Janet C. Sturgeon's Border landscapes: The politics of Akha land use in China and Thailand is not only interesting reading for those concerned with the political–social–ecological structure and dynamics of what the author calls ‘landscape plasticity: the ability of farmers [with different positions] to adjust complicated land uses over time in response to local needs, state plans, and border possibilities’ (p. 9). It also addresses an important subject in Southeast Asian studies. This book grew from the author's doctoral thesis at Yale University in 2000 but shows no disfiguring birthmarks.

In the introduction and chapter 2, the author examines the impact of ‘modernising’ or state-strengthening efforts on institutionalising the border of China and Thailand; ‘central to these transformations in rural areas were the imposition of citizenship, new forms of state-sanctioned property rights, and intensified state claims on rural resources’ (p. 43). In particular, after 1949 ‘in both China and Thailand, state projects have been laid out from the centre in relation to control of people and territory, extraction of products, and legitimation of rule’, through which ‘the projects formalised property rights for marginal peoples, strongly shaping resource access and pulling land uses in the direction of simplified, lowland landscapes’ (p. 64).

Chapters 3 and 4 provide insightful discussions on the relationships between minorities and the modernising state. The author introduces how hierarchical organisations and cross-border networks of varying scale cross-cut the landscape of the Akha and diminish its flexibility: ‘the processes of state building in these border regions, together with international efforts to combat the drug trade and communism, have reworked and reinforced certain small border chiefs and their patronage relations ….’ (p. 72) while, ‘along the edges of China and Thailand, clear, unambiguous borders added to the layers of practices in power relations among border entities and between these entities and their sovereign states’ (p. 73). Prasenjit Duara, in Culture, power, and the state: Rural North China, 1900–1942, describes the state as having relied on many informal channels and agents that it policed and taxed in both money and grains. Sturgeon observes that ‘these Chinese and Thai border areas were sites where village heads and other small chiefs with multiple loyalties and multiple connections could exert control over people and resources. In their role as protectors of the state border, they engage in smuggling and other illegitimate operations.’ At the same time ‘small border chiefs were well positioned to oppress and exploit local people marginalized by geography and by policies for “backward” hill people’ (p. 118). Thus the borderlands are not merely ‘zones of mutual interest’ to larger kingdoms and empires, but also sites with influential ‘chiefs’ — who have distinct capacities, continued to mediate, and indeed constitute the border as well as the marginality of the border villagers.

Chapters 5 and 6 take up the thorough ‘thick description’ of the constitution of ‘landscape plasticity’ as well as its loss. Plastic landscapes, managed by Akha farmers, were characterised by flexibility of access and use, under traditional rules. ‘The villagers’ experience of shifting cultivation has contributed to their knowledge of the plasticity of the landscape'; therefore ‘landscape plasticity stretches backward as well as forward in time, as previous uses and events are recaptured and reworked in current context’ (p. 121). In time, the landscape has been carved up by state-allocated property rights and land-use regulations, such as the introduction of wet rice cultivation and cash crops on smaller land areas, creating a clear landscape in which property lines and productivity became evident to state planners.

This book's argument would be more convincing had the author strengthened her analysis of several aspects of local village development. For instance, she concludes that Akha farmers in China engaged with growing markets by producing and collecting increasingly diverse goods, and wage labour was a growing part of household income, as was local mining. Most importantly, she points out that households in Xianfeng, China experienced rising incomes and greater opportunities for participating in the new market economy. The flexibility, or plasticity, of the landscape was still largely in place. However, this perspective requires some clarification of the concept of ‘landscape plasticity’. Is its usage here similar to its earlier definition as the ‘knowledge of future potential based on memory of land uses and of regeneration pathways in the past’ (p. 121)?

From a comparative point of view, there are scholars of the economic reforms in rural society in other parts of China who point to the shift from peasant–state to peasant–market relations. They argue that the de-collectivised and de-centralised market system in the post-Mao era has had a negative impact on the common property regime in rural China, derived from the rich experience and memories of generations of subsistence farmers (see J. Muldavin, ‘The paradoxes of the environment policy and resource management in reform-era China’, Economic Geography, 76, 3 [2000]: 244–71). The book does not explain why Xianfeng has not experienced this negative impact. Another question relates to the description of tin mining in Xianfeng's wet-rice fields as violating land-use regulations; further explanation is required here as to how the villagers combine the need for food security with profits from mining.

Overall, however, this is a highly recommended book on resource geography and ethnic identity in a border landscape. With clear writing and sophisticated analysis, the author has done an excellent job in delineating the lives and material world of a ‘people without history’ in Southeast Asia.