Introductory Summary

This document describes an innovative model of interdisciplinary, international collaborative research. Its authors argue that investigation into the deep historical and cultural genealogies of contemporary conflicts over identity requires a new type of cooperative research practice. Because the world has changed under the impact of globalizing trends, and because scholarship increasingly depends on international interactions, the conventional ways in which scholars have worked – alone or in isolated communities, within narrow disciplinary perspectives or geographic limitations of traditional Area Studies — are no longer adequate.

The modular network structure being proposed will enable participants to rethink the fundamental categories of "identity studies" currently used in academic as well as policymaking contexts. Though the literature has proliferated in this field since landmark works in the early 1980s by B. Anderson and Hobsbawm/Ranger, there have been few breakthroughs. It is the intellectual ambition of this project to re-orient the field by introducing fresh methodologies and abundant new empirical data to be collected in archival and field research in three world areas.

Key themes identified in this document constitute the project's unifying conceptual framework:

• Membership — inclusions and exclusions (the rise and changing definition of citizenship)
• Geographies of identification (imperial spaces and national boundaries)
  • Placement and displacement (the state’s project of fixing mobile and sedentary populations within its borders).

Basic research will be conducted by research teams focusing on metropolitan France and her colonies (in association with the University of Caen), Russia — tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet — (with the European University in St. Petersburg), and Southeast Asia/Southwest China (with Chiang Mai University and the Center for Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge in Kunming). In addition to the exchange and development of ideas, this project aims to establish lasting contacts among individual scholars and the institutions in which they work, formal and informal, which could serve as a durable, open-ended international infrastructure for future work.

The network plan of activities includes team meetings in respective world areas to allow cross-disciplinary, cross-region discussion, and a summative conference to make explicit implications of basic research for contemporary conflicts over identity and state sovereignty.

The principal coordinators of this project are leading U.S. historians and social scientists: Peter Sahlins (UC Berkeley, History) James C. Scott (Yale Political Science and Anthropology), Ronald Grigor Suny (Chicago History and Political Science), Mark Bassin (University College London, Geography), and Dru Gladney (University of Hawaii, Anthropology). They have invited younger colleagues in the U.S. as well as counterparts in other world areas to participate in their team activities.


Part I. INTELLECTUAL AGENDA

A. Ambitions of the Project

Impact on the field

We propose an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and transhistorical inquiry into the specific question of how states and nations come to fix ethnic and national identifications in the modern world, and how social groups contest, displace, negotiate, and meaningfully appropriate these identifications from above. As social scientists and historians examining a variety of cases and sites, we consider how the problem of "identification" 1) describes a process that operates on both the global and psychosocial level; 2) can be considered dialectically in the interaction and slippage between identities imposed and identities lived and experienced; and 3) whose genealogies reveal specific, historically deep, textually rich exemplars of a general set of problems about identity in the making of the modern world.

Our concerns with the making and unmaking of "modern" identities focuses on the processes in which identifications are normatively constructed as totalizing and exclusive. Paradigmatic of these forms of identification is the nation, understood as both a political and anthropological category, a principle of political legitimacy and an organizing framework of collective membership. This project takes nations seriously, not simply as "invented" or "imagined" membership categories, but as structures of social and political belonging imposed by states on diverse, mobile, and ethnically varied populations. But we do not simply view such official identifications as arbitrary, constructed, forms of hegemony. We also consider the vernacular appropriations of state, national, and ethnic identities as categories which may become deeply invested affectively, and transformed violently. The research organized by this project, moreover, focuses on nations, ethnic groups, tribes, religious identities, and other forms of belonging that act as alternatives to the nation-state.

Indeed, our hope is that research framed by this proposal takes seriously alternative possibilities in the making of the modern nation-state, and alternative ways of thinking about the process of identification itself. Such alternatives preceded the creation of the modern nation state and are continually being created in the modern world by pan-national forms of identity, diaspora, flows of immigration, and the institutions and ideologies of internationalism. Despite the striking hegemony of the modern, territorial nation-state (each with a startlingly similar formal system of bureaucratic administration, ministries, courts, taxation, armed forces, and representation), such forms are challenged and subverted both at the level of daily practice and normatively. For this reason, we propose initially to explore three thematic approaches or research themes: 1. the inclusions and exclusions in the making of the modern nation-state; 2. the geographies of identification and belonging in poly-ethnic imperial settings; and 3. practices of official and vernacular identifications in settings where the usual forms of sovereignty are absent, weak, or multiple. These approaches will be applied to a trio of cases, in France, Russia, and Southeast Asia/Southwest China, chosen to address very different institutional settings for official and vernacular identifications.

The principle underlying these approaches is that narratives of identity are continuously in motion, despite their protestations of deep, essential lineage, which, of course, they posit as natural and necessary. Modernity's attempts at normative stabilization are, therefore, continuously being undermined by identifications that are at root situational, if not oppositional. But it also needs to be observed that strategically and instrumentally deployed identifications often "stick," that is, they are accepted as affective markers of group belonging.

A commitment to these guiding propositions, we believe, will allow close comparative examination of a range of case studies, bringing new conceptual clarity to the dialectical process in which grids and classificatory systems of identification interact with social flux, in which official narratives help shape digressive or contending identifications, and in which some identifications wane while others, once marginal, emerge stronger in novel institutional forms.

A new model of collaborative research

To undertake such a project, we propose a new form of collaborative research: the modular research network. It will consist of regionally-based research teams working within a common framework of thematic interests and research questions. These interests and questions emerged and have been elaborated within a series of meetings sponsored by the ACLS/SSRC International Program. (See below: Part I. B. Common thematic framework) In our discussions, we conceptualized a new kind of collegial research interaction that would combine the most useful elements of a European-style research team with the distinctively American idea of a network integrating scholars from multiple disciplines working in several world regions. The modular research network has the added virtue of salvaging what was most useful about area studies (concentration of regional expertise) while positioning and interlinking the study of specific regions in a global context.

We propose to begin with three research teams focusing on the geographic areas of France, Russia, and the hill-borderlands between China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. (See below, Part II. Research Projects) Each team will conduct its own archival research and fieldwork, according to a plan designed by team members. But these plans will be informed by the framework of this proposal, as specified and refined in network meeting before and after the period of active research.

