ETHNIC MINORITIES IN SOUTH EAST ASIA
	From the Himalayas to the Annamite Range, all the way from the north of India to the borders of Vietnam and Laos a great range of mountains peopled with hundreds of ethnic minorities, stretches unbroken. This mountain range separates China from the other countries of South East Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. Throughout centuries past, the dominant ethnic groups (Han, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Kinh) in these inhospitable mountains have repelled the minorities that peopled their respective countries. Even if it wasn’t in these specific mountains that people were pushed back, they certainly suffered that same fate in other steep, craggy areas such as in the peaks that separate India and Bangladesh on one side, from Myanmar on the other. In the Cordillera Administrative Region of the Philippines, in the extreme north of the largest island of Luzon, the ethnic group who have fought most defiantly against various invasions in history, the Kalingas, are now entrenched. Travelling on horseback in a mountainous region of India between Chhattisgarh and Orissa we discovered the Adivasi, literally the ‘first dwellers’ in India. These minorities, at the very bottom of the social caste system are under attack from fundamentalist Hindus, the Indian government, the Naxalites (Maoist guerillas) and from the interests of the large mining companies, which want to exploit the mineral resources under their very soil. Being forcibly isolated far from the bustle of the great trading routes and the often bloody power of the dominant ethnic groups, these populations have somehow managed to resist ethnic intermingling and western and Asian conquests. We encounter these people as castaways from a bygone age, having become prey to a new order that has devastated their marginal traditions and cruelly subsumed their unknown and undervalued cultures. These peoples, so diverse, proud and beautiful in their desperation, are in great danger of simply disappearing.		They are already adding to the underclass of the plains towns, hunted from their protective mountains by the deadly policies of assimilation. The victims of exploitation or of drug-, weapons- or people-trafficking, they are also prey to unscrupulous tour operators who pen them up in ‘zoo-villages’ as is seen with the Padaungs in Thailand (whose women, known as ‘giraffe women’ are famous for the rings around their necks). My photography consists both in paying homage to the dignity of men and women forgotten by a time more interested in other things, and in bearing witness to dying civilisations (see Eduardo Masferré’s fantastic photographs of the Kalingas in the Philippines). Unfortunately I think that in 30 years many of these ethnic groups will have disappeared. There are more than 100 ethnic groups in Burma, the same number in Laos and around fifty in Vietnam and Thailand. Among these ethnic groups, a certain number had the tradition of female facial tattooing. There are various legends surrounding the origin of these tattoos but the most likely, besides the very strong need to demonstrate membership of a tribe, is that they were a means of keeping slavery at bay. It is true that, during battles with dominant ethnic groups, the victors carried away the women as the spoils of war. Facial tattooing but also other physical deformations like the Giraffe Women’s rings were the ‘elegant’ means by which these people parried this threat. Today, young women no longer get tattooed except in very remote places (in the Chin country, for example) for this painful form of ornamentation no longer exists. So, look carefully at these faces, they are already the last vestiges of an inexorably disappearing era. They are the symbol of our humanity, which is being eroded by the sands of time.   Jean-Stéphane Vissouze