Gillogly 2008 Opium Power People Contemp Drug Probls

Contemporary Drug Problems 35/Winter 2008 679
Opium, power, people:

Anthropological understandings
of an opium interdiction
project in Thailand
BY KATHLEEN A. GILLOGLY
Opium interdiction projects have dominated Thai state interactions

with northern upland ethnic minority peoples since the 1970s. One
of these projects, the Sam Muen Highland Development Project
(SMHDP), had great success in ending opium production. This
success emerged out of the participation of the most peripheral
peoples in international drug markets, the producers. To understand
why Lisu villagers cooperated with the Project, I examine how state
power was realized through its practice in the village through the
Project. Lisu had tactics and strategies available to them. They
strategically adapted through household and kinship practices.
They tactically cooperated through the use of Project discourse and
the performance of cooperation. Participatory drug interdiction
was not just a “new tyranny”; it opened up new political processes
at the microlevel. However, Lisu villagers’ tactics for regaining
local power were constrained by the global processes of drug
control.
© 2009 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.
CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

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680 OPIUM, POWER, PEOPLE
Starting in the 1970s, development projects focusing on the

interdiction of opium production commenced throughout the
northern Thai highlands. Opium was designated as the root of
poverty, lawlessness, and environmental destruction; ending
opium production was seen as the panacea to social, econom-
ic, and political problems in the highlands. Ending opium cul-
tivation was seen as rational so it followed that success would
arise out of the technique of education and persuasion:
the Huai Thung Choa Project is taking some initial steps to break
the opium production chain. A parallel step was taken by persuasion
of two of the senior Lisu families of the immediately adjacent vil-
lage to attempt horticultural activities as a substitute for opium pro-
duction on a two-year trial basis. The objective here was to
convince influential Lisu that recourse to horticulture would pro-
vide a higher standard of living than their traditional form of swid-
den-subsistence agriculture supplemented by opium. Since [there
are] numerous middle men in the opium proportion of the profits.
[sic] for the poppy grower, potato production, given a direct mar-
keting system. [sic] can yield considerably higher profits. It is not
surprising that the first steps in this approach have succeeded
(Voraurai, Ives, & Messerli [1980] my emphasis).
Fifteen years after this report, opium interdiction in Thailand

was finally declared a success. The Office of Narcotics
Control Board (ONCB) claimed that the area devoted to
opium cultivation in Thailand had been reduced by 97%
(Renard, 2001, p. 36). While the validity of this figure is dis-
putable, there is no doubt that opium was no longer the base
of the agricultural economy it had been before the mid-1970s.
In over 3 years of research,1 the only poppies I saw were in
front of a former drug lord’s shack, planted for the edification
of tourists. I have seen more poppies in the front yards of
northern Illinois farm houses. It was a far cry from the days of
“poppies from horizon to horizon.” Upland minority villagers
vigorously declaimed the evils of poppy cultivation to visitors;
they kicked elderly “opium addicts” out of their villages; they
sent their sons to Army boot camps for “playing with the
pipe.”2 They were model cooperators.

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681
In 1990, one of the villages in the Sam Muen Highland

Development Project (SMHDP) declared itself drug-free. A
pact had been made between the SMHDP and the Lisu of
Revealed River Village: the SMHDP would convince the Third
Army to remove its soldiers if the village guaranteed that it
would police itself. Revealed River got rid of its addicts by
bringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant households to evict
their addicts or leave the village. As a drug-free village, sol-
diers were removed from the village. This “village-initiated”
policy was one of the capstones of drug interdiction in north-
western Thailand, pointed to with great pride by officials to
visitors and used as proof by SMHDP workers and villagers
that upland minority peoples were safe, loyal residents of the
mountains of northern Thailand. In fact, SMHDP officials in
Chiang Mai had recommended this village for fieldwork to me
because of their pride in its initiative and the fact that it was
perceived as safe for a single, foreign female to live in.
Why did the people of Revealed River take this action? The
explanation of SMHDP officials was that minority villagers
saw the evils of opium and recognized their obligations as res-
idents of Thailand. I heard another explanation from the Lisu
of Revealed River and Thai teachers posted in the village. For
several years previous to the beginning of my research, sol-
diers had been posted in villages in the area to guard against
opium trafficking and use. These soldiers—young, often
drunk, carrying guns—caused a lot of trouble. There is a wide-
spread belief in Thailand that sexual promiscuity is culturally
acceptable among all of the upland minority peoples, and that
ethnic minority women are sexually available; they could not
be persuaded otherwise. The women of Revealed River and
the Thai teachers all told me of how the evening literacy class-
es for women had ground to a halt when the soldiers were in
the village because they came to the school and harassed the
women; conflict arose in other villages as soldiers flirted with
young wives. Declaring themselves drug-free was a tactic to
remove the daily presence of soldiers from their village.

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This dramatic example of participation in a drug interdiction

project illustrates the inner workings of opium control in
northern Thailand. I have written elsewhere of the institu-
tional structures and techniques of the implementation of
opium control and watershed preservation (Tan-Kim-Yong,
Limchoowong, & Gillogly 1994; Gillogly, 2004; see also
Renard, 2001). Developers took an instrumental view, focus-
ing on goals, implementations, and institutions of narcotics
control projects as their objects of analysis. The people who
stopped production were often invisible—categorized as
cooperators or noncooperators, but with little consideration of
their agency in choosing (more or less voluntarily) to stop
growing opium poppy. In fact, the meanings of development
were produced and negotiated in practice, with different sig-
nificance for the villagers and development officials (cf.
Mosse & Lewis, 2006, p. 9). This article queries the specific
effects of opium interdiction on local people and their role in
narcotics control. Participation cannot be taken at face value
as only the triumph of enlightened methods leading to
rational cooperation. In this article, I will analyze the social
processes and meanings of opium interdiction policy in
northern Thailand through examination of the strategies and
tactics of Lisu villagers in a Thai/UN opium control project. I
discuss Lisu strategic adaptation to the end of the opium
economy through transformation of their social structures, the
discourses that legitimated opium interdiction as national
development, and the ways in which Lisu tactically cooper-
ated in this participatory development program. A key point
is that Lisu did have tactics and strategies available to them.
Despite clear elements of subjection and discipline in the
ways in which this participatory development was carried out,
the end results were not predetermined because development
also opened up opportunities for action in these new contexts
(Williams, 2004). Opium interdiction wrought profound
changes to life in the mountains.