A crucial international dimension of this enterprise is the forging of affiliations among teams engaged in similar research within and outside the United States, and links among their institutions. But the virtue of the modular research network goes beyond the concentration of regional expertise by scholars working in different countries; it provides for the recombination of teams across regions according to thematic and disciplinary interests.

We propose, then, to retain what was best about Area Studies (in-depth cultural-historical regional expertise) with synoptic disciplinary interests open to new issues arising from global economic, political, and demographic transformations. All this said, however, our project remains rooted in the basic research we believe fundamental to the rethinking and renewal of the categories within which more immediately policy relevant research is conducted.

The specific products of this project are intended to be three collective, multi-authored volumes produced by each of the regionally-based themes, and a major summative conference to discuss the effectiveness of our collaborative experiment, and its implications for further work more directly trained on pressing contemporary issues.

B. Common thematic framework

The shared concern that shapes our common inquiry is the understanding of how official and vernacular identifications are established, how they come to have resonance and force in a society, and how they interact and conflict with each other, producing hybrid and unexpected forms and expressions of identity. While the cases that we will be examining are distinctive in many respects, we believe that a series of shared thematic frameworks will facilitate and illuminate the parallel inquiries. The research themes developed here thus supplement the subtle and situated case study with a conceptual clarity and analytical focus that permits us both to communicate and to add, collectively, to a broader theoretical understanding of processes of identifications in the context of the modern state system. Each theme is dialectically conceived: that is, each involves the interplay of an officially promulgated identification, always generated partly in response to vernacular understandings, and vernacular identifications which subvert, appropriate, oppose and elaborate these official identifications. It is understood, of course, that official identifications are always generated partly in response to vernacular understandings, and that together they are the context for conflict and negotiation over state structures, their borders, and rights of groups that reside within and astride them. These were developed in reference to specific areas (France, Russia, South East Asia, respectively), but accepted by all as relevant across areas. The purpose for a modular network is to allow area teams doing basic research to remain in touch with one another across disciplines and geography and to draw conclusions that go beyond the immediate focus of basic research.

Broadly conceived, these common points of orientation are:

Theme 1. Membership: Inclusions and Exclusions — the ways in which the nation state comes to define who is a member/subject/citizen and who is not, and the interrelationship between these authorized identifications and the changing vernacular practices and norms of identification.

Theme 2. Geographies of Identification — the ways in which official national identities are defined by territory, landscape, culture, and rites, and how the norms and practices of popular forms of spatial identification inflect these geographies of power.

Theme 3. Placement and Displacement — the ways in which official efforts to 'fix' populations in space [their residence, their movement, their classification, their property] encounter an inevitable flux of movement and identities that cannot ever be firmly codified.

Theme 1. Membership: Inclusions and Exclusions

Official identifications mark the boundaries of collective identity — juridical and political — which the "nation-state" imposes on its members. In this sense, the process of identification is political: it entails the ability to define and distinguish by law insiders and outsiders, nationals and foreigners, citizens and others. But scholars of the "nation-state" have not always been attentive to the genealogy of such official identifications. Nor have they always been attentive to the vernacular responses among "citizens" and "foreigners." This research theme examines the official languages and discourses defining the nation, nationality, and citizenship. In this, we are interested in the problem of the nation as a category of social closure, of inclusion and exclusion in the juridical and political spheres. And it considers the ways in which foreigners, nationals, and citizens take on such identities both in opposition to and collusion with official identifications.

The last twenty years have seen a renewal of scholarly interest in these topics, impelled by the dramatic changes in European labor markets, migratory patterns, and debates about citizenship and its exclusions. To the rise of far right-wing parties (France, Austria, northern Italy), the intellectual left in Europe responded with a brand new scholarship about immigration, nationality, and citizenship. As a result, much work has been done on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period of the nation-state's apogee, but only recently have social scientists and historians begun to examine the problem of the "nation" and its alternatives in a pre-modern world. Part of the research focus of this group will look at these early or pre-modern identifications, as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Studies might examine the juridical bases of membership in the nascent monarchies of the sixteenth century or the persistence of republican values and institutions at the heart of absolutist Europe. A second, and central focus of this group would focus on the historical process of making of modern identifications: the constitution of a "modern" state apparatus and the invention of the "nation" as a category of political legitimacy and popular sovereignty (in the eighteenth century), and the formal definition of the rules of access to the collective membership in the nation-state (e.g., "nationality" codes in the nineteenth century). We are thus interested in the ways in which states have defined the boundaries of membership in the modern polity, a genealogy of the "consecration of the citizen," to use Pierre Ronsenvallon's phrase. Thus the nineteenth century process in which democratic participation, grounded in the principle of national self-determination, developed alongside the formalization of the rules and procedures of citizenship and nationality.

But if identification is the process by which states and political elites create nation-states, it is also dialectically that which individuals and social groups enact in the practices of daily life. This first research focus will also consider the realization and articulation of identification from below, and from outside, the normative definitions of "nationality" and "citizenship." One obvious area of research is the process by which foreigners and outsiders acquire nationality and citizenship, a research problem at the intersection of a social history of migration and a legal history of nationality law. Other projects could include the study of social groups who do not fit neatly under the state's categories, whose social identity disrupts the totalizing aspects of state identifications — peoples such as the Roma. In addition to considering the problem of official, state identifications, we thus seek to explore the vernacular dimensions of the process, and consider the definitions of membership as they are disrupted, and made meaningful, by social groups who contest and redefine the formal identifications of states.

Theme 2. Geographies of Identification

Spatiality is one of the existential conditions of the national unit, and since the nineteenth century — indeed, as one of the conditions of modernity itself — the norm of nations was to possess a distinct and significant geographical dimension that underlies or at least impinges upon various aspects of an historical experience and a social constitution. But the "geography of national identity" speaks not to the timeless material objectivity which the non-anthropological natural environment would seem to represent. Rather it points to the virtually unlimited ways in which this environment can be subjectively interpreted and assigned a significance. Effectively, nature and space are absorbed into and utilized by an ideology of identity as they are refracted through the ideological prism of the respective national imagination, even as the nation's ideology typically inverts the calculation by ascribing an absolute objectivity and formative influence to these geographical factors.

