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The experiences of migration, exile, refugees and diasporic communities all suggest that nostalgia can be employed as a strategic resource to re-appropriate and forge new identities in the face of globalising dislocations from place. 'Exile is the nursery of nationality', as Anderson (1994) quotes Acton as saying. In this context, David Parkin (1998) points out that anthropologists 'can no longer assume that the people they study see themselves as attached to a particular, bounded locality', as in colonial ethnography which tended to depict territorially distinct peoples in homogeneous locations clearly bounded one from another in a way which facilitated ease of administration (the 'simplifications' of the state talked of by Scott, 1998). Yet real life has never actually been like this, as Parkin (1998) notes; there have almost never been autonomous communities perfectly isolable from one another, there has always been movement of peoples across boundaries and borders, and globalisation too has a long pre-capitalist, imperial history, as Friedman (1999) also notes. Nor in my opinion is the experience of the imaginative reconstitution of place so clearly linked either with the modern or post-modern, although it is often assumed to be.21 We have always constructed 'simulated worlds', admits Iain Chambers (1994); what is really new is the awareness of taking part in a global network of other and similar peoples. The experience of deterritorialisation is however a dislocation of place, and what we find here, for the Hmong as for many other dispersed or fragmented communities, is the use of nostalgia to reconstruct the past - and the nostalgic construction of place.
Louisa Schein (1998) and myself (1996) have both documented the returns of overseas Hmong, settled after the conflicts of Indochina as refugees in Western countries like France, the US, or Australia, to revisit their immediate homelands in South East Asia, and the imaginary homelands of their ancestors in Southwest China. A Hmong friend of mine in Chiangmai, who has lived all his life in an urban environment, makes a point of bringing his children every year to visit his wife's parents in their rural village, so that they should remember where the Hmong came from and what it is to be really Hmong. It is for similar reasons that some of those who are able to afford to do so return with their families for extraordinary, emotional homecomings which I have witnessed in Hmong homes in Laos and in Thailand, and the same happens, although on a smaller and less public scale, in Vietnam.
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The experiences of migration, exile, refugees and diasporic communities all suggest that nostalgia can be employed as a strategic resource to re-appropriate and forge new identities in the face of globaliszing dislocations from place. Exile is the nursery of nationality', as Anderson (1994) quotes Acton as saying. In this context, David Parkin (1998) points that anthropologists 'can no longer assume that the people they study see themselves as attached to a particular, bounded locality', as in colonial ethnography which tended to depict territorially distinct peoples in homogeneous locations clearly bounded one from another in a way which facilitated ease of administration (the 'simplifications' of the state talked of by Scott, 1998). Yet real life has never actually been like this, as Parkin (1998) notes; there have almost never been autonomous communities perfectly isolable from one another, there has always been movement of peoples across bound- aries and borders, and globalisation too has a long pre-capitalist, impe- rial history, as Friedman (1999) also notes. Nor in my opinion is the experience of the imaginative reconstitution of place so clearly linked either with the modern or post-modern, although it is often assumed to be.21 We have always constructed simulated worlds', admits Iain Cham- bers (1994); what is really new is the awareness of taking part in a global network of other and similar peoples. The experience of deterritorialisation is however a dislocation of place, and what we find here, for the Hmong as for many other dispersed or fragmented communities, is the use of nostalgia to reconstruct the past - and the nostalgic construction of place.
Louisa Schein (1998) and myself (1996) have both documented the returns of overseas Hmong, settled after the conflicts of Indochina as refugees in Western countries like France, the US, or Australia, to revisit their immediate homelands in South East Asia, and the imagi- nary homelands of their ancestors in Southwest China. A Hmong friend of mine in Chiangmai, who has lived all his life in an urban environment, makes a point of bringing his children every year to visit his wife's parents in their rural village, so that they should remember where the Hmong came from and what it is to be really Hmong. It is for similar reasons that some of those who are able to afford to do so return with their families for extraordinary, emotional homecomings which I have witnessed in Hmong homes in Laos and in Thailand, and the same happens, although on a smaller and less public scale, in Vietnam.
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