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Opium in Lisu life: Social transformations

past and present
The Lisu are one of six ethnic minority peoples in northern

Thailand. A Tibeto-Burman speaking group originally distrib-
uted along the Sino-Tibetan border, the Lisu migrated from
China via northern Burma starting about 110 years ago, com-
ing into Thailand, as did the Hmong, Lahu, Akha and Mien,
as migratory swiddeners who grew food crops and opium as a
cash crop. After the end of World War II, coinciding with
U.S. concerns with Thai border security in the early 1950s
(see Bowie, 1997), these upland minorities became identified
primarily as opium growers on the margins of the Thai
nation-state, categorized in Thai political discourse as
socially and spatially dangerous people. But this adaptation
was historically contingent. Lisu were not always opium
growers; rather, opium production became entrenched in their
social and agricultural adaptations in the period from the
mid-19th century to the early 20th century. Thus, a histori-
cally specific social and economic form was concretized in
the drug policy of Thailand.
This social form of southern Lisu3 society arose out of a num-

ber of related and congruent factors that made opium a
widely desired and easily saleable crop. Salient factors
included: the rise of British mercantile colonialism in the
wake of the Muslim Uprisings in Yunnan in the mid-19th cen-
tury; the destruction of traditional trade relations among
Tibet, Yunnan, Beijing, on into India, Burma, and south-
wards; the push of the Chinese Empire into western Yunnan;
and the growth of opium addiction in China and parts of
Southeast Asia where Chinese laborers worked (see J. Ander-
son, 1871; B. O’G. Anderson, 1993; Baber, 1882; Bello,
2005; Davies, 1909; Hall, 1974; Scott, 1981; Scott & Hardi-
man, 1983, vol. 1; Scott & Hardiman, 1983, vol. 2; Walker,
1991; Booth, 1996; Meyer & Parssinen, 1998; Trocki, 1999;
Hill, 2001; Gillogly, 2006).

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Opium as a cash crop heightened expression of particular fea-

tures of Lisu social structures over others. Lisu society in
northern montane Southeast Asia, where opium was the dom-
inant cash crop, was marked by migration, early marriage,
cognatic kinship,4 allegiance groups5 that cross-cut kin lines,
and a lack of stable village authority structures. This was
associated with key cultural principles of household auton-
omy and the seeking of “repute” (Lisu: myi 3-do 5). 6 Opium
facilitated changes in economic relations resulting in altered
social dynamics, leading Lisu households to choose to seek
new, relatively open lands for settlement on the margins of
the nascent Thai state,7 and their problematization as opium-
growing peoples. Opium was deeply imbricated into Lisu life
in northern Thailand, both in terms of the social structure that
evolved out of it and in terms of global/local relations.
Opium introduced a new and relatively stable source of

wealth, storable and portable either on its own or converted
into silver, granting small scale upland peasants a great deal
of autonomy regarding when and where to sell their crop.
Significantly, opium was ecologically suitable to mountain
soils, so it opened up economic and ecological niches that
had previously been unusable by humans. It could be grown
anywhere; it was very high value per unit of weight; mer-
chants came to the village to buy it. It gave households a
cushion of safety for buying food, land, and labor when
establishing themselves in new locations. In short, opium
increased and diversified the household subsistence portfolio,
making it more stable. This appears to have resulted in both
population increase and migration southwards in the late 19th
century (Davies, 1909; Hertz, 1912; Butterfield, 1920, pp. 77-
81, quoted in Renard, 1996; Enriquez, 1921; Fraser, 1922;
Renard, 1996, p. 35; Scott & Hardiman, 1983, vol. 1; Scott &
Hardiman, 1983, vol. 2). Opium increased the carrying capac-
ity of the environment for uplanders in northern montane
Southeast Asia. This increase in carrying capacity occurred in
large part because by producing a cash crop that was in high
demand elsewhere in affluent parts of the world, uplanders

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685
received wealth that could be used to subsidize their own sub-

sistence (e.g., Jonsson, 1996b; Gillogly, 2006). A population
of this size would have been nearly unable to live in the high
mountains of northern Southeast Asia without recourse to
opium as a cash crop.8
In addition, Thailand, like northern Burma under British rule

and western Yunnan before the extension of Chinese adminis-
tration, would have been familiar to Lisu at that time as a
place-in-between, at the edges of state power, like the Shan
States (Maule, 2002; Tagliacozzo, 2004); such regions had
been administered indirectly, creating places accessible to
markets but with little government control beyond peace-
keeping, which allowed free trade. This is key to understand-
ing Lisu strategies in dealing with increased Thai control, as
Lisu cultural values of autonomy had found full expression in
this political and economic setting.
The emergence of pervasive and effective interdiction of

opium production in northern Thailand brought about a fun-
damental shift in agricultural strategies. Kinship was a key
element in Lisu strategies. Lisu cultural ideology valorized
patrilineal relationships and enacted patrilineal relations in
ancestor rituals, but the value placed on age hierarchy, senior-
ity, and patrilineality was accompanied by a high value
placed on autonomy and the value of repute. Expression of
each particular set of values depended on the economic and
social resources available to people. The wealth attained from
opium, along with open lands and access to cheap labor for
this labor intensive crop, had allowed new households auton-
omy from parental households so that newly established Lisu
households could settle patrilocally, uxorilocally, or neolo-
cally with more distant kin, especially since the main con-
straint in this system was labor (more labor meant more
wealth since land was an open access resource). As a result,
patrilineages were dispersed across the landscape.
Opium interdiction fundamentally transformed social rela-

tions. The end of opium cultivation meant that households

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needed to invest in different enterprises, usually cash crops

that required more land. These crops also required better land
with access to water; capital for planting materials, fertilizer,
and pesticides for the new crops; and more permanent access
to land for long-term crops such as fruit trees and coffee
plants. Finally, households needed access to trucks and
motorcycles as well as access to passable roads in order to
transport their produce to lowland Thai markets because
traders no longer came to the village. People strategized on
the most minute local level, in marriage practices, household
structure, and interhousehold relations. Some of the most
immediate changes took place in marriage practices and these
led to shifts in kinship structures. People held back on financ-
ing marriages (which required a payment of bridewealth) in
hopes of having a better year in the future.9 This resulted in
later age at first marriage because young men could not accu-
mulate bridewealth themselves by opening land and cultivat-
ing an opium field; they found themselves dependent on
parents to not only pay bridewealth but to provide land to him
and his bride. Yet households faced many other demands on
available capital (land, cattle, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides,
trucks, education) and waited to expend bridewealth, espe-
cially since women’s labor did not expand household wealth
as it once had. In some villages, rates of suicide among
young women have increased because of their shame at not
being married (Hutheesing, 1990, pp. 153-156, 168-171;
Hutheesing, 1994).
Most strikingly, patrilineages reemerged among Lisu as the

primary organizing feature of Lisu society. With greater
investments made in smaller amounts of land and the growing
power of the parental generation over their male children
there was a resurgence of patrilocal postmarital residence.
Land was held for a family’s male children and daughters
were told that they could no longer expect that they could live
with their natal family after marriage. This also meant that
the previous system, in which poorer households (often
younger households with many young children) allied them-

