Neo-Tribes and Traditional Tribes (Theories and Concepts)

Theories and Concepts

Neo-Tribes and Traditional Tribes: Identity Construction and Interaction of Tourists and Highland People in a Village in Northern Thailand

by Morage Ann McKerron

Summarized by Khet Htan

In her research, McKerron use four conceptual tools approach to social reality. The theory of social constructionism and concepts of identity, marginal space and gender are reviewed as tools for the examination of the interaction between highland people and tourists in a village in northern Thailand.

Social Constructionism

“Social construction of reality”: Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann

-          Reality as phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition. It is created for the purpose of making sense of reality (1971).

“Relationship between society and language”: Ferdinand de Saussure and Thomas Kuhn.

-          Society creates a linguistic community, and conversely, a linguistic community is to an extent responsible for the unity of a society (Saussure 1959).

“The concept of persona”: Carl Gustav Jung (1972), expanded by Dean MacCannell (1989)

-          A surface expression of an identity shown specially to mask one’s inner thoughts and feelings when dealing with the world (Jung).

“Representation of reality”: Jean Baudrillard (1983)

-          No longer possible to distinguish between representation of reality and reality itself in a conventional way, which assumes the existence of a reality for the purpose of the representation.

The concept of constructionism can be used as a useful approach for the understanding of the complexity of social interaction, which is the basis of social reality.

Language, Discourse and Culture

Language, Discourse and Culture: Rethinking Representation in the Social Sciences

(Chapter 6)

1. Introduction

-in this Chapter author argue that understanding language, discourse and culture is central to understanding people and that social scientists ignore these complexities at their peril.

-the works of social scientist are within definite language systems and involve construction and reconstruction of language system

-there are many meaning of culture and language

-knowledge ß   à reality – the existence of a distinction between knowledge and the real world

-Debates of this Chapter:

-Why is language so important to the study of the social sciences?

-What is the role of the idea of discourse and culture that associated to language in different ways?

Neo-Tribes and Traditional-Tribes

Neo-Tribes and Traditional-Tribes: Identity Construction and Interaction of Tourists and Highland People in a Village in Northern Thailand

Chapter – 1 (Note)

Morage Ann Mckerron

-The culture of highland people is constantly changing, but as the highland people have had no prior knowledge of the purpose or process of national integration, modernization or tourism

-However, highlanders are considerable disadvantage when negotiation the changes in their lives

-She study the processes of interaction and identity construction between tourists and highland people (including from the gender perspective) to understanding culture change

-Identity at the point of interaction, tourist as a neo-tribe and highland people as a traditional tribe

-How identity negotiation both group during their interaction, two diverse people, meet in specific physical place (marginal space that exist between everyday lives)

-Tourist quest for authenticity Vs The erosion of culture of highland people

-Interaction – how impact on ethnic people, how women lives were affected by tourists in their village

-How gender and other differentiations affect and are reflected in the interaction

မီဒီယာသစ္၊ သတင္း နည္းပညာ အကန္႔အသတ္ႏွင့္ ျပည္တြင္းမီဒီယာ

K ခ်စ္ေမာင္

မီဒီယာသစ္္

ျပည္တြင္းတြင္ အင္တာနက္သံုးစြဲႏိုင္မႈအကန္႔အသတ္ေၾကာင့္ အင္တာနက္ႏွင့္ ယဥ္ပါးမႈနည္းျခင္း၊ ျပည္ပေရာက္ျမန္မာမ်ားအဖို႔မွာ ျမန္မာစာရိုက္ရန္အခက္အခဲႏွင့္ ဘေလာ့ဂ္နည္းပညာ ထိေတြ႔မႈနည္းျခင္းတို႔ေၾကာင့္ မီဒီယာသစ္တြင္ ျမန္မာတို႔ ပါဝင္စီးေမ်ာမႈ အရွိန္နည္းေနသည္ကို ၂၀၀၇ ေရႊဝါေရာင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးက ေမာင္းျဖဳတ္ေပးလိုက္သည္။ ထိုအခ်ိန္မွစ၍ ျမန္မာဘေလာ့ဂ္ႏွင့္ ဖိုရမ္မ်ား၊ ပုဂၢိလိက ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုဒ္မ်ား ဝုန္းကနဲ တိုးပြားလာခဲ့သည္။ ႏိုင္ငံတကာသံုးစနစ္ကို မလုိက္တာသည့္တိုင္ ေဇာ္ဂ်ီေဖာင့္ကလည္း ျမန္မာဘာသာျဖင့္ ဝက္ဘ္စာမ်က္ႏွာမ်ားကို ပြားမ်ားေအာင္ ေထာက္ကူေပးသည္။

