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Chris, thank you so much. Yeah, I have to say, walking through these villages was a bit of a "Ripley" experience. I mean, that's why tourists go there - to gawk and photograph a people who deliberately deform themselves. There is a kind of freak show aspect to it all that I was not at all comfortable with. On the way to these villages - one of which we could only get to by boat down the Pai river - we'd see hand painted signs that read "Longneck village, 2 km." with a funky cartoon of a longneck woman. I lived in China for several years and occasionally would see an ancient woman hobbling down the road with impossibly small, bounded feet. That was certainly freaky to see, but you'd never see dozens of them gathered together "on display" as it were, in a "bounded feet village." But of course, as an artist in Thailand I found myself really drawn to these people, just the look of their shiny coils, other decorations, native dress... my inhibitions/revulsion were put on hold. I knew I wanted to draw and paint them.
From everything I've read about them, no one is certain when or why this tradition started, though the explanation you mentioned certainly is one of the stronger theories out there. Different tribes will explain it differently.
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