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687
selves with a local “big man” rather than patrilineal relatives

for better living conditions, ended. Only male patrilineal rela-
tives were allowed to use a lineage’s land.10
Much of the reemergence of patrilineality arose out of the

constant jockeying with the SMHDP for access to scarce
land. Ending opium cultivation required expansion of cultiva-
tion even as Thai forestry laws decreased land available for
cultivation. This was a point of juncture of Thai state agency
needs and Lisu household needs. SMHDP officials promoted
regulation of land use as part of its goal of developing a sus-
tainable and self-subsistent agricultural system by attempting
to allocate no more than 15 rai (2.4 hectares or 5.95 acres)
per family, officially to the male head of household, in keep-
ing with the formal ideology of the Thai state. However,
patrilineality was not imposed from without; it had been
inherent in Lisu cultural ideology. Opium had allowed the
expression of counterpractices such as autonomy and repute
to flourish over patrilineage and obedience to lineage elders.
Faced with restrictions in the means of making a living, Lisu
villagers used social resources at their disposal, in this case
patrilineal structures, that were congruent with the political
and economic conditions of the modern postopium world.
These were the internal strategies of adaptation. However,

opium interdiction also brought about specific tactical prac-
tices vis-à-vis agents of the Project and therefore of the Thai
state the Project represented.11 Given the economic and social
burdens of interdiction on these poor farmers, we need to
query why Lisu villagers in the SMHDP chose to cooperate
and adapt.
Policy and practice in an opium control project
Narcotics control programs, funded by the UN, the US, and

various bilateral programs with the Thai government, had
served as a main vehicle for Thai government control of the

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highlands since their inception in the early 1970s. As such,

nearly all areas of the northern Thai highlands had been
divided up and put under the control of various bilateral
Thai/international projects for opium control and watershed
restoration. Policy toward the highlands shifted over the
years, reflecting how the mountainous borderlands and ethnic
minority peoples there had been successively problematized
by international development agencies and the Thai govern-
ment. The three main paradigms of development were secu-
rity, narcotics control, and watershed conservation, the “three
evil sisters of development” in northern Thailand (Kesmanee
& McKinnon, 1986). Each paradigm was based on a unitary
discourse of development (cf. Ferguson, 1994; Lohmann,
1998) that labeled and categorized people in terms of how
development institutions construed them as a “problem,”
from the point of view of utility to the state in its moderniza-
tion programs (cf. Escobar, 1995, p. 110). These problemati-
zations reflected international concerns, for instance, U.S.
concerns about their own heroin epidemic consequent upon
the Indochinese War (McCoy, 1972), but were refracted
through national interests (Jackson, 2003a; Jackson, 2003b),
particularly Thai concerns about modernization and incorpo-
ration of the borderlands into the body of the Thai nation-
state (Winichakul, 1994; Weimer, 2005). Each problematization
created its own set of conflicts and contradictions (Kesmanee,
1994; Gillogly, 2004) but all functioned as vehicles to extend
state power. In this article, I focus primarily on the problema-
tization of opium cultivation with some reference to the later
dominant problematization, watershed conservation.
A brief The Thai government proclaimed the Opium Act in 1958

history of the under international pressure, but the first recorded instance of
Sam Muen organized antiopium programs in Thailand was in 1963 in the
Highland Five Year Plan of the Department of Public Welfare, which
Development suggested finding other occupations to replace opium cultiva-
Project tion (Tapp, 1979; Cooper, 1984, pp. 203-204; Renard, 1996).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis was almost purely
punitive, with the Army and Border Patrol Police destroying

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689
fields, arresting growers and traders, and evicting entire

minority communities. In many parts of northern Thailand,
this led to violence between Thai government officials and
local mountain minority people (see Saihoo, 1963; Keen,
1968; Hearn, 1974; Chirapanda, 1982; Tapp, 1986; Kammerer,
1988; Eudey, 1989; Pungprasert, 1989; Renard, 2001). The
Second National Economic Development Plan (1966-1971)
recommended coffee and tea as replacement crops (Tapp,
1979) as did the Thai/UN project for “Replacement of Opium
and Other Crops and the Development of Hill Tribes in
Northern Thailand” (cited in Sabhasri, 1978). At least 15
replacement crops were tried over the years, all driven by an
assumption of a technological solution to opium-growing—
finding the one perfect replacement crop that only necessi-
tated development of the markets. However, replacement
crops in northern Thailand often resulted in expansion of cul-
tivation as upland farmers attempted to both compete in low-
land markets and match the income previously generated
from opium; this brought about environmental degradation,
as did roads built to markets and the reduction of fallow peri-
ods with the shift to permanent agriculture (Renard, 1994;
Fox, Krummel, Yarnasarn, Ekasingh, & Podger 1995; Wang-
pakapattanawong, 2001; Coxhead, Kaosa-ard, & Phuang-
saichai, 2002; Ziegler, et al., 2004).
In reaction to these problems, integrated Highland Develop-

ment Projects (HDPs) became the model of upland develop-
ment starting in 1972 in selected areas of Chiang Mai and
Chiang Rai Provinces, although it was not until the mid-
1980s that a fairly large number of projects emerged from the
Highland Development Masterplan12 (Keen, 1972; Tapp, 1979).
The HDPs focused on social welfare rather than on punish-
ment as the means of control, seeking not only more effective
means of ending opium cultivation, but also increasing the
administrative control over local populations (Bhruksasri,
1989). The Sam Muen Highland Development Project was
one of the first HDPs. It began in the mid-1970s as a King’s
Project crop replacement program and evolved into an inte-

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grated development project in part to coordinate the range of

agencies involved in local development. It is a joint
UNDCP/Royal Thai Forest Department project. Significantly,
it developed its own unique philosophy and methodology
with the goal of creating a sustainable economy for upland
peoples. The story told me about the genesis of the project
was that the head of the SMHDP, a forester, faced frequent
violent conflict between Lisu villagers and forestry officials.
His attempt to reduce social disruption arising out of the col-
lapse of the opium economy by finding marketable crops to
replace opium resulted only in further deforestation and eco-
nomic decline. The project head had an epiphany, that the
core goal should be sustainable subsistence for uplanders,
and devised a Buddhist-based philosophy of self-sufficient
and sustainable development (discussed below under Terms
of Cooperation). The integrated approach to opium interdic-
tion included: an opium replacement program; road building
to improve access to legal markets; “mountain” schools with
specialized curricula for upland minority peoples; and a range
of other social services, depending on the locale and the Thai
government department and bilateral partners involved. This
philosophy joined together the streams of international trends
toward integrated development (Escobar, 1995, pp. 106, 170);
Thai government concepts of zonally integrated development
(Keen, 1972; Tapp, 1979. pp. 6-7, 40-43) espoused in the Third
National Economic Development Plan (1972–1976) and the
Second Phase of the Thai/UN Program (1979–1983); along
with middle class popular discourse on Buddhism and com-
munity (Nartsupha, 1991; Nartsupha, 1984, 1999; Connors,
2002); and the growing interest of urban Thai in forests and
‘natural’ spaces (Stott, 1991; Jonsson, 1996a).
Evaluating a The SMHDP was widely considered a success as measured

successful by the reduction of opium produced, increase of forest cover
project (Tan-Kim-Yong et al., 1994), and decrease in violence in
SMHDP controlled areas; it was made the template for the
Accelerated Watershed Development (Raengrat Kaan Funfuu
Paa Ton Nam) program across all of the major watersheds of

