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3 - Thailand: High Quality; China: Low Price”: “BanalCosmopolitanism” in Local Marketplaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2022

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Summary

Abstract

By establishing Luang Namtha's past and presentrole as a regionally central intersection insteadof a national periphery, this chapter examinesthis province's municipal marketplaces in theirspatial and material organization as sites wheretransnational commodity flows and tradeintermediaries, vendors, customers, and travellersfrom multi-ethnic and multi-national backgroundsintersect and interact—leading to what Iconceptualize as locally rooted “banalcosmopolitanism.” Adopting a practicalunderstanding of cosmopolitanism, I refer to theshopkeepers’ and traders’ capacity to conceive andmanoeuvre the overall transnational dimension oftheir local social and economic lives. Browsingthrough these marketplaces, this chapterdemonstrates that this cosmopolitan handling oftransnationality is, seemingly paradoxically,rooted in clear articulations and negotiations ofnational differences and boundaries.

Keywords: Luang Namtha; marketplace;banal cosmopolitanism; transnationality; nationaldifference

While the two previous chapters have pointed to Laosmall-scale traders’ highly mobile, strategic, andintentional ways of acting out largerrepresentations and realities of land-linkednessthrough different embodiments of smallness (inconspicuouslyblending in with landscapes of transnational Tai Lueethnicity or self-ironically deriding their nationalunderdevelopment and inferiority), this chapterspatially fixes those mobile practices in the localcontext of marketplaces in northern Laos. Zooming infrom frequent cross-border trade fair trips andtransnational commodity flows to concrete physicallocations, I will examine the marketplaces of LuangNamtha and Muang Sing towns (both in Luang Namthaprovince) as central nodes of an overall localcondition of everyday lived transnationalconnectedness—and consequently as sites of a certainvariety of cosmopolitanism where transnationalcommodity flows and trade intermediaries, vendors,customers, and travellers from multi-ethnic andmulti-national backgrounds intersect andinteract.

Parallel to the seemingly antithetic “peripheralcentrality” (Brown 2018) of Laos in general,nationally rather remote but regionally interlinked,Luang Namtha province is central to theYunnan–Laos–Thailand borderland economy. It is inLuang Namtha where the cross-border mobilities ofChinese trade fair attendees and traders of Thaifruits converge. This is best illustrated by Amnuay,my key informant in Luang Namtha, who in factcentrally facilitated my research by providingessential contacts that linked together these twocross-border trade activities. To put it bluntly,the reader would not have enjoyed the previouschapters if I had not met Amnuay—first in Jinghong,then in Luang Namtha.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos
Mastering Smallness
, pp. 141 - 170
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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