The geography or spatiality of national identity may be approached through an examination of the following themes:

1. Territorialization of the national idea: the historical-psychological process by which a portion of territory is apportioned a specific significance as the native zone of the group. This process of territorialization can be examined as part of the state's identification of a territory, in the development of a territorial form of administration. But it can also be examined as a series of representations, an iconography of homeland, in which a series of characteristic physical features in this zone are invested with special meaning and value within the framework of the respective identity structure as a whole. Such iconographies — maps, landscaping paintings, geographical manuals, but also administrative surveys of territory would all be subjects of research. While some scholars might examine the pre-modern iconographies of the nation, which has already produced a fruitful scholarship (Helgerson), attention will be paid to the iconography of the modern nation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2. Fixing and negotiation of boundaries: The historical process of territorial identification necessarily rests on fixing the geographical extent of internal cohesion and homogeneity, while simultaneously and contrariwise marking difference. Beginning in the later eighteenth century, states began to demarcate and delimit their territorial extensions, and during the nineteenth century the idea of demarcation and "territorial violations" became part of the political rhetoric of nationalism. Border studies can examine the development of these processes of territorial identification over time. Simultaneously, the study of borderlands permits us to examine the dialectical process of identifications, situating the norms of territorial integrity in the context of local customs, usages, and identities which both ignore and make use of state identifications.
3. Civilizations: Recent scholarship has returned us to the idea of essentially constituted civilizations, covering specific territorial extensions, on which boundaries violence is inevitable (Huntington). This research topic challenges such essentialist thinking, by looking at the widely divergent ways in which zones of culture and civilization have been iconographically and textually conceived. The definition of continents, of civilizations, of cultures, and their territorial extensions is an essential part of the process of territorial identifications, and through case studies we will be examining both official mappings of human difference and diversity, and the lived, daily experience of individuals and social groups on the borderlands of civilizations and cultures whose own identifications disrupt such normative classifications.

Theme 3. Placement and Displacement

Sedentarization, as the attempt to settle migratory peoples permanently, is perhaps the oldest and most continuous project of states. But modern state-making projects produce a unique mode of sedentarization, a project of spatial and political identification. The attempt to locate, fix, identify, order, and monitor population, property, and exchange is the project of colonial, national, and post-colonial states alike.

Thus, for example, anthropologists and historians have long studied the processes in which colonial states identified populations as 'tribes', constituted them as administrative units, and (not always) successfully produced state subjects through censuses, mapping, cadastral surveys, and other administrative means. But peoples entangled in both colonial and European state projects of sedentarization have always escaped these forms of identification through movement. Nomadic and semi-nomadic populations presented peculiar problems in terms of power holders, with whom, historically, they were often in intimate relation (e.g. as the core of the army; as a source of dynasties established after overthrowing their predecessors; in complex regional alliances and factions etc.) But other kinds of subject populations have remained mobile fugitives from such official identifications, and for a wide variety of reasons. Vagrants and the mobile poor, for example, escaped the control of the state. The geographical periphery (mountains, marshes) bred populations who escaped the attempts to "place" and prescribe sedentarization, but who were often carriers of the values and technologies of modernity (Pollard). Pastoral nomads or gypsies were not easily identified, while migratory traders and larger populations of mobile laborers disrupted the normative ideal of autochthony, an ideology frequently at the core of modern state projects of sedentarization.

In the project of modernity, then, states attempt to place and identify mobile populations, immigrants, fugitives, and others. In the official state representation, such people and spaces are frequently glossed as barbarians and hence the project of domesticating and incorporating them becomes a 'civilizing process.' The official story, then, is one of a largely beneficent and voluntary incorporation into a wider, refined, and higher cultural order. But the vernacular identification in this dialectic rests on the fact that mobile, illegible peoples, are likely to assert both identities and practices that are counter-hegemonic. In some cases, such mobile peoples are continually being newly generated as a consequence of state action (e.g. runaway serfs who became the Cossacks, deserters and those ruined by taxes who flee to the frontier). In other cases, popular cultural forms linked to movement and displacement give voice to vernacular identifications of individuals and social groups caught in the fluctuations of different national and regional economies, concepts of state, citizenship and identity. The constitution of vernacular discourses, forms, and spaces in reaction to state projects of identification in turn are seen as deeply troubling and threatening.

The success of such modern projects creates new kinds of nomads, sometimes deliberately, by policy (the recruitment of a labor force), sometimes not. They drive massive movements of populations that no controls seem able to regulate and that have major unintended consequences. Rural-urban movement in Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, linked to complex economic and political changes, threaten in different ways the whole notion of 'the urban', 'the civilized', the 'city' itself. And so too the movement from the southern and eastern Mediterranean to the northern and western, where debates about foreign "invasion" (often of racially and ethnically distinct groups) are shaped by cultural expectations of sedentarization and placement.


Part II. RESEARCH PROJECTS

A. Foreigners and Citizens: France, its Colonies, and Europe, 15th 18th Centuries

Team Coordinator: Peter Sahlins, History Department, University of California, Berkeley

This collaborative research team, coordinated by Peter Sahlins, will examine the central category of citizenship, in theory as in practice, in France, the French colonies, and more broadly in Europe during the early modern period. Citizenship has been a long neglected concept in the study of early modern societies, for it is commonly believed that the structure of absolute monarchy and the corporatist organization of the social order precluded an identity that incorporated all the diverse statutes and statuses of the kingdom’s inhabitants. Yet beginning in the sixteenth century, and most dramatically after the French Wars of Religion, the monarchy began to elaborate a distinctive politics of citizenship within the broader projects of both encouraging and policing immigrant populations within the realm. At the same time, the expansion of the French empire, especially in North America and the Caribbean, brought with it a series of difficult juridical and political questions about citizenship among French settlers and the indigenous populations that they administered. In both cases, and in a wide variety of contexts, the question of what it meant to be a French citizen was posed and vociferously debated.

Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, the "absolutist" model of citizenship began to be questioned, both in metropolitan France and in the colonies. The culmination of these challenges, intellectual, political, and economic, led to a variety of alternatives, ranging from the republican citizenship of Rousseau to the cosmopolitanism of mobile populations, both rich and poor. The French Revolution, in the colonies as in Paris, posed a new set of definitions, while continuing many of the state practices of identification that had developed in the Ancien Régime. Examining the period from the late 16th century through the French Revolution, this research team seeks to establish a genealogical link with the modern world, while focusing on the processes of state identifications that remain fundamentally different from those of the post-French revolutionary period, but which establish the groundwork on which such late modern practices are built.

This team will examine collectively the ideals and practices of French citizenship, its related terms and competitors ("nation," "fatherland," "subject," "foreigner," and so forth) in four separate contexts: 1) the ideological and intellectual traditions and practices of citizenship from the late 16th century through the French Revolution; 2) the monarchical politics of immigration (including the politics and practices of naturalization); 3) colonial citizenship (within French Canada, Louisiana, Saint-Domingue, and Guadeloupe); and 4) the French Revolution (in its national, local, and colonial settings). In all cases, the participants’ research is informed by the themes of membership and its exclusions, the geographies of identification, and the problem of placement and displacement as outlined in the first part of this proposal, as well as the overall framework of official and vernacular expressions.

1) The ideological and intellectual traditions and practices of citizenship

The first focus of this project is on the representations of citizenship in the major thinkers of the absolute monarchy (Bodin, Choppin, Bossuet) and in the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Smith, Hume, Kant, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others). This aspect of the collaborative project involves a survey and census of the widely divergent languages of citizenship (juridical, philosophical, rhetorical) in the development of the absolute monarchy as during its decline in the 18th century. The project will coordinate a systematic inquiry into an array of texts ranging from legal treatises, sermons, state declarations, pamphlets, and philosophical treatises, where we shall examine the uses of a variety and of terms and concepts describing "citizenship" and locate the different but overlapping usages in a set of institutional and intellectual contexts. The investigation makes use of databases of literary texts, such as the ARTFL database (3000 literary texts available on line), but is not satisfied with a simple statistical tabulation. Like J.G.A. Pocock, Keith Baker, and other scholars taking a historical approach to the study of political thought, we are attempting to classify the distinct ways in which thinkers conceptualized citizenship and the debates that followed from their often mutually exclusive conceptualizations. Unlike these intellectual historians, however, we are broadening the kinds of texts in which we will compare the ideas of citizenship in the eighteenth century.

2) The monarchical politics of immigration (including the politics and practices of naturalization).

This part of the project examines the monarchical politics of immigration, the politics and practices of naturalization, and the elaboration, both by the crown and more broadly in society, of a politics of citizenship in the early modern period. In this section, we continue our exploration of the political and cultural frameworks through which pre modern states seek the juridical and political incorporation of foreigners, investigating the official identifications constituted in the process of exercising authority and territorial dominion as the nation-state comes into being. Thus, rather than concerning itself with the traditional problematic of assimilation (rejection, acceptance) of foreigners, we propose to study the dialectical relations and reciprocal definitions between "states" on the one hand, and "foreigners," "aliens," "refugees," and "naturalized citizens" and "citizens" on the other. At the same time, then, the project seeks to show how a wide variety of social groups, both immigrant and native, made use of these categories, and of the central concept of citizenship, in collaboration, negotiation, and opposition to royal authority.

The development of a politics of immigration includes the police of foreigners. (The French word connotes an administrative function, in addition to a penal one). We thus examine the efforts both of the monarchy and of municipalities to 'fix' populations in the kingdom and the local community, to register their residence, their movement, and their property. These efforts culminated in the 1770s, when the state instituted an elaborate administration to count and measure the influence of foreigners in the kingdom. But they can also be found in the administration of the "general hospitals" during the 17th and 18th century. Our research project will use both sources to compile a statistical profile of different groups of foreigners in the kingdom. But we will also be sensitive to the ways in which such an inevitable flux of movement — and of identities — cannot ever be firmly codified.

The principal framework is France, although it is necessary, methodologically, to see the study of international migratory movements and modes of inscription in a comparative context, evaluating the experience of other European countries with important traditions of refuge (Geneva, Holland, England, and Prussia). At the same time, we seek to link this politics of movement and of state-building to France’s own colonies (see below).

3) Colonial Citizenship

During the 17th and 18th centuries, France's colonial expansion created hybrid societies in Quebec, Louisiana, Saint-Domingue, and Guadeloupe, the four sites of our collective investigation into the problem of colonial citizenship. The question of what it meant to be French, juridically and culturally, had practical, daily importance in New France, because while in France itself the problem of who qualified as a French subject directly concerned a relatively small minority of foreigners and immigrants, in New France it concerned literally everyone.

The history of the French colonial experience reveals a diversity of official responses to the problems posed by both "slave societies" and the conquest of indigenous peoples. In the Caribbean, the former predominated, and the majority of the population resided outside legal subjecthood. In North America, by contrast, the French government was remarkably liberal, passing laws extending full rights as French subjects to any Indians who embraced Catholicism. unlike the racial mixing prohibited in the Caribbean, the monarchy encouraged French-Indian intermarriage in North America, and expressed the explicit hope that the two populations might eventually, in Colbert's words, "constitute one people and one race." Part of this study of colonial citizenship will be a comparative analysis of the "French identity" of three groups: Canadian Indians, French colonists in Canada, and French colonists in Louisiana.

Racial categories were central to an understanding of colonial citizenship in the Caribbean. In the Code Noir of 1685, emancipation was made equivalent to naturalization as a subject of the king, thus providing a modicum of legal equality for those of African descent who were made free — the gens de couleur. At the same time, a variety of policies assured the continuing exclusion of even the most wealthy gens de couleur from many professions and from positions of political power.

In both cases, the examination of colonial citizenship will undertake a study — through both administrative correspondence and the materials of social history — of the various and contested uses of racial and cultural forms of identification, both from the perspective of the colonial state, and from that of the diverse groups who differently negotiated, collaborated with, and contested the monarchy’s identifications. The contestations will be especially salient: in the case of Louisiana, they involve the only significant post-1763 revolt by French colonists against their new rulers—a little-known episode that will be considered in particular detail. In the case of Guadeloupe, these contestations are crowned by the dramatic explosion of slave revolt and the complete transformation that it brought to the colonies at the end of the 18th century, which represented a completely new and radical configuration of colonial administration and identification.

4) Revolutionary Citizenship

Citizenship, as both official identification and vernacular practice, underwent a profound mutation in the late eighteenth century, both in France and its colonies. As legislators set out to transform the basis of France's social and political order, they redefined official language of citizenship and the distinctions between citizens and foreigners that were associated with these languages. Equally importantly, the late eighteenth century was a moment of extraordinary ferment in the creation and development of "vernacular languages" of citizenship, often blurring the distinction between official and popular categories. Not only representatives of the state, but also ordinary men and women, whites and blacks, regularly claimed rights from their membership in the nation or disputed the mechanisms that branded them as foreigners, excluded them from the prerogatives of citizenship — or even made them French citizens against their will.

In this final research theme, we will explore different sites where the struggles over citizenship took shape, and the outcome of these struggles in the 1790s. These disputes and contestations occurred in a distinctive context, for the makers of a new order dramatically transformed the basis not only of national citizenship, but also of family and gender roles. Disputes over the acquisition and loss of citizenship rights in France are particularly revealing of these contradictions and conflicts. As men and women struggled to define who deserved to become a French citizen or conversely, should be stripped of their citizenship rights, they directly confronted tensions and contradictions built into new institutions.

In the Caribbean colonies, a distinctive set of problems was posed by emancipation, decreed by the National Assembly in 1794, when quite suddenly the majority population of slaves were granted citizenship. This radical reconfiguration of legal identity brought into question the traditional racial categories through which slavery had been administered, and therefore incited complex new experiments in the naming and defining of race. Throughout the years of the slave trade, whites had described the origins of slaves according to African nation, categories which while they were often constructed somewhat artificially from a superficial knowledge of African political organization, also became imbued with meaning for the slaves themselves. With the incorporation of former slaves into the nation of France, such older identities were reconfigured and new ways of thinking about African origins were created. So, too, the terms used to describe gens de couleur changed, notably with the introduction of the term "nouveaux citoyens," — "new citizens," a term which harkened back to the "new Christians" of Spain and the New World, whose recent conversion gave them a particular status within their new community. Thus we will examine the intertwined emergence of new forms of racial and political affiliation as it was linked to the process of social transformation, and set within the context of an increasingly important movement of people across national boundaries. In particular, because it presents such an extreme and violent set of social transformations and political conflicts, the movement from slavery to citizenship within a colonial Republic, and then from colonial territory to independent nation, the example of St. Domingue will provide new insight into our understanding of how political and social identities develop in relation to the emergence of national projects.

Workplan

The collaborative research team will undertake its archival research in Paris (National Archives, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Aix (Colonial Archives) and various departmental archives of the metropole and the French overseas territories. The archival phase of the project is scheduled to begin in January 2001 and to last through the summer of 2001. Prior to undertaking its research, the team will gather in Paris to discuss strategies and sources for the project, and to coordinate different methodological approaches so as to best assure a conceptual unity to the project. Individual members will then undertake research in a variety of archives. Periodically — every six weeks — the team will reassemble and continue its discussions. Half-way through the field season, the team will draft the plan of a book, and will return to the archives with a specific framework. Discussions will continue throughout the field research and afterwards, with exchanges of written drafts and ideas continuously informing the separate components of the project. The final product, to be published in 2003, will be a collective, multi-authored volume.

B. Imperial Spaces, National Boundaries: Situating Russia

Team Coordinators:
Mark Bassin, University College, London (Geography)
Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago (Political Science)

The hard passage from empire to nations has been the source of much of the violence that falls under the rubric of ethnic conflict. As new nation-states are formed, either within the body of existing empires or at the moment of disintegration, the boundaries of the nation and the state seldom coincide. Violence arises from both the ambitions of anti-colonial movements and efforts to preserve empires as well as over boundaries within and between states. The destructive struggles during the Russian Civil War (1918-1922) or at the end of the Soviet period, over Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and Chechnya, are only a few of the cases in which imperial collapse has produced the crisis of defining new nations. Using the cases of the tsarist Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and the constellation of post-Soviet states, this project explores how one kind of state is shaped into another and how both are constituted spatially, territorially. The ways in which new political identifications are established will be investigated along with mutual influences of nationalism and imperialism on the political and ideological development of states, in particular the ways in which empires constitute nations, and nationalism undermines empires.

Recent thinking about nations has forced researchers to question the objectivity and stability of categories like nationality or ethnicity. Indeed, it is precisely their fluidity and contingency that makes the project of nation-making so difficult. Intellectuals and politicians not only spend great energy and much time to shore up the boundaries of the national community, create political symbols around which to cluster allegiances, and decide on criteria of inclusion and exclusion, but are also compelled to use their discursive and coercive power to eliminate differences within the nation and exaggerate them between nations. This research looks at Russian empires to explain the failure of empires to form a single coherent nation internally even as they foster sub-imperial national communities. Empires and nations use contradictory formulas to legitimize their existence, and the tensions between those forms of legitimation have led to violence, secession, and inter-ethnic conflicts. While Soviet power rationalized its rule over Russians and non-Russians alike through a developmentalist ideology, nationalists appealed to principles of national self-determination that undermined the supranational ideology of the Communists.

Often imperial and nation-making practices coexist historically, even in the same state, the one subverting the other. Investigating the tension between nationalizing policies that homogenize the internal political community and imperial policies that differentiate between various internal communities, empowering some and subordinating others, can help explain 1) why some states are relatively stable, while others, even very powerful ones, collapse; and 2) how some communities succeed in becoming nations, while other national projects fail. Such a study will contribute to understanding the present difficulties of post-Soviet states to consolidate both state structures and national identities, deal with national minorities within the state, as well as speak to the burning issue of the potential revival of imperial relations among newly-formed states.

The project is divided into three parts. The first explores the problems of maintaining and building an imperial space in the age of nationalism by looking at tsarist Russia in the 18th to early-20th centuries; the second the contradictions of nation-creation in a state dedicated to the eradication of nationalism (the Soviet period); and the third, the problems of nation-making in the post-Soviet period. The research team will focus on the relationships between culture, politics, and spatiality in the formation and dilemmas of identification in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states. This region has been a veritable laboratory in shifting and contested identities. Though culture and politics have featured in much of the identity discourse in this region, the centrality of space has largely been neglected. Fundamental to our investigation is the tension and ambivalence between nation and empire that characterizes virtually all of the Russian experience and how spatial elements affected culture and politics. Our research team will explore the ways in which national, imperial, religious, tribal, and territorial identifications were generated, evolved, and contended with one another over time.

