ABSTRACT
Field studies carried out in mainland South East Asia are among the most sophisticated investigations of ethnicity and ethnic transformation anywhere, and this is due in no small measure to the influence of Edmund Leach's Political Systems of Highland Burma: a Study of Kachin Social Structure (1970 [1954]). Because of wars, revolutions, and military rule at one tinle or another in the states of the region, most subsequent research has been conducted in northern Thailand; little fieldwork has been carried out in Burma, southern China, Laos, or northern Vietnam. One of the purposes of this chapter is to spread the empirical field of the debate to the northern Indo-China highlands.
