Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

MORE THAN CULTURE, GENDER, AND CLASS

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 43; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14672715.2011.623521

1472-6033

Sai S.W. Latt,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

Abstract Class is back on the critical social research agenda in ways that are different from the class reductionism of "old" Marxism. Contemporary theorizations integrate culture, gender, and other axes of identity in interpreting socioeconomic processes. This article argues that the intersection of culture, gender, and class cannot adequately explain complex socioeconomic processes without sensitivity to migration or the legal status of individuals and bodily qualities conditioned by that legal status. This argument is made in the context of ethnic Shan migrants working in agricultural production in the Doi Soong (pseudonym) Royal Development Project site in northern Thailand. There, the "success" of the Project is fundamentally predicated on the simultaneous representation and erasure of Shan labor, whose exploitability is shaped not only by the dynamics of culture, gender, and class, but also by the migrants' historically contingent and lived experience as migrant (mobile) and precarious/undocumented (noncitizen) bodies. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Hmong and Shan research participants from Doi Soong. I thank Robin Roth, Philip Kelly, and Peter Vandergeest for critical insights and various supports. I also thank Mary Beth Mills and Bernadette Resurreccion for critical reviews of this article; I have sole responsibility if I cannot do justice to these comments. I also thank Tom Fenton, editor of Critical Asian Studies, for his editorial assistance. Thanks to the Geography Department (York University), the York Center for Asian Research, and the Regional Center for Sustainable Development (Chiang Mai University) for supporting my research. This research was funded by Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia (ChaTSEA) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.