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the northern region. The SMHDP’s success was perceived as

being due to community participation, carefully nurtured by
the planning of development experts, the architects of pro-
grams that created the rational conditions for cooperation,
according to SMHDP designers. In this view, successful
social technology was responsible for successful opium con-
trol, specifically the technique of Participatory Land Use
Planning (PLP), which was
an operational tool or process which creates conditions of frequent
communication and analytical discussions, hence strengthening local
organization by generating common understandings and shared
rights and responsibilities among project partners who carry out
activities that lead to the solving of local forest management prob-
lems and other related community problems. (Tan-Kim-Yong, 1992)
PLP was constructed as a form of conflict resolution applied

to issues of opium control and natural resource management.
3D maps served as the conduit for communication and the
joint development of land use plans by villagers and SMHDP
personnel, and a means of regularly revisiting issues of inter-
diction and appropriate replacement crops. As such, PLP was
intended to help ethnic minority villagers to gain a voice in
the process of land-use planning. This technique was congru-
ent with overall goals set for the SMHDP of not only ending
opium cultivation and swiddening, but also integrating uplan-
ders into the Thai nation, helping them to gain citizenship
and land rights, developing health, education and communi-
cations, and improving literacy and ability to speak Thai. The
work of PLP in the SMHDP has since been cited frequently
by local researchers, the United Nations Drugs Control Pro-
gram (UNDCP), Office of Narcotics Control Board (Thai-
land), and the Royal Forest Department as having fulfilled its
goals, and PLP has now been labeled the “traditional” form
of land-use planning in Thailand (Kaosa-ard, 2000; Straub ¶
Ronnås, 2002). Here was a successful opium control project
with a significant community participation component. 13
Because local people were involved in planning, they had a
stake in enforcing land-use plans that they themselves had

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helped to develop. Cooperation was seen as arising out of an

effective form of social technology. It was a simple and ele-
gant solution to complex, many-layered problems of resource
management, ethnic and class divisions, and international
policy. The unquestioned popularity of this technique went
beyond quantifiable success rates. Much was unexamined
because the SMHDP was congruent with other concerns, such
as political trends toward decentralization. Received interpre-
tations of the success of the Project are not inaccurate, but
they are incomplete.
Next, I will examine how the paradigms of development and

modernization undercut examination of essential components
for understanding the active cooperation of ethnic minority
villagers with the SMHDP. The meanings of Lisu participation
were made invisible by its success (Mosse & Lewis, 2006,
p. 15); we must, therefore, understand Lisu interests as they
constructed them, as well as how the Project employed them.
The terms of cooperation
To understand cooperation, we need also to keep in mind the

power of the state, the ways in which it has penetrated the
village and the villagers’ lives, enveloping them in a grid of
state power that defined the tactics possible to them. Govern-
ment intervention and administration under the Thai bureau-
cratic structure had intensified and accelerated by 1982 and,
by the mid-1990s, representatives of the Thai state were per-
vasive in the life of Revealed River Village. The state had
penetrated the village on many levels and villagers’
anonymity and autonomy were lost (Bhruksasri, 1989). The
power of the Thai state was the power of Thai people to enter
villages for official or personal purposes at any time, even
ignoring cultural boundaries in Lisu rituals (such as at Lisu
New Year or the First Fruits); to post teachers and military as
residents in the village, placing Lisu villagers under the con-
stant gaze of the state; for forestry officials to walk into

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693
homes at any time to berate a man in front of his wife, chil-

dren, and friends for opening a new field. Below, I will out-
line the cultural frameworks or discourses by which Thai
policy defined the development of upland minority peoples.
Lisu had to learn these modes of discourse in order to earn
legitimacy in the eyes of the Thai who had power over them.
Perceptions Uplanders have been defined as a significant problem in

of upland Thailand since the end of World War II, corresponding with
minorities the government’s solidifying concept of its own nationhood
in the based on borders (Winichakul, 1994). It also corresponded
Thai state with Thailand’s ongoing negotiations with the international
community as to its right to be identified as a member of the
fraternity of modern nations. Modernization once meant
excluding upland ethnic minorities; now it means incorporat-
ing them. Thai society at large has pronounced reactions to
the upland minorities, called “hill tribe” (chaaw khaw), as
strange and foreign people within Thai borders. Upland
minority peoples are, by definition, not citizens because they
are not Thai—they do not speak Thai, they do not practice
Buddhism. It can be difficult for them to acquire “blue cards”
(the equivalent of United States green cards) because their
households typically have not been allowed to register with
local district officials. Most of the land on which they live
has been taken over by the state, most recently by classifying
all mountain land as Class 1A Watershed Land on which no
one is allowed to settle; this makes all uplanders illegal squat-
ters by definition. This policy is reinforced by Thai cultural
perceptions of uplanders. Their tribal egalitarian social rela-
tions appear anarchic and disordered to Thai, who conceptu-
alize social relations in terms of their own frames of binary
hierarchy and patronage; hill tribes are believed to never
bathe; to be sexually promiscuous and I even heard my Thai
landlady in Chiang Mai tell a Lisu college student visiting me
that she had once believed uplanders to have tails. In short,
they were considered disordered and dangerous peoples. A
recent countervailing trend is to conflate all uplanders into a
“cute” role—several recent Thai TV serials have had a “hill

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tribe” character who filled the role of clown and Thai models
dress as naïve hill tribe girls for photo shoots (Chiwit Chiwaa
1993, pp. 20-29). Upland minorities are now familiar as
“exotics.” Wealthy urban Thai visit annually to make Bud-
dhist merit (tham bun) by providing charity to poor upland
villagers; Thai tourists seek out the Night Market and enter-
tainment locales in order to enjoy the performance of “hill
tribe-ness.”
Nevertheless, significant discourses in state policy of upland

minority peoples as a danger to the security of the nation by
their lack of loyalty (through lack of shared culture, language
and religion) and a danger to the Thai state and the well-
being of the world through opium swiddening remained
firmly in place: they were seen as purveyors of dangerous
drugs and destroyers of the forest. It was the duty of upland
peoples to change, and young teachers or community organiz-
ers worked in the mountains to bring about this service to the
Thai nation. Thai validated their control over upland minority
peoples as their responsibility to guide uplanders comparable
to how older siblings guide younger siblings, in keeping with
the Thai cultural model of binary hierarchy and political lead-
ership (cf. Anbarasan, 2000, p. 48, for an interview with one
such Thai community organizer).
Discourses of Development discourses are an extremely powerful form of

development control because they define both the “problem” and methods
to achieve its solution. Discourses are totalizing and their
logic cannot be reduced to an objective causality. That is, the
discourse sets up a relationship between the problem and the
solution that exists even if the specific objective elements
change (Escobar, 1995, pp. 42-43). These discourses, not the
actual or objective existence of poor minority people, shaped
the development planning. The discourse of development cre-
ates a space in which only certain things can be said or even
imagined; policy is structured and problems constructed so
that policy is seen as practice and information that might
question development models is not available for examination

