Resource Scarcity and the Hmong Response

Cooper's 1984 ethnography of Hmong villages in northern Thailand, published by Singapore University Press, asks an economic question about a subject usually treated culturally: what do swidden farming households do when the land and forest they depend on run short? His answer traces settlement and resettlement, household economy and the decision to move, and it reframes Hmong migration as a rational response to resource pressure rather than as restlessness or tradition — a corrective to a lot of what was written about highland peoples at the time. Three hundred and forty-four pages, and still cited in work on shifting cultivation and highland livelihoods. For anthropologists, geographers and anyone reading Hmong movement as economics.