8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

— Surviving Dispossession, Producing Space: Burmese Migrants, Precarity and Social Ties in Thailand’s Border 
Economic Zones
Adam Saltsman (Boston College)
Based on qualitative research in the Thailand-Myanmar borderlands, this paper considers how mobility and dispos-
session have reshaped urban spaces, rural spaces, and the boundaries between the two. Considering space from a 
relational and material perspective, this study looks at how Burmese migration to Thailand and the establishment of 
a garment industry in the town of Mae Sot and industrial agriculture sites in the rural areas around Mae Sot have en-
gendered a multiplication of borders in terms of belonging and rights. Factories and farms are the sites of what Aihwa 
Ong refers to as graduated sovereignty and citizenship where governance manifests itself from unique arrangements 
between the state and private production firms. However, this study’s findings suggest that the personal and collective 
agency of migrants is equally important to consider when theorizing mutations in territory and sovereignty. Burmese 
migrants move across borders and establish regimes of order that are parallel to, but not entirely disconnected with, 
formal Thai institutions, such as the police, hospitals, and administrative units of governance. As the contemporary 
relations of global production reshape urban and rural areas, migrants’ efforts to survive and maintain trans-local 
family and social networks lead to unanticipated spatial arrangements, some of which foster semi-autonomous modes 
of social organization and some of which reproduce the logics of gendered neoliberal discipline. This empirical study 
is based on qualitative research conducted in 2012-2013 with 154 Burmese migrants in the town of Mae Sot, Thailand 
and its neighboring rural district, Phob Phra.
— Coolie Families: Colonial Labour Relations and Local Economies
Oliver Tappe (University of Cologne)
Vietnamese labour migrants are a familiar sight on construction sites in neighbouring Laos. They are part of a large 
transnational network of migrant workers, itinerant traders, recruitment agencies, and other actors. Already under 
French colonialism, the colonial administration engaged Vietnamese coolies to work in the mining, plantation and 
construction sectors in other parts of Indochina. While the majority of contract labourers moved from the Red River 
Delta to the plantations of Cochinchina and Cambodia, others found themselves in the nickel mines of far-away 
Nouvelle-Calédonie.
Relating to the other papers of this panel that deal with contemporary patterns of labour migration and their impact 
on rural livelihoods, this paper asks if and in how far the colonial coolie system may function as a comparative case 
study for the analysis of Southeast Asian labour migration in general. We will explore the experiences of Vietnamese 

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coolies in colonial Laos and Nouvelle-Calédonie, and discuss the question in how far this specific migration dynamic 
affected local household economy in the villages of Tonkin. Moreover, concepts and theories developed in the Car-
ribean and other contexts of coolie labour – for example, the concept of coolitude – will be discussed with regard to 
their application to the Vietnamese experience of contract labour and migration.
— Rural-Urban Migrants’ Remittances in Vietnam: A Re-Examination
Hy V. Luong (University of Toronto)
The literature on rural-urban migration and remittances has focused heavily on the one-way flow of remittances to 
migrants’ rural families and their impact on rural life. However, city-dwelling members of these rural families include 
not only income earners but also dependent members such as students. The need to support dependent members 
in cities is a major factor in the migration decisions of many income-earning migrants in Vietnam. On the basis of 
comparative data on rural-urban migration in northern, central, and southern Vietnam, this paper compares income-
earning migrants’ and their rural relatives’ narratives on remittances and remittance use, with close attention to dis-
crepancies as well as convergence. It examines the relative importance of the urban-to-urban and urban-to-rural flows 
of remittances of migrants. 
    
— Hybrid Lives: Cyclical Migration and Rural Transformations in Comal, Central Java, Indonesia
Gerben Nooteboom (University of Amsterdam)
Rural – urban migration has critically influenced village life in in Southeast Asia and engenders a great deal of hybrid-
ity in both rural and urban areas. For many people from poor backgrounds, the city entails a place to earn money, but 
also a place in which they never get fully entrenched – both materially and emotionally. Unable to secure a permanent 
living and to sustain a family in the city, the village remains the place to raise children and to settle after retirement. As 
a result, the boundaries of rurality and urbanity have shifted as people creatively craft their belonging and citizenship 
across places. 
In many villages in rural Java, a large percentage of male and, to a lesser extent, female villagers work outside the vil-
lage on a daily or seasonal basis. For their work and livelihood, they are oriented on the city, but for their identity and 
moral values, their orientations remains largely rural. Nevertheless, city experiences have generated new lifestyles, 
gender roles and consumption styles in the village.
The increased urban – rural connectivity has also led to a large number of transformations in rural areas. In the paper, 
some of these major transformations will be described and analyzed for Comal, a wet rice and sugar cane area close to 
the north coast of Central Java. In this area, recently an extended survey has been carried out covering 7 villages and 
1000 households by the University of Kyoto, Yogyakarta and Amsterdam covering a large number of topics ranging 
from income and labour issues to the emergence of new institutions and consumption styles. Besides the survey, a 
number of qualitative in-depth case studies have been carried out to understand underlying processes and mecha-
nisms.
Comal is an interesting research site for the study of long term transitions due to the availability of previous studies 
in the 1990s and the availability of sugar industry surveys of the late 1890s. In this way, trends and transitions over 
longer periods of time can be made visible, compared and understood. The transformations concern, among others, 
new rural lifestyles, mobilities and inequalities as articulated in changing economic, political, financial and ecologi-
cal landscapes (i.e. consumptive credit, copying of urban lifestyles, new forms of interconnectedness, old and new 
dependencies and three planting). As a result, the village is no longer completely rural, but a complex aggregation of 
old and new hybrid lives.
Panel: Cross-Border Livelihoods in Southeast Asia 
convener: Jean Michaud (Université Laval)
discussants: Jean Michaud (Université Laval)
panel abstract
Overlooked as ‘internal peripheries’ within individual states, borderlands have become a new frontier in Southeast 

