BDB Bertsolaritzaren datu-basea

Pan-Tai ethnicity in southwest China is created and sustained in large part through a network of minority temples, which function as schools, as political centers functioning below the radar, and as inns for traveling monks. This horizontal temple network once spanned the many fiercely independent local Tai states. Here, I argue, the weak warp of a multicentered, consensus-based political system was held together by a horizontal woof of mobile intellectuals. In the twentieth century, national expansion into Tai regions led not to the incorporation of these independent minorities into larger nations but rather to their marginalization. Efforts to secularize Tais, to make them into good communists or national citizens, in fact merely forced former Buddhist monks and local oral traditions underground, creating a radical sense of shared ethnic oppression around the borderlands. Today, these minority institutions are resurfacing in a new form, re-creating a historical geography and promoting new notions of ethnic identity.