Editorial introduction

This additional issue of Culture, Health & Sexuality brings together a selection of papers that examine contemporary sexual and reproductive norms and practices amongst minority ethnic communities in South-East Asia and Bhutan. The result of a collaboration with the Medical Committee Netherlands Vietnam and the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, this special issue includes the perspectives of both researchers and development practitioners working with minority ethnic groups. A growing body of work examines the dramatic changes in sexual and reproductive health behaviour, gender roles and identities among dominant ethnic and cultural groups in the region. Yet little research has been published on these topics in relation to minority and indigenous peoples. Conducting fieldwork research among such population groups is extremely challenging in many South East Asian countries (Turner 2010). Obtaining official clearance can be a lengthy process and qualitative social science approaches, including medical anthropology, are only beginning to be applied in a number of countries. Minority ethnic group members themselves are not yet active in the South-East Asian social science research community, the papers included here are therefore inevitably reflections on the Other. We would like to thank all those who worked painstakingly to share their scholarship and the participating minority groups who made these studies possible. Two recurrent themes emerge from this collected body of work: the side-effects of national modernization policies and the impacts of migration and increasing mobility, including new sexual networks and opportunities for transactional sex, with an associated vulnerability to HIV.