This project aims, not at developing some grand theory of imperial rise and fall that applies to all states at all times, but rather at learning from the complex cases of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states in order to make significant generalizations and theoretical statements about the dynamics (and statics) of empires and nations in the modern period and how they may lead to instability and violence. The productive renaissance in historical and theoretical discussions of nations and nationalism has been paralleled more recently in new interest in empires and imperialism. Yet the two literatures on empire and nation have only occasionally intersected, and though the subversive force of nationalism for empires has been noted, the particular ways in which empires provide the context for nation-making has been less thoroughly theorized. Exploring the cases of the tsarist Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and the constellation of post-Soviet states, this research project seeks to understand how empires contributed to the making of nations, sometimes at the all-state level (as in the first nation-states of Western Europe), but other times at the sub-all-state level (as in the tsarist, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Soviet empires). Tsarist Russia and the USSR were both states that ultimately failed to create a coherent national identity within the state as a whole. In an age when the predominant form of legitimation for states is the claim that they represent the people organized as a nation, that failure to constitute a nation contributed to the ultimate loss of legitimacy for the imperial and Soviet authorities and facilitated the political collapse of those states.

This project begins with an investigation of why tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union developed so effectively as imperial states, yet failed to construct cohesive "national" identities. It looks at how developmentalist ideologies that justified imperialism contributed to the formation of nationality among Russians and non-Russians both in the tsarist period and the Soviet Union, while the practices of empire were far less effective in creating an "imperial national" or "Soviet" identity. If, as many scholars have noted, nationalism was not the primary cause of the collapse of either the tsarist or Soviet states, how does one explain imperial collapse and the influence of nation-making within these empires? And, if one does not accept primordial ethnic identities as natural, given, and relatively constant, then how is one to understand why identities with the union republics (and other ethnic political units) proved more salient than an all-Soviet identity?

One of the principal arguments of this project is that the very rationale for imperial rule — that the more advanced power would modernize, "“civilize," the less advanced peoples —contained within it a powerful justification for the end of imperialism. Empires justified their rule over others because they were agents of modernity and modernization, instruments of development and progress. But the Russian and Soviet imperial states carried out their "civilizing mission" in unexpected ways. They supplied their subordinated populations with languages of aspiration and resistance and indeed created subjects that no longer required the imperial center’s domination in the way the colonizers claimed. This dialectical reversal of the justification for empire, embedded in the theory and practice of modernization, was, in my view, also at the very core of the progressive decay of the tsarist and Soviet empires. In the Soviet case, for example, in a real sense the Communist Party effectively made itself irrelevant. Who needed a "vanguard" when you now had an urban, educated, mobile, self-motivated society? Who needed imperial control from Moscow when national elites and their constituents were able to articulate their own interests in terms sanctioned by Marxism-Leninism in the idea of national self-determination?

The new research agenda that opened up with the more historicist thinking about nations has forced researchers to question the objectivity and stability of categories like nationality and ethnicity. Yet writers continue to assume that empires were inevitably vulnerable to nations, which possess a more secure ontological foundation than supranational formations. When one refuses to assume that the nation-state form is the necessary product of history or that empires inevitably fall, new questions arise and alternative historical scenaria can be imagined. As states in early modern times homogenized their territories, eliminating competing sovereignties and standardizing administration, a number of states, most notably in Western Europe, consolidated a relatively coherent internal community, either on linguistic, ethnocultural, or religious lines, that made an idea of "nation" conceivable with the coming of the late eighteenth-century revolutions and the subsequent "age of nationalism." At the same time less homogeneous states, like contiguous empires, tightened their internal interconnections in order to be competitive in the new international environment but without achieving the degree of internal homogeneity of proto-nation-states like Portugal or France.

Contiguous empires can more easily conceive of becoming integrated nations, if not ethnically then civicly, and many present-day nation-states indeed began as multiethnic imperial arrangements. In contiguous empire states the distinction between the nation and the empire is more easily muddled than in overseas empires, and ruling elites may attempt to construct hybrid notions of an empire-nation, as in tsarist Russia or the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Nicholas I attempted to create an ideology of "Official Nationality" that bound the people, religion, and autocracy in a unified sense of what Russia was, but it proved to be artificial and limited in its appeal. About the same time in the Ottoman Empire bureaucrats developed a multinational idea of an imperial community based on civil equality (the notion of "Ottomanism"), but decades later that ideal was undermined by Pan-Islamic and eventually Turkish nationalist programs.

On the other hand, decolonization is far more difficult for a contiguous empire than for an overseas empire, for it changes the very shape of the state itself. Downsizing the state means abandoning certain ideas of the very enterprise that had maintained that state and searching for new sources of legitimation. Contiguous empires, like the Habsburg, Ottoman, tsarist Russian, and Soviet, did not have hard borders within the empire, and therefore migration created a mixed population, a highly integrated economy, and shared historical experiences and cultural features — all of which make extrication of the core or any of the peripheries from the empire extremely difficult without complete state collapse. Understandably in three of the four cases at hand — the Habsburg, Ottoman and tsarist — defeat in war preceded the end of the empire. And while secession of peripheries weakened these empires, in two of the four cases — the Ottoman and the Soviet — it was the secession of the core from the empire — Kemal's nationalist Turkey in Anatolia and Yel'tsin's Russia — that dealt the final blow to the old imperial state.

The possibility of pursuing different policies in core and periphery is easier in non-contiguous empires than in contiguous ones. In contiguous multinational empires the state authorities often try to homogenize the differences within the state, in an attempt to become more like a homogeneous nation-state, but for a variety of reasons (that I will try to illustrate in the Russian and Soviet cases) they may fail to become a nation-state. What was once possible in medieval and early modern times when quite heterogeneous populations assimilated into relatively homogeneous proto-nations, perhaps around common religious or dynastic loyalties, became in the age of nationalism far more difficult, for now the available discourse of the nation with all its attendant attractions of progress and statehood became available for all to claim. At the same time the appeals of popular sovereignty and democracy challenged the inequity, hierarchy, and discrimination inherent in empire and compelled modern empires to consider reforms along liberal lines. While it may be possible to have a democratic metropole and colonized peripheries in overseas empires, as in the great "bourgeois" empires of the nineteenth century, it is far more difficult, if not impossible, to have democracy in only part of a contiguous empire. Here is a major tension of contiguous empires. Some kind of separation, apartheid, is essential to maintain a democratic and non-democratic political order in a single state. But this is a highly unstable compromise as the governments of South Africa and Israel discovered.

