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This project is concerned with examining the impact of colonial administrations on post-independence state behavior in Southeast Asia. Despite a similar historical context, the region exhibits broad variation in terms of policy preferences after independence. Past literature has focused, largely, upon pre-colonial or independence era factors. This project, however, proposes that state behavior is heavily determined by a combination of three colonial variables: indigenous elite mobility, colonial income diversity, and institutional-infrastructure levels. It also constructs a four-category typology for the purposes of ordering the broad variation we see across post-colonial Southeast Asia. Utilizing heavy archival research and historical analysis, I examine three case studies in the region, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, that share a common colonial heritage yet exhibit markedly different post-independence preferences. Vietnam's colonial legacy is characterized by high indigenous elite mobility, medium colonial income diversity, and medium-high levels of institutional-infrastructure. This creates a state where the local elites are capable and socially mobile, but lack the fully developed skill sets, institutions and infrastructure we see in a Developmental state such as South Korea or Taiwan. As a result, Vietnam is a Power-Projection state, where elites pursue security oriented projects as a means of compensating for inequalities between their own social mobility and acquired skills, institutions and infrastructure. In Cambodia, indigenous elite mobility and colonial income diversity are both low, creating an entrenched, less experienced elite. Medium levels of institutional-infrastructure enables the elite to extract wealth for class benefit. As a result, the state becomes an instrument for elite enrichment and is thus classified as Self-Enrichment state. Laos' colonial history is characterized by low levels of indigenous elite mobility, colonial income diversity, and institutional-infrastructure levels. Laos' elite are deeply entrenched, like their counterparts in Cambodia. However, unlike Cambodia, Laos lacks sufficient institutional-infrastructure levels to make wealth extraction worthwhile for an elite class. Laos' inability to execute an internal policy course, or even enrich narrow social class, categorize it as a Null state. The theory and typology presented in this project have broad applications to Southeast Asia and the post-colonial world more generally. It suggests that the colonial period, counter to more recent literature, has a much greater impact on states after independence. As most of the world is a post-colonial state, understanding the mechanisms for preferences in these states is very important. / Political Science

This dissertation examines how globalized biomedical definitions of reproduction are being adopted by the Chinese state and interpreted at the local level in Yunnan. It provides an anthropological perspective on how to provide affordable health care for the mass population, a question that most nation states have to contend with in the current neoliberal economy. In the dissertation, I present a critical view of the state through a medical lens (Kleinman 1995) so as to reengage anthropological theory and social theory. The following chapters of the dissertation investigate how the local people articulate their understanding of medicine, science, the body, and ethnicity in relation with the state and in the everyday life of medical practice and consumption. In particular, this dissertation examines the relationship between different narratives of modernity and ethnicity as embodied in the transformation of the public health system in Weixi Lisu Autonomous County in Southwest China, the so-called "margin of the state" (Das and Poole 2004). As a historical ethnography, I contextualize the transformation of public health policy in this area within the nexus of shifting political and economic policies from 1) the Maoist period from 1958 to 1981, during which "cooperative medicine" backed by the commune provided basic health care for the peasants; 2) 1981 to 2006, the transitional period from the command economy to the post-Mao market economy, during which most rural peasants had been left out of post-decollectivization health care; and 3) 2007 until now, the period in which the New Cooperative Medicine has been implemented in rural China. By historicizing the transformation of public health policy in the ethnic minority area, this dissertation not only intends to illuminate how the changing public health policy has been embedded in the state's pursuit of modernity, development agenda, and nation-building strategy in the borderland, it also attempts to portray how its multi-ethnic residents maneuver their ethnic minority identity within the changing historical periods by taking on, reconfiguring, or resisting public health policies in their daily life so as to achieve the maximum benefit of state policies and their citizenship status. In this way, this dissertation will shed light on how the ethnic minority residents articulate different narratives of modernity and how their articulation contests and reconfigures the contours and constitution of modernity. / Anthropology

From the introduction: On the occasion when the great master came to Pao Lin, the Prefect Wei Chu of Shao Chou and his officials came o the mountain and invited the master to come down to the lecture hall of the Ta Fan Temple in the heart of the city so that an opportunity will be open to all to hear him speak about the Dharma.

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