The mountainous borderlands of socialist China, Vietnam, and Laos are home to some seventy million minority people of diverse ethnicities. In Moving Mountains, anthropologists, geographers, and political economists with first-hand experience in the region explore these peoples’ survival strategies, as they respond to unprecedented economic and political change. Although highland peoples are typically represented as marginalized and powerless, this volume argues that ethnic minorities draw on culture and ethnicity to indigenize modernity and maintain their livelihoods. This unprecedented glimpse into a poorly understood region shows that development initiatives must be built on strong knowledge of local cultures in order to have lasting effect.

Jean Michaud is professor of anthropology at Universite Laval. He is the author of Incidental Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880-1930 (Brill, 2007) and Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the South-East Asian Massif (Scarecrow Press, 2006), and the coeditor of several volumes, including Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands (UW Press, 2015).

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… this book is much more than a collection of individually interesting case study chapters. There is an argument that weaves its way through the text. After an intriguing foreword from Terry McGee where he connects his interest in urban change with the book’s concern with highland change, there are eight core chapters bookended by a substantial introduction from the editors, editors, and a rather briefer conclusion.

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, June 2013

This expertly edited and unusually coherent collection of enlightening essays on livelihoods and cultural identities in the post-socialist situations of China, Vietnam and Laos, adds usefully to the emerging literature on the borderlands of what the editors call the “Southeast Asian Massif”...this well-edited book is an argument for and demonstration of the value of good ethnography in the developmental context and as such it deserves to be very widely read.

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology