Places are not given, but a production of social imagination and practice (Lefebvre 1991). The process of identifications often involves the linking between people and place. One of the significant tools by which official identification gains its hegemonic configuration of power is through the establishment of spatial meanings—the making of spaces into places, and the attempt to fix and freeze people in place. Nations, societies, cultures, and localities in their isomorphic forms are premised upon the "natural" division of space where people and their cultures are territorialized and confined within and inscribed by a discrete and homogeneous space. Place making is also intrinsic to the modern project of nation-building where "place" is conceptualized on the basis of space as statis. A nation is thus bounded and perceived as a site of authenticity, as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity. From this view, to be Thai, one must reside within a confined territory, the Thailand proper. At the same time, the state homogenization and conflation of national space (Thailand) and national identification(Thainess) seeks to erase all ethnic and cultural differences associated with places. In the case of China where multicultural/multiethnic identifications are tolerated, locality and local identity have become a product of the permanent mapping of ethnic communities into culturally unitary groups with their fixed geographic territories. Such spatial arrangement of culture and nation while emphasizing the discontinuity of space and culture, naturalizes the official/national order of people and identification.

Yet, place making is also the making of place for change, the space that produces alternate social ordering (Hetherington 1998). This is because space and place are not a self-contained entity/fixity but a social relation rooted in and constantly shaped by everyday practice. Vernacular identification of place suggests the notion of place as groundedness from below with a flexible and porous boundary around it where the struggle for place in the concrete is a struggle against power and the hegemony of abstractions (i.e., nation, ethnic classification) (Milan Kundera cited in Dirlik 2001). This paper analyzes the vernacular identifications of places on the margin of the stateless/displaced Shan women at the border between Thailand and Burma with a comparative discussion with the case study of the Jinuo women of a shifting cultivation community in China's Yunnan province (by Wang Jieru of CRN S/W China team). Both case studies are illustrations of how in the course of political repression and economic restructuring, women have negotiated with the constricted and suppressive landscapes (borderland in the case of Shan women, and state forest reserve in the case of Jinuo women) and turned them into meaningful places, the "marginal space" (Shield 1991, Hetherington 1998) which serves to challenge the powerful rules and structures of the center for the renewal of social identities and reproduction of networks of transitional identifications. As the making of marginal space is never homogeneous but multiple and shifting, the production of vernacular identifications is constantly characterized by the interplay of gender, ethnic, and class relations. The paper argues that vernacular geographies of identification can be viewed by the identification of social roles by gender in which home/nation (in the case of Shan) and home/market (in the case of Jinuo) dichotomy characterize the ideological framework of the marginal space. Tension, contradiction and contestation are therefore the result of everyday practice of women in the attempt to break as well as make use of such dichotomy in creating their social centrality of the margin.

Women and the Politics of Place

Contestation and contradiction of geographies of identification are best manifested at the border. For the Burmese military regime (SPDC), the establishment of Tai Long village (pseudonym), a strategic insurgency village by the Shan United Revolutionary Army (SURA) in 1969 on the border between Thailand and Burma represents a threat to the absolute sovereignty of the Burmese state. For the Thai state, the shifting political relationship with Burma has (re)shaped the perceptions towards this bordering village from time to time ranging from the strategic buffer that prevent the expansion of communist ideology from Burma (during the cold war period) to a village of immigrants with drug problems and other illegal activities (after 1980s with the Chatchai government policy to transform the battlefield into a market place"). For Shan males who joined the insurgency movement, this bordering space represents the source of inspiration where the Shan nationalist project and the imagination of the Shan nation have been germinated. The inspiration has, however, oscillated between hope/success (which reached its peak during the rise of SURA in 1970s when the insurgency successfully united various arm forces and had its base secured in southern part of the Shan state), and despair/being betrayed (with the rise of Khun Sa into power who transformed the Shan army base into the world's largest heroin production site. In 1997, Khun Sa also ceased fire to the Burmese military and disbanded the Shan independence movement.). For Shan women, Tai Long village represents a liminal zone where diverse yet ambivalent identifications between traditional Shan women (confined by home and loyalty to males) and Shan national subjects (domestic role serves not only the male but also the nation) have been experienced.

It is suggested that borderland should be perceived not as analytically empty transitional zones but "as sites of creative cultural production (Rosaldo 1989:208). The bordering village of Tai Long represents not only a creative space of cultural reproduction but also a site for expression of ethno-nationalism that has been strongly suppressed in Burma. While Shan or Tai language has been forbidden from the formal education in Burma,¹ the teaching of Tai language in Tai Long village has become the significant means to foster cultural and ethnic continuity. Vernacular identification of the Shan against that of the Burmese and its domination has also been produced through various cultural practices and manifested in a number of cultural markers including dress, tattoo, national flag, play, dance, song, and music. These cultural practices while often expressed in the language of the past (i.e., homeland and the desire to return home, the pain of being betrayed and oppressed by the Burmese, and the Pang Long Agreement in 1947) serves as a source of utopian longings for the future (the Shan independent nation-state). The marginal place of borderland is thus a site for not only "the struggle of memory against forgetting" (Kundera cited in Dirlik 2001), but also the striving for existence and visibility.

For the stateless Shan people, living at the border has implied exclusion and rejection from any nation-state. Border as a marginal space has become a signifier of everything the center denies or represses. Yet, the margin as the Other can be turned into a condition of possible de-centering and re-centering. In the course of being denied an official recognition of their nationality,² some Shan women joined the Shan army in the struggle for an independent nation-state. It is through this space that the official vernacular imposed by both Burmese and Thai states have been challenged. The absence of vernacular identification has been made present by creating a new meaningful center, the social centrality of the Shan identity. As one Shan woman recounted the decision to participate in the Shan independence movement, " in Burma, we had been forced to accept the Burmese regime, to speak and live like a Burmese. In Thailand, we are not accepted as a member of the Thai society, but have been forced to be Burmese once again. I have then started to think about the nation to which I belong, the Shan nation".

The history of remaking of a vernacular space at the margin by the Shan women, is nevertheless, divergent and not without unease. Women participation in the nationalist project has been a liberating experience in which the right to bear arms equal to men has provided Shan women an opportunity to move from a "traditional" role of submissive wives and daughters to become "modern" or "new" women, the national soldiers. However, throughout the years of engagement with the national movement, Shan women have also come to realize that their role in the nationalist project is but a reproduction of the domestic sphere where home has been extended to the army. Whereas the idea Shan nation represents an imagined place that constantly serve as the powerful source of inspiration for Shan people, such nation is not located in a homogenous space but characterized by the traditional division of domestic and public spheres. Most women entered into the Shan army with assigned feminine/contributive roles of nurse, food provider and messenger. Similar to the position at home where the major decision making rests in the hand of male, women in the army took part in the project of nation-building that they never designed. At the same time, the male construction of the nation has also been shifting through time as a result of constant competitions and conflicts over control of power among male leaders within the army.

In challenging the unity of the nation, some Shan women have created an alternative space for imagining a new nation, the nation that centers on livelihood of people. The establishment of the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN) whose works aim to empower women and children represents an example of the attempt of the margin that embark on internal critiques of its own homogenization. As one member of SWAN states, "it would not be a good and healthy nation if members of such nation are often in constant pain, hunger, and displacement. If a nation is like a house, it should consist of firm structures and healthy residents." While SWAN continues to emphasize women and children issues as an alternative process of nation-building, their work has often been viewed by the male organization as trivial, domestic, and non-political. This perception has been well-received by women, as one SWAN member critically responds, "it is correct to say that SWAN is not a political organization if politics are defined only by the (male-dominated) arm struggle and constitution. But this by no means implies that our work is non-political". The politicization of women issues and women's attempt to break through and transcend the powerful female home/male nation dichotomy became fruitful when the Shan women's campaign against sexual violence in war and the report, "Licence to Rape," a documentary that compiles the cases of Burmese military's systematic use of rape as a weapon of war against civilian populations aimed to subjugate and terrorize ethnic minorities in Shan State received a worldwide attention from international communities. It was the first time in the Shan history that women issues shake the Burmese military regime when the UN fact-finding mission was sent to investigate the issue in the Shan State. It was also the first time in the history of the Shan independent movement when its male leader publicly acknowledged the significance of the domestic sphere as the powerful site of political contestation. The boundaries of the marginal space have then been redrawn to accommodate the multiple positions of the margins with an alternate mode of re-ordering vernacular identifications.

The tension in vernacular identifications in which gender relation plays a significant role in redefining marginal space can also be seen in the case of Jinuo women and their response to the shifting state policies towards the forestland in China's Xischuanbanna. The changing meanings of forest as a productive asset to a natural landscape with conservation and touristic values imposed by the Chinese state through the ban on logging and hunting and the restriction of shifting cultivation have resulted in the constraint of local mobility and the change in gender identification with place. Male domain of cultivation area has been constricted and fixed while their traditional relationship has been devalued and forced to change. Women sphere and their tradition role of food collector, however, has been commodified. As the non-timber forest product has increasingly become commercialized, the domain of customary goods exchange between the hill Jinuo and the lowland Dai has expanded to the lowland market where the Han Chinese are predominant. Unlike the Shan women whose existence is asserted through the attempt to disrupt the traditional home/nation dichotomy, Jinuo women's economic status is sought through the strengthening of women's attachment to forest, the commercialization of domestic sphere and women's role of food collector and provider, and women's attempt to connect/conjoin home and market relationship. Such attempt, however, has also been increasingly competed by Jinuo males as they move towards domestic arena of gathering of non-timber forest products.

The two case studies of the Shan women and their contesting identifications and the Jinuo women and the changing meanings of forest landscape and non-timber forest products are examples of how places interact with multi-dimensions of identifications in a complex way. While vernacular identifications are often associated with marginal spaces as powerful sites of negotiating and contesting the official domination of the center, margins are always differential. Vernacular geographies of identifications are therefore not only the product of the dialogue between margins and centers, but the process in which multiple margins interact or even confront one anther. In this sense, margins are thus strategic places where gender, class, and ethnic differences are negotiated. Lived experiences of women on the margins demonstrate the splitting of vernacular subjects and dissented discourses of minority identifications as they engage with multiple centers. It is in this complex and heterogeneous space that opens up the possibility for women to assume historical agency in their creation of an alternative and meaningful identifications.

Dirlik, Arif, 2001, "Placed-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place," in Prazniak, R. and A. Dirlik (eds.) Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC.

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (eds.) 1997, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham and London: Duke University Press

Hetherington, Kevin, 1998, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics, London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Lefebvre, Henri, 1991, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Rosaldo, Reneto, 1989, Culture and Truth: the Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press.

Shields, R., 1991, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London: Routledge.

1. Over the last few years, while the teaching of non-Burmese languages has continued to be prohibited in Burma, the Burmese government has allowed such activity to take place only at home and in the temple. But the content of the instruction is strictly controlled by the government while an official permission of the instruction is required. [Back to text.]

2.In Burma, Shan is recognized as an ethnic group and not a nationality. The Shan people, however, insist that Shan is a nation-state with a clear boundary but has been robbed their territory by the Burmese military regime who betrayed its promise to allow for the Shan independence as indicated in the Pang Long Agreement in 1947. In Thailand, the Shan exile is granted a status (as indicated in the identification card issued by the Ministry of Interior) of "a displaced person with Burmese nationality". Both official identifications deny the existence of Shan as people of their own nation. [Back to text.]