The Hmong are a mountain-dwelling subgroup of the Miao of southwest China. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they began migrating southeast to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In the second half of the twentieth century, mainly because of their participation in the Second Indochina War (1954-1975), the Hmong began migrating to the West. Today the Hmong are one of the fastest-growing ethnic populations in the United States, increasing from about 94,000 in the 1990 census to approximately 190,000 in the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey. With this rapid expansion, there has been a substantially increased interest in Hmong-related written works; multimedia materials; and websites among students, scholars, service professionals, and the general public. To help meet this interest, Mark Edward Pfeifer has compiled Hmong-Related Works, 1996-2006. An Annotated Bibliography, which includes full reference information (including Internet links to articles) and descriptive summaries for more than 600 Hmong-related works. Book jacket.

The concept of cultural spatiality includes all aspects of human agency, experiences and outside influences. As such, it encompasses socio-culturally enacted localities, whether these are real, imagined or only potential spheres of social, economic, religious, symbolic, or political action. As in the case of the Hmong in northern Thailand, people can be anchored via processes of place making in local settlements, in a diaspora spread over five continents or in the "Otherworld" of the supernatural agents. The concept of the Hmong Mountains signifies the "place" the Hmong people have constituted to maintain their socio-cultural distinctiveness despite statelessness. It is a mental model of the Hmong lifeworld which has evolved during the course of a long history of migration, dispersal and settlement in Thailand.

This work provides access to information on the rich and often little known legacy of anthropological scholarship preserved in a diversity of archives, libraries and museums. Selected anthropological manuscripts, papers, fieldnotes, site reports, photographs and sound recordings in more than 150 repositories are described. Coverage of resources in North American repositories is extensive while Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia and certain other countries are more selectively represented. Entries are arranged by repository location and most contributors draw upon a special knowledge of the resources described. Contributors include James R. Glenn (National Anthropological Archives), Elizabeth Edwards and Veronica Lawrence (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford), Francisco Demetrio, S.J. (Museum and Archives, Xavier University, Philippines) and many others. The guide covers selected documentation in social and cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology and folklore. Some major area studies collections (such as the Asia Collections, Cornell University Libraries, and the Melanesian Archive at the University of California, San Diego) are also represented. Web URLs have been cited when available and personal, and ethnic name indexes are provided.