Chapter 4 Tribal People 121There are several good studies of Hmong villages, notably a study of two
Blue Hmong villages, Pasamliem and Meto, by William Geddes (1976), and of
the White Hmong village of Nomya, by Nicholas Tapp (1989). In addition, the
photos in this chapter are from the White Hmong village of Chengmengmai,
where one author (Heinz) spent a short time in 1987.
When it comes to transliterating Hmong names and words, some authors
use the Barney-Smalley system, devised specifically for Hmong. It uses Roman
characters but expresses Hmong tones by adding a letter to the end of each
word that should not be pronounced as a consonant but instead indicates the
tone for the whole word. So “Hmoob” is pronounced “Hmong” in a high tone,
Vaj is Vang, and so on. For Hmong speakers, this system is not confusing since
none of their words end in consonants anyway, but because it is highly disori-
enting for non-Hmong readers who are not specialists in the Hmong language,
I will transliterate Hmong words in a way closer to their actual pronunciation
for English speakers, ignoring tones altogether.
The Transitory Community
A Hmong village is a comfortable array of thatch and bamboo houses fre-
quently situated in a horseshoe pattern on the highest hillside available to
them, at least 3,000 feet in altitude, but four or five thousand if possible. At
these elevations, mornings are cool, often beginning with a still mist, thickened
by smoke from cooking fires, which burns away after a few hours. Even in the
heat of the day the temperatures will be 10 degrees cooler than on the plains
where the Thai live. The first sounds of the morning are rooster calls and rice
pounders shaped like teeter-totters hammering out the rice for the day. Women
rise early to get at the work that fills their long days, but in moments of leisure
they will sit just outside their doorways at work on embroidering the new
clothes for the New Year festival with a child or two playing nearby.
There are clues to the transitoriness of a Hmong village if you look around.
The houses are airy and spacious structures built directly on swept earth with
walls of split bamboo and thatched roofs. These are easily packed up and
moved. At Chengmengmai all the fruit trees planted around homesteads were
younger than five years, and the nearest fields visible from village doorways
were already in fallow. People were having to walk a long way to their fields.
Chaitong, the shaman, had a four-hour walk to the four rai (1.6 acres) he culti-
vates with his two wives. As the soil near the village wears out and it becomes a
day’s walk just to reach your fields, you begin to think about packing up and
moving to where your fields are.
This simple calculation lies behind the famous mobility of swidden cultiva-
tors everywhere. The Hmong are often said to be the most mobile of the hill
tribes of Thailand, but the same issues face all of them. In 1965 the village of
Meto studied by Geddes had a total population of 570. It had been pioneered
in 1961 by four men of Tang clan and six men of Jang clan. When Geddes
returned for a brief visit in mid-1966, not a single house remained. By 1970, the