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Asian studies. Recent macro-analyses such as those by van Schendel (2002), Michaud (2006), and Scott (2009) have 
contributed to mapping this field from on high. Concurrently, on the ground, a flourish of case studies have appeared 
on how borderlands people – and peoples using cross-border strategies – make their living. One can think of Evans et 
al. (2000), Sturgeon (2005), Michaud and Forsyth (2011), Sadan (2013) and Turner et al. (2015).
This panel wants to pick up these treads and keep weaving this new pattern of locally rooted, ethnographic studies of 
borderlands and cross-border dynamics. Based on extensive fieldwork, it intends to explore - in addition to notions 
in the fields of borders and livelihoods studies - ideas of actor oriented strategies (Long 2004), resistance (Mahmood 
2004, Kerkvliet 2009), alternative modernities (Gaonkar 2001), agency and intentionality (Ortner 2006).
How do dwellers in the Southeast Asian borderlands currently respond to and cope with the pressing demands to 
integrate into the Nation and step to the tune of the market economy? How does cross-border exchange contribute 
to sustain these locally designed strategies? This panel wants to shed light on economic dynamics and livelihood 
equations that take into account the state, markets, institutions, organizations, but also, and crucially, history, culture, 
locality and identity.
— Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong Resilience in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands
Christine Bonnin (University College Dublin), Sarah Turner (McGill University)
Do ethnic minorities have the power to alter the course of their fortune when living within a socialist state? In Fron-
tier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands co-written by Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin and Jean 
Michaud (University of Washington Press, 2015) the authors focus their study on the Hmong—known in China as 
the Miao—in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, contending that individuals and households create livelihoods about 
which governments often know little. 
It is our contention, from fieldwork during the past 15 years, that Hmong individuals, households, and communities 
creatively blend active engagement, cautious choices, and, at times, resistance. And by resistance, we do not suggest 
that Hmong in these uplands refuse change; that would be a simplistic depiction. Rather, they use their agency to 
indigenize aspects of modernity, and they set in motion forms of adaptation that make sense to them, which some-
times amount to subtle yet perceptible acts of resistance to modernization processes. Given the cross-border nature of 
many Hmong livelihoods (such as trades in textiles, non-timber forest products, homemade alcohols, and livestock), 
translocal and transnational approaches to social space are needed, with observations, ethnographies, and viewpoints 
from both sides of the border. By placing Hmong minority agency at the center of our discussions, we explore what it 
means for Hmong individuals and households to make a living while sharing an identity across adjacent countries, to 
be confined within the restrictive definition of a “minority nationality”, and to frequently differ with the state and the 
nation on an assortment of livelihood choices and concerns.
— Alleviating Suffering: History and Development of a Humanitarian Culture at the Thai-Burmese Border 
Alexander Horstmann (University of Copenhagen)
The paper is about the Emergence of a Humanitarian sector among the Karen in Eastern Burma. This humanitarian 
economy can be distinguished from the capitalist economy, in which many Karen migrants are absorbed when they 
try to locate a job for survival. The humanitarian economy is emerging from the good will of international humanitar-
ian organizations that are able to mobilize funds from governments and from private donations to provide emergency 
help to the Karen who have to flee from civil war and mass atrocities. The humanitarian economy also includes cru-
cially a local humanitarian regime that however functions completely different from the international regime. While 
the international regime focuses on the minimum obligation to provide material resources to needy Karen, the local 
humanitarian culture focuses strictly on issues closely associated to livelihood. The local humanitarianism is based on 
social support and local security networks that were originally built to resist the marauding and killing state. Religion 
has a very important role in both the international and the local regime of humanitarianism. The nine Karen refugee 
camps that were built in Northwestern Thailand on the borderline got support from Western Christian missionary 
networks, while the internal management of the camp was given to pastors of the Karen Baptist church and soldiers 
of the Karen National Union. This paper thus studies the unequal development and close entanglement of the local 
and international culture and regime of humanitarian assistance. I am interested how flows and networks of material 
support in the West (including the Karen Diaspora) keep alive the ethos and material support of an utopian project 
to instill live and reconstruct lives in exile. The first part of the paper looks at the historical origins of the humanitar-