Both on the level of discourse and on the level of international politics and economics, the late twentieth century appears to be a most inhospitable time both for formal external empires and contiguous empire-states. And yet the problem of empire remains relevant in present-day politics for at least two important reasons. First, self-styled nation-states themselves do not usually approximate the ideal form of the state containing or representing a single "nation," however conceived. The boundaries of nations do not usually correspond to state boundaries. "Homelands" are contested between states and nations. Within states there are often several potential "nations," and nations often spread across state boundaries or have far-flung diasporas. For minority nationalities the state is often not seen as a nation-state but as a mini-empire that discriminates and subordinates part of its population to the metropolitan nation. If a nation-state is perceived as empire, then the legitimacy of that state can be questioned (as occurred in the case of Georgia), and the possibility of secession or reconceptualization of that state becomes a political possibility.

Second, empire persists as a possibility and a threat to the sovereignty of smaller states. In the post-Soviet sphere there is great apprehension that the current hegemonic role of Russia, particularly in the "southern tier" of Central Asian and Transcaucasian states, could easily metastasize into an imperial one, with Russian attempting to control the internal as well as external policies of those weaker states. Given the close connection between nationalism, democratic representation, state formation, and constraints on empire in our own times, the likelihood of new imperialisms has diminished — but it has not been eliminated.

Among the topics to be investigated are:

1. The historical-geographical formation of the empire, its impact on native peoples as "foreign" territory was absorbed into the new imperial structure, and the counter-impact of multinationality and expansion beyond existing cultural zones on the core "Russian" population. A geo-political taxonomy of the ideologies of expansion will be developed, along with examination of the production and manipulation of imperial images, for example, the evolution of imperial mapping projects.
2. The location of national Russia as entity within but somehow distinct from the larger empire, the confusion over imperial Russian and national Russian identifications. The whole question of boundaries will be investigated, for they either did not exist or were heavily contested. At the same time, a national iconography attempted to offer alternative means for identifying Russia, e.g., via so-called national landscapes understood either scientifically-ecologically or alternatively represented in pastoral literature and the nineteenth-century flowering of landscape painting.
3. The problem of nation and empire as two kinds of political identifications, as the source of two different kinds of state structures and legitimations. Here questions of boundaries, legitimation formulae, political iconographies and discourses will be explored. Imperial Russia was self-consciously imperial and anti-nationalist, at least as concerned the subordinated non-Russian peoples. The USSR deliberately and self-consciously rejected an identity either as nation or empire while effectively constituting nations within its boundaries and arguably establishing imperial relations between a center and periphery. The legacy of this historic confusion of supranational and national identifications has left post-Soviet Russia and the successor states with highly ambivalent understandings of national identity and legitimate state boundaries.
4. The problem of "homelands." While states are territorially bounded entities, nations and their territorial counter-parts, homelands, are unbounded. The idea of homeland (rodina in Russian) is a powerful affective element in all nationalisms and is often the source of conflict between different peoples or states that claim the same geography as their own. While homeland is treated as constant by virtue of its geographical materiality and apparent objectivity, while it appears to be fixed and stable and exclusively the property of one people, it is in fact profondly subjective and fraught with tensions and ambivalent meanings. We seek to investigate how an idea of homeland, continent and ideological, subject to variation, contestation, and negotiation, is arrived at and becomes an irresistible claim to a given territory.

These investigations are historical and geographic, literary and art historical, and they contribute to an understanding of current real-world problems of state-building, international security, nationalism, and ethnic conflict.

By studying earlier periods of state formation and state collapse, and comparing past dynamics with current developments in the post-Soviet region, this project seeks to contribute to the understanding of ethnic conflict as well as interstate conflict. Peace and security require relatively stable states that can maintain their authority and legitimacy in the eyes of their own people, even as the sources of legitimacy have changed over the last two centuries. Research in the Russian and post-Soviet cases illuminates how states develop (and lose) legitimacy and authority, how they use the available discourses to make their claims, create instabilities, and open the way for deadly conflict. Coercive power is most often used in conjunction with moral arguments, and it is precisely the ways in which discursive power is employed that this project hopes to illuminate.

Understanding the power of nationalist and imperial practices is essential for understanding problems that will arise in the international arena. Though it is a broad inclusive claim, we are convinced that with a sensitivity to historical, structural, and discursive factors, as well as the international context in which states find themselves, analysts will be better informed to understand stability and fragility of states, the potential for collapse, ethnic and civil violence, and the choice of strategies that political leaders might employ. A study of the shape and political and discursive content of modern states, the ways they identify and legitimize themselves, the ways they are structured, the ways that others perceive them, can inform foreign policy analysts. No state is likely to last forever, and the presumption today is that empires are doomed but nations are here to stay. Working toward a conceptualization of empire, exploring the ways they persisted and declined, may give us insights into the problems facing those states that claim to be nation-states but are themselves in tension with an ideal form which they find difficult to match.

Workplan

The directors of the project will invite scholars to join us in an exploration of these themes with the Russian/Soviet/Post-Soviet space but across time. They will coordinate research projects of scholars in the United States, Europe, and in the former Soviet Union, that will be organized around the themes described above. Team members will be invited to meet in January 2001 in a preliminary meeting to discuss research projects to be carried out individually or in groups. Emphasis will be placed on working with students and researchers in the region. Not only Russia but non-Russian republics will be the focus of this work. The European University at St. Petersburg will serve as our in-region collaborator.

Research findings will be published in two volumes, in Russian and English. The second meeting in June 2001 will also serve as an editorial meeting to discuss common themes, progress of research, and preparation of articles to be published in a collective volume.

C. Hill and Valley in Mainland Southeast Asia, Mobile and Sedentary Populations in China: Official and vernacular identifications in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Southwestern China

Team coordinators:
Dru Gladney (Anthropology, University of Hawaii) and
James C. Scott (Political Science and Anthropology, Yale)

The distinction between hill and valley peoples in Mainland Southeast Asia is perhaps the most enduring social and cultural cleavage in the region, easily discernible in pre-colonial kingdoms, colonial, and independent regimes. Valley peoples, broadly speaking, live in relatively densely settled communities, growing paddy-field rice, and are hierarchically integrated into state-like structures. Hill peoples, also broadly speaking, live in less sedentary, relatively dispersed hamlets, growing a variety of dry-land crops, and have a social structure that is more egalitarian and less state-influenced. There are, of course, many intermediate cases and both groups and individuals move between these "statuses." Nonetheless, the distinction between hill and valley has been formative in the mutual self-definitions of the various societies and alleged "ethnic groups" in the region. For many of the larger, politically dominant valley kingdoms (historically and today), valley traditions, mythology, culture, and etiquette represent the apex of "civilized" life. Informal and often juridical definitions of inclusion in the nation (as opposed to the territory) are codified along these lines. Official identifications, at their most beneficent, figure hill peoples as backward, isolated peoples, "our living ancestors," (what we were like before we discovered paddy-field rice, Islam/Buddhism, and "civilization"), who ought to be brought into the national culture. Less beneficent constructions figure hill peoples as irremediable barbarians who represent all that is crude, unrefined, un-cultured. Vernacular identifications among hill peoples, of course, appropriate, transform, and subvert these official understandings, often asserting the nobility of their freedom, mobility, and, especially today, connection with the physical landscape.