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695
(Appadurai, 1996, pp. 114-135). It is a process through which

the social reality imagined by the developers is brought into
being (Ferguson 1994).
From the point of view of Thai national development (kaan

phatanaa phrachaat), the upland minorities were marked as
having primitive economies in which they subsisted by cut-
ting down “pristine” forests to plant a poisonous drug, opium.
Drug interdiction contained multiplicity of meanings, or
polyvalence (Turner, 1967, p. 54). It was conceptualized as
nation building and also as a move toward the idealized “suf-
ficiency economy”(as it has been recently termed by the King
of Thailand). 14 National development was reframed from
Westernization to Thai-style development according to a
model of romanticized self-subsistence and abstemiousness
in which agriculture and village life exist without external
social and economic linkages, isolated, and self-regulated
(Nartsupha, 1991; Nartsupha, 1984, 1999). At the core of this
were Buddhist values of taking the “middle path” (the Fourth
Noble Truth of Buddhism [Bercholz & Kohn 1993], a path of
moderation and restraint [cf. Sivaraksa, 1992, pp. 102-106])
arising out of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and particu-
larly renunciation and right livelihood (Bercholz & Kohn,
1993). Opium production came to be seen as iconic of desire,
greed, and lack of community. Thus, opium control was not
only about stopping opium cultivation, but about being good
citizens without the status of citizenship, good stewards of
the land without the legal right to live on the land, and
renouncing profit-making inherent in growing a cash crop
without the means to make legal livelihood.
Project personnel frequently carried out a discourse of sacri-

fice for the good of the nation in their interactions with Lisu
villagers. At a 1993 meeting of Project personnel and vil-
lagers, I counted 45 different uses of the word sia-sala (sacri-
fice) in 1 hour by Thai speakers explaining to villagers why
they had to suffer economic hardships in order to help the
Thai nation. SMHDP officials recognized the hardships their

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Lisu “charges” endured and, in other situations, Thai officials

pointed to themselves as examples of self-sacrifice to be
emulated because they had left the comforts of their urban
homes in order to help poor mountain peoples.15 This equated
the position of Thai officials and Lisu villagers and required
that Lisu demonstrate their own sacrifices to SMHDP offi-
cials and other Thai villagers. Lisu did this through participa-
tion in the Project.
Political and community activists emphasized participation, but

participation according to middle-class Thai mores. In this
view, people like the Lisu are not rational, educated, or high-
minded enough to have an opposing voice in even local politi-
cal processes (including negotiations for land management
plans to end opium cultivation) except under the right guidance
toward Thai standards. In effect, a stable society was seen as
depending on a hierarchical centralized leadership. The role of
the people is to be self-disciplined and well-ordered citizens,
and to that end they are endlessly educated on their proper role
in the state (Connors, 2002). The role of the villagers of
Revealed River was to follow the model of the wise leaders of
the SMHDP and, yet, because of the character of these defini-
tions of modernity and citizenship, the Lisu could not really be
citizens of Thailand. In the end, this discourse was oriented
toward the closer regulation of Revealed River by the discipli-
nary mechanisms of the state (McKinnon, 2007).
This discourse of participation illuminates the nature of the

profound satisfaction of policymakers with PLP in decreasing
opium cultivation. There was participation in the original
applications of PLP, but as it was extended across northern
Thailand the elements of listening to and taking into account
the interests of upland villagers were filtered out in favor of
satellite photos and GIS (Geographic Importation Systems).
Why, then, this emphasis on the participatory nature of the
Project’s prize program? It legitimated Thai forms of democ-
racy in which the people acceded to the leadership, an argu-
ment of great political potency in the 1990s.

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697
Lisu agency—discourse, performance, and adaptation
I opened this article with an account of the declaration of

Running River as a drug-free village. The irony is that Lisu
typically did not use opium; addiction was rarely a social
problem even at the height of the opium economy. In fact,
one of the ethnic identifiers of being Lisu was to not smoke
opium; they defined smoking opium as Chinese behavior (cf.
Zheng, 2005). If addicts were so rare, then who was kicked
out of the villages? Most of the “addicts” were elderly men
and women who used opium medicinally to alleviate the pain
of arthritis. Opium use allowed them to continue as produc-
tive members of their households, doing light work, cooking,
and helping with child care. Labeled as drug abusers, they
were sent to live with other children in other villages or entire
households with their “addict” kin were moved to new vil-
lages, 16 and some elderly were moved to huts in the forest
where their children visited them several times a week to
bring them food. The village also banned trekkers as they
were known for smoking opium as part of their tours in the
Golden Triangle (cf. Leepreecha, 1997); a number of house-
holds gave up considerable income from the tourist trade as a
result. Through these actions Revealed River won the appro-
bation of Thai officials, giving villagers grounds for negotiat-
ing more secure land tenure and less onerous monitoring of
their daily behavior. They had regained a certain degree of
autonomy over their lives.
However, Lisu autonomy was illusory. Most evident was a

ceaseless round of hosting visitors and going to SMHDP
meetings and holiday festivities. Village leaders17 frequently
complained to me that meetings interfered with agricultural
activities and marketing. Holiday festivities sometimes con-
flicted with local village and lineage festivals as well. For
instance, Thai Mother’s Day sometimes conflicted with First
Fruits, a Lisu day of ritual presentations to the household
ancestors, and the SMHDP usually added a day to the Lisu
New Year rituals by holding a celebration and dam hua 18

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ritual at the local SMHDP center. Nevertheless, Lisu tacti-

cally complied with the meeting requirements of the Project
by sending at least one household member to each event.
Attendance demonstrated Lisu commitment to the plan of
modernization through ending opium cultivation. Lisu vil-
lagers learned the forms of discourse typical of SMHDP and
perfected their performance of participation at meetings by
talking of the superiority of their new agricultural economy,
the need for sustainability, and giving up the profit of culti-
vating opium.
I also had the opportunity to observe Lisu villagers “back-

stage” (Goffman, 1959; Kothari, 2001) as they discussed
what the latest policy meant and tactically dealt with the
changing conditions of daily life in the mountains under the
SMHDP. For example, my team visited my research site
while carrying out an evaluation of PLP for the UNDCP Pro-
jects Coordination Office (Northern Thailand). While inter-
viewing the three leaders of the village, they told us about
how bad it is to grow opium, that they were not seeking com-
mercial gain and “conspicuous consumption” anymore, but
now sought sustainable subsistence as advocated by the Pro-
ject. Near the end of the interview, as my colleague turned
away to make notes, they said to me in an aside, “How are we
doing, Ajarn [Professor]? Is it good?” This was a consciously
wrought performance.
There was also an intravillage discourse of cooperation in

which leaders and farmers in good standing with the Project
exhorted the village. “We must change our ways. We must
follow the Project’s advice. If we don’t, we’ll lose our land,
they won’t respect us, they’ll think of us as bad people, as
uncivilized. We have to progress,” they exclaimed when oth-
ers complained of the onerous regulations against opium,
police harassment, the limits on land use, and in general
bemoaned the poverty that had beset them since the end of
opium cultivation.

