“The Mlabri in Thailand travel across the forest with ease to visit other Mlabri. There are two areas in which they live, one area is in Nan Province and the other is in Phrae Province. Traditionally, they traveled in small bands comprised of three to four families each seeking food and safety. They had no problem with the identification of who they are. Their language, customs, knowledge and even their blood all told them about their identity. The idea of a nation bounded by internationally recognized borders does not fit their history or even their present day status. They are more akin to the First Americans who to this day identify themselves by nation. But the question now asked is: Can they remain who they were without changing their identity? I believer the answer is, “no, they cannot remain who they were unless a part of them changes.” Then, if this case, to what extent can they be considered a nation, or in civic parlance, a community? Apart from issues of nomenclature, the important point here is that a group of people live in more than one world at the same time with little opportunity to come into parity with any of the others in their world- such as the government, other people groups–Thai and Hmong, or the missionaries. Identity based in the traditional concept of the individual does not have the authenticity or depth to help us think about who we are in today’s transidentified world.

The Mlabri do not refer to themselves as belonging to a country as much as to a group of people. The Mlabri are in a sense a transnational community over three countries. This community resides as much in the memory of the Mlabri as it does on various kinds of land. Some of the land belongs to the Thai government, some is the personal property of Hmong farmers, and still other land is part of sparsely populated forest areas in Laos and northern Burma. The boundaries of the physical land lack definition and are highly porous. More accurately, the Mlabri reside in their memory and imagination which are the source of any future for them if they are to retain aspects of their identity and not completely vanish physically and culturally. To repeat, identity is not individual, rather our concept of self is evidenced only within the context of others. Hence, the Mlabri, and all others, take on identity only in relationship to others. Because our identity is centered in relationship to others, there is a dual nature in what we traditionally identify as individual identity. Herein enters Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity in which two natures of the self can be held together authentically through emplotment—the bringing together in ways that make sense of the concordance and discordance in our life.

Stories about ourselves hold the contradictions, sufferings, hopes, the past, and the imagined future in a plot that allows us to make sense of our lives. Each of us has two aspects to our identity in order for this sense to come alive. Ricoeur argues (1992) that the self is constituted by an idem-identity and ipse-identity – the idem aspect of our identity is that part that remains the same over time. It is our character.

Yet over time, a person changes which reflects the ipse aspect of our self. We hold both the permanent sense and the transitory sense of self in a narrative identity. The stories that the Mlabri tell of their past are also found in the stories they tell about their present. How anyone imagines their lives to be in the future requires the wakening of the social imagery housed in each of us. Without reflecting on our past to find those very elements of our lives that did not come to bear, there is no future. In other words, the future is housed in the reawakening of our memories” (Herda 2007).

Herda, Ellen
2007 Mlabri Nation Vanishing: Horizons of Social Imagery in Development. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May (CD-ROM proceedings).

Citation Style AAA