By William F. S. Miles

Canny Benjamin Franklin, to challenge later generations, leaves behind a source of wealth for thrill-seeking eggheads. One prize is embedded in the form of a tantalizing Triangle. To claim it, you must travel to parts unknown, endure discomfort and uncertainty, and risk landslides, spies, and other assorted dangers.

Sound like a spinoff from the movie National Treasure? Now throw in Lewis and Clark and the allure of wilderness adventure, and add some good old-

fashioned Anglo-French colonial rivalry for good measure. String the plot threads together, and you get the origins, aims, and pains of my summer fieldwork in Southeast Asia last July. (Coincidentally, National Treasure was showing during my seventeen-hour Thai Airways flight from New York to Bangkok.)

For the last two decades, I've examined the long-term legacies of French versus British colonialism throughout the Third World. I do so by looking at indigenous ethnic groups that were once arbitrarily partitioned into territories controlled by France and England, when they were the planet's superpowers.

I pursue answers to questions: How did these two distinct colonial pathways affect the politics of postcolonial societies today? What kind of legal and educational systems have the current societies adopted? Which languages have they preserved, and for what purposes? Where are women better off? What about church-state (or mosque-state) relations? In short, what does the colonial past tell us about the postcolonial present?

My investigations have led me to live among West Indians in the Caribbean, Melanesians in the South Pacific, Tamils in South India, the Hausa in West Africa, and Mascarene islanders in the Indian Ocean. My favorite methodology has been to relocate to a border that once separated a French colony from a British colony, and compare local communities on both sides. Boundaries, I have discovered, crystallize national differences in dramatic fashion. Where a boundary separates neighboring communities that are otherwise similar in culture, language, and religion, the differences resulting from colonial and postcolonial politics become very clear.

Until last summer, Southeast Asia was the only major geocultural zone that had escaped my research grasp. Coming of age during the agony of the Vietnam War, I'd never thought it feasible or even desirable to conduct fieldwork there. For sure, Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) had once been an integral part of the French colonial empire. Yet it seemed I had an American allergy toward traveling to an area associated with carpet bombing, Agent Orange, and the My Lai massacre.

Slowly, however, I learned even the region's Communist regimes were opening themselves up to visitors from the West. Then one day, while scrutinizing my son's National Geographic atlas, I realized that, in all Southeast Asia, there is only one border that separates a former French colony from a former British colony: the 200-mile north-south stretch of the Mekong River that doubles as the border between Laos and Burma (now officially known as Myanmar). This area, bounded on different ends by Thailand and China, is informally known as the Golden Triangle. I just knew I had to go.

But who would send me to the Golden Triangle, a region long associated with opium, drug lords, and lawlessness?

Ben Franklin would. Franklin was the principal visionary behind the American Philosophical Society (APS), which he helped found in 1743. A spur to intellectuals, with a writ broader than its name implies, APS has long sponsored research grants. While surfing the Web around Memorial Day, I discovered APS had a brand-new program—the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research.

To an anthropologically oriented political scientist yearning to poke through the jungles of the upper Mekong, it sounded perfect: "The Lewis and Clark Fund encourages exploratory field studies for the collection of . . . data and to provide the imaginative stimulus that accompanies direct observation." There was only one hitch—the summer grant's application deadline was May 31.

Thank Gore for the Internet.

June dragged on as I awaited the result. When I received the exciting (and suddenly daunting) go-ahead in early July, I scrambled to secure a flight to Bangkok, the air hub of Southeast Asia. On the plane, by chance, I sat next to a fellow former Peace Corps volunteer, Gary Jahan, who had served in Thailand, recently did research in the Philippines on "dry" (upland) rice, and was now relocating to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. We traded addresses, and he invited me to visit him there.

The easiest path to the Golden Triangle lies through northeast Thailand. By mid-July, I was standing above the Mekong in Sop Ruak, the very heart of the Golden Triangle, viewing the convergence of Thailand, Burma, and Laos. A riverboat transported me across the muddy Mekong to Don Sao Island, in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Scrambling up the dingy dock, I was met by a row of upright snakes fermenting in jars of local whiskey.

This market village, where you can buy cheap T-shirts, cartons of cigarettes, and all sorts of tacky souvenirs, didn't seem like it belonged in a Communist country, my first since I crossed Yugoslavia by train the summer after my junior year in college. But I wasn't focused on the contradictions of capitalism and communism just then. I was thinking about the conversation I'd had the day before with Sombat Boon at Rajabhat University's Center for Interethnic Studies.

"Your research proposal is very interesting," he'd said encouragingly. "But going to Burmese and Lao villages along the Mekong is very difficult." Actually, he meant impossible. "Since the coup in Myanmar," he said, "the Wa tribe has been pushed back to the Mekong. From there, they have been battling government forces. Even we"—he meant the region's indigenous neighbors—"cannot go there. On the Lao side, the government also restricts travel.

"We do have contacts with the rebels," he went on. "And your project is worth pursuing. But it will take six months to make the necessary preparations." In the meantime, Sombat advised, I could visit comparable towns inside the bordering countries: Kengtung in Myanmar, and Meung Sing in Laos.

That's how I found myself in Kengtung, beneath the serene gaze of a giant Buddha, interviewing an elder of the Wat Pha Sao Lung Buddhist pagoda about his recollections of Burma's final colonial years. My cassette player was recording from inside his shirt pocket, and my NU business card lay face up on a table, when an undercover agent of this notorious police state sidled up and baldly interrogated me. Northeastern may now be listed in some spy report filed in Myanmar—and I've got the lackey's rude intrusion on tape.

In quest of interviews in Laos (some with French-speaking former inmates of the infamous reeducation camps), my greatest dangers were giant boulders and landslides that washed away portions of the muddy "highway." But more frustrating was the government's sudden decision to close the capital to foreigners, preventing me from ever getting to Vientiane.

So I need to return to Laos, and to the Golden Triangle along the Mekong. Meanwhile, I contemplate this war zone that once fixated America, even as we now obsess over another.

Thank you, Ben Franklin. Your hunt for wisdom goes on.

William F. S. Miles is a professor in the Department of Political Science. His forthcoming book is Zion in the Desert (State University of New York Press).