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699
This is not to say that there was no everyday resistance. Daily

resistance occurred through refusing to repair roads on the
grounds that officials drove in more often than villagers, sur-
reptitiously opening new fields, cultivating mushrooms in the
forest, or (more pertinently) cultivating opium fields in
Burma or small fields in isolated places around northern
Thailand (the “balloon effect” of drug interdiction). While
Project personnel often suspected Lisu of acts of resistance
such as setting forest fires, large-scale opium planting within
SMHDP borders, or involvement in the drug trade (officials
assumed that any late night activity was evidence of drug
trafficking), by and large villagers made every effort to pub-
licly and vocally adhere to the standards of the Project. Nev-
ertheless, outright rebellion was rare and I never saw a Lisu
villager directly and publicly confront an SMHDP official.
The Lisu villagers’ energies were more often put into private
negotiations with individual Project officials to gain access to
land, seeds, fertilizer, rights to graze cattle,19 and help in navi-
gating the government bureaucracy. That is, they treated Pro-
ject personnel as sponsors, much in keeping with the Thai
political style of patronage.
There was an implied contract in their good performance.

People expected that if they cooperated with the Project they
would be granted land security. There was plenty of evidence
of the precarious position they were in—no legal land rights,
living well beyond the carrying capacity of the land, seeing
people in other villages evicted and in general how grindingly
poor other villages had become in the last decade. Yet they
believed that the SMHDP kept things from being worse. The
Lisu of Revealed River had land; their girls were in the vil-
lage, not in the lowlands in the sex industry; their boys were
in the village, not heroin-addicted drug mules for some drug
warlord in Burma. From this perspective, the Project was
their best hope for stability, and so they cooperated.
SMHDP personnel sometimes made this trade-off very

explicit. At a meeting shortly after the Black May Massacre

09-09-2009 Rev.
in 1992, 20 one SMHDP extension agent exhorted: “If you

don’t do this, the soldiers will come up here, and they’ll
shoot first! Only we can protect you, and that depends on you
following this plan [to cease opium cultivation]!” Most Lisu
had had enough personal experience of the violence of sol-
diers and the venality of the police that they feared the conse-
quences if they each individually lost the support of patrons
in the Project. Everyone knew someone in jail in Chiang Mai
or Bangkok for purported opium cultivation or trafficking.
The villagers appeared to believe, furthermore, that the Pro-
ject would protect them from being evicted from their land as
had occurred widely in the uplands in the past and more
recently in the lowlands of northeastern Thailand (in 1992).21
I raised this case and others with villagers, but they insisted
that they had done everything the Project wanted—they were
drug-free!—and therefore had land security. In order to sur-
vive sans opium, farmers had made considerable investments
in their land by planting coffee, fruit trees, and other tree
crops that did not give return for several years. It seemed
illogical that they would make these investments in condi-
tions of land tenure insecurity. Yet they did so, and perhaps
there was no other rational course of action.
One way that actors with different interests worked together

is through polyvalence; when more than one meaning is
attached to the signifier, different interpretations can be sub-
sumed and conflated such that the opposing understandings
of different actors do not usually collide. Lisu tactically took
advantage of different meanings. An example of this was a
case of Thai redefinition of Lisu practices. Most Lisu villages
have an Old Grandfather’s Shrine established by the founding
Lisu lineage of the village. 22 Thai SMHDP personnel had
noted the location of Revealed River’s shrine at the peak of a
mountain and that, as sacred space, no cultivation took place
around it. They reinterpreted the practice as a form of water-
shed protection. There was no evidence that Lisu thought of
the shrine this way, but they did not dispute SMHDP claims
of indigenous wisdom when Thai Project personnel espoused

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701
it at meetings; they simply continued to carry out their semi-

annual rites of offering. Counterdiscourses existed in these
multiple meanings, particularly in gaps in understanding. The
Lisu accepted the benefits their “indigenous ecological wis-
dom” brought them, but did not otherwise alter their own
sense of meaning of or use of the shrine.
Meetings communicated not only adherence to the SMHDP

opium cessation plan, but also something among the partici-
pants other than what the organizers intended (cf. Steinberg
& Clark, 1999). Lisu adopted SMHDP development dis-
courses to reinterpret and own them. Antidrug officials
intended cooperation and that is what they saw, but for the
Lisu villagers cooperation was about affirmation of local
ownership of the process. One villager, who was regularly
invited to regional meetings to discuss opium replacement
and sustainable subsistence agriculture, began to make a habit
of managing the ritual showing of his garden. SMHDP offi-
cials resented this usurpation of their roles as “guides” to the
Project. A community organizer exclaimed “I taught it all to
him in the first place!” and complained about this villager’s
“arrogance.” This overstepped the community organizer’s
understanding of the interpersonal relationship of patronage
and went against the paradigm that Project workers worked
within, that they shared the travails of the upland minority
villagers in order to lead the way. They were older brothers,
not masters, and any implication that they controlled their
“younger brothers” was deeply resented, but the villagers
owed respect to their “older brothers” nonetheless. But by
demonstrating superior knowledge (and, privately, this farmer
insisted that most of the innovation in replacement crops had
been his own, not the Project’s), the farmer sought to make
legitimate claims to land and the right to autonomy.
Resistance more typically took the form of a counterdis-

course that appeared, on the surface, to adhere to the stan-
dards of the SMHDP. There was little open resistance by the
1990s, but there was a constant discourse of “freedom” (often

09-09-2009 Rev.
using the English word free or the Thai word issara) in vari-
ous contexts, and constant worry about what the future held.
The Lisu of Revealed River along with villagers of the Sam
Muen cluster in general perceived the SMHDP as patron and
opportunity, yet experienced their relations with staff as
restrictive and onerous, and they were constantly self-vigilant
to fulfill the ideals of the Project. We can see this as the Lisu
villagers’ counterdiscourse, by which they took control of the
conditions of their own lives within the parameters of the
world as it had become.
Conclusions
The SMHDP’s success in reducing opium production

emerged out of the active participation of the most peripheral
peoples in global drug markets, the producers, who cooper-
ated for complex reasons based on their own culturally-con-
structed strategies for household survival in the light of their
experience of the penetration of the Thai state into their daily
lives through this opium control project. To understand why
the Lisu of Revealed River cooperated with the SMHDP, we
need to look at power and its realization through practice in
the village. How and what this power expressed were func-
tions of a series of dynamic linkages between the Thai state
and global interests, and of the structure of Lisu society and
its interactions with a particular instance of Thai policy, the
SMHDP. Officers of the SMHDP were adamant about why
the Lisu cooperated—They had participation! They had a bet-
ter life than in the old days! And, by the standards of many
other upland minority villages, the Lisu of Revealed River
Village did have a better life. But they had little choice. Their
cooperation is understandable in the context of their everyday
experience of the power of the state. Lisu experienced the
global drug wars through the prisms of the interests of the
Thai nation-state to modernize and their own concerns with
autonomy.

