Abstract
Diasporic communities which transcend national boundaries represent a challenge not only to essentialized notions of identities separated by clear political and cultural frontiers but also to geographically bounded national sovereignty itself. This chapter considers effects of the recent diaspora of the Hmong of Laos to ‘the four corners of the world’, and endeavours to make some assessment of the significance of their attempts to renew or maintain contacts with kinship relatives across huge global barriers of time and space, political borders and modern nation-states. These findings emerge from a project on the diasporic Hmong as a global community which I conducted in collaboration with Dr Gary Yia Lee.1 Our primary aim was to examine the return visits of migrant Hmong in ‘the West’, originally cross-border shifting cultivators from Laos, to their homelands in Laos or Vietnam, the neighbouring zone of Thailand or their original homelands in southern China. What are the effects of these visits on local identities and communities?
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© 2007 Nicholas Tapp
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Tapp, N. (2007). Transporting Culture Across Borders — the Hmong. In: Robinson, K. (eds) Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592049_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592049_11
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