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ian sector in the context of civil war and the second part addresses the transition of humanitarianism after the fragile 
ceasefire.
— Negotiating “Extralegality” across Borders: The Secondhand Clothing Trade between the Philippines and 
Hong Kong 
B Lynne Milgram (OCAD University) 
 
Since the 1970s, in the Philippines, trade liberalization, rural-to urban-migration, and the lack of income-generating 
employment have led to new forms of urban livelihood characterized by complex intersections of formal/informal 
and legal/illegal work. One’s differential capacity to operationalize emergent opportunities and mitigate state-led con-
straints, however, have, in turn, given rise to enhanced class distinctions among successful and less successful traders. 
This paper engages the dynamics of such shifting socio-economic circumstances by analyzing the cross-border work 
of women entrepreneurs in Baguio City, Philippines who trade secondhand clothing between Hong Kong and the 
Philippines. Because it is “illegal” to import used clothing into the Philippines for commercial resale and for tourists, 
such as visiting Filipinas, to “legally’ work in Hong Kong, these entrepreneurs’ transnational trade straddles legal-
illegal practice in both locales. That their trade continues to grow, I argue, demonstrates that these entrepreneurs 
navigate both formal state and informal socioeconomic channels to connect parts of societies not previously linked, or 
to connect them in different ways. The extent to which Filipina entrepreneurs can simultaneously access networks of 
relatives working in Hong Kong while forging business partnerships with resident South Asian (Pakistani) business-
people also engaged in this trade, determines their success in fashioning interstitial spaces of work and new arenas of 
consumption at the frontier of a global trade. Filipina’s cross-border entrepreneurial work in this sphere thus helps us 
situate local initiatives within wider negotiations of agency, and understand the extent to which personalized actions 
on the edge can transform global economic-political forces.
Panel: Shifting Perceptions of Boundaries in Contemporary Myanmar 
conveners: Maaike Matelski (VU University Amsterdam), Marion Sabrie (Centre Asie du Sud-Est CNRS)
panel abstract
The political, social and economic developments that occurred in Myanmar since 2010 have modified representa-
tions and perceptions of the country, its economic activities, its landscapes, its boundaries, its inhabitants and its civil 
societies for both national and international stakeholders. Although the civil space is still strongly determined by the 
political and intellectual elite, it seems to be opening up to new voices that will be heard in the coming decades. This 
panel discusses how recent political and economic changes have impacted on the political and geographical spaces 
and how those changes are perceived by various actors in the country. The rising and numerous civil actors are taking 
new directions, facing up to the government, testing the waters and, in that way, moving and pushing boundaries – 
real and perceived ones. In the context of the renewal of ethnic conflicts – especially in Rakhine and Kachin States 
– and of the upcoming elections in 2015, the debate on physical and psychological boundaries remains very relevant. 
Censorship practices, questions of citizenship and peace processes remain sensitive topics that may potentially cause 
backlash. Our panel will explore shifting perceptions of political, geographical, religious and mental boundaries and 
bring face to face political and mental geography to facilitate a dialogue between academic disciplines.
— At the Border of Intersectionality, Muslimization of Burmese Migrants across the Thailand/Myanmar Border-
land
Samak Kosem (Chiang Mai University)
The religious movements along the Thailand - Myanmar border are significant to understand the various forces that 
took part for changing borders, and creating migrant identities. Islamic movement is one of the movements that 
resulting religious missions and the establishment of a network for the propagation, through the integration of this 
movement for reviving and practicing Islam in various border communities in Mae Sot, Mae La and other refugee 

