The hill tribes are one of the big tourist attractions in Northern Thailand. The Lonely Planet Thailand book has a long section on them, showing drawings of their traditional clothes and describing their lifestyle, religion, agriculture, and history as well as where they live. When I came across this section of the book I became cross; in all honesty, it read way too much like a gaming book describing the rural tribes of some fantasy continent. But these are real people and societies, not purely imagination.

The idea of visiting a modern instance of a primitive culture (here I use primitive in the technological and economic sense, not ethical or spiritual) as tourism rubs me the wrong way. The analogy I gave – an extreme one, yes, but I tend to do that, as many of you know – is when the British captured African tribesmen and put them in zoos. Going to view other people in their day to day life is not itself problematic: I sometimes enjoy sitting outside a cafe and watching the street as much as anyone else. But when the distinctive feature you’re going to view is poverty, I recoil.

Because that’s what it is, really. You’re not going to see the modern manifestation of an old culture. The selling point is to see it for real – people living much as they did 200 or more years ago, although now they have a motor scooter or two for transportation. Using an analogy closer to home, tourists don’t go to Native American reservations to see a modern Native American lifestyle. There are reservations where residents perform tribal dances and ceremonies in traditional garb for tourists to see (I recall seeing one dance in New Mexico when very young), but re-enactment of history under your own terms (admission fees, camera fees, etc.) is very different than a paid guide taking you into a village.

A particularly noxious example of this are the long neck Karen, whose women use brass rings to push down their collar bones and give themselves long, extended necks. The only reason they do this is for tourism. By going to see the long necked Karen (there are Karen who do not follow the practice), you are paying people to self-mutilate and live in a society which your payment implicitly forbids them from leaving (the village without TVs and running water will see more tourists).

It’s even worse when you pay a guide a bunch of money to take you to a village and they don’t receive anything. Add the fact that most of them are not Thai citizens and so do not have many rights. For example, guides to the hill tribes must be Thai citizens, which means they cannot be the guides to their own culture,

Of course I’m being a bit extremist here. While I’d want to talk with someone who paid a guide to take them to the long necked Karen and point out what they’d done, there are many shades of grey. For example, there is a group (which the hill tribe museum in Chiang Rai praised highly) that pays much of the visit price to tribes, and works with them to organize when and how visits occur, a bit more like the Native American model I’ve experienced.

This was the debate The Private Eye and I were having in Tha Ton. She pointed out that going to a village and buying their crafts was the best thing one can do. The idea of traveling to a village without a guide, seeing if it was alright if we entered the village, and buying crafts made me a little uncomfortable, but I thought it was a light enough shade of grey that I should go so I could have actual experiences with which to understand the situation better.

So we went, I bought a scarf, we tried to be respectful and friendly, and I’ll need to think about it more.

– The Professor