{"product_id":"cross-border-traders-in-northern-laos","title":"Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos","description":"\u003cp\u003eNorthern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. \u003ci\u003eCross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness\u003c\/i\u003e demonstrates that these traders’ indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of ‘smallness’ foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Taylor \u0026 Francis Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56280789549400,"sku":"9781041177760","price":56.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781041177760.jpg?v=1778680879","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/cross-border-traders-in-northern-laos","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}