Sino-Southeast Asian frontier, subsequently labelled as “Southeast Asian Massif” (Michaud 2000) or “Zomia” (van Schendel 2022, Scott 2009), also investigated how its local inhabitants (sometimes writing of Zomia people/Zomians), have been responding to border transformations and diverse forms of mobility and networks. This panel intends to revisit this frontier region by offering fresh ethnographic insights and providing anthropological reflections on ethnicity, femininity, and material, human and non-human assemblages to examine “multiple marginalities” formed through neoliberal enclaves and dispossession. Informed by these anthropological reflections, the four papers discuss two main issues.
First, the process of bordering, either physically or metaphorically, has been transformed intensively under the new form of neoliberalization. Consequently, emerging capitalist resource frontiers have become the hotbed for multiple marginalities with manifold consequences for local livelihoods. Looking at gold mining on the Myanmar-Thailand border and locally crafted transnational business of globally demanded commodities such as rubber cultivated in Xishuangbanna (Southwest China’s borderlands), Pu’er tea grown throughout Southwest China, and silver craft and jewelry produced in northern Thai borderlands, these four case studies reflect the social, economic, and political complexity engendering the multiple marginalities at the frontier.
Second, the four presenters not only inquire simply how local people passively respond to the new neoliberal frontier context of emerging marginalities, but also contribute to a more nuanced and complete understanding of local agency and empowerment of actively engaging with those, through their thorough anthropological analysis of ethnicity, femininity, and assemblages.