The fact that a huge swath of hill peoples straddle, (promiscuously!) the northern national frontiers of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Guangxi and Yunnan in Southwestern China makes for arresting parallel inquiries into their historic links the various national polities at whose peripheries they lie. (How do the Akha, Kachin, or Hmong understand and use their identities in the various national contexts in which they find themselves?) These frontiers, once buffer zones and now fixed legal boundaries (but very porous), have not just represented difficulties for hill peoples, but also amphibious opportunities to smuggle, to play off various rivals for their allegiance, to move between jurisdictions and between identities. Covering a period from the late 18th through the 20th century, studies of official and vernacular identities in this region offer the team a chance to compare the policies of Hinduized classical states, the late Ching dynasty, Republican and Communist China, colonial regimes, and independent states — both democratic and authoritarian.

We envision a series of comparative historical explorations, each coinciding with a different institutional setting in which official and vernacular identities are mutually constituted. In a rough and ready way, we might consider the following situations: 1) classical states and empires, 2) periods of dynastic decline and disorder, 3) colonial states, and 4) independent states, both revolutionary and post-revolutionary. In each of these settings the conditions under which official and vernacular identities are negotiated are markedly divergent. For the classical states and empires, it appears that the organization of tribute and military security dominated court policy and the exact conformation of tributary units (their religious, linguistic, economic, and ecological identities, not to mention the boundaries of their zones of residence and movement) were largely a matter of indifference. Classical texts, identifying tribute paying units, their numbers, their qualities, the tribute they brought, and their customs, offer something of a privileged window on the "official" identities in use. The oral accounts and legends of hill peoples, used carefully, also provide some speculative evidence on how tributary units 'tacked' between identities and statuses. We know, for example, from Tongchai Winichakul's work, among many others, that situations of multiple sovereignty and shifting representations of identity were very common.

The second setting, periods of dynastic instability, are less well understood inasmuch as they have left fewer traces in the written record. They are nonetheless formative. If one, for example, thinks of the major Burman dynasties from the 10th century to the 19th century, the 'blank spaces' of inter-dynastic disorder or dynasties were so weak that their writ was negligible outside the palace walls. Thus, vernacular identities were forged, in such periods, as part of a very different and more decentralized game than being largely oriented to one or more powerful courts.

Colonial identity-making is of a different order altogether and far better documented. What is striking about early colonial exercises in identification, with analogous instances from Ming administrators in Yunnan, is how they resemble a 'field guide to the tribes'. That is, they describe the visual characteristics — in the field — of what they imagine to be the different 'hill peoples' (e.g. "the xs wear neck rings, have red turbans and black leggings, in contrast to the ys who......") Later on, the creation of juridical categories, administrative zones, authorized leadership, the codification of customary norms and offices, and the creation of schools gave, by virtue of establishing 'traffic patterns', a social reality to what had often began as a colonial fantasy. We hope to trace such identity-fixing episodes in mainland Southeast Asia and Southwestern China as well as how vernacular identities are crafted outside, underneath, and strategically athwart such official identities. Here the use of official categories to novel ends and the self-representations of identity within and among hill peoples are particularly germane. How often, as in the case of the Karenni, has a new sub-ethnic identity arisen in part to stake an exclusive claim to teak or other valuable resources?

For the independent states of Southeast Asia a whole series of national projects, demographic pressures, wars, and rebellions have affected both the stakes and logic of identifications. Vernacular identities and self-representations (not necessarily the same) have always been contingent, situational, and multiple. Since 1950, however, they have had to coexist in a political context in which territorial sovereignty, internal wars, and nationalist campaigns promoted cultural and religious assimilation, resettlement schemes, and the effort to secure important economic assets at the periphery. These new factors and the growing presence (except perhaps for Burma) of the state in the everyday life of previously 'out-of-the-way' peoples have created new identity options while at the same time making many of the choices more momentous. The existence of national territorial boundaries also allows us to examine the identity politics of the — putatively — same group in two or more distinctive national settings (e.g. the Hmong or Akha in Thailand, Laos/Burma, and China).

The conceptual issues here overlap substantially with those of the teams working on France and Russia, and we foresee opportunities for "pull-out" meetings. We envision a good deal of comparative intellectual commerce between China specialists and Southeast Asianists centered on the issues of mobility, sedentarization, and identifications. Just as "Southeast Asia" was made in large part by Hinduizing and Sinitic currents absorbed and deflected by local populations, it is seldom sufficiently appreciated how China was created and defined by peoples at the periphery (Mongols, Muslims, hill peoples) as well as by international social and intellectual movements (inter alia, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Marxism, and global capitalism). For that reason Gladney and Scott are co-convenors of this portion of the research network. One of our central concerns will be to understand the historical dynamics of hill-valley relations: How have the hills been created and figured over time? How much of hill society has been constituted by the shards of state-making projects in the valley kingdoms (e.g., military desertion, religious dissent, famine, flight from taxes and corvee)? How have the taxonomies of hill "tribes" been constructed and changed? How have groups and individuals moved between various identities over time or situationally?

Workplan

Prior to undertaking its research, the team will gather in Chiang Mai to discuss strategies and sources for the project, and to coordinate different methodological approaches so as to best assure a conceptual unity to the project. The overall themes for the project include official and vernacular identifications in relation to claims to place, property rights, land use, and migration. Subsequently, individuals in the collaborative research team will undertake field work and archival research in sites in various parts of mainland Southeast Asia, as well as in Yunnan Province in China. This phase of the project is scheduled to begin in January 2001 and last through the summer of 2001. After six months, team members will reassemble in Kunming to continue discussions, including drafting the plan for a book. The final product, to be published in 2003, will be a collective, multi-authored volume.