In this study, I intend to articulate the Lisu people’s sensemaking craft in times of difficulty. The Lisu people have nurtured sensemaking since the days they engaged in shifting cultivation in a highly multi-ethnic setting in the Thai Highlands and beyond and had to adjust to flexibly fit the modern context.
The Lisu, one of the indigenous peoples of the Thai Highlands, have long since been seized by the wave of modernization and the concomitant changes in neoliberal settings. They were virtually forced to stop engaging in shifting cultivation in the highlands and adopt a sedentary lifestyle. They farmed new cash crops and were incorporated into Thai-ness. However, they have managed to retain their vernacularly nurtured and socially embedded sensemaking ingenuities up to the present to maintain their incessantly redefined Lisu-ness so as to avoid provoking political tension in the given context. That is, they have always crafted ways out of predicaments that threatened them with the loss of their solidarity as a people with a collective identity. They have done this by finding commonalities among people with various values and by bridging people with different backgrounds through elaborate unification rhetoric.
The Lisu people have showcased these tendencies, for instance, by incorporating neighboring ethnic groups into their loosely defined Lisu-ness through intermarriage. Additional examples, among others, are when they proactively define commonalities between people with spiritual beliefs and converts to Christianity and when they embrace changes in gender norms in the interest of passing on intangible cultural heritage. In this study, I argue that the sensemaking perspective presumably derives from ingenuities the Lisu people naturally figured out during the period when they enjoyed relative autonomy and were not directly governed by the lowlanders. It can be better understood as an ontologically rooted aspect, not as logic fabricated merely for survival.
