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An examination of funeral ritual among upland Tai and Black Tai in particular, in northern Southeast Asia looks at the way it has articulated social and ethnic relations historically and in the present. It looks at how ritual and cosmology has shifted in response to social change and considers how this either weakens or strengthens ethnic boundaries between upland Tai and the surrounding dominant civilizations of Laos, Vietnam and China.
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Grant Evans (1991) studied this question.
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