09-09-2009 Rev.
703
It should not be judged from this that Lisu were simply cogs in
the wheels of the machinery of power. They took action and
cooperated for reasons that arose out of their own interests sep-
arate from those of the Project. Autonomy was a generative
principle of Lisu society in northern Thailand. Lisu sought
autonomy within the framework of possibilities constructed by
the SMHDP. By practicing Project policy, the Lisu of Revealed
River sought to regain a degree of autonomy within their own
village. They assessed, they manipulated, they took advantage
of opportunities to turn SMHDP policy and practice to their
own ends. This is why we cannot say that these Lisu cooper-
ated, therefore the technique of participatory development was
effective and examine participation no further. Rather, I have
shown how we need to analyze the agency of local actors such
as the Lisu and see the variety of ways in which they made use
of available resources within the terms of their own cultural
understandings. In this context, the SMHDP was a resource for
maintaining access to land, subsidies for opium replacement
crops, and shelter against other, more threatening arms of the
Thai state. The social relationships between Lisu villagers and
SMHDP workers were a key element of the practice of the Pro-
ject. Lisu strategically adapted to the end of the opium econ-
omy within the spheres of household and kinship relations
through marriage and patrilineage, where they had power. They
tactically cooperated through the use of Project discourse and
the performance of cooperation.
This is not to say that a program in which participation is a

key component is no better than the militaristic punishment
and eviction formerly typical in northern Thailand. Participa-
tion is not just “the new tyranny” (Cooke & Kothari, 2001).
Participatory opium control opened up new political
processes on the microlevel (Drydyk, 2005; McKinnon,
2007). By their participation, Lisu as former opium producers
validated Thai political culture both within Thailand and on
the global stage on which the drug wars were carried out.
SMHDP officials needed good outcomes (Kampe, 1997), and
this gave Lisu villagers a certain amount of power vis-à-vis

09-09-2009 Rev.
them (Tessier, et al., 2001); this put SMHDP officials in the

position of brokers for the Lisu (Mosse & Lewis, 2006) and
illustrates the dynamic linkages between policy and practice
(Lawrence, 2006). Participation is more than a tool for sub-
jection. It expanded possibilities for political action in an on-
going process of engagement (Williams, 2004) in which Lisu
were able to tactically structure some of the effects of opium
control in their piece of northern Thailand. The terms of par-
ticipation were heterogeneous, the intentionality of Lisu par-
ticipants in drug control multifaceted, and the understandings
of the Project by the actors involved polyvalent. This is
worthwhile to remember as international agencies apply par-
ticipatory integrated development to narcotics production
control in new settings around the world.
Notes 1. This article is based on a little over 2 years of field research from Jan-
uary 1992 to March 1994 as partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. in anthropol-
ogy. My main fieldwork took place in the village I call Revealed River,
one of a cluster of seven Lisu villages at the core of the Sam Muen
Highland Development Project. Using participant observation of vil-
lagers and Project personnel, archival research, and interviews of Thai
and foreign development officials and data from anthropological
research done in the late 1960s–1970s (Durrenberger, 1971; Dessaint,
1972) and the 1980s (Hutheesing, 1990), I studied transformations of
social structure of the Lisu upland ethnic minority as a result of the
cessation of opium swidden cultivation. Research funding was pro-
vided by a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship for Doctoral Dissertation
Research Abroad (Grant No. P022A-10068) and a Rackham Grant for
Dissertation Research (University of Michigan). At the end of my term
of field research, I was contracted by Dr. Gary Suwannarat of the
UNDCP Projects Coordination Office (Northern Thailand) in Chiang
Mai, Thailand, to evaluate the role of participatory land use planning
in natural resource management and narcotics interdiction. This
research was carried out from February to April 1994.
2. This is the practice of young unmarried men experimenting with
opium smoking. Not all boys tried it. It was a short period in their
life, ended by marriage when a young man began to establish his
own household. With the end of opium cultivation, boys sometimes
experimented with heroin, which more often led to addiction. With
later age at first marriage and more difficulties in establishing an
autonomous household, the rate of addiction among young men was
increasing.

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705
3. Lisu are divided into Black Lisu, generally in the far northwest of
Yunnan and southern Sichuan, but as far south as northern Burma;
the White Lisu, further east and south; and the Flowery Lisu or
southern Lisu, a more Sinified group found throughout southwestern
Yunnan, northern Burma, and into Thailand. Most of the Lisu in
Thailand are Flowery or southern Lisu. Each of these subgroups
were distinguished by different patterns of political and economic
relations with the Tibetan and Chinese states. For further details on
distributions and the construction of these ethnicities in the context
of local political economies, see Gillogly 2006, chap. 2.
4. Cognatic kinship is when descent is calculated through either or both
the mother’s or father’s side. North American kinship is cognatic.
Patrilineal kinship traces kinship only through the father’s and
father’s father’s side, and so on. North American society has vestiges
of patrilineality as evident in designation of surnames. In kinship
theory, the significance of and relationships between formal kinship
structures and people’s actual social relationships with kin have been
extensively debated and was at the core of this research. Uxorilocal
postmarital residence, mentioned later, is when the new couple set-
tles with the bride’s father and his family.
5. In the opium economy, Lisu grouped themselves together via alle-
giance groups more often than as patrilineal groups. The core of alle-
giance groups was a group of sisters, affines, or friends; or alliance
with a powerful man. The members of an allegiance group worked
together as allies in pursuit of mutual interests. Most commonly this
entailed exchange of agricultural labor, sharing of a rice mortar,
making liquor together, and depending on each other for emergency
needs. They also cooperated in rituals that allowed status display and
required extra-household labor (Dessaint, 1972).
6. Myi 3-do 5 is a significant generative principle in Lisu society that
organizes people’s goals, strategies, and their relations with each
other and their ancestors. Generative principles are the basic, unex-
amined, assumptions that guide behavior and constitute the ways
people implicitly evaluate their own and others’ behavior on the basis
of fundamental standards (Bourdieu, 1977). Myi 3-do 5 reflects the
logic of Lisu social relations. Myi 3-do 5 is generally translated as
“repute”: Lisu translate it into Thai as mii kiat, meaning to have honor,
face, fame, and especially repute as in to have or be imbued with
repute. Etically, it is comparable to what anthropologists call prestige.
7. Due to warfare and disease, many parts of northern Burma and north-
ern Thailand were greatly underpopulated (Hanks & Hanks, 2001;
Maule, 2002; Tagliacozzo, 2004).
8. Poor areas such as Kokang in Burma have long been made wealthy
by opium (Scott & Hardiman 1983, vol. 2, p. 466). Both historical
and recent bans on opium caused widespread famine as no other

09-09-2009 Rev.
crops grew as well in this high, steeply mountainous region. (See

