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in this sense therefore does NOT mean it is impossible to 'go home again', as Chambers (1994) maintained (cf. Mathews 2000). Homes, whether imagined or remembered, are physically being returned to and are being transformed through these nostalgic homecomings."
I have seen something of this process occurring with the Hmong, in Thailand and Laos and China, and the transformations it has wrought on local senses of identity. I recall a sophisticated Hmong tourist from California in Chiangmai, North Thailand, telling me how he had insisted on wearing a suit and tie to address a meeting at his wife's brother's village despite his brother-in-law's pleas not to do so; it had felt very wrong to him not to do so.
27
But local senses of Hmong community, both in Thailand and Laos, have been severely disrupted by some aspects of these return visits. A Hmong group in Chiangmai expressed their alarm at the behaviour of some American Hmong, who made love to local young Hmong girls at the New Year, the traditional time for a certain licence of courtship practices with a view to eventual marriage, and disappointing them with false promises of marriage and a new life in the West before disappearing back to their American families. Feelings became violent about this behaviour at a time of increasing fears of the spread of HIV/AIDS, and some of the Hmong who had complained received anonymous death threats.2 In China too there have been cases of Hmong expelled for courting several young girls in different villages at the same time.
While there is certainly the sense of belonging to a much wider, expanded Hmong community, in a global sense, and a great longing expressed both by many overseas Hmong and local Hmong for the Hmong community to reunite as a whole in a return to their original homeland, there is also an emerging awareness of class and regional differences among groups of Hmong settled elsewhere or even within the same communities, which has paradoxically added to an increased sense of the importance of bonds of locality.
And indeed a resurgence of local power, and local identities, has been seen as one response to the forces of economic, political and cultural globalisation, even to the extent that those localities (‘homes') have been partially reconstituted, or re-constructed, through the powerful
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175
in this sense therefore does NOT mean it is impossible to 'go home again', as Chambers (1994) maintained (cf. Mathews 2000). Homes, whether imagined or remembered, are physically being returned to and are being transformed through these nostalgic homecomings."
I have seen something of this process occurring with the Hmong, in Thailand and Laos and China, and the transformations it has wrought on local senses of identity. I recall a sophisticated Hmong tourist from California in Chiangmai, North Thailand, telling me how he had in- sisted on wearing a suit and tie to address a meeting at his wife's brother's village despite his brother-in-law's pleas not to do so; it had felt very wrong to him not to do so.~
27
But local senses of Hmong community, both in Thailand and Laos, have been severely disrupted by some aspects of these return visits. A Hmong group in Chiangmai expressed their alarm at the behaviour of some American Hmong, who made love to local young Hmong girls at the New Year, the traditional time for a certain licence of courtship practices with a view to eventual marriage, and disappointing them with false promises of marriage and a new life in the West before dis- appearing back to their American families. Feelings became violent about this behaviour at a time of increasing fears of the spread of HIV/ AIDS, and some of the Hmong who had complained received anony- mous death threats.2 In China too there have been cases of Hmong expelled for courting several young girls in different villages at the same time.
While there is certainly the sense of belonging to a much wider, expanded Hmong community, in a global sense, and a great longing expressed both by many overseas Hmong and local Hmong for the Hmong community to reunite as a whole in a return to their original homeland, there is also an emerging awareness of class and regional differences among groups of Hmong settled elsewhere or even within the same communities, which has paradoxically added to an increased sense of the importance of bonds of locality.
And indeed a resurgence of local power, and local identities, has been seen as one response to the forces of economic, political and cul- tural globalisation, even to the extent that those localities (‘homes') have been partially reconstituted, or re-constructed, through the powerful
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