Slow Anthropology is the second book by Hjorleifur Jonsson. His first book, Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), is a remarkable book not only because it is a rare monograph about the Iu Mien people but also, and more importantly, because it presents an exceptionally sensitive and sensible ethnography, capturing both the historicity and the everydayness of an upland people in Southeast Asia. Jonsson's ethnographic analysis, especially of how the Mien today maintain their communities through seemingly mundane activities of “serious fun,” like sports festivals, makes a particularly rewarding and memorable reading.

Slow Anthropology is, however, very different from Mien Relations. It is a strikingly polemical work. Jonsson denounces many of the existing studies on upland Southeast Asia. He bemoans how academics have been preoccupied with the same old theme of “marginalization and dispossession” and laments that “we have not...

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