Jagan, 2005; Kramer, 2005; Pathan, 2005; U Sein Kyi, 2006 for the
socioeconomic consequences of a recent opium ban in northern
Burma as an example.)
9. Anxious parents with young children constantly asked me when they
would be allowed to grow opium again, assuming that I had some
useful inside information about the Project’s plans and at New Year’s
dances the elders bemoaned boys’ and girls’ lack of opportunity to
marry.
10. In Revealed River, many of the families that left due to having an
opium user in their household went to join kin in places where they
thought land was still available. Many of these families were not
patrilineal kin of the two dominant patrilineages in the village and so
lacked political power to negotiate for more land. In addition, these
households tended to have a high ratio of young children to produc-
tive adults. That meant that these households were more dependent
on elderly resident grandparents who used opium for child care while
the parents worked their fields. In addition, these households were
less likely to have sufficient land in the future for their children due
to the restrictions on land ownership by the SMHDP in the Sam
Muen cluster. In other parts of northern Thailand, there are no proj-
ects, or the projects that exist are poorly managed and land is bought
and sold in these places, albeit not legally. Migrant families therefore
could buy land or work for people who had a lot of land. A growing
class of landless Lisu with no secure access to land arose in Chiang
Rai when these poor families sold what little land they had to
wealthier residents (Hutheesing, 1990). In addition, there is an
emerging trend toward rural urban migration. I met a group of Lisu
in Chiang Mai living off the Thai and foreign tourist trade near the
end of my fieldwork.
11. Here, I use tactics in the sense of Certeau to refer to those practices
vis-à-vis the dominant power, where people have no secure inde-
pendence, using ruses and opportunities to gain possibilities for
their own ends. “In short, a tactic is an art of the weak” (Certeau,
1984, p. 37). These are arts of resistance that do not directly resist (J.
C. Scott, 1985) but rather use the systems of power in their own
ways when possible. As opportunistic and private actions, they do
not “count”—they are outside the system and so do not appear to be
systematized (Certeau, 1984, pp. xvii, 38), they are practice (local)
rather than policy (universal), and thus made invisible. Certeau’s
distinction between tactics and strategies is useful in that it high-
lights differences in power available to different actors. However,
the distinction is too binary; it does not allow for recognition of the
ways in which action takes place in different niches of power, as
for instance, Lisu had power within their household and kinship
relations.

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707
12. Dr. Gary Suwannarat, personal communication September 24, 2002.

13. Extended throughout the north in the Accelerated Watershed Devel-
opment program, the original goals of PLP were distorted, serving a
nation integration function far more than a communication negotia-
tion process that gave villagers a voice. The extension privileged GIS
and satellite photos (“Don’t lie to us, we can see what you’re really
doing,” as one project officer said to a villager) and cut out the long-
term research element that had built relationships between commu-
nity developers and villagers (Puginier, 2001; Gillogly, 2002) and
potentially made PLP a tool of the science of discipline (Foucault,
1978), a panopticon on a regional scale (Foucault, 1975).
14. For more recent discussions of this idealized view of the Thai village
economy, see Sufficiency democracy in action on the New Mandala
Blog. http://rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/newmandala/2007/08/03/sufficiency
-democracy-in-actin/#comment-137003.
15. Mountain teachers, political liberals, similarly conceptualized Thai-
land as a place of unity, community, and nationhood for which the
ego had to be abandoned.
16. Five out of 48 households left the village in 1990–1991.
17. There were three key village leaders. Two were the senior males of
their patrilineages and one of those was the headman of the village;
they represented the main part of Lisu in the village. The third leader
represented the Yunnanese Chinese/Lisu in the village, and he led
that faction by virtue of his education and the force of his personal-
ity. However, Lisu society was egalitarian, so Lisu leaders had no
power over people to whom they were not related and any respected
older male in the village had a certain amount of authority in the vil-
lage. It should be noted that Yunnanese Chinese had lived in Lisu vil-
lages for decades and intermarried with Lisu. This leader’s mother
was Lisu, his father the son of a Chinese man and a Lisu wife; his
wife was of similar parentage. Being Yunnanese Chinese was more
of an ethnic identity than a reflection of objective bloodlines. He
identified as Chinese, but lived according to Lisu social rules in a
Lisu village, for instance, he participated in the Lisu village rituals.
18. Dam hua is a ritual in which young people pour water over the hands
of their elders and receive blessings in return, marking the mutual
obligations inherent in binary hierarchies. It is often performed by
members of an entourage for their patron. One year, the drug lord
Khun Sa in Burma held a dam hua to which most villages in the Sam
Muen cluster sent a representative, even though it conflicted with the
SMHDP New Year dam hua.
19. Cattle were an unspoken “replacement crop” in this part of northern
Thailand.

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20. Black May refers to the 1992 massacre of prodemocracy demonstra-

tors in Bangkok.
21. In this case, northeastern (Isaan) peasants were forcibly resettled
when a company with military backing took over their community
forest for a eucalyptus plantation.
22. This is a type of founder’s cult, found across Southeast Asia that ritu-
ally marks rights to the land (Tannenbaum & Kammerer, 2003).
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Contemporary Drug Problems 35/Winter 2008 679

Opium, power, people:

Opium interdiction projects have dominated Thai state interactions

© 2009 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

Starting in the 1970s, development projects focusing on the

Fifteen years after this report, opium interdiction in Thailand

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

In 1990, one of the villages in the Sam Muen Highland

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

This dramatic example of participation in a drug interdiction

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

Opium in Lisu life: Social transformations

The Lisu are one of six ethnic minority peoples in northern

This social form of southern Lisu3 society arose out of a num-

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

Opium as a cash crop heightened expression of particular fea-

Opium introduced a new and relatively stable source of

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

received wealth that could be used to subsidize their own sub-

In addition, Thailand, like northern Burma under British rule

The emergence of pervasive and effective interdiction of

Opium interdiction fundamentally transformed social rela-

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

needed to invest in different enterprises, usually cash crops

Most strikingly, patrilineages reemerged among Lisu as the

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

selves with a local “big man” rather than patrilineal relatives

Much of the reemergence of patrilineality arose out of the

These were the internal strategies of adaptation. However,

Policy and practice in an opium control project

Narcotics control programs, funded by the UN, the US, and

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

highlands since their inception in the early 1970s. As such,

A brief The Thai government proclaimed the Opium Act in 1958

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

fields, arresting growers and traders, and evicting entire

In reaction to these problems, integrated Highland Develop-

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

grated development project in part to coordinate the range of

Evaluating a The SMHDP was widely considered a success as measured

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

the northern region. The SMHDP’s success was perceived as

PLP was constructed as a form of conflict resolution applied

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

helped to develop. Cooperation was seen as arising out of an

Next, I will examine how the paradigms of development and

The terms of cooperation

To understand cooperation, we need also to keep in mind the

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

homes at any time to berate a man in front of his wife, chil-

Perceptions Uplanders have been defined as a significant problem in

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

Nevertheless, significant discourses in state policy of upland

Discourses of Development discourses are an extremely powerful form of

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

(Appadurai, 1996, pp. 114-135). It is a process through which

From the point of view of Thai national development (kaan

Project personnel frequently carried out a discourse of sacri-

CDP Winter 2008 article by: Gillogly

Lisu “charges” endured and, in other situations, Thai officials

Political and community activists emphasized participation, but

This discourse of participation illuminates the nature of the