Dr Holly High

Lecturer

Room 232, RC Mills Building A26
+61 2 9351 6682

Research areas

I study desire in everyday politics and economy. Currently, I am conducting an ARC-funded project looking into a “culture village” in the south of Laos. The aim is to track this policy from the village to the capital, Vientiane, as a real world example of how desire operates as decisions about scarce resources are made and contested. The theoretical framework combines psychoanalytic and Deleuzian concepts of desire with ethnographic theory. The aim is to produce a political ethnography of Laos and new conceptual tools for understanding politics and economy. In particular, I aim to examine how desire can be conceptualized and its potentially radical implications for political and economic theory.

Publications

Book chapters:

2011. “Poverty and merit mobile persons in Laos”. In Kathleen M. Adams and Kathleen A. Gillogly (eds). Everyday Life in Southeast Asia. Indiana University Press.

2010. “Laos 2009: Crisis and resource contestation.” Daljit Singh (ed). Southeast Asian Affairs 2010. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies: Singapore.

2009. “‘Communal” sentiments: belonging and the puutaa cult of southern Laos.” In Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and state in Southeast Asia. Andrew Walker (ed). 84-95. NIAS Press, Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with University of Hawai’i Press: Honolulu.

2008. “Dreaming beyond Borders: The Thai/Lao borderlands and the mobility of the marginal.” On the Borders of State Power: Frontiers in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Martin Gainsborough (ed). 75-100. Routledge: London.

Refereed articles:

Accepted July 2011. “Horror, romance, or science fiction? Anarchy and anthropology.” Introduction to a special issue of Critique of Anthropology. For publication Issue 1, 2012.

2011. “Melancholia and Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 38:2, 217-233.

2010. “Ethnographic exposures: Motivations for Donations in the south of Laos (and beyond).” American Ethnologist. 37:2, 308-322.

2009. “The road to nowhere: poverty and policy in the south of Laos.” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 53, 75-88.

2009. “Rejoinder: Complicities and complexities: Provocations from the study of resettlement in Laos.” Critical Asian Studies 41:4, 615-620.

2008. “The implications of aspirations: reconsidering resettlement in Laos.” Critical Asian Studies 40:4, 531-550.

2008. “Violent landscape: Global explosions and Lao life-worlds.” Global Environment 1:1, 58-81.

2008. La guerre segretta degli Stati Uniti d’America contro la natura. It paesaggio violent del Laos. Demetra 16. 37-48.

Published July 2007.
“Violent landscape: Global explosions and Lao life-worlds” Global Environment 1:1.

Published December 2006
“Ritualising residency: Territory cults and a sense of place in southern Lao PDR” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. 7:3: 251-264.

Published April 2006
“Work together, act together, for the common good, solidarity! Village formation in southern Laos” Sojourn 21 (1):22-45.

Book reviews:

Published December 2005
Review of “Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam.” Asian Studies Review. 29 (4):438-439.

Published December 2005
Review of “The Lao: gender, power, and livelihood.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly Volume 36.4

Published May 2005 Review of “Laos and Ethnic Minority Cultures: promoting heritage.” Asian Studies Review 29 (1):98-99.