ABSTRACT
Community studies specialist Michael Peter Smith affirmed the importance of looking at the kind of multilocal grass roots political activism that takes place in transnational contexts. This chapter looks ethnographically at "identity exchanges" between Hmong and Miao across the Pacific. It seeks to use of "ethnographic" to be provocative, since the character of this kind of research is necessarily divergent from a conventional sense of ethnography. The chapter explores upon this issue of itinerant ethnography further after a brief introduction to Hmong-Miao transnationality. It also explores Hmong refugee production of homeland videos along with an array of other cultural practices out of which identity is being forged along with the reciprocal interests that US Hmong and Chinese Miao bring to their encounter. The chapter describes such interests in terms of the respective state constraints which may engender such maneuverings and explore the latter's significance for the notion of the post national.
