The ‘highland frontier’ between Yunnan and Myanmar is a zone around and across a border, but is much larger and more complex than a mere legal boundary. Sharp conflict and strong cooperation has occurred here, side by side, for centuries. Business, inter-marriage, and trade have stimulated cross-cultural communication and socio-economic development along this frontier. People have learned new languages, lived together, and made new kinds of societies along frontiers, inspiring new art, music, design, and styles. The frontier requires translations and invites interpretations. No frontiers could function without strong networks of cooperation. Whether on highland passes, over fast cold rivers in deep valleys, or across broad rice-growing plains, this Yunnan-Myanmar frontier was a place which compelled people to make transitions and to adapt.
Edmund Leach wrote a book in 1954 which became famous (Political Systems of Highland Burma), but he did not let us know much about what he learned during the 1940s, and he did not reveal how he learned about the highland frontier. His work had a profound effect on ethnology and ethnography. Using British and Myanmar frontier records, and the personal papers of Leach himself, I shall show what we can learn from this curious person, whose restless curiousity drew him along so many interesting (and dangerous) paths.
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中央研究院民族學研究所 敬邀
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