Open Category: Photojournalism / Story (AMATEUR) - HONORABLE MENTION
Mountainland: Vietnam North Nortwest
Photo © Sascha Richter
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The Southeast Asian Massif is a region that sprawls across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, China, India and Bangladesh, roughly 2,5 million sqare kilometers.
Most of the people dwelling there are fragmented into hundreds of ethnic identities, linguistically and culturally distinct from the populations that dominate the state cores in the valleys.
Estimations put the ethnic minority populations at around eighty million to one hundred million people.
The population of the hills is far more dispersed and culturally diverse than that of the valleys and their history is best understood as a history of runaways from nationbuilding processes in the lowlands.
Historically all states, classical, colonial and independent nation-states, in the region have tried to bring such people under their administration and encouraged politics of economic, administrative, and cultral absorption into the majority population at the state core.
Thereby the upland belt became both a space of political resistance and a zone of cultural refuge.
Today the option of avoiding the state is one that is fast vanishing. The region is knittered together not by political unity, but by comparable patterns of hill agriculture, dispersal, mobility, and rough egalitarianism.
Vietnam North Nortwest is part of my ongoing project "Mountainland"
In early 2015 I graduated from Humboldt University of Berlin, where I received my bachelor’s degree in Southeast Asia studies and Philosophy.
After graduating my focus turned solely on photography.
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The Southeast Asian Massif is a region that sprawls across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, China, India and Bangladesh, roughly 2,5 million sqare kilometers.
Most of the people dwelling there are fragmented into hundreds of ethnic identities, linguistically and culturally distinct from the populations that dominate the state cores in the valleys.
Estimations put the ethnic minority populations at around eighty million to one hundred million people.
The population of the hills is far more dispersed and culturally diverse than that of the valleys and their history is best understood as a history of runaways from nationbuilding processes in the lowlands.
Historically all states, classical, colonial and independent nation-states, in the region have tried to bring such people under their administration and encouraged politics of economic, administrative, and cultral absorption into the majority population at the state core.
Thereby the upland belt became both a space of political resistance and a zone of cultural refuge.
Today the option of avoiding the state is one that is fast vanishing. The region is knittered together not by political unity, but by comparable patterns of hill agriculture, dispersal, mobility, and rough egalitarianism.
Vietnam North Nortwest is part of my ongoing project "Mountainland"
About author:
I was born in Berlin, Germany in 1987.In early 2015 I graduated from Humboldt University of Berlin, where I received my bachelor’s degree in Southeast Asia studies and Philosophy.
After graduating my focus turned solely on photography.
BACK TO GALLERY