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camps. Understanding by ‘Muslimization’ process by structure and individual levels of Dawah Tabligh movement 
among Burmese migrants in difference ethnic groups and created religious activities called ‘Missionarizing Border’. 
However, it has occurred in cooperation, conflict, negotiation and compromise over power relations with respect to 
time and place. The latter movement shows the possibility of creating alternatives and opportunities for Muslim mi-
grants in their everyday lives under the specific contexts in the network of Dawah Tabligh, that can help them to ‘make 
a new home’ by sharing Muslim religiosity of ‘Ummah’ (nation/community) and connecting with difference Muslim 
groups in other countries along their movement in IBP (India, Bangkladesh, Pakistan) network. Moreover, the active 
process of religious space construction at the border has encouraged integration across lines of nationality, ethnicity, 
locality and universality. This process also includes the migrants’ participation in religious space which re-positions 
them with respect to social relations in the new context that set within an adaptation to new cultures and a change of 
status in light of a lack of security in life, caused by economic and social crises.
— The Shifting Meaning and Political Status of Linguistic Community Label Boundary within the Unified Kachin 
Ethnic-Cultural Subnational Community
La Raw Maran (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Analytically shifting boundaries are partitions between two or more sides capable of moving the line by intention. 
In the postcolonial era in Southeast Asia most of the enigmatic boundary shifting has been related to differences in 
political expectations on each side as regards the correctness of the a given boundary. Nation building and national 
integration are particularly important frameworks within which efforts to achieve desired boundary by intentionally 
shifting it frequently occur.
 Burma/Myanmar, since the agreement in 1947 between the Burman/Bama and Hill Peoples has seen competing 
visions of political order; the boundary of political rights according to that charter never materialized and the “Hill 
Peoples” or non-Burmans, have been trying to correct the situation via adjusting the boundary of political power shar-
ing. This has frequently meant armed struggles alternating with peace talks, but nearly seven decades of antagonism. 
My paper deals with some of the consequence of this political antagonism as experienced by the Kachin national 
community. The Kachin group is culturally, historically and traditionally homogeneous, but linguistically there are 
seven labels among its members. Inevitably, over the years, the meaning of a linguistic label as identity has had to be 
constantly reexamined and redefined, and yet this is clearly constrained by the primary function of political unity to 
oppose military-central policy. The strength of Kachin unity cannot be compromised, and when the language-based 
group identity requires shifting its meaning it must be done under that constraint. So what kind of ethnographic trail 
attests that this interesting phenomenon of boundary shifting within one ethnic community has been occurring?
My paper will present analytic observations of this unique development for the first time in an international venue.
— Beyond the Politics of Fear? Shifting Mental and Legal Boundaries in Myanmar since 2011
Maaike Matelski (VU University Amsterdam)
For many decades, the social and political sphere in Myanmar has been characterised by insecurity and censorship, 
as evidenced by titles such as ‘Living Silence’ and ‘The Politics of Fear’ (Fink 2009; Skidmore 2004). The potentially 
severe repercussions of public dissent and mobilisation included intimidation, arrest, and long prison sentences. In 
contrast, the new quasi-civilian government which has been in power since 2011 has emphasised its openness to 
participation of political opposition members, civil society actors, and the media. It has drafted new laws that prom-
ise more freedom of speech, of the press, and of association, and has invited non-state actors, including dissidents 
formerly in exile, to provide input. In addition to these legislative steps, the new government has responded to long-
time demands of the international community by releasing a large number of political prisoners, initiating peace talks 
with ethnic armed groups, and frequently pledging adherence to the rule of law, all of which has caused a boom in 
international engagement.
Civil society actors such as non-governmental organisations and human rights activists show a great eagerness to test 
the boundaries of the new political reality. At the same time, they still encounter certain levels of surveillance, repres-
sion, and ambiguous responses by the authorities. Although in many areas of the country people enjoy far more free-
dom than before, this new reality also causes uncertainty about the current allowances and limitations. As in previous 
times, this leads to vast differences in the perceived ‘space’ for Myanmar citizens to express their views and carry out 
their activities, with certain minorities potentially being worse off than before, while others demonstrably benefit.

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— From the “Great Irrawaddy” to the Sittang River Valley: Moving Geographies of Myanmar Territory?
Marion Sabrie (CNRS)
The Irrawaddy River has been considered as the main artery of the Myanmar territory for Centuries by both Burmese 
and Kachin inhabitants as well as researchers. While the central role played by the River has decreased – evidenced by 
the capital city moving from Yangon to Nay Pyi Taw in the Sittang River Valley, the opening of the Yangon-Mandalay 
Express Highway, as well as the disuse of some economic activities along the river banks–, the perception of its great-
ness and indispensability has never been so strong. Based on human geography, on the research works done about 
the « cultural imaginary » (Hall, 1997; Anderson, 2006) and on interviews made along the River from 2009 to 2014 
in Burmese language, my research compares real geography and mental ones in both Burmese and Kachin communi-
ties. My paper aims to reconsider the national territorial organization through the analysis of the new role of the Ir-
rawaddy River and of the perceptions confronted with population data and economic indicators. In the context of the 
economic openness, the democratization process and the renewal of ethnic conflicts – in Kachin State for example –,
while the geography of Myanmar is slowly evolving – Southernization of the investment projects, Transasian proj-
ects “displacing” the national boundaries, logic of urban economic hubs more than Valleys dynamics – as the recent 
changes have impacted the territory, its perception among different stakeholders does not change.