ျပည္တြင္းမီဒီယာမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ဝက္ဘ္ဆိုဒ္မ်ား ထူေထာင္လာျခင္းသည္လည္း ထိုကာလေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ပိုမ်ားလာခဲ့သည္။ အေစာပိုင္းတြင္ ျပည္တြင္းမီဒီယာမ်ားအဖို႔ အင္တာနက္သည္ အခ်ိန္မီ သတင္းရယူရန္ႏွင့္ ပံုမ်ား ရွာေဖြရန္သာ ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ ဂ်ာနယ္မ်ားအတြက္ ေဒသတြင္းသတင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာသတင္း ေဆာင္းပါးႏွင့္ ပံုမ်ားအတြက္ အင္တာနက္ကိုသာ အားကိုးရသည္။ ထို႔ထက္အေစာပိုင္းကာလ အင္တာနက္ မတြင္က်ယ္ေသးခင္က ႏိုင္ငံတကာ သတင္း၊ ေဆာင္းပါးႏွင့္ ရုပ္ပံုမ်ားအတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေလယာဥ္ျဖင့္ ပါလာေသာ သတင္းစာမ်ား၊ လစဥ္ထုတ္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ စာေစာင္မ်ားကုိသာ အားကိုးခဲ့ရသည္။

အင္တာနက္ႏွင့္ ထိေတြ႔လာျပီးေနာက္ အခ်ိန္မီ သတင္းရယူျခင္းျဖင့္ အလုပ္အျဖစ္ဆံုးမွာ အားကစားဂ်ာနယ္ အမည္ခံ ေဘာလံုးေလာင္းကစား အားေပး ဂ်ာနယ္မ်ားျဖစ္ျပီး ႏိုင္ငံတကာ သတင္း ဂ်ာနယ္မ်ားက ဒုတိယလိုက္သည္။

Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia

By Aihwa Ong

Summarized by Tun

Globalization is becoming inevitable for all the nations of 21st century and it makes various changes in the politics, economics, culture etc in the world. All the countries have to deal with global market in this global era. Global market has already been developed and it contributes to both strengthening and weakening of different activities of the states in dealing with global regulatory entities. So, it needs to understand how states manage transnational networks that variously integrate them into the global market and political community.

There happen fundamental changes in the states when stimulated by economic globalization. The author, who is a professor of anthropology , demonstrates how so-called Asian tiger countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, which develop a system of graduated sovereignty, created new economic possibilities, social spaces and political constellations, which in turn condition their further actions in the course of interactions with global markets and regulatory agencies such as the UN. The shifting relations between market, state, and society have resulted in the state’s flexible experimentations with sovereignty. She says she explores these fundamental changes using what she mentions ‘the model of graduated sovereignty’.

ထိုင္း-လာအိုနယ္စပ္ မုန္ ဒုကၡသည္အေရး

ခက္ထန္

မၾကာေသးမီက ထိုင္းေရတပ္ဟာ ျမန္မာနဲ႔ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္က စက္ေလွနဲ႔ ခိုးဝင္လာသူေတြကို အင္ဂ်င္စက္ျဖဳတ္ျပီး ေလွကို ပင္လယ္တဲ့ ျပန္ေမွ်ာလိုက္တဲ့ မတရားသျဖင့္ ဆက္ဆံမႈေၾကာင့္ ကမာၻ႕မီဒီယာေတြ အာ႐ံုစိုက္စရာ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီလိုပဲ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ေမးခြန္းထုတ္စရာ အျဖစ္အပ်က္မ်ိဳး ထိုင္းနဲ႔ လာအိုနယ္စပ္မွာ ထပ္မံျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ ထိုင္းနဲ႔ လာအိုနယ္ျခားမွာ ပ်ံ႕ႏွံ႔ေနထိုင္တဲ့ မုန္ (Hmong) လူမ်ိဳး ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ကိစၥပါ။ ျမန္မာျပည္က ဒုကၡသည္ေတြရဲ့ အျဖစ္နဲ႔ ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ေလ့လာႏိုင္ဖို႔ တင္ျပလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ထိုင္းအာဏာပိုင္ေတြက အခု ၂၀၀၉ ဇြန္လမွာ မုန္လူမ်ိဳး ဒုကၡသည္ ငါးေထာင္ကို လာအိုကို ျပန္ပို႔ဖို႔ စီစဥ္ေနပါတယ္။ ဘန္ေကာက္အစိုးရနဲ႔ ဗီယန္က်င္းအစိုးရဟာ မုန္ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို စစ္ေအးေခတ္ရဲ့ ေခတ္မရွိေတာ့တဲ့ အၾကြင္းအက်န္နဲ႔ စီးပြားေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ရာမွာ အဟန္႔အတားျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ လူမ်ိဳးစုေတြလို႔ ျမင္ေနပါတယ္။ မုန္လူမ်ိဳးစုေတြဟာ ၁၉၆၁ ကေန ၁၉၄၇ အတြင္း ကြန္ျမဴနစ္ ပတ္ထက္ လာအိုနဲ႔ ေျမာက္ဗီယက္နမ္ေတြကိုတိုက္ဖို႔ အေမရိကန္က ေလ့က်င့္ေပး၊ ေထာက္ပံ့ေပးထားတဲ့ ေျပာက္ၾကားတပ္သားမ်ား အျဖစ္ အသံုးခ်ခံခဲ့ရျပီး အခုမုန္လူမ်ိဳးစုေတြက အဲဒီတပ္ဖြဲ႔ရဲ့ လက္က်န္ အဆက္အႏြယ္ေတြလည္းပါပါတယ္။