The Lisu by Michele Zack

Author:Michele Zack [Zack, Michele]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Travel, Asia
ISBN: 9781607326038
Google: lCFBDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 35820858
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2017-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

An ongoing switch from mountain rice to paddy, or wet, rice in both China and Myanmar has dramatically affected the Lisu economy and migratory way of life. Building terraced fields requires an investment in time and labor that makes farmers less keen to move on. The same is true as Lisu in Thailand become adept at orchardry. The issue of land title is also of increasing importance as highland farmers compete for dwindling supplies of arable land. If a Lisu has improved a piece of land by terracing it or making any other improvement, he will ask for compensation to transfer use to another person. Today, only in Thailand are Lisu and other minority farmers unable to register and own land. Greater personal freedom and mobility there must be weighed against such drawbacks, yet I heard no reports of Thai Lisu returning to Myanmar or China.

While all the changes going on around the Lisu are having huge effects, their culture has not shattered, and their equilibrium has not been as unbalanced as might be expected. One reason for this, concluded by Dessaint in 1972, still has validity: the nexus, or point of contact, between Lisu and non-Lisu is mainly cash, while between Lisu and Lisu, labor and social relations remain paramont. Because credit and capital have been generally unavailable to them, the Lisu have not been drawn into si-so (patron-client) relations with traders or bankers or extensive enmeshment with lowland economies. Relations between traders and Lisu, in fact, remain as mistrustful as ever. Middlemen used to come with trucks to their villages to buy produce and squeeze them on price. Some things never change, but in this case, in Thailand today and coming soon in other countries, many Lisu have trucks. Access to price information on the Internet is universally available.

While Thailand is still probably the most globally integrated place in which Lisu live, because its economy is smaller and more exposed than China’s and there is less political stability, life in the kingdom is more erratic. Income gaps between prosperous and poor Lisu there are growing.

In China, many Lisu have become city dwellers or at least urbanized, but this has happened in Yunnan Province—in both Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture and nearby Weixi Lisu Autonomous County within Diqing Prefecture (adjacent to Tibet), where they are in the majority and have as much political voice as anyone else in this centrally controlled nation.

In Myanmar, protracted insurgencies and military dictatorship have affected them the most negatively: Lisu there are materially the poorest of those in all three countries, paralleling the general population. Change and reform there, however, began accelerating rapidly after elections in 2010 and 2012. Many ceasefires have been signed with ethnic armies with which the central government has been in conflict for the last fifty years, although not with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Lisu territory. The air is redolent with hope even there, following Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy’s huge electoral victory in 2015. Amid

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