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Thailand's hill tribes have been the object of anthropological research, cultural tourism, and government intervention for a century, in large part because these groups are held to have preserved distinctive ethnic traditions despite their contacts with modern culture. Hjorleifur Jonsson rejects the conventional notion that the worlds of traditional peoples are being transformed or undone by the forces of modernity. Among the Mien people of northern Thailand he finds a complex highlander identity that has been shaped by a thousand years of interaction in a multiethnic contact zone. In Mien Relations, Jonsson suggests that as early as the thirteenth century, the growing influence of Chinese and Thai state authority had led to a peculiarly urban understanding of the hinterlands—the forests and the mountains—as an area beyond state control and the rhetoric of civilization. Mountain peoples became understood as a distinct social type, an idea elaborated by government classification systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their discovery by Western anthropologists is, he suggests, merely one more episode influencing Mien identity. Jonsson questions traditional ethnography's focus on fieldwork and personal observation—and its concomitant blindness to political manipulation and to historical formation. Throughout Mien Relations, he revisits long-neglected connections between China and Southeast Asia, combines ancient history and contemporary ethnography, engages with the serious politics of representation without abandoning the quest to write ethnographically about particular communities, and keeps state control in view without assuming its success or coherence.

For the Yao minority in rural southwest China, the bronze drum is a sacred heritage. Its sound aids the souls of deceased elders in reaching the ancestral land. When the Chinese government steps in to protect the heritage, the life of the bronze drum takes on a new meaning and becomes an icon for tourist performances. Bang the Drum traces the path that heritage takes in a changing China.

Thailand's hill tribes have been the object of anthropological research, cultural tourism, and government intervention for a century, in large part because these groups are held to have preserved distinctive ethnic traditions despite their contacts.

As her father lay dying in a hospital bed, Fahm Saeyang and her siblings gathered around to watch over him. The family's tradition on many occasions, both big and small, was to record everything on video, and this was no exception. Her father's final words were about walking through the mountains in his home country of Thailand. After his death, Fahm grieved for the unfulfilled promise of her father's life.

Since 2007, the American Folklore Society has pursued a partnership project with the China Folklore Society. Diverse in activities and extensively participated in, the endeavor is known as the China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project. In this peer-reviewed report, one sub-project within this umbrella effort is reviewed. The Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies sub-project continued the project's established exchange practices and added a program of material culture and heritage studies research.

This film is an intimate and caring look at the Yiu Mien, Southeast Asian refugees who originally settled in the Pacific Northwest. In their ancient society in the mountains of Laos, this hill tribe had no electricity, cars, or any other twentieth century technology. Their involvement with the CIA during the Vietnam War forced the Mien to lose their homeland. Coming here, they were catapulted from one century into another. Moving Mountains dramatically portrays a people caught between two worlds. Through the words of the elders and rare archival footage of the Mien in their mountain homeland, their ancient culture is brought to light. Moving Mountains vividly portrays the complex realities of adapting to American life with its shopping malls, freeways, and apartment living.